Free The Better to Hold You by Alisa Sheckley Page A

mouth to respond, I clarified, “Not to night. In Romania.”
    He looked almost relieved, I thought. “In Romania,” he said, and I waited for him to continue. But he just left it there, and I thought about all the ways I could interpret those two words. They could mean, Yes, I was unfaithful in Romania, but now I am here and I am with you. Or, There is so much you don’t understand about Romania that I don’t know where to begin. On the other hand, they could also mean that, in some very real way, my husband was still in Romania, his whole imagination caught up in the adventure of it.
    But, no, I was trying to analyze this away. I knew what he meant. “Who was it?” My mind raced through the possibilities. Magdalena Ionescu, the chief wolf researcher, had to be in her forties, too old for Hunter. “Was it a girl in a bar? A call girl? Who was it?” I found myself hoping that he’d been with a call girl, something that moments ago would have felt unspeakably disgusting.
    “Listen, Abra—I don’t think there’s any point in rehashing all the details. It’s only going to upset you, and frankly, I don’t have the stomach for it. Besides, it’s very American, this idea of absolute, uncompromising fidelity, with any deviation punished by an exhaustive cross-examination.” Hunter rummaged on the table for a cigarette. “In any case, sex is really the smallest part of what we have, isn’t it?” He lit the cigarette and then said, “For Christ’s sake, woman, don’t just stand there all doe-eyed. Either slap me or get over it. I don’t have patience for this victim act.”
    And then I understood. Not a call girl. Not a random girl in a bar. “Are you in love with her?”
    Hunter took a drag on his cigarette. “I don’t know, Abra. Probably not in the way that you mean.”
    At that moment, I think I could have walked straight off the balcony without blinking. Instead, I made myself walk into the bedroom, lay myself down on the bed, and removed my glasses. Turned the light off and tried to sleep, but only wound up staring into blurry space, tears trickling down my face and into my left ear.
    I wanted to scream: Tell me who she was! Tell me how many times! But in a sense, the deeper betrayal was what he’d said afterward. It wasn’t his extramarital affair that he felt was meaningless, it was sex with me that felt unimportant. All our passionate games had been nothing more than a distraction for Hunter. And he hadn’t said he didn’t love her.
    I hadn’t had the guts to ask if he still loved me. It was like being told I had a potentially fatal illness, and not being able to ask whether or not there was hope.
    From the other room, I could hear the steady click of the keyboard as Hunter typed. Closing my eyes made me feel like crying; I kept hearing my mother’s voice, telling me all the things that would go wrong with my marriage after the newness wore off.
    I put my glasses back on and found the remote control. On Channel 54 I found what I didn’t know I was looking for: my mother, her perfectly voluptuous size-eight figure encased in a skintight space suit, trying to kiss a poor man’s Steve McQueen.
    “I’m not what you think I am,” she warned him as she wrapped her arms around his neck.
    “Baby, the way I feel right now, I don’t care if you’re really a five-headed barbatrid from the swamplands of Venus.”
    “Well, in that case … kiss me.”
    I settled back under the covers as my mother consumed her prey.
EIGHT
    The decision to take a sick day and go visit my mother was something I began to regret before I had even arrived. All the way to Pleasantvale, I kept rethinking the moment of sleep-deprived weakness when I had made the call to work. Surely it would have been better to go in and lose myself in rounds before receiving the obligatory birthday card and cake at lunchtime. But once I had made the call, I couldn’t unsick myself, and the idea of staying home all day to be ignored by