Free What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman Page A

disrupt their lives. Well, Jeff probably didn’t. Miriam was no longer sure what she wanted, what she was doing.
    Jeff was getting impatient with her. She was usually so fast, almost too fast, but today she could not still her thoughts. And Jeff, while generally polite, would abandon her eventually and pursue his own pleasure if she didn’t get going. She focused on that one part of herself, syncing her movements to his mouth, aligning things better, and soon she felt it. Her orgasms with Jeff were like the trick of a soprano shattering glass; it was the resonating frequency, not the pitch, that broke her. She was useless afterward, barely able to move, but Jeff was accustomed to that. He arranged her rag-doll limbs beneath him and pushed into her rather violently until he also was done.
    Now what? Usually they just pulled their clothes on, not that they had ever gotten them totally off before, and returned to work, or home,or wherever. Jeff fetched the bottle of wine from the plastic ice bucket. “No corkscrew,” he said, amused by his own mistake. Casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he broke the bottle’s neck on the rim of the bathroom sink and then filled the water glasses, picking out a few glass fragments that were caught when the wine flowed over the bottle’s broken neck.
    â€œI like screwing you in a bed,” Jeff said.
    â€œOur first time was in a bed,” Miriam said.
    â€œThat didn’t count.”
    Why not? she wondered, yet didn’t ask. Their first time had been in a client’s house, and the violation of the space with which they’d been entrusted had seemed more shocking than the actual fact of adultery. When Jeff asked her to go over to see the new listing, she had known that they were going to have sex, but she pretended naïveté. The woman always sets the pace, her mother had told Miriam in her euphemistic way when probing for the reason behind Miriam’s breakdown. Miriam liked to pretend that Jeff had controlled everything, as easily as he manipulated her body in bed. Jeff made Miriam feel wispy, featherlight, almost as if she were in her girlhood body again. She had not gained weight as she aged, but she had thickened a little, a fact that she had been able to ignore until she noticed her own daughters’ bodies, so impossibly narrow and slim-hipped. Both looked as if they could be snapped in half at the waist.
    â€œWhat now?” she asked.
    â€œNow, as in here, this specific moment? Or now as in tomorrow and next week and the month after?”
    She wasn’t sure. “Both.”
    â€œNow, here, today, we’ll have sex again. Maybe twice, if we’re lucky. Tomorrow, while you’re in church, acknowledging Jesus’s alleged resurrection—”
    â€œI don’t go to church.”
    â€œI thought—”
    â€œHe didn’t ask me to convert. He just told me he didn’t want thegirls raised in any organized religion or exposed to anything but the more nonsecular traditions. Christmas trees, Easter baskets.”
    She had broken an unwritten rule, mentioning her children, and the conversation stalled awkwardly. Miriam didn’t know how to raise the topic she really wanted to discuss. How do we end this? If we’re doing this just because the sex is fun, will it stop being fun in a convenient and mutual way? Will I yearn for you while you move on to someone else? Or vice versa? How did affairs end?
    Theirs was ending that very moment, Miriam would realize later, in ways both banal and cataclysmic. Maybe it had always been this way. A mushroom cloud formed over Hiroshima, and some of those who ran through the streets, stunned and burned, had been routed from beds not their own, from places they shouldn’t be. Tsunamis washed over illicit lovers, adulterers were put on the train to Auschwitz, just not for that particular reason.
    This was her legacy, this was her before, the