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Marie must have a headache again, I think as I climb the stairs to the bedroom. I have other thoughts, but I do my best to keep them at bay. I try not to feel anything. Not resentment. Not pity. Not anger. I aim to keep my temperament neutral.
I walk down the cramped hall and pause in the doorway of the bedroom. She’s lying on the bed, her back to me, fully clothed. I don’t want to disturb her. I don’t want to have to deal with her anger, or worse, her indifference.
It’s been like this for as long as I can remember, though now my memory seems too fluid. Has it been months? Years? Our whole marriage? Has she always been this unhappy with me? Had she ever loved me? For a while there, when we were trying for a baby, it seemed she did. But when time and time again it wouldn’t stick, the blame would turn to me.
Then the malaise came. The melancholy. The headaches.
She started flinching at my touch. She started leaving the house at night, going for walks that I wasn’t allowed to go on. Day-by-day any control, any hold I had on my marriage, slipped through my fingers.
Now we’re just two passing ships in the night. I go to work at the academy, I come home. She’s in bed, she gets up, she leaves. Sometimes it’s not a walk, sometimes it’s dinner with friends, sometimes she says she’s seeing her uncle.
I haven’t let myself entertain the thought of what she could really be doing.
I don’t want to feel the shame.
I don’t want to feel even more helpless than I already do.
But…I’m curious.
I slowly take off my coat, damp with the San Francisco fog, and drape it over the armchair, then quietly walk over to her. I pause by the bed and stare down at her. Her chest is rising and falling, and I watch it for at least a minute. Sometimes she pretends to be asleep when she’s not. I should know, sometimes I do the same.
When I’m sure she’s truly asleep, I take my hand and I gently place it against her cheek, palm barely pressed against her skin.
I close my eyes.
I travel through the void.
Through her skin, into her mind.
I break all trust between us, commit the deepest invasion of privacy.
Because I need to know.
I need to know.
I step through the darkness, so many doors in front of me, and I pick the one she’s laughing behind. I haven’t heard her laugh in years.
I open the door and step inside her memories.
She’s walking down the street, somewhere I don’t recognize at first, then I realize it’s a gambling hall, not far from us in the Mission district. She has her arm hooked around the arm of a tall, handsome man with a mustache. He’s not just any man.
He’s Raymond De Haro, a neighbor from across the street by the baseball stadium.
He’s staring down at her, smiling, radiant white teeth, tanned skin, and the sight of him does something to me, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I’ve always felt a strange connection to Ray, but I never knew how to put those feelings into words.
Now I know the word.
Desire.
I desire this man, and I desire the way she’s looking at him, wishing it was me.
My wife has been having an affair.
This confirms it.
I should stop watching the world through her eyes.
I should leave the memory, leave her mind, leave the room.
But I don’t.
I continue watching, and then things skip and then I see it, I see them outside of his yellow house, the lanterns flickering on the red-roofed stucco. Beside them is the Recreation Grounds baseball stadium, the sounds of a cheering crowd filling the summer air. They disappear inside his house.
I want to see more.
I want to see what he does with her.
I want to see how he fucks her.
I want to see what makes him a better lover than I am.
I want to watch it all.
But her memories skip again, flashing faces, flashing bodies, and I’m starting to get dizzy, as if the nausea she gets with her headaches is seeping into me.
I withdraw.
Back, back, further back.
Until I’m standing in our bedroom and taking my hand off her face.
She stirs below me, and I hold my breath, waiting for her to wake.
She doesn’t. She continues to sleep, not knowing all that I’ve seen.
I’ve seen too much and not enough.
I vow to never do that again, never read anyone’s memories without their permission.
Because now I know the truth.
And now I have to fix this.
I quietly back away from her, let her sleep away her headache, lost in her memories.
I grab my coat.
I head downstairs and out the door.
The cool fog meets my face as I cross Mission Street, the day already sliding into night as it does so quickly here in November. I don’t know what my plan is, I just know I have to talk to Ray. The man who stole my wife.
