by Jason Starr
“Who . . .” She almost added is she? but managed to restrain herself. She knew she was reacting emotionally right now, and without solid evidence. For Jeremy’s sake, she didn’t want to create unnecessary drama.
“Who what?” Simon asked.
“Never mind,” Alison said.
When he returned from the run, he went right into the shower. Was it to get her smell off him? He also took his cell phone with him into the bathroom. Was he texting her?
She couldn’t wait to get her hands on that phone.
Later in the evening she had her opportunity. After Simon read a bedtime story to Jeremy, he came into the bedroom, where Alison was lying in bed, watching The Rachel Maddow Show DVR’d. He stripped to just his boxer briefs and Alison noticed his chest, which looked even hairier than it had last night.
“Have sex with me now,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
They’d been having a lot of sex lately, but was he seriously demanding intercourse?
“Sorry,” Simon said, seeming almost embarrassed. “I don’t know why I said it that way. I meant, Jeremy’s asleep, so do you want to make love now?”
She glanced toward his crotch and saw that he had a hard-on. She saw a flash of him and his lover.
“No,” she said.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” she said, looking at Rachel Maddow. She wished Simon would just leave, because she couldn’t bear to see his lying, cheating face right now.
“It seems like you’re angry at me for some reason,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “Then how come you don’t want to—”
“We don’t have to have sex multiple times every single day.”
“We don’t have to,” he said. “I thought you wanted to have more sex. I thought you liked it.”
“I did . . . I mean do . . . but I feel like you want to break records or something. And I don’t understand why you . . . Never mind. I’m just tired and want to go to sleep early tonight, that’s all.”
She saw that he still had a hard-on, and she shook her head in frustration.
“Okay,” he said. “I can tell you’re in a bad mood. I’ll leave you alone.”
He went into the bathroom. She didn’t hear water running or him lifting the toilet seat cover. She wondered if he was masturbating, and if so, who was he thinking about?
Then she spotted his phone on the dresser. She opened it and checked his recent received and dialed calls. Besides calls to and from home and to her cell, there was a call to Mark, his ex-assistant. How did she know it was really Mark? Maybe he’d purposely mislabeled his lover’s number, thinking it would prevent him from getting caught. She opened her purse and took out a pen and a business card and jotted down the digits. Then she checked his texts. There were no messages in his sent messages or inbox. This was strange because Alison had texted with him several times recently. Had he deleted all of his messages for a reason?
“What’re you doing?”
She looked over and saw Simon standing there near the bathroom door.
She put down the phone quickly and said, “It started beeping. I thought the alarm was going off.”
It was a lame excuse, but the best she could come up with at the spur of the moment.
“It’s okay,” he said. “If you want to use my phone, you can.”
His gaze was aimed downward, toward the business card she was holding. Instinctively she made a fist, crushing the card.
“It was just the alarm,” she said.
When he returned to the bathroom, she put the business card back in her purse and got back in bed. She felt awful about the whole situation. Just this morning everything had been going so well and now she was in a troubled marriage again.
She was determined not to let this drag on. She was going to get answers and put this all behind her one way or another.
On Saturday morning, after Simon returned from yet another long run, she went out to do some grocery shopping. On her way, she stopped at a phone booth on Columbus. She hadn’t made a call from a phone booth in ages, but she wanted to check the number she’d written down and didn’t want Caller ID to pop up from her cell phone.
Mark’s number was actually Mark—his voice mail picked up. She was more frustrated than relieved. If Simon was having an affair, she wanted to find out about it already, and her instincts told her that something was going on, that what had been going on lately definitely wasn’t normal.
The rest of the weekend Alison didn’t actively check up on Simon, but she was attentive and didn’t notice anything. He was his usual self—well, usual as of late: exercising, eating meat, and wanting to have sex with her, well, pretty much constantly. He was talking in this weird, demanding tone too. When he asked questions he’d leave out the question mark. Like during dinner one night he poured himself a glass of apple juice and then said to her, “You want apple juice,” but not as a question, as a statement. He’d done it maybe a dozen times, and it was getting very annoying.
On Saturday night she told him she was tired again. He seemed disappointed but didn’t question her about it. But when she turned him down again on Sunday, he said, “Can you please tell me what’s going on? I’m not a mind reader. If you’re angry at me about something, tell me what it is.”
Alison knew that a discussion would erode into an argument, so she said, “What’s the point?” and watched a DVR’d Rachel Maddow Show until she fell asleep.
Alison didn’t sleep for long. After about an hour, she woke up, ruminating about Simon’s strange behavior and whether it really meant he was cheating on her. Maybe he was just acting weird for no reason, as part of some kind of midlife crisis. After all, he’d lost his job and had become a stay-at-home dad—these were major life changes. She had no evidence that he was cheating on her, so maybe she was jumping to incorrect conclusions. Maybe all of the crazy exercise and interest in sex was just his way of making an extra effort at saving the marriage. Hadn’t she been asking him to make more of an effort for months? Maybe she was being extremely unfair. Now that he was actually making an effort, she was freaking out.
On Monday morning she had a sales appointment with Dr. Greenberg at his office on Eighty-fourth Street between Park and Madison. The receptionist had her wait in the waiting room until Greenberg was available, close to noon, and Alison actually had started to doze when the nurse said she could see the doctor now. Alison didn’t know Greenberg particularly well, and her pitch was uncharacteristically rushed and scattered. He took her samples and told her to call for a follow-up meeting, but she could tell it wouldn’t lead to anything. She felt bad because Greenberg was an influential, prestigious gynecologist who could be elusive, and she felt that she’d blown a major opportunity.
Alison walked down Madison Avenue, pulling her suitcase with samples behind her, trying not to be too hard on herself; she’d been going through a lot lately, and everyone was entitled to an off day every now and then. It had turned into a beautiful sunny afternoon—shoppers were out in abundance and the outdoor tables at the side street cafés were filled. She texted Simon:Hope you’re enjoying the beautiful day!
He didn’t write back right away the way he usually did lately. She kept checking as she continued downtown, but there was still no response. She imagined him angry at her, deleting the message without even bothering to read it. If she was wrong about this and he wasn’t having an illicit relationship, all she was accomplishing with her suspicion was pushing him further away. Maybe her sister and the websites were wrong, and Simon’s behavioral changes were just his weird way of making an extra effort to work on the marriage.
It seemed weird, waiting for him to write back, so she called him.
He picked up after the fourth ring and said, “Hey.”
“Hey, just saying hi,” Alison said. “And I wanted to apologize for the way I’ve been acting this weekend. I’ve just been stressed out, but I’v
e been taking it out on you and I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Simon said. “I miss you.”
She couldn’t remember the last time he’d told her he missed her—when they were dating? He sounded sincere, which made her feel even guiltier for the assumptions she’d made.
“I miss you too,” she said. “So where are you guys? Battery Park?”
“No, the guys came uptown today. We’re hanging out in Sheep Meadow.”
“Oh, that sounds great. Well, you two have a great day. And give Jeremy a big kiss for me.”
“I will. I love you.”
“Love you too.”
Alison ended the call, feeling awful. Not for saying “Love you,” to her husband—that felt great and normal; she felt awful because of the way she’d been treating him lately. All of her reasons for doubting him and acting so distant toward him over the weekend seemed ridiculous. She missed him and couldn’t wait to see him later.
She tapped out a text: I miss you! but didn’t hit send, as it occurred to her that she was about a ten-minute walk from Sheep Meadow and she didn’t have another appointment until after lunch. Wouldn’t it be nice to surprise Simon and Jeremy?
Without giving it any more thought, she headed toward the park.
She went up the hill, and gradually Sheep Meadow came into view. She spotted Simon and his friends right away—they were impossible to miss. In the middle of the field, people were cheering, watching Simon and the other men playing Frisbee with their shirts off. Alison was surprised to see Simon with his off—he never went shirtless in the park, even on the hottest summer days—and she was also surprised to see how hairy his chest was. She’d seen it in the bedroom, of course, but the lights were usually dimmed. Out in the open his hairiness somehow seemed more startling. The other guys seemed noticeably hairy too. She stopped and watched as the man with thick gray hair—she assumed this was Michael—flung the Frisbee extremely far and a Latino-looking guy chased it down and sprinted back to him like a happy dog. After the stocky muscular guy retrieved the Frisbee, it was Simon’s turn. Alison watched in awe as Simon ran at blazing speed and snared the disk, then ran back to Michael, grinning, and not appearing to be out of breath at all. Jeremy and the three other boys were cheering with the other onlookers.
Alison watched the scene, thinking, Is this really happening? Why was Simon acting this way, and how was he able to run so fast? He’d never been a particularly fast runner, but all of a sudden he was like a track star. He couldn’t have gotten in such great shape during the past week, just from going running in the park and playing soccer with Jeremy.
Now the guys were taking turns hugging one another. Simon hugged the gray-haired guy for a long time, maybe a minute, and then the guys shouted at each other stuff like “Woo-hoo” and “Yeah, baby.” Then the guys high-fived some more, still acting like overgrown frat boys on speed. Alison had seen guys with lots of machismo in the park before. On weekends in the spring and summer, the park was filled with testosterone-fueled soccer and touch football games. But this didn’t seem like usual male bonding. They were emitting a weird energy that seemed practically euphoric.
Alison had no idea what to make of any of this, but her gut told her that it had to be related to Simon’s other odd behavior lately. It was too coincidental that he’d met these guys and changed right around the same time. There had to be some connection; she just had no idea what it could possibly be.
She decided not to say hi after all and walked away quickly before Simon and Jeremy noticed her.
Between afternoon appointments, Alison stopped at the Starbucks on First and Seventy-fifth and went online and did searches for “husband suddenly fast” and “husband suddenly hairy” and “husband suddenly eats meat.” The results didn’t give her any insight into Simon’s situation, though one site suggested that the hairiness could be related to a hormone imbalance. Were there too many hormones in the meat he was eating? Alison did a search for “meat hormones hairy husband,” but it didn’t solve the mystery.
The rest of the workday, Alison couldn’t get the images out of her head of Simon shirtless, high-fiving and hugging the guys. Where was all that machismo coming from? Simon had never been so outwardly touchy-feely with guys before. Come to think of it, he didn’t even have a lot of male friends. Once in a while he met his friends, Stu or Kenny, for beers, but he wasn’t exactly a guy’s guy. That was one of the things Alison had liked about him when they first met. Most of her previous boyfriends were sports fanatics, and it was refreshing to be with a guy who’d rather go to a wine tasting or a gallery opening than sit slumped on the couch watching a hockey game.
Recalling Simon and Michael’s ultralong hug, Alison said, “He’s not gay, is he?”
Alison didn’t intend to say this out loud. Cheryl, a barista with whom Alison sometimes chatted, was mopping the floor nearby and asked in a gossipy tone, “Who’s not gay?”
Covering, Alison said, “Oh, just, uh, some actor I saw on TV last night.”
“Actors?” Cheryl laughed. “Trust me, girl . . . they’re all gay.”
Alison had never gotten any gaydar from Simon before, and he’d seemed very straight—especially lately. That said, although he wasn’t exactly a metro style freak, he dressed better than most guys and was usually well groomed. She remembered teasing him when they first met because he used an apricot facial scrub and a “skin-firming” body moisturizer. Maybe he and that gray-haired guy Michael were having an affair. Maybe that explained the all-nighter, and why he was going running and going to the gym all the time—to get in shape for his boyfriend. And maybe all the interest in heterosexual sex was just some kind of overcompensation so he could stay in the closet. Maybe Alison wasn’t his wife; she was his beard.
Though she wasn’t convinced that any of this was true, it seemed as logical as any of the other theories she’d come up with lately. If he wasn’t gay, he had some big secret, and maybe it had something to do with his new friends.
That evening when she came home from work, she didn’t talk to Simon much. He asked her how her day was, and she said, “Fine,” and then played with Jeremy for a while. She felt so uncomfortable around Simon, she actually found it hard to look at him.
After dinner, Jeremy was watching The Wiggles and Simon was washing dishes. Figuring there was no reason to put it off any longer, Alison came into the kitchen, asking, “Did you have fun with your friends today?”
“Fun” was loaded, but Simon didn’t pick up on it.
“Yeah, we did actually. Jeremy had a blast too.”
“I thought you were going to stop hanging out with them.”
“I changed my mind,” Simon said. “I think they’re cool guys. I really like them.”
Getting that vision again, of Simon hugging Michael, Alison asked, “What do you like about them?”
“What do you mean?” Simon asked.
“I’m just curious,” she said. “I mean, what’s so special about them?”
“I don’t know,” Simon said. “I guess I just fit in with them. I mean, we’re all stay-at-home dads, or part-time stay-at-home dads, we each have one son. . . .”
“Do they exercise a lot too?”
“I’m not sure, but they’re all really athletic. What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“You don’t have to do this anymore,” Alison said.
Simon, scrubbing the frying pan in which he’d cooked the pork chops he’d had for dinner, asked, “Do what anymore?”
“All of this,” Alison said, letting loose with her frustration. “If you have some secret, or if something’s going on, you can talk about it with me. Or we can talk about it with Dr. Hagan. But all of this acting out, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t accomplishing anything.”
Simon shut off the faucet and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m really confused right now. You’re the one who’s been acting weird, not me.”
“Me?” Alison said. “How’ve I—”
“Ma
ybe I was in Dr. Hagan’s office with a different wife who was talking about how great things have been lately and how much our marriage has improved.”
“It’s true I like some of the changes,” Alison said. “I mean, I like that we’ve been more intimate, and it’s nice to be having sex again, but all of it’s just too much. Your exercising, your meat-eating, the way you suddenly have this great hearing and you have more hair on your body than you’ve ever had before.” Alison realized how crazy all of this sounded, but she continued, “I know there’s something going on, something you’re not telling me, and don’t say it’s all my imagination because it isn’t. I know it isn’t.”
Simon dried his hands with the dish towel and then tried to put his arms around Alison, but she backed away.
“Look, I know I’ve been acting different lately,” he said. “I was concerned myself at first, but I called Dr. Segal’s office and described my symptoms and they pooh-poohed the whole thing. Then I thought, why was I concerned about this when our lives were getting better? We weren’t fighting as much, we were having great sex, and Jeremy was happier. That was what we wanted, right? We wanted to figure out a way to be happy, to improve our lives, and it was happening, so why fight it?”
Alison didn’t answer right away, at first finding it hard to poke any holes in this logic. Then she said, “But what about the physical changes? The crazy meat-eating and your hairy chest?”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Simon said. “All I know is I feel amazing.”
For emphasis Simon smiled widely, but to Alison the smile seemed exaggerated, kind of maniacal, the way he’d looked earlier when he was high-fiving with his friends in the park. She had no idea who this man was, but he wasn’t her husband.
“I feel like I’m losing you,” she said.
