EPILOGUE

 

Something that had always bothered Toby about the sexual fantasies he had about his wife was the ending: what happened, after the fantasy was fulfilled? Was it like what happened after porn, when a tremendous sense of guilt and humiliation overtook you in the stark blue light of a computer screen, your cum cooling on a wad of tissues and something you didn’t mean for it to land on, the very filthy video you just watched repulsively continuing, the contents of it temporarily stripped of their ability to arouse you? Or did something else happen, as he thought it surely must, if there were so many couples out there who explored this lifestyle? And if something else did happen, what was it?

Perhaps if these reservations could have drowned out his libido, he might have stopped his wife and never experienced what happened in Jersey. Perhaps if his wife had not been the one to lead the charge, they never would have done the things they did.

And that was where the mystery still remained: inside Heather’s head.

They went back to their own hotel room. Down two floors, their giggling and their footsteps echoing in the terrible acoustics of the stairwell. They entered quickly, Heather looking furtively down the hall, perhaps checking to make sure that the disdainful woman from two floors above would not appear in their hallway.

The door closed behind them, and they stood in the utter darkness, breathing heavily, their laughter dying down to something more serious. The moment seemed to last a long time, at least to Toby’s memory. Then Heather moved in the darkness, and tripped on the discarded shoebox. Toby fumbled for the light, and then it was suddenly on, and they were standing in their hotel room, looking very worn, Toby without a shirt and Heather without panties. She was holding a shoebox in her hand, a familiar look of irritation creeping into her features.

Married people, they argue about these sorts of banalities all the time. Who left the dishes in the dishwasher, who didn’t properly crush the cans in the recycling bin, why this pair of socks or that screwdriver was left on the table instead of put away. The furor of these domestic disputes had always seemed to Toby like an acid, pouring into the more serious cracks of their marriage and making them bigger, deeper, more jagged.

But seeing the look on Heather's face at that particular moment felt comforting. She never got going about the shoebox, not like she would have ordinarily: why can’t you put anything away? How hard is it to set this over here? Toby stepped toward her, made a joke, he forgets now what he said exactly, but it made Heather laugh.

They stripped out of their clothes and took a shower. It ended up being a shower together, and then they moved to the bed, where their make-out session turned ferociously passionate. The sex they had was conservative by the standards of that previous evening/morning. The excitement came, on Toby’s part, from pushing past the squeaky, just-cleansed folds of Heather's outer lips, into the wet and velvety center of her, where another man’s cum still made her body slick. In the reddened soreness of her nipples, and the way she squirmed when he sucked on them, part discomfort, part pleasure.

They made love, Toby reclaiming the body of his wife that had been used by other men. He has very clear recollections of meeting Heather's eyes, of feeling like she had come back to him in full. She was incredibly into it: it was one of the best and longest lovemaking sessions they had ever had. They fell asleep mid-morning, and housekeeping came to kick them out at 1pm, after they had exceeded the checkout time by an hour and not woken to any of the knocks on the door.

I bet every man asks that question,” Heather said, after thinking long and hard about Toby’s question, the one he really wanted answered. How had he phrased it? Will we ever do this again? Or was it: Is this ‘us’ now?

Toby had stared at her, not really knowing what her answer meant.

I just mean,” she said, unprompted, “that guys are always like… that was great, so when are we doing it again. With sex, I mean. And then women are more...” she stared over Toby’s head, thinking.

Toby bit his tongue, but not long enough. “Are you saying you don’t… are you saying you’re upset by what we did?”

Heather’s eyes drifted from the point above his head, wherever they had been floating and whatever they had seen unknown to him. She smiled. It was the same sort of smile she had tossed back at him, as they’d walked to the shuttle bus. Unknowable, uncategorizable. She brought her wine to her lips and took a sip. It was the same wine she had pushed away, saying just moments before she never needed to drink again in her life.

Inside his own head, Toby’s mind screamed with unanswered questions: what did she think? What was she thinking of now? Had she done something she didn’t like? Or had she liked it, better than him? Would she do it again? Would their marriage be the same?

And finally, a juggernaut of a question, which spilled from his mouth:

Why did you do it?”

This was a friendly conversation. They were both smiling, having made some kind of binding arrangement between them that had never been spoken aloud but which Toby could feel. But the question burned inside of him.

Heather smiled again. Another sip of wine.

Why did you do it?” she asked.

How long passed between them, Heather giving him a kind of know-it-all look that ordinarily would have irritated him, swirling her wine, grinning. She did this kind of thing when she was trapping him at the ass-end of an argument, when she knew she was going to win. Maybe, in fact, he started to have the reaction he always had when things went that direction, but Heather set off in a new direction before he could build up any steam.

He had no answer. He could feel the answer, but he would never have been able to articulate it.

She reached across the table, took his hand. Her fingers slipped into his, weaving themselves in and out. She was looking at them when she said:

People can have different reasons for wanting the same thing. They can even… not be sure what they are.”

Sure, but -”

I don’t know why I did it,” Heather said softly. She smiled. “I don’t think you know, either. But...” she sighed. “I don’t really know why I’m married to you, you know what I mean? It’s not something knowable. It’s just… a feeling.”

Toby blinked. Heather squeezed his hand. “Does it really matter why it’s your fantasy?” she asked. “Or why it’s mine? Does it really matter if those are two different things?”

It was a good question. Toby said so, as he lifted his beer to his lips. Did it matter if two people did something together for different reasons?

Wasn’t marriage like that? Having children? Pretty much any aspect of sex? Wasn’t there just basically an endless field of things two people consigned themselves to doing together by being married, and why on earth would their reasons be exactly the same?

I say,” Heather said, lifting the drink menu and reading it studiously for a moment before finishing her thoughts. “What happens in Jersey, stays in Jersey.”

She scanned the drinks menu. “I need like, a Caesar or something,” she murmured.

She looked up at him, and searched his eyes. Toby had a moment of extreme lucidity, in which he realized that Heather might be searching for the same certainty, the same reassurance, the same absolute knowledge of her husband that he sought in his wife. But neither one of them could ever know everything.

He didn’t even really know himself enough to give it to her, as much as he wanted to.

Want to split this giant fishbowl Caesar with me?” she flipped the menu around to show him a picture of what must have been a Caesar in a huge glass that looked like a fishbowl. He nodded. The powers of speech had left him.

Stays in Jersey,” Heather repeated, lifting her arm and her pretty face to get the attention of their waiter.

Then casually, almost as if she were talking to someone else: “But that doesn’t mean, it can never happen again, anywhere else.”

 

It took a while for Toby to realize that something in her final words about the matter was at the heart of what he would have said, if there had been any conceivable way to put into words his answer to her question.

Why did you do it?”

Lots of reasons. Mostly feelings. One of them being something to do with the hope embedded in the unknowable.

The unknowable, like what Heather’s answer to that question might be.

 

 

END

 

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