6. Playing House
six
Playing House
Afew weeks with no trips. I checked the closet anyway, the way you re-read a text you know you can't un-send.
She was marking months ahead. City names written on green days in the same tight hand she used for client notes.
Of course she was. The calendar had stopped being a secret she kept from me.
It had become the schedule of our marriage.
“You’re planning the sex around the calendar.”
“Of course.” Bright. Unashamed. Standing in the closet doorway like she was proud of the system. “I can’t make every date land. I postpone the ones that fall on the wrong color. I’m not wasting a pink day on a man who doesn’t know, or a green day on a conference call.”
She was itchy. I was worse. We’d been picking through the same last memories of getting high the way you pick at a scab, and the scab was gone now, just raw skin underneath.
“When do you see your work husband.”
“Technically Wednesday. All-hands. He drives in.”
“Hotel? Here?” The words were out before I’d weighed them. “He’d love it. Wedding pictures on the wall while he uses you.”
She actually shivered. I saw it go through her, a full-body yes. “I’d love that. Feel him in me looking at us.” Then the air went out. “He has to get home. Pets. Family’s away. Even if I let him fuck me in a conference room we don’t have the time.”
I told her the next trip could grow an extra night. Her ‘yeah, I guess’ was distant. I heard myself still talking, trying to solve another man’s logistics, so my wife could get fucked. The words tasted like ash, and I shut my mouth.
Late, I looked at the calendar again. Wednesday was green. No wonder she was raw. I had spent the evening trying to get another man into our marriage bed. I didn’t know if that made me helpful or sick. I was hard about it either way, which was the only data point I trusted anymore.
* * *
Wednesday she came downstairs in the pinstripe suit and the heels she wore when she wanted a room to take her seriously. Something was off. I told her so.
“Usually a top under the jacket,” she said, and bent for her keys on the table. The flap fell. Breast. Nipple. Clean shot, no blouse, just the jacket and the dare in her eyes.
“That’s for Steve.” Then a grin that was all sharp edges. “Other guys can look. I’m horny. It’s been a while.”
“Find one closer.”
“What do you think I am, some kind of slut?”
“You promised.”
“You’re right. I am one. Mind open.”
“Legs?”
“For the right guy.”
At the door I asked about panties. She had them on. I told her to lose them. Access. A flash if the room went that way, if a breakout session turned into a closet, if Steve got five minutes he wasn’t supposed to have.
She looked at me for a second, then reached under the skirt, slid them down, stepped out, and left them on the hall floor like a little white flag on hardwood.
“You can still talk me out of my panties,” she said. “For other men.”
“Consider it. New guys at corporate. Driving distance.”
“Okay.” She left. The panties stayed. I stared at them after the door shut, a small surrender on the dark wood. I’d just sent my wife into a meeting with no underwear, on a green day, armed for a man who had no idea I was part of the plan.
* * *
I spent the day inventing supply closets and under-table hands, imagining him cornering her by the coffee station, a promise whispered against her neck while the CEO talked numbers. I did my job badly. I checked my phone the way you check a door you already know you locked.
Late afternoon: Have a plan. Call you later. Don’t worry. #slut
I ignored dinner. I ate standing up. Bedtime I sent Everything OK? because the silence had started to grow teeth. Ten minutes later the phone rang and pulled me out of a half-sleep I hadn’t earned.
“Where are you. You being bad?”
“Very.” Her voice was the hotel voice, low, pleased. “I’m at Steve’s.”
“His hotel.”
“His house. Springfield. I’m staying.”
Three hours. His family was gone, I knew that already. “Clothes?” I asked. “What’s the story?” Stupid questions, anything to silence the picture of her in another man’s kitchen, pouring a drink from a bottle I didn’t recognize.
“Listen,” she said. “This is too much for a text. I called because this will excite you and torment you, and I want both.”
She laid out the details: They had dropped her car at the train station. She had ridden home with him, the real home, the one with pets and a wife’s closet. The plan was to train back later. His wife and kids were at her mother’s until Monday.
“His wife used to be my size,” she said. “Porked after the kids. Her clothes fit. The sexy ones. Shoes almost. I’m already in her lingerie. Her jewelry. Her perfume.”
I sat up in our dark bedroom with the phone against my ear and the hall light still on downstairs, her panties still on the floor where I had left them.
“We’re playing house until Monday. I’m taking her husband.
Fucking him in her bed.” My own breath felt loud in the silence.
“All my stuff is in a trash bag in the garage,” she said, her voice steady.
“When I hang up, I power off my phone and drop it in. I’ll be Steve’s wife until Monday. Nothing of mine on me.”
“Your ring,” I said, stupid, soft, reaching for the one thing that still said us. “That’ll remind you.”
“Your ring is in the bag too. I’m wearing hers. Fat fingers after the kids — it was in the safe. He put it on me and I swore I’d be his wife until he releases me Monday. It’s a real sparkler. He’s a good husband.”
A breath. I heard the smile in her voice.
“So now I’m Mrs. Steve Johnson, and you have no wife. She’s in a garbage bag in the garage. It’s exciting. Disorienting. I’m going to do his laundry, walk his dog, sleep on her side of the bed. I can feel you fading already. I’m his wife until he tells me to leave.”
“I have to go. My new husband wants to put a baby in me.”
I yelled “Wait!” into a dead line.
Voicemail. Text undelivered. Phone off.
Her words echoed—garbage bag, new husband, baby—as I poured a drink with a hand that didn’t feel like mine. I went to the closet, needing the calendar to argue, to tell me this wasn’t real.
* * *
Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday were a long animal noise in my head.
I went to work and did not work. I came home and walked the house like a ghost haunting his own life.
I pictured her using his coffee mug, wearing his wife’s ring in his shower, christening rooms she might laugh about later, if she came back.
I wondered what lie she’d used for work—a sudden flu, a family crisis—to buy five days as someone else.
I jerked off to the memory of the call more times than I want to count. I jerked off scared, and the fear was the point every time.
Sunday night still nothing. I went to work Monday, so I wouldn’t sit in the hallway with her panties. I last-looked the closet before I left. Monday was pink. That fertile window was the gun on the table now. She had already walked right past it, assuming she was coming home at all.
Afternoon, finally, a message. Kids travel delayed. Staying longer.
I typed When? I sent another: calendar. you are fertile.
Both undelivered. She’d powered off again the second the first text left, like she knew I would try to pull her back with some argument.
I left work early. Tuesday I called in sick.
I picked up the phone to call her office, then put it down.
What would I say? ‘Is Wendy there? Her husband.’ The title was already forming on my tongue: concerned husband.
A man whose wife had vanished. How do you ask for Wendy when Wendy called in with female problems, or a family thing, or whatever lie a work wife uses when she’s in another woman’s bed.
I called and asked for Steve Johnson. They put me through to a voicemail. Away with a family issue until Wednesday.
Family issue. Yeah. He was trying to put a family in my wife. Wednesday. Third day of pink if she stayed. Live ammo. The clean shot I had asked for on a green day, bleeding onto a color we hadn’t planned for.
I waited up, the same fear churning: that I wasn’t losing her to a divorce, but to a life. To a house in Springfield and a ring that fit. To a man who was using her like a real wife because, for five days, she was.
I was Hard, too, that she might come home carrying something I hadn’t put there.
I kept walking to the hall to look at the panties.
I had talked her into this. She had taken the dare and sprinted past any line I’d ever imagined.
Exactly the slut I’d asked for. And that fact, clean and sharp, was what made my hands shake.
I fell asleep in the chair. Woke to nothing. The next day bled into the one after. A week of silence stretched out. Sick day number two. I was useless now, the other man. The new husband had the house, the ring, and the womb.
She was still Mrs. Steve Johnson, somewhere in Springfield.
It was a pink day. I had no wife, just a pair of panties on the floor to prove I ever did.
The calendar still had a gun on Monday, a shot she’d already walked past. I poured another drink.
Waiting was the job now, and the job had gotten longer than the vow.