The Spot: Stories

Adultery is multifaceted, he said. It’s shapeless but at the same time has a rudimentary figure, like a snowflake; an abundance of clichés surround it and yet it’s unique, an entity different each time. Over the window in his bedroom was a grate secured with a large padlock. The sun came through the grate and then the embroidered curtains he brought back from Spain, spreading a lattice across her body that he traced with his fingers, from her belly — with its cesarean scar — to her chin.

There was the inelegance of it, too, of course, and the requisite lies that must be told, and the foolishness they felt when alone: his feeling of desertion when she was up at her house along the river. He went down near the water, to walk the length of Riverside Park, to breathe the creosote and salt air, and to look at the edge of the Palisades beyond the bridge.

The superstructure that held the subway where it emerged from the tunnel at Broadway and 125th Street. The brutal way the trains heaved to a stop, out of sight but not out of earshot — the clandestine sensation of secreting some part of his life away.

They made love in his apartment most afternoons, one way or another, during lunch.

I don’t care about this job. I’m a part-timer. I’m not obligated to this career, he said.

We provide fine insurance for religious institutions under the umbrella, but otherwise we’re just another business; we weigh the risk factors — and she stopped herself here because it was easy, she found, to fall into a mindless prattle about the nature of the insurance business, about the ways risks were covered. This subject, along with the embroidered curtains, made her think of the time in Spain, with her husband, when they had gone up onto the mesa for dinner with a British couple, a man who worked for Lloyd’s of London. She remembered something seminal about that night; they had felt so young, so fresh, so keenly American. They drank a punch made of Pimm’s and talked about life. Then there had been — and here she was somewhat fuzzy on the details — an insinuation about group sex? A hint at some form of experimentation? It was never clear. They’d excused themselves, gone to the car, driven down the road into Carboneras, laughing and excited, cutting straight through the town. The street busy, jammed with people, she had sensed the carrying of a secret agreement, of something deep and unspoken.

The night when the circumstances were correct — her daughter was on a sleepover with a friend, her husband away on business — they took a cab through the park to the East Side for dinner, roaring through the trees, the redolent smell of the earth, passing the old horse stables, to emerge into a larger order, the stateliness of Park Avenue.

The rattle of the emerging subway, salsa music from gypsy cabs — if he listened, when she woke him to make love again, he heard these sounds coalesce and deteriorate into nothingness: the quaint, paradoxical dynamic of knowing and not knowing. She’d become acutely aware of this sensation much later, when she moved back to the city and was living near Park Avenue, looking down at the traffic.

The great sorrow of being part of the overall tradition, for lack of a better phrase: knowing that Chekhov had it right. They read “The Lady with the Pet Dog” together, in the grass in the park, lying on a blanket, while across the street, near Grant’s Tomb, a boy lifted a pit bull up by a stick to strengthen its jaw.

I’d come to Lincoln Center some night, he said, when you’re with your husband, and watch you two listening to the symphony. I’d meet you at the fountain during the intermission and we’d steal away.

No, we’d meet just as we’re meeting now. Except it would go on forever. The story would end and then it would just keep going, the way this one does. That’s what it’s about. It would keep going onward, like the light from a star. We know they’re not going to find a way out, around it, and we know that they’re just going to continue until it ends.

But it doesn’t end, he said. He was on his back with his hand behind his head and the sun coming down through the bristle of his whiskers.

Around the edge of her voice when she was tense, or anxious, came the tightness of her Midwestern upbringing; she spoke one afternoon about her daughter. She’s, well, how should I say this? She’s kind of a troubled teenage kid. Maybe not much different than most. A little on the edge. Troubled is the only word I can find for it. I try never to say it because to say it is to make it so. But saying it to you seems safe enough.