In your haste, you might trip over the charcoal grill Bob stowed in the garage for the winter, knock your head against the bricks left over from last year’s patio repair. You would lie there, unconscious for two days, until he returned from his business trip and found you. His first question after you awoke in the hospital would be, why the overnight bag?
This sequence of events is astoundingly unlikely, and Bob is fastidious about keeping a tidy space. But the garage door might fail to open after you’ve started your car. At the same time, several fuses could fail in series, locking the car and sticking the ignition key in place. An hour or two later, you would peacefully expire, dumbed to death by carbon monoxide. It would appear to both Bob and me to be a suicide. He would wonder what had caused you to take your own life. I would think I knew.
Stranger things have happened.
Suppose you make it out of the house (in which 74 percent of all accidents occur) and to the hotel. The lobby could be undergoing renovation. You are standing in line at the front desk, behind the sponsor of a junior glee club in town for a cheering contest. She is trying to find her credit card while keeping twenty-seven eighth-graders out of the lobby bar. You’re the most patient person I’ve ever met, and you hate to ever make a scene, so you’re perusing the “Pardon Our Mess” sign and never see the rope tangled about your left foot. When the workers raise the scaffolding, you’re knocked to the floor, hitting your head.
But say you check in safely. You’d think the odds of bumping into someone you know in a city of two million, at a restaurant neither of us have been to before, are incalculably low. But before the duck flautas had given way to the osso buco, your best friend from college spots you across the room, screams your name and runs to our table. Only then she looks at me, back to you, back at me again. “He’s not Bob,” she says.
Most likely, we will make it through dessert without being discovered. Our chances are better if we avoid the martinis, though you’re cutest when the flush of alcohol reaches your cheeks. If I have to carry you, there will be a scene. Things like that never go unnoticed.
Suppose we have a wonderful weekend, and everything is like those Italian films you love. In the mornings, a butterscotch sun shines through open windows. Nothing goes wrong, not even a maid knocking on the door. In the evenings, a lavender mist settles onto the city, and we decide to stay another night. On Sunday morning, we part reluctantly, leave separately.
What if it turns out to be what we’ve been telling ourselves all along, nothing, an infatuation, an embarrassing crush?
But we might discover that it is in fact something. You would have to choose. Either way, you would break your husband’s heart. You would have to explain to mutual friends, and ask them to choose, too. You would have to tell them why, after all these years, it turned out to be me you were looking for all this time.
We might be forced to leave everything behind.
We might be found out and forgiven.
This sequence of events is astoundingly unlikely, and Bob is fastidious about keeping a tidy space. But the garage door might fail to open after you’ve started your car. At the same time, several fuses could fail in series, locking the car and sticking the ignition key in place. An hour or two later, you would peacefully expire, dumbed to death by carbon monoxide. It would appear to both Bob and me to be a suicide. He would wonder what had caused you to take your own life. I would think I knew.
Stranger things have happened.
Suppose you make it out of the house (in which 74 percent of all accidents occur) and to the hotel. The lobby could be undergoing renovation. You are standing in line at the front desk, behind the sponsor of a junior glee club in town for a cheering contest. She is trying to find her credit card while keeping twenty-seven eighth-graders out of the lobby bar. You’re the most patient person I’ve ever met, and you hate to ever make a scene, so you’re perusing the “Pardon Our Mess” sign and never see the rope tangled about your left foot. When the workers raise the scaffolding, you’re knocked to the floor, hitting your head.
But say you check in safely. You’d think the odds of bumping into someone you know in a city of two million, at a restaurant neither of us have been to before, are incalculably low. But before the duck flautas had given way to the osso buco, your best friend from college spots you across the room, screams your name and runs to our table. Only then she looks at me, back to you, back at me again. “He’s not Bob,” she says.
Most likely, we will make it through dessert without being discovered. Our chances are better if we avoid the martinis, though you’re cutest when the flush of alcohol reaches your cheeks. If I have to carry you, there will be a scene. Things like that never go unnoticed.
Suppose we have a wonderful weekend, and everything is like those Italian films you love. In the mornings, a butterscotch sun shines through open windows. Nothing goes wrong, not even a maid knocking on the door. In the evenings, a lavender mist settles onto the city, and we decide to stay another night. On Sunday morning, we part reluctantly, leave separately.
What if it turns out to be what we’ve been telling ourselves all along, nothing, an infatuation, an embarrassing crush?
But we might discover that it is in fact something. You would have to choose. Either way, you would break your husband’s heart. You would have to explain to mutual friends, and ask them to choose, too. You would have to tell them why, after all these years, it turned out to be me you were looking for all this time.
We might be forced to leave everything behind.
We might be found out and forgiven.
