Free Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill Page A

mistress. (Because his wife will never understand.)

34
    The wife is reading
Civilization and Its Discontents
, but she keeps getting lost in the index.
    Analogies
    bare leg on a cold night, 40
    cautious businessman, 34
    guest who becomes a permanent lodger, 53
    Polar expedition, ill equipped, 98
    When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to get lonely?”
    Get?
    Imaging studies have found that the pain involved in romantic breakups is not just emotional. Similar areas to the ones that process physical assault light up in the brains of the recently jilted.
    What John Berryman said:
I’m too alone. I see no end. If we could all run, even that would be better
.
    At night, they lie in bed holding hands. It is possible if she is stealthy enough that the wife can do this while secretly giving the husband the finger.
    Grow old with me. The best is yet to be
, say the cards in the anniversary section.
    But there are other lines from Yeats the wife keeps remembering.
    Consume my heart away; sick with desire
    And fastened to a dying animal
    Things fall apart
.
    “The girl had red hair,” the wife tells her sister. “The same color I used to dye mine.”
    The wife stopped dyeing her hair when she got pregnant. (Because of the monster babies with no hands that the vain hair-dyeing women have.) But she never went back to it and for years now her hair has been streaked with gray.
    Spell for invocation of divorce:
Greener! Greener!
    Sometimes she talks to the husband in her head.
You think I don’t know. I know. Once I was sleeping next to that boy and a mouse ran through my hair, but I didn’t move. I didn’t want to risk him getting out of bed
.
    The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)
    I was hoping your happiest memory might include me
.
    Later the wife realizes what that was, why he placed that special emphasis on each word of the sentence.
    Ladies and Gentlemen, the prosecution rests
.
    In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids informationand interpretations that contradict prior beliefs.
    “You’ve made me into a cartoon wife,” she tells him. “I am not a cartoon wife.”
    The Buddha named his son Rahula, which means “fetter.”
    The Buddha left his wife when his son was two days old. He would never have attained enlightenment if he’d stayed, scholars say.
    As for us, our days are like grass
.
    “We don’t know, but the cards know,” her daughter says when they are playing a game later.
    Are you going to leave him? Is he going to leave you? Do you think you’ll make it?
    It is her married friends that ask these questions. The single ones don’t. They think it’ssimpler. Sometimes the wife cries. Sometimes she shrugs.
    The cards know.

35
    The wife has never not wanted to be married to him. This sounds false but it is true.
    She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn’t dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks
instead
of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.
    Do you have a secret life? This is what she asks all her friends. Hardly any of the other writers do. But a few people avert their eyes before answering. No, they say. Either that or they tell her everything.
    She has never had a secret life. But after all of this, she does a little. But the secret part seems too small to tell anyone who might be a true secret lifer.
    Like how two guys are sending her music, how she is taking yoga, how she has borrowed $400 from the philosopher that she keeps hidden in an envelope in the closet, how she has received but not cashed her royalties check.
    “Sometimes I think of revenge,” she tells him. He winces. “What would that