Free Discretion by Elizabeth Nunez

she said, as if she were chiding a child. “But it’s not your day. It’s Wednesday today.” She had no remorse.
    “I don’t want to bother you with cooking for me.” I softened my tone.
    “I thought it would be more convenient,” she said. “In my apartment.”
    “Yes. That was kind. But is there a restaurant close to you?”
    A place where I would be surrounded by people
.
    She lived in the Village, she said. There were many restaurants close to her. I asked her to choose one, and she gave me the address. We could meet for lunch, I said.
    “Twelve-thirty?”
    I agreed. I did not consult my appointment book. I said twelve-thirty was a good time for me. I did not dare say more. I did not dare risk my good luck. She had said yes. I would meet her tomorrow.Tomorrow was not a long time away. Tomorrow was an afternoon, a night’s sleep. Tomorrow was hours away.
    There are times we wish for things we should not have: another man’s wife, another man’s job, another man’s power. But when we wish for those things, we know that we will do nothing to actually get them. We will not steal, we will not murder. We will not betray the ones we love. We know these things we wish for are the stuff of our imaginings. Safe in the privacy of our illusionary world, we are free to make what we will of these things as if we had them. We make love to the other man’s wife, we sit in the other’s man castle, we drive the other man’s Rolls-Royce, we use the other man’s influence and power.
    We do this in dreams, and we are not culpable. Behavior, we know, is what counts. We cannot control how we feel. Temptation, the devil’s lethal weapon, comes to us in many forms—feelings and yearnings, the most persuasive. But we do not surrender to them, not always for fear of the loss of paradise in the next world, but for fear of the loss of the paradise we have in this world, the present world in which we live.
    I had paradise in the present world, paradise that it would shatter me to lose: Nerida, my son, another child to be born in four months, a job with prestige and influence. I believed I was happy. Yet when I said good-bye to Nerida that morning before I took the shuttle from Washington to New York, it was another paradise I was thinking of—not of the next world, or of the present conscious world, but of the subconscious world, the world where I had lived in secret when the first woman I loved so devastated me, I was forced to shield what was left of my heart with a lie that consoled me.
    Nerida saw the glaze in my eyes when I said to her that something had come up unexpectedly that morning and I had to go to New York.
    “Why didn’t they call you last night?” she asked me.
    I blamed the diplomatic bureaucracy.
    “They had probably given the message to someone who thought someone else had already telephoned me.”
    “Oh,” she said. She did not take her eyes off me.
    “I’ll be back early,” I promised. “I’ll take the six o’clock flight.”
    “So you will have dinner at home?”
    I knew she was pressing for a commitment from me.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “I’ll wait for you.”
    She said it as if she meant she would wait longer than the hours it would take for me to get back to Washington from a day’s trip to New York. But women have this prescience. When they sense danger approaching them, they send out signals. Warnings. I’ll wait for you, they say. A promissory note. They make you sign it. They throw out the rope to you that could save them. Catch it, they tell you. Reel me back into the boat with you, they say.
    I wish it were so with men. We keep our fears silent, our dreams secret. We know emotions can erode our manhood. I could have said to Nerida, Reel me back in. But I did not, though I was afraid. For though I was afraid, I was not so afraid as I was desperate, desperate to see the woman of my dreams.
    This is where women prove themselves more levelheaded than men. They know there is a fine line