7. Mrs. Johnson #3
She promised to be my loving wife, to have and hold, from now until death.
She also promised to give herself completely to any man who struck her fancy, to tell me about it like she had just cheated on Steve, and to keep being an unfaithful slut.
I said thanks, and she laughed. She wanted some time back as my wife before next week’s trip—with Steve, of course.
“Hard to be a cheating slut with your own husband,” she said.
Steve would just want to knock her up. He hadn’t asked for the calendar, but she didn’t know if he was serious.
We lay there a minute. Then she asked it again, the real question.
“What if I am pregnant?”
I started talking about her belly swelling, her tits getting sore—anything to avoid the question. She swatted my chest.
“I’m serious. What do we do?”
“You want a baby. We keep it.”
“It will be Steve’s.”
I told her exactly what the after would be like.
She would walk around with another man inside her, stretching her, coming out of her.
Nursing would be like a man at her tits three times a day.
Whenever I looked at what was left of her body I would know it was because she was a cheating slut, and it would get me hard.
She said I made the after sound horrible.
I asked how she felt about carrying a bastard from an affair, and I said it as raw as I could because raw was the only language we had left that wasn’t a lie.
She went quiet, then filthy. It’s how she tells the truth now.
Dirty, she said. Constant. She would be horny all the time.
She would almost want people to know. Maybe she should have fucked the Black train guy.
She said that last part looking at me, still checking the edge, and I kissed her so she would know the edge had moved.
* * *
She went back to Steve anyway. I drove her to the airport like a husband and came home to a house where every room held its breath in the wrong way.
When she walked in again she was lit the way she had been after the honeymoon week, except this time the talk was a baby and not a disc she had rinsed in a sink.
“I told him I wanted him to knock me up so I could have him inside me all the time.” She laughed, dropping her bag.
“That drove him crazy. Asked if I would tell you. I said no. I told him I’d make you raise it and watch while he put another one in me.
” She said he went insane after that, fucking her every hour he could steal, talking about years of babies.
She hadn’t told him she might already be pregnant; she wanted that energy to stay sharp.
Steve still blind. That was the sentence I had asked her to protect, and she had protected it with her mouth on him and a lie I would have paid for.
She kissed me with her eyes open and said, slowly, like a vow she had already practiced in a hotel bed, “I’m a dirty cheating slut wife. Now fuck my cheating cunt.”
There wasn’t much to say after that. I played my part as the leftover husband. She told it like betrayal. I took it like a job, in our bed, with my ring on her hand and Springfield still in the way she came.
* * *
Late the following week, she came home after dark and dropped a small bag on the counter like a verdict. I asked what was up. She stood in front of me with a solemn look I didn’t like.
“My period was due yesterday,” she said. She let that sit. “I’ve never been late.”
Something went wrong in my chest, like a gear slipping. The cold went straight into my hands. She upended the package and cheap plastic tests tumbled out, three of them, as if quantity would change math. She picked one up and said, “Let’s see if I have Steve’s bastard child inside me.”
“Or mine.”
She was stressed enough to be sharp. “Steve shot his load directly against my cervix ten or eleven times while I was fertile. You came into a piece of plastic. It will be Steve’s.”
She went to the bathroom. About a minute later she came out holding the device like evidence. It was red all over, not the plus I had been picturing in the chair in the dark all week.
I asked what it said, feeling stupid, needing her to say the words.
“It says I have my period, genius. No baby.” She tossed the test in the trash and swept the others after it. A small clatter. The week going in with them.
I followed her to the bedroom, not knowing where else to put my body.
I asked if she was okay. She said she was relieved, that not knowing had been stressful.
I watched her on our bed, just Wendy again, the red in her hair fading back to her real color, my ring on her hand.
Her expression gave nothing away. Neither did mine.
I couldn’t sort out the relief from the disappointment.
Both, probably. That was the marriage, too.
Pink would come around again. She already knew how to stay past the first day of it.
I already knew how to wait in a house with no wife in it.
The next time, we were both going to pretend we were surprised, and neither of us would be, because we had stood in a bathroom with another woman’s ring on her hand and named what we were doing out loud.