Free Good People by Robert Lopez Page A

good sport concerning his need for a go.
    The one driving says, It’s like the old joke: Take my wife. She’s a good woman, but my dick isn’t going to suck itself.
    Unbeknownst to him, she is aware of his voyeurism. She hasn’t confronted him about it because she doesn’t mind him spying on her. She would rather he spy on her than on a neighbor, though she is worried that he does this, as well. There is an attractive woman across the street and she has noticed her husband observing her. The first time it happened was on a Sunday as they were getting into the car to go shopping. On Sunday,they shop together instead of walk together. They both think it important to do things together, for the marriage. In truth, the wife doesn’t like to shop, but she also doesn’t like it when she gives the one driving a list and he fails to acquire every item listed. Sometimes what he forgets is the one thing they need most, so Sunday is reserved for them to pick up what he’s forgotten during the week. On this particular Sunday as they were getting into the car, she noticed him glance several times across the street, and there was the woman. She doesn’t know who this woman is, doesn’t know her name, her occupation or if she has one, whether she is single or married or what. She looked at her husband after his second or third glance across the street and told him to get in the car.
    She has searched through his closet and the downstairs garage, looking for binoculars or a telescope or a camera with a telephoto lens. She searches approximately once a month, usually when he is out at a store. She has yet to find anything incriminating.
    She doesn’t want to humiliate him about this particular predilection, the voyeurism. All in all, he is a good man. Every good man has something wrong with him, something fundamentally unwholesome and feeble. She told him early on that she was open-minded, and enjoyed the look on his face afterward. She said thisbefore they were intimate, before they’d even kissed good night.
    Topless, she said, Are we clear?
    He hasn’t mentioned the sales representative since.
    Before, when he was single, he would go to a store only if it was absolutely necessary. Now he lives in them. He tells his friends that it’s awful, that it’s the death of some essential part of himself, but he does not actually mind. He knows he has to do something. He is a man.
    She does everything else around the house, both inside and out. She is always dusting, cleaning, building, caulking, grouting, finishing, fixing. She mows, trims, weeds, gardens, waters. He does not like to be around when she is doing any of these things. Whenever she is out there, he will try to think of a store he should visit, something they might need for the house. Plumber’s tape or clippers or something she mentioned over dinner or during a walk the past week.
    He will come home with the plumber’s tape or clippers, proud of himself. He knows not to make a production of it, however. He knows he shouldn’t come bounding through the door exclaiming, I got the plumber’s tape or clippers you wanted. He did this once on a Saturday when his wife was in the downstairs bathroom fixing both the showerhead and toilet tank. The showerhead had been leaking water for sometime, since they’d moved in. But the chain connecting the handle and ball cock in the toilet tank had come unhinged the night before. He was the one who broke it. She’d told him repeatedly that he had to be gentle with the handle in the downstairs toilet. She told him the chain was about to come unhinged. To his credit, he’d tried to remember this, and for weeks he was gentle in the downstairs bathroom. The trouble is, he is never gentle with anything, at least not for long. He always finds himself slamming cabinet doors shut, violating keyholes while opening locks, gripping a toothbrush like he’s strangling a garter