Free Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill Page B

look like?”
    In Africa, they tied the couple together and threw them into a river of crocodiles
.
    In ancient Greece, the punishment was a root vegetable inserted into the anus
.
    In France, the woman was made to chase a chicken through the streets naked
.
    Door #3?
    How did you meet? Go back to the beginning
.
    This is what the worksheet in the adultery book says.
    It will be a long time before one of the
Voyager
s will encounter another star. And even then it won’t come very close. There is a red dwarf star called Ross 248. In 40,000 years
, Voyager 2
will come within 1.7 light-years of it, still far enough away that it will seem like no more than a dot of light. Astronomers say that if you looked at it through the porthole of
Voyager 2,
it would seem to slowly brighten over the millennia, then slowly dim for many more
.
    There is one thing the wife tells the philosopher which she isn’t sure anyone else will understand. If she tells it to someone else, they might think she is being self-deprecating. But she isn’t being self-deprecating. She is being religious. The thing is this: Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him. “It was a fucking miracle that I found him,” she tells the philosopher. “A fucking miracle. Past tense.” They are sitting cross-legged on the floor like they used to in their dorm rooms. “I think I was afraid to go all in,” she says.
    “Because all in is terrifying. With all in, you lose everything.” He nods and suddenly they are both crying a little.
    He calls her up later. “Get him up to the country. You can leave him in six months if you want, but get him out of here.”
    The adultery book says it’s unwise to make any big moves in the aftermath of such an event.
There is, unfortunately, no geographical cure
.
    Bullshit, her sister says.
    She goes to visit her and writes the husband a letter from London. She isn’t sure if she should use the old return address, but then at the last minute she pencils it in. She is after all, speculating.
    Dear Husband
,
    Forget the city. There is nothing for us anymore. The birds are leaving even. I saw two pigeons on the runway when my plane took off yesterday
.
    She’ll leave the city to her students, the ones whose shoes are held together by electrical tape, the ones who tear up at the sight of discarded umbrellas, the ones who buy the inscrutable Russian candy and the halal goat meat. Just last week, one was outside her office memorizing all the categories of clouds (in case this proved necessary).
    “What is the worst thing that ever happened to him?” her sister asks her. And the answer is nothing ever has.
    “That’s the problem,” she says. “He’s just a nice boy from Ohio. He has no idea how to fix something like this.”
    There is a pause and the wife thinks they are both wondering what it would be like to grow up like that. Their mother died when they were young. Their father was elsewhere. What would it be like to make it so late into life before trouble hit? To always have someone on the front porch, calling you to dinner? The husband doesn’t have even a touch of this raised-by-wolvesness.
    But the girl does, she bets. Something in her past that makes her want to tear things to shreds.
    Is it possible there is some alternate universe in which the wife and the girl would be friends? She has heard such stories before from her grad students, of the sad-seeming married man, of the unkind wife, of the “all I did was send him music” variety.
    She imagines having lunch with her and hearing the story of this married guy she thinks she’s in love with. Should she get him drunk and say something? She is almost positive he feels the same. The way he looks at her, the way they walk back together from lunch, their hands almost touching.
    What Ann Druyan said:
Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman