Dark Fire

In a mid-sized city within an average suburb sits a house that from the street looks like any other. Inside one enters a mirror world.

On the left side of the staircase, one bedroom that was once the master now looks like a bachelor pad, complete with abstract modern sculptures; on the right side of the staircase, the former guestroom now looks more like a master bedroom and has a painting of a Romantic landscape above the bed.

In the kitchen, you will find two of everything: two coffee makers, two sets of dishes, two entirely different meals in the fridge. It is not a house divided, but a home that refuses to unite.

One summer day, Betty Henderson lowered her coffee mug to the right side of the sink, next to the cabinet with her coffee mugs, above where her coffee maker (a Braun) gave off the last steam of the new pot of bold roast. On the left side, the Keurig belonging to her official husband and roommate, Ron, waited for its first use of the day with something hazelnut-blackberry inside.

Sighing, she picked up her car keys and called up the stairs: “I’m off!”

No response.

“Don’t wait up for me,” she said, then broke into a giggle that ended with a sob before she fell silent for her lonely drive.

Things had not always been this way. Entropy and decay happen, she knew, but it seemed that people were often too willing to let it. Allowing everything to go to hell made it easier to avoid doing the stuff that they should be doing.

Speaking of sudden mortality, she changed lanes to be out of the left lane of the freeway which ran dangerously close to the Sassafras Road bridge and its middle pillar which formed a solid block of concrete between the lanes. If you just drifted left a hair, the end came quickly. The grey rectangle marked the far end of a nice straightaway where people could get their cars up to speed, and six had died in insuppressible fire that year so far.

Her story began in a similar anonymous suburb many years ago. Born to a university professor and his high school teacher wife, Betty Jansen grew up in a house where the adults were constantly busy. They each graded the papers for their own classes, then met up for a glass of wine before bed, while the children — Betty and her older brothers David, Phillip, and Julian — did their homework at the identical desks in their rooms.

When she had free time, Betty liked to paint. She frequently painted “Romantic” scenes, like stormy mountain passes or Gothic castles shrouded in mist, and imagined herself living in them instead of her dreary, obedient household stranded in the cookie-cutter suburbs. She wondered what her painting, the painting of her life and how her story would end, would look like once she got old enough to make her own decisions.

Her parents gave her no direction mainly because they focused so much on her older siblings. The boys were good at sports and school, and all the adults seemed to fawn over them. Betty was assumed to be just, well, Betty: a tidy little person who liked to paint and sing, had big dreams, and would find a place somewhere.

“Will I grow up to have a castle someday, or a prince?” she asked her mother. Betty was painting her favorite scene, a radiant castle in the mountains, rich with spring green and empyrean azure above a field of white flowers.

“No, dear, you’ll become a functioning member of society, develop your own career, pay taxes, and have an accomplished husband, so we have grandkids to visit,” said her mother.

“What your mother said, dear,” her father murmured, barely looking up from the papers he was grading. Her parents as she remember them were attired in bold browns and subdued reds.

On weekends, her father liked to golf, her mother hike, and the two would meet up on Saturday night for a “date night” that involved dinner, drinks, dancing, and a movie. They both liked arty cinema but she knew they sometimes guiltily went to see a good spine-tingling thriller. She imagined that, on that one day a week, they made love. She had no idea what went on in their room at the end of the hall; it was a loving home and a safe one, but not an affectionate home.

While her brothers went to highly-ranked colleges, Betty who had good grades but not exceptional aptitude test scores barely got a scholarship to the state university down the road. When she announced her engagement to Ron her senior year of college, after a long and steady romance beginning when they shared a group project in an early economics class, her parents barely nodded before returning to their books. Her brothers had married well or were engaged, and while the first of these events was exciting, the last was measured more in terms of how much free time it took from their comfortable middle-aged lives.

She married Ron because he seemed to fit into the painting that she hoped would portray her life: maybe not a prince, but a strong silent man, loving his devoted wife, in a castle ensconced in a valley surrounded by mountains, or at least a nice part of suburbia. To this she added two things.

First, she borrowed from what her parents wanted, and decided that her man needed to be accomplished, either by success or being an innovator. Second, on top of this vision floated her own unarticulated dream: she wanted someone to spend time with who actually wanted to be with her, who was affectionate, and appreciated her as more than just a kid with above-average grades and adequate performance on the field hockey team. Betty did not want to be her mother and father repeated.

“Hey, is this seat taken?” Ron had said. Betty looked up and saw not a football hero, but the mythical “well-rounded” all-American, a guy who was obviously both fit, being on the swim team, and going somewhere, since his research in the computer science department had already made it into at least one newspaper. They had met in her Econ 101 class, where he seemed to have a good grasp of the material but was slightly bored, revealing a shadow of arrogance behind his affability.

“No, go ahead,” said Betty, and turned back to watching the game, even though she considered football about as exciting as watching traffic. One light changes, the cars go ahead, and then the lights change again, and cars from the other side go. If someone tosses a ball out of a panel van and the person in the station wagon catches it, they drive straight down the street and everyone cheers. If not, repeat.

“I didn’t realize that you are a painter,” said Ron. “I had a bad date last night, and ended up in the art center after too many beers, just looking at paintings. I saw this one that took my breath away. It took ordinary colors and made them glow,” he said with a warm smile.

“I like to paint my hopes,” said Betty, then steered the conversation toward his hopes. That chiseled jaw caused her a bit of a flutter in her lower parts, and his resonant baritone curled around her like a warm cat on a winter evening. He also seemed not just accomplished, but quietly powerful, and he liked her paintings. She made sure to offer her number.

A string of actual dates followed. The mousy brunette of above average but unexceptional looks, height, grades, and sexual prowess, according to both her high school and freshman year boyfriends, never stopped paying attention. After some time, Ron and Betty, who had thrown away her virginity on her high school boyfriend just to get it out of the way, began to spend nights at her apartment.

One evening, as he was tracing circles around her nipples while she massaged his cock back to full strength for their second round of energetic coupling that evening, she caught him looking at her with a glow of affection. “You really are a talented woman,” he said, “and I’m not just speaking of your ability to keep me turgid for half the night.”

She tittered and lowered her head to his stiffening member.

“But seriously, there’s something we should talk about, something good,” he said, sucking in his breath. Ron told her that he wanted her to submit prospective art for the company he was starting. He could get her a better computer from his mentor, and she could learn a new skill.

Betty murmured something around his penis, but when he slipped into exhausted sleep a half-hour later, she decided that this was part of her picture, too. Betty — the former mousy do-nothing — could also be accomplished.

She canceled everything unnecessary — her volunteer activities, nights out with her friend group, and a call home to her parents — and lived in her pyjamas while she learned the software. She had never worked “hard” on anything this much before in terms of giving it her complete attention, noting every detail, and measuring the quality of the outcome so severely. After a week, she had redesigned the website for Ron’s startup company, and it both looked like a solid corporate site and nothing like anything else out there.

“I wasn’t a big fan of that spring green and gold color scheme at first,” said Ron. “I thought we wanted the big colors: red, black, orange, blue. But it works. I’ll run it by my partners and see.”

Life settled back into normal. She attended classes, wrote papers, studied for tests, and showed up for psychology department meetings. On Saturday night, they always went out on a date, which since neither of them had much money meant hitting a movie at the local mall, getting coffee at the independent bookshop in the little town surrounding the college, and then pigging out at the all-night Mexican restaurant just outside of city limits.

By the time junior year rolled around, Ron and Betty were “an item” with an asterisk by it. She had never asked if they were exclusive, but they were both too busy for anyone else to be in the picture. The asterisk said that they were both seeming to fall into the same trajectory, toward marriage, kids, and a bright future. No one had mentioned love, but neither of them were very sentimental, and they seemed to be moving in the direction of family.

“We have to talk,” said Ron one Wednesday afternoon as he walked her home from class. Sunlight speckled through the trees above in the midst of a central Texas spring. “I’m leaving the university. My startup needs to move now, and staying in school just delays that for two years. I’ll come back and do night classes.”

“Okay,” said Betty.

He looked pained. “You don’t need to change anything. Just… say that you’re not breaking up with me because of it.”

“I would never do that,” she said. “I’m become quite fond of you. You’re my Prince Charming, just a very practical one, and I’m proud of your work.”

He sighed in relief. “Good, because I think I’m rather fond of you too, Betty. In fact, I think I love you.”

She was not ready to say back those words, but opted for a political compromise: “I’m very near that as well. Let’s see how it goes for the next few months.”

Something dark passed over his eyes, a light grey that she always found inscrutable and appealing, at that moment, but it was gone quickly. Ron had grown up like her in a family of high-achievers surrounded by the roughnecks and transients of the Abilene oil fields, which meant that he had never felt particularly special, and feared the loss of affection, esteem, and dedication.

“I understand,” he said finally, with a slight throatiness as if he was hit by emotion. But like most men, he recovered quickly. “Let’s get a coffee and plan the future.”

They planned: she would do all the artwork, he would write all the code, and his mentor, a former professor, would handle the business side. Ron owned half the company. He wanted to retire in his thirties and travel the world. He didn’t mention her; he would have, if she had said she loved him, but he hoped it would be so. His early life having been devoid of affection and rife with competition, he wanted something he could trust as the basis of his future and family. Maybe it was her.

It turned out that she did all the artwork, he wrote all the code, and his mentor, a former professor, tried to steal the company. It made a ton of money, and while Ron owned half of it, his mentor had control through his role as CEO. After a lengthy battle that occupied most of his thirties, Ron gained control through other executives supporting him, since their product was hot and could go bigger if someone with more business experience took over. Exit the mentor, enter the professionals. Ron traveled the world, but only to give talks at foreign universities.

Ron’s firm made a product that Betty barely understood. He described it as a computer which spread tasks to other computers and made sure that they could get the data they needed, all while watching for anomalies that indicated a hack, hardware failure, or that a recent change was not working. At first a competitor in a crowded market, it improved once Ron could turn his focus away from corporate affairs toward systematic improvement in the product. Soon it dominated the industry.

By the time they hit their thirties, they were established, sort of. They had a nice house in Georgetown and his company was doing great things, but all of their money was tied up in the stock that cemented his ownership. For awhile they got by on her private practice offering counseling to marriages, depressed teenagers, and lonely people. Their four children appeared to be doing well in school, and unexpectedly they celebrated with a bottle of wine as the sun descended below the wide Texas horizon.

“I love you, Ron,” she said softly, at one point, realizing that other than at moments where she was prompted to say this — their wedding, date night, ending phone calls — she rarely said.

“I know,” he said. “I have loved you for a long time, as well.”

Within another decade, cracks appeared in the image of the perfect life. They never managed to travel the world. Their children were growing up and sprinting away, each with his or her own mountains to climb, and as the house became increasingly empty, they had nothing to distract from a growing sense of hollowness within their relationship. Or rather: with their initial goal accomplished, their careers had taken the place of family, love, and affection.

Betty frequently arrived late and stayed late to catch patients who could only fit in appointments in the evening. Like her husband, she put in sixty hour weeks or longer. Ron traveled frequently, and they often saw each other only on Date Night and for random errands and bumming around the darker recesses of Netflix on Sunday.

On paper, their lives were good, but like the phrases “in theory” and “in the abstract,” the idea of something being on paper meant an abstraction that was a phantom of the human brain, not part of the world out there where we could not directly control it. Abstraction was addictive, she recalled from her early psychology classes, and could become somewhat of a rabbit trail, leading away from reality entirely. What happens in the lab often tells only part of the story.

“You’re looking worn, boss,” said her receptionist Erin one afternoon. Betty found this hard to believe: in theory, she was getting her eight hours of sleep a night, but something had been nagging at her, something she could not put her finger upon. Something was amiss, even in the fairy tale she had painted for herself, which fell short of what she had originally wanted.

“Probably just season affective disorder,” Betty replied.

“Calendar’s light for the rest of the week,” Erin mentioned. They had seen quite a few cancelations for the holiday weekend. “Why don’t you go somewhere? Maybe take a cruise.”

Betty thought that quite entertaining. Cruises were for people with lots of time and salaries. On paper, they had lots of money. In reality, things were often tighter than she wanted to admit, but she splurged on a ticket to New Orleans, where her husband was attending a conference. Perhaps it was time to reconnect and start sealing those cracks.

However, when Betty walked into the lobby of the grand old hotel she knew her husband favored, she could not reach him on his cell phone. At the desk, they gave her a room key, and with the same confidence she displayed with her patients, she strode right into the room without knocking. At that moment, her face fell.

All she could see of Ron — her husband of two decades — were his quivering buttocks as he dove into the waiting snatch of a young, pretty dark-haired girl who was trying to both contain her laughter and alert him that his wife was standing behind him. Finally she screamed and he turned around.

“I’m not going to insult your intelligence by saying that this is not what it looks like, that it’s just sex, that I’ll come home with a stronger love, or that she doesn’t matter to me,” said Ron slowly, his voice gentler than Betty suspected it would be. “We fractured. Our picture is out of focus. I’m lonely, and I’ve found affection with someone else.”

Betty looked from one face to another and back again. Everyone seemed to be waiting on her, but in her mind, there was not much to say. “I’m sorry I interrupted,” she said finally. “I’ll be around for the next hour if you want to talk at some point.” She departed, keeping her professional mien, and congratulating herself on handling the situation with maturity and low emotion as she walked back down the plush carpeted hall.

She settled down in the lobby, staring out into space as she collected her thoughts. As a counselor, she frequently had to give advice, but rarely to live it. Her response felt empty, as if she showed how little love she had for her husband by reacting professionally to the revelation. On the other hand, she wondered what else she would do; in her experience, ostentatious displays of emotion usually showed how the person in question was unsure of their feelings, and was trying to convince themselves of their emotions by acting them out.

Her practice had shown her this path of infidelity many times. At first, she counseled the going line in psychological circles, which could be called maturity. The maturity approach held that humans should treat infidelity like any other mistake, and lump in the deception and lack of respect as part of the act of cheating. Her clients usually saw it the other way around, which was that when someone decided to lie and cheat on their partner, respect had been lost and was unlikely to return.

She remembered a few cases:

 

• A very open-minded woman who believed that by acting as a married couple again, the two could overcome the infidelity of the husband. At first, this went well, until one day the husband was a half-hour late from a trip to the hardware store. At this point, cognitive dissonance kicked in: the wife could either admit that this path was not working, or rationalize it as good by embracing the behavior. The couple became swingers, opened their marriage, and soon seemed to be getting on well, until one day the husband noticed that they were roommates with benefits and left, at which point the angriest divorce in Betty’s experience began its three-year curve. By the time it was settled, one child was in jail for drugs, another had lattices of scars from slices on her arms, and the third had joined the French Foreign Legion and was never heard from again.
• Another man could be described as an entrepreneur, and viewed his life through this filter, so saw the cheating as an attempt to renegotiate the marriage. He put an end to the renegotiation, united his family, and spent another decade as an unpaid professional actor, looking very much the devoted husband and father. This fell apart one day when the wife talked to a coworker and found out that the husband spent a lot of time “in the field,” then followed him in a rented car and found not one but two love nests with younger, prettier women. The marriage dissolved in an acrimonious divorce. None of their children even completed high school, with the eldest son working as a bartender in an alcoholic haze and the daughter taking jobs in China where she gained a hundred pounds from bourbon alone.
• The third case was told to her by a very conventional woman, church-going and active in a number of social causes, who immediately recognized that with her husband cheating, she no longer had a partner but an enemy within the gates. Defying her family, priest, and friends, she opted for a quick divorce by claiming almost none of his assets. A decade later, she had not remarried or dated, but her former husband had done so. She confessed later that her children were “black boxes” to her: they had gone on to college and careers, but almost never talked about their personal lives with either her or their father. Like the parents, the children were strangers within the family.

These seemed to her to be her options: reconcile but realize that trust was gone, or acknowledge the loss of trust and split up. The former seemed more complicated, since of almost a dozen couples that she knew had tried it, only two were still together, and wariness seemed to be the mood in those homes. The latter might break her heart more than the infidelity. As she cautioned her clients: “Ask yourself if you would be happier with your spouse, or without them.”

Betty reflected that she did not know. This led to another thought, which was that she had been living without her spouse for some time. The few hours when they were not working went by quickly with the little tasks of daily life — cleaning, laundry, paying bills, shopping, cooking, calling friends and relatives — to the point that they might be spending an hour or less per week actually together like a married couple. It seemed to her as if they were each cheating, but with their social status, which they romanced through careers and professional contacts.

“Hello, Betty,” said Ron, startling her out of her thoughts.

“Oh, hello,” she said, looking up into his eyes for a trace of the warmth that she once saw. It was there, lingering behind an emotion she knew as resentment, a cold obsidian burning. This frequently came up with her clients who had trouble with alcohol, drugs, and gambling. If you fell into pitying yourself, you would start to see life as a prison sentence and rationalize it as a bad thing, which in turn limited your pleasures to only the addictive behaviors that seemed to make it better.

“I owe you an explanation,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” said Betty quickly. “We have not had much of a marriage for some time, and part of it is my fault. I let you drift away because I was busy drifting, and spent too much time at the damn office.”

“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “I always felt that your little lost lambs, adrift in the seas of addiction and heartbreak, got the best of your loving.” He stopped, uncertain of how much to continue.

“I understand,” she said. “What is done, is done. Do you want a divorce?”

Ron pondered. He colored when he realized that if he could choose anything, he would choose what he had before Betty discovered his affair. He had a nice public life with a wife to show off, an autobiography of unbroken successes that he used to promote himself, and then for the six weekends a year when he needed it, mind-blowing sexual activity with a younger and more sensual woman.

Samantha expected nothing from him except that he pay for their lavish accommodations, bar tabs, and meals when he was in town, and he expected nothing from her other than a lack of STDs. Naturally a promiscuous woman, the willowy Samantha had taught him new skills in the arts of love, something which calm but affectionate missionary with Betty could not compare, at least on the surface. He and Samantha had even tried anal, although after one particularly gooey accident he decided that this was best left up to other people.

For a moment, Ron saw a flash of a realization before his mind clamped shut to keep it out. In that brief shimmering vision, he realized that he might be a narcissist because working with science and computers gave him a god-complex, and he had finally believed his own puffery. He deflated a bit, having seen himself, and before it clammed up, his inner voice told him that this self-worship was the real cheating, and that he had really simply cheated himself of being the gentle, strong, and good person he had always wanted to be.

Struggling against the waves of guilt, he said quickly, “No, I do not want a divorce. I want to work through this.” At least this would buy time.

Betty watched the conflict swim across his face, and decided that she should apply some of her professional knowledge, quoting from her psychological dictionary entry for cognitive dissonance:

 

Dissonance theory holds that when a person encounters a disconnect between expectations and reality, they must reconcile the two inputs by reducing one of them. They will either change their expectations, making them subordinate to what is observed, or alter their perceptions of reality, distorting what they know to be true in order to remove the offending data.

 

She knew that her husband had thought he was happy and happily married until he had an opportunity to cheat, at which point he blamed the marriage instead of facing his own unhappiness. She formulate a simple strategy: trap him in his unhappiness until he saw the value of their marriage together. Unlike many wives portrayed in internet fiction, Betty was neither a slut nor an idiot, and although she got only medium scores because of test anxiety, had a high IQ and the unusually sensitive perception of an artist. She acted pragmatically but with a long-term focus.

“Well, then, I will see you back at home,” she said. “We’ll have to make some changes, of course, but you have nothing to fear from me. I never said it when we were dating, something I later learned was borne of my fear that I would end up like my own family of origin, but I love you, more than life itself, and I have wasted too much of my time — really, our time — with my stupid job, something I now regret.”

Holding her head as high as could be expected, Betty walked out the door into the bright sunlight, got into the waiting cab, and went back to the airport where she spent a desultory four hours until she caught a standby flight home. She held it together until she got inside the door and had locked it, then collapsed in a maelstrom of tears, sobbing so hard that she retched and vomited. Science did not recognize it, she thought, but there might be a “heart” or a “soul,” and her had just broken in three layers:

 

1. On the surface, the cheating itself. Part of this was social fear. It was embarrassing to be a femme cuckold, and doubly so to have failed at one of the major tasks in life that tests the mettle of the participants, marriage and family. She also feared for her children and what it would do to them to believe that coming together of the people whose DNA made them had been in fact a mistake; it would be like rejecting their very origins! In here, she kept a small room in her mind for herself, and in this room she would always been weeping until she vomited, heartbroken that in her life, love had flown.
2. Just below the surface, the mental health issue. Somehow, two intelligent and capable people had either deluded themselves into marriage or out of it. Which was the error? This formed a jagged crisis like a splinter of ice in not just her heart, but her analytical mind. Something very wrong had happened. Even in the best case scenario, the two had decided to give themselves body, mind, and soul to their careers instead of love, family, and happiness. It felt like a cold wind on her shoulders, the presence of a ghost, or perhaps a demon, were she to believe in such antiquated superstitions.
3. Deep below her conscious mind, the revelations about each of them. She felt like Ron must have when Samantha gushed semen, feces, and lubricant from her anus after a particularly rigorous exploratory session. She had seen something disgusting there which would forever be associated with him, a nasty desire for revenge and what seemed like an ugly narcissism of hubris, the excessive arrogance that caused people to pretend they were God or scientific progress itself. In herself, on the other hand, she saw a wilful denial of the labors of affection that had produced a home as devoid of affection as that of her parents.

 

It was easy to stop weeping. She remembered from her training in psychology that most people weep for themselves, and the weeping itself convinces them that they have been wronged by life or another person, which makes it easier for them to feel bad and therefore, to keep weeping instead of facing whatever conflict has come their way. Her problem was that she did not want to; she needed this discharge of the dark energy hiding inside her, and maybe a feeling like holding her teddy bear close under her favorite blanket when she failed a test, during a thunderstorm, or when she was ill as a child.

Two days later Ron returned home. He had gone back to the hotel room to pack, but then realized that he was going to pay the price either way, so he should just enjoy his weekend. After all, at this point to him Betty represented everything that he had to do in life, like the job that produced endless demands, even just the ten thousand little problems that cropped up every week which only he could address, since he did not trust others. Betty was stability, conformity, and the endless rules like taking off his muddy shoes and not drinking more than six beers a night. Fuck that! He turned to Samantha with a smile and a quivering erection.

Betty had spent the time thinking, reflecting on what the entrepreneur had told her. She wanted cognitive dissonance to work for her — like prisoners of war who were treated well, being treated cordially by the deceive spouse had a tendency to force the cheater to decompensate, or realize that his internal dialogue about his evil wife and boring marriage was a crock — but she also wanted economic psychology to swing her way. That is, she wanted to make it less painful for him to reconcile than to keep deceiving her.

“Uh, where should I put my stuff?” Ron was asking sheepishly.

She reflected that, like most “cake eaters” or those who wanted the stable marriage to go back to after their weekends of unbridled passion and acrobatic fornication, Ron was not so much seeking another relationship as he was seeking something that he could not get or was afraid to get at home. Why would he be afraid? Betty colored when she thought about how confident her psychological knowledge, career acclaim and awards, and power as the mistress of the house had made her. Perhaps she had unintentionally been the type of woman she called a “bitch.” A soft response was required.

“It’s good that you’re home, sweetie. Everything here is the same, for you,” she said. “I have divided the house to signify where we stand, for now, which is that without my recognizing it, we became ‘at odds’ with each other, so I have taken the east side of the house, with the guestroom and dining room and half of the kitchen, while you have the west side, with the den and master bedroom as well as your half of the kitchen. We’ll have to share the fridge, of course,” she added.

“And let me say,” she continued. “It is wonderful to have you home. You are the man I have always loved. I want us to get past this, and to be not what we once were, but what we can be, now that we realized that there were issues — really, problems, our own self-deception — with what we were. We can be better than we have been, both recently and for the whole of our marriage.”

Exhausted without reason, she paused. His eyes swam, unsure of where to focus. From her study of clients, this meant that they were unsure of whether to invent a fiction (looking down to the left), falsely portray honesty (meet the eyes, nod the head, vigorous gestures), speak from memory (looking up to the right), admit where their view of reality had been mistaken (looking straight down), distance themselves from the issue (looking straight up, moving back), or say something they feared to bring up (looking straight ahead, but below eye contact).

“Thanks,” he said, trailing off. “For being so mature about all of this. I don’t know how you do it.”

“I’m thinking of the future, honey,” said Betty. She wanted to get in as many affectionate diminutives as she could. The angel on her right shoulder wanted him to feel as accepted as possible, and the devil on her left wanted him to recognize what he was missing.

Ron took his stuff upstairs. The master bedroom looked stark without the clothes, perfumes, books, makeup, and toiletries that his wife customarily scattered about, since women require six dozen implements to get ready in the morning where a man needs a toothbrush, comb, and bar of soap (towel optional, in most cases). He sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hand for quite some time.

“Henderson, what the fuck was that?” It was back in the 1990s, and Ron’s coach towered over him standing on the edge of the pool while Ron floated in the water below.

“It’s just a practice run,” said Ron. “Coach, it’s been a long week, and –”

Coach Moffit flung down his clipboard, the clatter on the pool edge both startling other swimmers and being a familiar sound.

“Henderson,” he said, “You gotta have the mentality of a champion. You gotta win in your head, first. It’s all mental: you have to want to make each strong perfect, to keep your rhythm, to put all of your energy into moving efficiently down the pool. You’re not here today. Your head is in the clouds. Get the fuck out and come back when you’re ready to win.”

Ron heaved himself out of the water. The look he gave the coach had fire, but it was a dark fire. He resented the man for having caught him under-performing and for having diagnosed so expertly his crisis. Ron’s head was wrapping itself around money and technology, fame and renown, not trying to be the best second-stringer on his high school swim team. He wasn’t going to the Olympics, but he would use this doofus activity to get into college, and that was all he cared about.

In that moment, Ron decided that his coach was wrong, and as he showered after practice, he reflected on how much better he knew than the angry old guy whose best career prospect was screaming at recalcitrant teenagers, all of whom were snidely using this as a springboard to college, not a pursuit in itself. He did not love swimming. Nor did he love his hometown, his parents, his country, or even life. Life, he decided, was “nasty, brutish, and short” as Thomas Hobbes had said, and the only revenge on that was living well, and that in turn required money.

“Too bad, Henderson,” Coach said without looking up from his clipboard as Ron packed up to leave. “You could’ve been someone. You could have been a hero to yourself.”

That night, lying in bed, Ron decided that he could be a hero to himself, but not by pitting his mind against its own lack of discipline in the water. He wanted to be a rich, powerful man with a trophy wife who was living the 1990s dream: not just wealth, but a career that was meaningful, and social justice activities to show the world how good he and his wife were inside. Even if he did not believe it, he could act the part, at least in the business world if not the swimming pool.

And so… time went on for the divided house. Betty went to her job, but cut down on the number of evening appointments. Surprisingly, her clients were able to reschedule despite their previous protestations. With the office running eight hours a day on the nose, her staff perked up as well, and Betty found herself with more time for the things she had once neglected. The bedroom above the dining room was draped in tarps, and an easel appeared out of nowhere. One night she came downstairs and Ron, without saying anything, wiped the dot of paint from her nose, as he had done in the past. They shared a laugh.

But then, silence came and stayed. Ron, too, had cut back on his work hours. He finally accepted that he had been micromanaging, and started to delegate. This let him rethink their product line. That in turn allowed him to see how their products could expand to take on even more roles, and by adding an easy GUI, he took away the requirement of having highly-paid super-engineers make the product work. He democratized it so that your average sort of technologically literate middle manager or overnight IT support person could use his tools.

“Good night, boss,” said Erin as Betty headed out the door. “Oh — Mrs. Henderson? Can I ask a quick question?”

“Sure, Erin,” said Betty, a smokiness coming over her eyes as she readied herself for a query about her marriage.

“It’s for my night school,” said Erin with a slight twist to her mouth in an apologestic gesture. “We have to write about differences in grieving between men and women.”

Betty went to her bookshelf and pulled down a volume here and there for a few minutes, then handed the stack to Erin.

(“I knew she’d do that,” Erin told her roommates later. “It’s so like her! But this basically gave me a bibliography to add to our assigned reading. I’m going to kick ass on this one.”)

“It’s not de rigueur to say this, Erin,” said Betty, “But men and women are psychologically different. Intersex — transgenders, homosexuals, weak men, and assertive women — fall somewhere in the middle. Men are oriented toward a goal and minimums. They want to know what are the things they must do in order to have a life they like, and they guess that they will figure out the rest when the time comes. Women are oriented toward a situation, or having all the details aligned to make a… well, a picture, or a diorama, of the perfect life. They figure that they will respond to needs as this happens, and those are their goals.”

“When their attempts fail, men figure that they have the wrong goal, and try for something new, different, or contrary to what they were doing. Male grief takes on the form of retaliation often. Women assume that something is out of place, since they are content as they are, and must simply say yes or no to offers from men, at least insofar as making a family goes. Sex is the primal motivator, but that’s only because over time people gravitate toward family in order to have a sense of satisfaction in life. Female grief becomes a search for the betrayer, the detail that went wrong.”

She continued: “This means that while a man will decide he was betrayed, a woman will decide that she was insufficient. For some reason, she was broken, therefore the details were all wrong. The man does not question himself, but finds someone to blame, usually someone who is guilty, when really he needs to reconsider his own needs. The woman rejects her needs, and concludes that she is wrong, so she tries to remake herelf, and becomes a perfect little actor, trying to portray a life that she could like.”

Erin made a few notes. “Thanks, teach!” she said. They rode down in the elevator together, talking about little things, each grateful for the distraction.

The divided house carried on. Every morning, Betty would rise in her own bedroom, wash up in the hall bathroom, and make herself coffee (while microwaving a Danish) and then truck off to work. While she was in the kitchen, Ron was in the shower, and he left the empty house after making himself coffee in his Keurig on the west side of the kitchen. Then he got in his Porsche, a treat he had gotten himself a few years back when their IPO hit the news, and roared off to the office.

On weekends, they amused themselves. Neither worked Saturdays any longer. Ron had not mowed the lawn in years, paying a service instead, but now took pride in making nice even rows and trimming the edges expertly. He tried the couch potato lifestyle, watching a bunch of Hulu and Netflix, but gave up after finding the programs and movies to be too similar to each other to really care about. He read more, restarted his jogging regimen, and started learning gourmet cooking. Betty painted, took long walks, and plinked around on the old piano the kids had left in the garage.

They tried date night, but the silences killed it. They ran out of everyday topics, and the monster loomed in the negative space of what was not mentioned. After the food was gone and the wine drunk, they would pick at dessert plates, Ron wondering why he chose this path, Betty wondering what was so wrong with her that she could not keep to it. Then they would depart, pull up to the empty house, politely wish each other good night, and retire to their rooms.

Samantha had made it easy for Ron. After Betty left the hotel room, the younger woman tidied up the place and ordered a white wine from room service. She knew that Ron would be in a troubled state of mind. It surprised her when, after making excuses and going to see his wife once the shock wore off, he appeared again in the door as if nothing had happened. They made love with the ferocious intensity of those who know their time is short. When she got back to her home in Los Angeles, Samantha changed her number and deleted her social media profiles.

Betty fought herself over the urge to investigate, but eventually gave in and began hammering search engines to find any mention of “Ron Henderson” and “Samantha.” She found the trollop on a picture page for a conference four years prior, labeled as a “promotional manager” for one of the other firms in the field. Betty could not find an email address, and saw the dead social media profiles, but found a number through the directory at Samantha’s workplace. She wrote it down, and stared at the post-it often, knowing that there was no point in calling but driven by a need to know that she could not explain.

“She’s too nice,” Ron said, talking to his brother Greg on his boat in the lake one weekend. “She would talk about it if I brought it up, but she keeps just being Betty, I guess. She’s sweet to me but distant.”

Greg, a confirmed bachelor, nodded and swallowed his first impulses. “Guess she wants you back,” he said. “I’d take it, to be fair. Betty’s blind to a lot, heck she’d have to be with parents like hers, but she loves you.”

“She doesn’t show it,” said Ron, musing that none of them — Greg, Betty, or Ron — were really in contact with their parents. His had gone off on a tour of the world years ago, and he stayed in touch by phoning them at their Florida condo on holidays. Betty wrote her parents a card for their birthday, and never got a reply.

“Women do weird stuff,” said Greg. “When things go badly, they figure the problem is them, so they back off until you fight for them again, but then they get bossy because you just affirmed their value. I guess that’s why I date them and leave them.”

On Monday, Ron left work late and parked his Porsche outside Roman Holiday, the local bar his engineers often mentioned as a pick-up place. He got himself a non-alcoholic beer and waited. Soon enough, he had female companionship and conversation. It was only when he came home, the memories of one simmering-hot kiss at the bar, that he realized he’d done it again. He had cheated, if not with all of his body, at least with most of his heart.

When he went back to the house, he did not see Betty. For a moment he wondered if he had finally done it and broken them irretrievably. Then, he heard the sound of a paintbrush being rinsed in a jar of turpentine from above, and the smell of oil paints wafted down the stairs. His empty bedroom, the master that they had once shared, beckoned to him, so he slipped inside quietly, showered, and went to bed. The next day he woke up, expecting a momentous change, but it was just an ordinary day in the divided house.

Over the next few days, each retreated into the mindset of their respective gender. Ron began to question whether he wanted to be married; in fact, he questioned whether he wanted to be in his career path, working for this company, living in a city, or even wearing shoes. He thought about growing a beard and retreating to a mountain cabin. But then, who would he talk to? What would he be? Betty on the other hand began to feel the echoes of time amplifying her flaws, and wondered what was so dead inside of her that she could not be a normal wife.

When he came home late on Wednesday, however, Betty was in the kitchen. She looked at him — loosened tie, mussed hair, lipstick on his cheek, reeking of beer — and retreated into the dining room where she had her book.

That’s it, I’m broken, she thought. Then he appeared in the doorway.

“What?” he said with the exuberant aggression of the intoxicated. “Running away?”

“No, Ron,” she said. “Just wondering if this is a choice… or if you just angry with me.”

He guffawed, but said nothing more. Words were just colors that people used to make the inevitable seem acceptable to them, he thought.

“Now that it has made itself the issue of the hour, Ron, what is our future?” Betty looked at him with clear blue eyes and a calm countenance.

“I think I broke it,” he said. “There’s nothing. You can’t trust me again, and I can’t trust me again. And I can no longer be what you need me to be, your loving husband in whom you have absolute faith. Because you’re not going to have that faith, Betty. I can see it in your eyes. They’re empty.”

She did not appear taken aback, or even rustled in any way, he thought to his surprise. In fact, she seemed almost to have expected that.

“Let’s talk about it in the morning,” she said, but both of them knew this would not happen. Instead, the divided house would come gradually to life and its humans would leave, separately, as they had come to live.

Ron spent an hour at his desk massaging his temples while gulping down copious amounts of iced tea. Slowly the throbbing receded and he felt less of the cottonmouth. He had still slept badly, and so his brain worked poorly, but fortunately he had little of dire consequence on his plate. He met Greg for lunch.

“She makes me feel terrible,” he told Greg. “Sitting there, like Mother Mary, immaculate in her suffering, beyond criticism. She is wounded and I wounded her, and she’s being nice about it just to make me feel terrible, so I come crawling back. Then, I’m going to have to be a dog. Sit, Ron. Stay, Ron. Stay home tonight, Ron. Beg, Ron. Nah, there’s not much I can do to fix this. Even if she takes a lover, we’ll still never trust each other, and her vision of me is always going to be fractured, tainted.”

“Maybe you could just be friends,” said Greg. “You clearly care about her, or you wouldn’t even be entertaining these thoughts. You’d just move on, like you did when you had to take the company back. You don’t think about those guys any longer.”

Across town Erin and Betty were having a quick lunch in the cafeteria of the medical center next door. “And so that’s how I ended up being a single mom,” Erin said. “When I found out I was pregnant, I had to leave school.”

“Was that hard?” Betty asked. “I asked a friend at the university, and she said you were a promising student, with a full-ride scholarship.”

“Of course it’s hard,” Erin said, frowning slightly. “I work all day, go to school at night, and I don’t have weekends. I used to think I would do it differently, but if I had to do it all over again, I would do the same damn thing, because I got Tommy out of it. He’s eight now, a perfect angel. Well… an angel, if you consider that boy angels should be naughty, you know the old rhyme about snips, snails, and puppy dog tails. As far as I can tell, people act as if every moment is their last, which makes them see it as an eternal state, instead of a step to something else with lots of options along the way. I couldn’t imagine living without my boyfriend, so I let him use me, and I ended up pregnant. Was it bad, or good? My child is good, and in another two years, I’ll be there too.”

She patted Betty on the leg. “No matter what you’re going through, it will be fine in the end,” she said. “You can’t un-do the past, just move forward.”

“In the end…” said Betty. “The final moment.”

Back at the barbecue restaurant where Greg and Ron were tossing back a midday Shiner, the conversation got similarly esoteric. “There are no sure things. We like to think that love is, and maybe God, but I think they’re like gravity and time, relative to velocity and direction. I believe in the Malthus-Eckhart theory, which is basically that humans think linearly and arithmetically but life operates exponentially and three-dimensionally. This means that we recognize only the parts of reality that repeat consistently until the last second of time, and we filter out all of the other possibilities. This gives us something that we can work with, as a group, so it goes really well at first, but then something we never thought of comes in, and the failure is exponential. The fascinating thing is that whatever we did looked like a really good option at first, but then became not just a not so-good-option, but our doom. This is why humans are so self-destructive.”

“Yeah,” said Ron slowly. “I guess I did filter out everything but what I wanted. I wanted a perfect marriage, and I got a wife who was too busy to be there for me, so instead of working on that, I just moved on to something else. Now I can’t get back to what I thought was linear. I thought that I could step out for a few days, then come back to exactly where I was, but it is like how a space ship moving at light speed might take a few decades to reach another world, but when it came back, the relative speed would mean that twenty thousand years had passed on Earth. It’s like that with my marriage: I was gone for a few days, but I came back and a thousand years have passed, and now we’re unknowns to each other.”

Greg drained the last of his beer, the vaguely iodine flavor lingering tingling on his tongue. “Cheer up, brother of mine,” he said. “This won’t be forever. Either she’ll crack because you’re still better than anyone else, or you’ll leave her and then I can show you around the dating world. Nothing is final. I mean, until death, I guess, and maybe even that is relative, too.”

“You mean I might wake up on another planet as a lizard man and still be married to a lizard-woman who is Betty?” Ron asked, laughing.

“No, but at some point, the two of you might converge, and find out that you share a destiny,” said Greg. He felt the statement jar him then, as if stirring up a memory of some thought he wanted to express, but it vanished evanescently and he simply said, “Come on, let’s get back to your office.”

Thursday was a slow day since the political news was unsettled, the economy was in turmoil, and as a result, people were in a frenzy. It struck Ron as wrong somehow that instead of living individual lives, people had to react to these things that happened so far away. Someone made a decision somewhere, and so a city turns to ash, the world economy crashes, or humans go to the moon or Mars. He wanted it all to go away so he could be in silence with his inner life, where he began to suspect he had lost the ability to trust himself, and therefore could never take Betty back.

After a post-lunch session with a patient whose entire family had died when their plane went down over Zimbabwe, Betty received phone messages canceling her last two sessions. She drove home, wondering if survivor’s guilt happened to all of them for even more mundane things. For example, she was not the one caught cheating, but she still felt guilty for — for things she did not understand. Was it wrong to consider a husband her property, for her exclusive sexual use? Or was it the only way to get out of treating each other like property, through the mystical transformation of love?

Uncharacteristically, Betty helped herself to a beer from the fridge. If Ron wanted her to pay him back, she would, she rationalized. She could justify the beer by claiming that it helped put her in the mood to talk, and she sensed a big four-word (“we have to talk”) event coming in their future with dread in her gut and genitals. Everything seemed ruined, and she reflected that her parents had always known it would end this way for her, since she was not a solid through-and-through winner like her siblings. She could see their scornful faces now in her mind.

Without knowing why, she stripped off her pantsuit and shoes, then stood in her bra and panties before her latest painting. Squeezing paint onto a palette, she readied her brush. Art was like reading tarot, scrying, or conjuring, she reflected. You look into the future to see the past. You take things to their ends, and see what their essence was, then paint that. A good painting was like the daily planner of the gods, telling you how everything would turn out and what it meant. She saw so much in her future: the marriages of her children, publishing an article about survivor’s guilt, maybe finally getting Ron to buy that cabin in the woods, bungalow near the beach, or boat in which they could travel the world. But that picture was no longer clear for her, and she felt it slipping away, like a destination in the rearview mirror as she roared on toward places unknown in a fast car.

A few hours later Ron slipped through the back door to take a quick shower and change into something less nerdly than his grey sere suit. His personal email contained a message from his insurance agency, confirming that both he and his wife had increased their life insurance to a ridiculous number. That’s Betty, he figured, looking out for the kids. Curious, he stopped by her workroom. Two easels took up all of the space. On one was a bizarre painting; the other held what looked like one of books they had given to their children, decades ago. It was open to a dog-eared page. He read:

 

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

 

He heard Greg’s voice echoing in his head: “Women, can’t live with ’em, can’t figure them out either.” Then he turned his attention to the painting. It was classic Betty, with a white castle shining the clouds, lush in the blues, golds, and spring greens she liked to use. She had painted that before, he chuckled.

But then he looked down, tracing a root that seemed to grow from the tree next to the castle into the foreground, then snake zig-zagged to a castle below in a dark world of violets, reds, and silver. There was a moon below it, and it was surrounded by psychedelic paisley plants. Then his eye caught how from the sides of the root, a vine in dark forest green stretched across the blazing orange background toward castles on the right and left.

As he studied the painting, he thought about the character of his wife. Being male, Ron oriented himself toward objectives, but if he lost sight of the big picture, this momentum slipped to noticing flaws.

For too long, he thought, he had seen mostly what he did not like in his wife, instead of the whole picture. He had seen only the dark fire of someone he would never be sure loved him, not the bright and light she brought, her actions speaking louder than words.

She, when she gave up her painting for a career, she lost sight of the picture entirely, figuring that the issue was her or in her, and not about her relationship to the world around her. Life is not a picture, thought Ron, but this was a pretty good painting.

The castle on the right had a high window in which he could see a man, looking like a statue of the ancient god Apollo that had been at their museum, and the castle on the left featured a sunroom in which a virtuous maiden of some kind with long flowing golden hair held a sword. “Nutty female psychological intrigues,” thought Ron, and after taking his shower, got dressed to go to the Roman Holiday. As he opened the back door again, but then had a feeling of being watched.

He turned around. She was there in her light robe, a nearly-transparent garment that he had always found appealing, and under it he could see the lace of her bra and panties. “You could stay,” she whispered. “You could — I could — forget about the past. We could just be us again. Stop thinking so much, look toward what we have left.”

Ron fixed her with an eye and she saw the dark fire in it. “I’ll just screw it up again,” he said. “There’s nothing left for me. If you give me love, I’ll ruin it. I need a life without things that I can lose because I have no discipline. We can’t undo the past. There’s just nothing left.”

He bowed his head slightly, and ducked out the door, then forgot all about the situation as he zoomed on to the Roman Holliday and parked behind the one-story brick bar pulsing with dance music. As he stepped in the door, Marcia called out to him. Five foot nothing without heels, she was covered in exotic tattoos in Enochian and Mayan writing, had long dark hair, and worked as a security auditor at Google. Even more than that, she believed in no-strings dating, where when they saw each other they had wall-banging sex, but otherwise made no claim to a future, any future.

At two in the morning, Betty felt her phone buzz next to her. She had fallen asleep on the sofa with the light on, facing the front of the house. Her gut crawled with uncertainty.

“Hey, it’s Greg,” said Greg. “I’m here at the, uh, Roman Holliday, and it’s about Ron.”

“Won’t his date be taking care of him?” Betty asked, too close to spitting for her taste. “I’m sorry, I mean, doesn’t he have someone there?”

“No, she… uh…. bolted with one of the personal trainers from next door. He’s had a few, needs someone to make sure he doesn’t get sick. And I’ve… uh… I’ve met someone, and we’re going our way in just a few. Can you take Ron home.” It was not a question, more like a dismissal.

Betty hung up and picked up her car keys and purse. She looked like anyone else going out to that club; the revealing nightgown-slash-robe would probably count as conservative. When she went into the garage however, her car refused to start. She remembered battery warnings on the dashboard for the past few mornings, so it was not entirely surprising. She called up some apps and soon had a paid ride to take her to the club.

Stepping out on the sidewalk, she was taken not by how lewd the place was, but by how cheap it seemed. The bar was a box building with office-style glass windows. There were cheap geegaws like disco balls, streamers, and silly string there to keep the “adults” occupied. The music sounded to her like a record she would have bought for her children, just with a pulsing techno beat. And the girls? They were pretty, just like the men were rugged, but there was no handsomeness there. This was a mating booth, and it struck her as tawdry and empty. She thought more of Ron than this..

 

 

Paying the ridiculous cover fee, she found her husband curled up at the bar. He looked ashen grey and there was vomit on the floor, not that anyone here would notice. A wave of perfume hit her in the face, and she realized that they pumped it into this place to cover the stench of sweaty bodies, alcohol, cigarettes, and flatulence. “Come on, Ron,” she said, shouldering him and leading him out to his car. She fished his keys out of his pocket.

“Hey, pretty lady, looks like your date is hors de combat,” said a six-footer with bulging muscles, a firm jaw, and bold dark eyes. “Drop him off and let’s have a good time.”

“No, thank you,” said Betty with her best smile. “Some other time, maybe.”

“Maybe,” said the guy, and shot finger pistols at her. Betty sighed and got the Porsche open, then slid Ron into the passenger side, where he slumped against the door as she took the driver’s seat and belted on his seatbelt. She pressed the little button to lower the top, mainly to get the alcohol fumes out, but also because it was a beautiful night, with a black infinity over them studded with stars, each one a world of promise to be explored. Wrenching the wheel of the powerful car, Betty peeled out of the lot and got them up on the freeway.

The cold night air rushing past brought Ron back after a few minutes driving. “Where are we?” he mumbled.

“I’m taking you to a safe place,” said Betty.

That woke him up more. “Betty? Why are you…”

“Ssh,” she said, petting his hair. “Rest now. I’m going to make sure that everything will turn out all right. It will be just like it was before things went wrong.”