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After a moment, Wendy said, “That’s it?”
“She loves me more than I love her, and down deep she knows it and it makes her very anxious. She’ll be convinced that I had some sort of affair this weekend.”
“And she’ll be right.”
“I know. Part of me, and this is obviously a rationalization, figures that since she already suspects me of being unfaithful, I might as well do the deed.”
“You’ve cheated on her before,” Wendy said.
“Not a lot, but there’s this woman I work with.”
“I don’t need the details,” Wendy said, laughing.
“Oh, you’re jealous.”
“Of course I’m jealous. I’m jealous of Maggie too. I’m jealous of everyone who gets to spend time with you, everyone who gets to touch this body.” She slid her hand up his stomach to his chest.
“So what are we going to do?” Thom said.
“I’ve been thinking about that—”
“Let’s just each disentangle ourselves from our lives and start over together?”
Wendy bit her upper lip. “I think that’s what we should do, too, but don’t you think we should meet again first? Give this a little bit of time?”
“Not really,” Thom said.
“I’m coming out east, to Boston, in two months to visit a college friend. I’ll be staying with her for a week, but she’s working while I’m there. My days will be mostly free.”
“I’ll be there. I’ll make it happen. Tell me the dates.”
After giving him the dates of her trip and her friend’s address in Cambridge, they made a plan to meet up at Harvard’s natural history museum on a Tuesday afternoon. “And then we can figure out what to do next, okay?” Wendy said.
“And between then?”
“And between then we have the memory of this weekend.”
1991
June
The phone rang and she ignored it. It was either Bryce calling from work because he was bored and needed someone to talk with, or else it was her mother and one of the dogs was sick, and in either case, she was happy to keep reading her book.
But she marked her place with her finger while listening to her own recorded voice tell the caller to leave a message after the beep, and then listened. “Wendy, hi, it’s Kerry. Long time no speak—”
She picked up the phone. “Hey, Ker.”
“Oh, hi. Screening calls?”
“Maybe.”
“Howareyou?”
They lied to each other for five minutes about their lives, but Wendy could tell that Kerry had called for a reason.
“Do you remember that poem you published in the review our junior year? ‘Graveyards’?”
“Yeah, of course. But how doyouremember it?”