There was once a young couple, kind to each other, but kinder to themselves. And though they both felt marriage was quite the thing to do - and it was quite a lovely wedding, in the style of Barbie and Ken or perhaps, better still, Cinderella and the Prince - they felt after they had done it as if it was, in a word, done. The next item on the list must of course be children.It was a time when the house and the family was the world of the woman, the female, and office and the road and all the other places of danger and sexual exploration, and any sort of interaction at all outside of tea parties, socials, telephone calls, was the universe of the man. Little oases, the home; or little prisons. Alternately, Elizabeth felt about her home as such. A haven, and a prison, and sometimes, vaguely, a place she hated. But those sorts of ideas were soon squelched.
Charlie was a good man. He was nice to his wife, he rarely had a mistress at a hotel, and he never embarrassed her, at least not in front of others. He was kind to dogs, children, old women. And she loved him. As love is wont to do, though, it tended to wane in the light of the days spent away from him, and the moments when it really came to her that the strange smell upon him was the product of other lips and hands than her own. So it was a wan sort of love, something like the perfume of a distant flower that would come and go as the winds blew, or as often as she saw him in his nice suit, smoking a cigarette and looking like a mixture of Clark Gable and John Barrymore.
It was all well enough. Two years of quiet socializing, and fondness, and firesides with a book or two, and very little talking. Until he came home, broken, and he collapsed upon the sofa and he wouldn't look at her at all. The roast got cold. The jello began to melt slightly, but he didn't want any, and she felt funny eating by herself. She offered him a drink, trying to pretend that all was usual, and everything was just as it should be; but she couldn't help feeling she was missing some amount of wifely knowledge. This was outside bounds.
"Oh, Shelly," he said - he called her Shelly because he always had teased her that Elizabeth was the name of an ice queen, and that Shelly was so very much more her, like the happy sunny feeling at a sandy beach - he said her name again, and couldn't look at her.
"Yes?" she answered, tentative, really not sure what to say at all.
He just stared at the clean, tiny, empty fireplace, his face wooden.
"Would you like another drink?"
"NO!" he screamed at her, and went face down on the couch.
Two days later, he hadn't gotten up or gone to work. He was a mess, she tentatively called the doctor, who came, and sat with him a long time.
He came out, saddened, but with a smile for her. She fluttered around him, her large skirt rustling, her eyes worried, but still prettily so. "What is it, doctor?"
"I'm afraid he'll have to tell you himself, my dear," said the doctor kindly, and walked out of the house, purposefully, as if he had something better to do.
After another day of silence, and worrying, she finally entered their room (she had been sleeping on the hideabed in the study) and sat by him, her face hard. She asked, in a stiff little voice, what the matter was.
No answer.
She cleared her throat and asked again.
Silence.
Finally, quite deliberately, she upended the jug of water by their bed on his head.
He popped up, his eyes sad and horrified. "How could you?" he demanded!.
"How could I? How could I?!" She screamed back at him. Ladies always kept their voices down, but ladies' husbands didn't do these strange things, either.
"You have lain in here for four days, Charlie! Four days! No word to me, no eating. Drinking. You disgust me."
"I disgust myself," replied Charlie, surprisingly.
She turned to him, astonished.
He looked right back at her.
"What happened?"
He looked like he was trying to put up that painless facade, the one he had presented her so seamlessly for so long. "I slept with the boss's wife," he stated baldly.
She yelped, and sprang up from the bed.
"How could you do anything so stupid!" she cried.
And in that moment, they both knew they had always known. And he looked at her shocked, and amazed.
"You are so smart, Charlie. This was a stupid, hurtful thing to do."
"I was fired."
"You betrayed me."
"I'll leave."
"You'll stay."
They stared at each other. That night Elizabeth went to the bar. She got drunk, she kissed a man who was not her husband. She came home smelling of liquor.
Charlie was watching tv.
"You stink, Shelly."
"Don't call me that. My name," and she drew herself up to her full height, swaying on the strong winds of alcohol, "is Elizabeth."
"You," she said, pointing at him, "betrayed me."
And she went upstairs to bed, and she stayed there for a week. When she got out of bed, Charlie was still there. And so was she. And the world had changed.
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