Free Architects Are Here by Michael Winter

Nell’s predicament would be discovered. There wasnt much inventiveness happening in the factory of his brain. His brain knew he was done for. He had collapsed partly for the shock value but the crying was unexpected. Then he thought of something.
    Richard, he said, has been sleeping with her. Those are Richard’s pictures.
    Are you all right down there. Youre not having a heart attack.
    I’m exhausted, he said. It was exhausting.
    So you had a little thing you were saying.
    There was a tone in his wife’s voice he had heard before, but usually when Helen was discussing with him her father who hurt her emotionally when she was a teenager. Arthur opened his mouth. I kissed her once, he said. It’s Richard. She’s actually pregnant.
    You dont know a thing about your friends, she said. Not one thing.
    He wasnt afraid of his wife. He wasnt afraid of anger and being the cause of upset, but he was unnerved by this tone of voice. He had partly forgotten that he had slept with Nell Tarkington. Nell’s admission that it was not his baby had made him think of Richard, and that solution overwrote all that had happened before.
    I think theyre seeing each other.
    It hasnt occurred to you, Helen said, that Richard is gay.
    What was she saying, and could it be true. And of course it was. What kind of mind did he have, that he could not see what Richard really was. His wife knew, his wife knew everything. She was the smartest woman ever. Did she know that the weekend he shared with Nell in St John’s they did not make love. Would she know that. Would she give him some points for that. They hardly touched each other. When a man decides to stop seeing someone, it’s as if they have never slept together. An unclear window remains, which he shares with the woman he’s slept with. But the majority of him feels loyal.
    It was a relief to him, especially after the fiasco of the St John’s trip. It irritated him that so much had been planned and, in the end, nothing done. But then he realized a lot of work had been done. Sometimes saying one sentence is a lot of work. It couldnt be Richard’s child. He had been trying to figure out a way to tell Helen and now he could say it. But it was worse than she’d thought.
    Pregnant, great.
    It was a boy, he said. That one, Joe Hurley. She said it was someone else’s.
    That was not the information that would exonerate him, he now knew that. Helen had been upset when he’d had an affair with Debra Logan. Debra was Helen’s age, there was the utter loss of reason after Zac had gone. It was the idea of a student and that he’d invite her to their house. That she’d see her things. She’d compare. Perhaps he thought a student was not a threat. A student can propel large folds of life into the sexual act. Helen had been a student, she remembers crushes. Debra Logan was married and thirty-nine. It was more like a form of yoga to Debra Logan, sleeping with Arthur Twombly. But a student. That reflected on her, on Helen getting old. It had been over a year since Zac’s death. She wouldnt be judged that way. It was mean of Arthur to have hidden it. Was it cold, it was an insult. And worse than unthinking. It suggested nothing that she could improve on except a time machine. She did not for one second believe he had only kissed her. You slept with her here, she said, in David’s bedroom.
    When she met Arthur, in graduate school in Ann Arbor, she took him boating in Saginaw Bay (her parents have a cottage at Worth Corners). They skied and hiked in White Cloud—Arthur’s neck of the woods. His father took blind people downhill skiing. She’d watch him assist amputees climb in a bucket with outriggers. The blind he skied in front of and told them what they were hearing. That’s a gondola, those are trees to your left. It was deeply moving and it made her want to have a piece of him, the son. They both got summer jobs as interpreters at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit. The Vietnam War made them