Windows or Doors, either way don't enter if you're not invited
A little fictive piece for the STSC Symposium on Windows
“Heyyyy,” I answered the phone with a drawn-out “y” late at night but not so late that I was already asleep. My voice was the tasteful blend of silk and syrup, and my greeting was one of familiarity, like the proverbial “hey, you,” that indicates some level of intimacy.
Most of our on-again-off-again emotional affair took place on Messenger, not the phone. Even in person, you’d never know about our shared obsession. But like I said to a wife once, “You shouldn’t be worried if you see me talking to your husband. You should be worried if you DON’T,” and I walked away leaving what I thought was a scent of mystery in my wake but was more likely the diesel fumes of a cheap speedboat.
One woman’s perfume is another woman’s choke.
But after having run into each other a few weeks ago after a spell of “off again,” we’d struck back up and dove straight into phone sex. His wife was away for the weekend, and I was between assignations, so I was less surprised and more aroused at his unexpected call on the cusp of midnight.
“What exactly is going on between you and my husband?” I knew her voice immediately, Julia. A woman I both admired and opposed. She was so measured, the calmest of angry seas.
Confronted.
I’d never been confronted before because I’d never been caught. My first emotion was alarm; my second was fear; my third was anger at him for letting her call me from his phone – betrayed -, and – finally – my fourth was guilt.
Guilt is the salt of sweat, and the snot of sobbing chased with the sting of acridity. The cocktail for vomiting.
“Uh, Julia? Um. What?”
“I want to know everything. I want to know how long this has been going on. He says he told me everything, but I don’t believe him.”
Finding out from the person you betrayed that your affair is found out felt so fucking Knots Landing to me. Laying in bed that night, wondering how to respond, would’ve been easier with feathered hair and a bedtime boa. How does a dream of being Knight Rider end up a Knots Landing nightmare?
The next day, in all my drama, I raised dermatographic “A"s along my skin, building a pink chain-link fence of exposed adultery. Everything on my terms. I would decide how news of the affair got out. Hang myself by my own rope rather than be executed on the gallows they built in the backyard to match the jungle gym he constructed between erotic messages to me.
I steeled myself for the day. Selfish enough to be caring mainly about my own reputation, and detached enough to not understand the gravity of my culpability. You’re only perpetrating betrayal if you made the vows, and while I may tie my neck with velvet ribbon, I never bound my life to another. It was he who was guilty of betrayal, and I was guilty only of paying attention to a man who felt ignored. However, all men, even the ones who are doted on, feel abandoned when, in reality, they just aren’t getting their way. The ungrown boys walking around with grandiose erections. They are as ubiquitous and delicious as Sweet Tarts.
But nothing happened publicly. Catholics like to keep their secrets.
How naïve I was to believe him and his tales of her in the first place.
“She lives a life that doesn’t align with my values.”
“She spends too much time mothering.”
“She spends too much time on her dissertation.”
“She spends too much money at Target.”
“She never bakes.”
So I spent time on him.
I sent him photos of buns and cakes and tits and clits.
I regaled him with tales of upcycling.
Wrapped up and wound up.
Knowing we’d never be together but basking in being what I believed was better than she.
Weeks after Michael and I were found out, Julia requested we drink tea together. Less for her to hear me and more for me to hear her. Once naughty, now haughty, I sat and sipped and listened. Keeping my guilt in my gut like an unbirthed fetus until it grew into a raging toddler, ripping its truthful way through my belly.
No longer superior and aloof, she met me on a pitch that was finally tilting in her direction.
Up until this point, my guilt was tempered by the fact that the affair was more emotional and virtual than physical, never having even kissed. The closest we came to cumming together was over cell towers. Husbands rarely walk into the door with a fast heartbeat and a hard-on, but the husbands of others do, and the power to raise the dead makes any woman feel like the most magical witch.
It would take me years to realize that betrayal is betrayal. Big B or little b, it’s still a bitch. Torn boundaries are like torn flesh, the best that you can hope for in the future is a varicose scar that itches you awake from the soundest sleep.
Decades go by and you forget the words of others, but some stick. Some refuse to dissolve or digest. A rotting piece of food in the back of your throat that grows into a garden, filling your mouth with plump fruit and replacing your cheeks with stringy meat. The piece of knowledge you tongue like a bad tooth. It is both life-giving and torturous. A reminder of who you were and how you treated people, a memento mori of who you were on your way to becoming.
“This didn’t start with Michael when your affair began; this started when you used your words with him. I know you talked about sex, and intimacy, and romance. That’s where it started. Your words opened a window that neither of you could close. Words are powerful, and you should treat them as such.”
A window.
Why a window and not a door, I wondered.
Doors open as easily as windows and have the threshold of monogamy. But Julia chose the word “window,” and she never chose her words lightly.
A door is for the invited.
A window is for the invading.
And so it is true, I snuck around under the windowsill, waiting for a scrap of his approval. Flakes of paint from old clapboard peeled underneath my crawling into a life not mine.
No door would have me, I was a woman of windows.
Breaking.
Entering.
Robbing.
My submission to the
monthly symposium with the theme of Windows.
I am floored with how well you did this. The reality is so much smarmier than the imagined.
Um... so good. Doors, windows, beautiful analogy. Any way to get together, our only real currency