The Photograph

Danny's wife offered me coffee as she explained that my best friend was out of town. I'd known of his trip but had forgotten. It was Monday night and I was here for the usual football game and beers. Michelle tolerated me. She was slightly suspicious, I think, of my single lifestyle and my influence over Danny. To tell the truth, we did not get along; we were opposites. I was sort of free and clumsy, taking things as they came and letting the next day take care of any trouble. Michelle was contained and totally in control. Things in the world seemed to move towards her as she needed them, events fitted themselves to her plans, people fell in line. She irritated me with her smugness and I'm sure I irritated her. She was tall, her flesh firmly shaped to her frame, unblemished and with a natural tan. She always wore her blond hair tightly scrimped into a bun. Her glasses were large; objects of practical use, not aesthetic in any way. Her clothes were likewise practical; they were like the model answers to questions the weather and temperature asked. I couldn't imagine her ever being caught out with the wrong coat or without a jersey if needed.

I sat on a stool at the kitchen counter and watched Michelle slide effortlessly through the required motions of making coffee. Her grey skirt fitted like a second skin around her hips and beneath her short, tailored grey jacket she wore a white top. The lapels of the jacket accentuated the mound of her breasts. In the background NPR prattled on. Outside a late fall sunset had painted the horizon an improbable pink. The tick of the radiators measured the slow passage of time.

"You can stay and watch if you want," she said in a voice that was almost husky.

"Watch what?" I asked, noisily sipping the hot coffee.

"The football of course, or whatever it is that you watch," she replied, annoyed.

I continued loudly sipping my coffee, mainly because I could see it irritated her. I could see that she didn't know what else to say to me, but she was too polite to just abandon me in the kitchen. Suddenly I remembered something from earlier in the day. Danny's car crookedly parked in the back of a restaurant on Route 7. But Danny had already left town.

"So what were you doing at the Lantana at lunchtime today?" I asked. Michelle first went pale and then a mottled red. It was most flustered I'd ever seen her.

"What are you talking about?" she stammered.

In these kinds of situations I let my instincts guide me.

"The guy I saw you with in the restaurant. Who is he?" I had, of course, not seen anything of the sort. I'd just driven by and seen Danny's SUV crookedly parked.

She said nothing. Instead she pulled my cup away and filled it from the pot, spilling a little on the counter. Her hand was trembling.

"He's just a friend. Why are you asking me these questions?"

This time I sipped my coffee silently, looking at her from above the rip of the cup.

"He looked like more than a friend to me," I said, achieving a renewal of the blush. "Does Danny know about your friend?" I asked. Again she said nothing, this time turning away from me.

"Look," she said quietly, fearfully, "it's nothing. I just went to lunch with a guy from work. That's all, nothing happened. It was just lunch."

"And in the car afterwards," I said, wildly guessing, "what about that?"

Michelle spun around, her eyes now wide with a feral fear. "Were you spying on me?" she demanded.

I spoke calmly, softly, reasonably. "I saw what I saw. I wonder what Danny will make of this? I truly do; his perfect little wife out whoring herself in crappy Italian restaurants.

"It wasn't crappy," Michelle said. There was a moment of silence before we both laughed breaking the tension for a moment. She stepped closer to me and rested her elbows on the counter top, her face level with mine. There was a depth to her brown eyes I hadn't noticed before; a certain sadness perhaps. She gently bit against her bottom lip as she pondered her words.

"I know we haven't always got along," she said softly, "I don't really know why. Perhaps it's because I see in you something of myself, something I wish wasn't there. I love Danny," she went on after a short pause, "you have to believe that. I have my demons but he's happy; we're happy. I don't want to destroy that, I can't destroy that. So I'm begging you, Paul, please don't say anything to him. It will crush him. You know it will."

I ran my finger along the rim of the empty coffee cup, allowing her words to echo a while in the silence of the house.

"Then why suck off guys in parking lots?" I asked, fixing her eyes with mine.

"Please, I'm not trying to excuse myself. I know what I did was wrong. Jesus, don't you think I know what I'm risking when I do this stuff?"

"This stuff?" I interrupted. "How often do you do this stuff? How many men have there been?"

She stood up and walked away, pausing in the kitchen doorway. "I don't have to explain myself to you," she shouted, "fuck you, fuck you!"

I listened to her stomp angrily up the stairs. I fetched a couple of Danny's beers from the fridge and followed her. The bedroom door was closed. I didn't knock.

Michelle was sitting cross-legged on the bed. Her skirt was hiked up around her thighs, the stretched fabric of her red panties clearly visible. She made no attempt to cover herself. She had shed her jacket revealing the sleeveless white top. Across her lap was a magazine on which was spread the dried, crumbled leaves of marijuana which she was mixing with tobacco. A small freezer packet of dope was on the bed next an orange pack of cigarette papers and a cheap lighter. I shifted some of Danny's clothes onto the floor and flopped down into a plush green chair. I twisted off the cap of a beer bottle.

"Full of surprises aren't you" I remarked. She said nothing. I watched her expertly roll the joint and lick the gummed edge of the paper. She flicked the lighter and squinted as the smoke curled up before she inhaled deeply. A single bedside lamp battled the gloom of the day's end. Outside an autumnal breeze whistled through the telephones lines. I drank the beer down and opened another. Michelle shifted off the bed and doused her joint in my discarded beer bottle. She walked over to the window, her back to me.

"So, Paul the Inquisitor, what do you want to know? What will save my soul?"

"I'm serious," I said. "I think Danny deserves to know what kind of wife he has. I would want to know myself. Why shouldn't I apply the same standard?" She said nothing. I could see the uncertainty in her shoulders and in the tilt of her neck. She didn't believe me but she also didn't trust me. I pulled out my cell phone.

"Let me see, there are eleven numbers to dial, that's all. And then ... bang, your fake marriage is over. Eleven numbers and then just the slightest pressure on the send button and that's it for you."

"You're bullshitting me," she said quietly.

I started pressing the numbers, the electronic beep harsh in the dull silence of the room. She turned around, her hands raised in surrender. "Okay, okay, please. Let's talk," she stammered, "what do you want?"

I snapped the cell phone closed. "Tell me everything about today; what you did, everything. And take off the panties. I don't think a whoring slut like you deserves the dignity of panties. A little too much false modesty I think."

She looked at me, shrugged and reached under her skirt, pulled her panties down and stepped out of them before sitting on the edge of the bed, her knees tightly together, her hands clasped tightly on her lap. Her bright red panties lay on the carpet between us.

"His name is Derek," she said, her voice a confessional monotone. "He works in one of the offices below us. I'd seen him in the corridors a few times. He smiled and I smiled back. I didn't think much of it really. Then he emailed me; just a playful email, nothing heavy. I emailed back. That's how it started." She paused as she took up the magazine and started to roll another joint. "He seemed to know me. Not the married woman, good daughter, efficient worker me; the other side of me - how much I like the attention of men; their gaze on me, especially that. For some reason I trusted him. We met for a drink after work. I told Danny I was meeting a girlfriend. Derek seemed so suave and sophisticated; a real gentlemen. But the look in his eyes was not gentlemanly," she smiled at this, the lamp throwing shadows across her face. The end of the joint flared as she lit it. "We made a lunch date in some far away place he knew; somewhere where no one would see us. We were thinking colleagues of course, not my husband's best friend."

"Tell me what happened in the car," I instructed.

"After lunch we sat in Danny's car just talking. I could tell he was nervous. He's also married with kids. I kissed him first. He was a good kisser. His hands were all over me; my breasts, under skirt, everywhere."

"Did he finger you?"

"Yes," she said.

"Did you suck him?"

"Yes."

"Did he cum in your mouth?"

"Yes."

I heard the 'plop' of a tear hit the magazine. I stood up and walked to the window. Michelle's panty drawer stood open; the hiding place for her marijuana. I picked out a white thong and stretched the elastic as I looked out over the neighbor's house. I could see the family all seated at the dinner table. Someone had told a joke and their faces were all thrown back in silent laughter. A cat on the boundary wall looked up at me, its eye caught by the flashing white of Michelle's thong. My own mouse was hunched silently behind me on the bed.

"How many others have there been since you promised to be faithful to Danny in front of all of us at the church?" I whispered.

"Paul, this has gone too far," she said, her voice attempting reasonableness. She got up off the bed and stood directly behind me, her hand resting lightly on my upper arm. "Please let's just end it now."

"Put these on and take your skirt off," I said ignoring her plea. She stepped back aghast.

"Fuck, this is mad. You can't do this. You can't, don't you understand?" She pleaded.

I stood there, the thong dangling from my finger and my cell in my other hand.

"Your choice," I said smiling. She yanked the thong from my hand and retreated to the shadows, pulling on the thong before stepping out of the skirt. I told her stand next to the lamp. She had long, strong legs and muscular thighs. Her ass was smooth and tight and the folds of her pussy were visible beneath the thin fabric of the thong. I instructed her turn around in the light of the lamp. Her long back was perfectly bisected by the deep valley of her spine.

"You're as bad as me," she whispered. "What would Danny say if he saw this; his best friend ogling his wife? You're no better than me," she repeated.

She was right of course. This really had gone too far but now I was powerless to stop it; it had its own logic, its own conclusion.

"Look at me," she said, while she posed for me, now caressing herself in front of me. "Is this what you wanted?" She laughed at me and sat down again on the bed, picking up a framed photograph from the bedside table showing her and Danny on their wedding day, hand-in-hand outside the church. "You want to fuck me, don't you?" she asked, a smirk on her face.

This was not a proposition I could easily contradict. More than anything in the world I wanted to have her, possess her, make her absolutely mine. It was a desire that was suddenly concentrated at the center of my existence; I couldn't imagine not fucking Michelle.

She turned the photograph towards me. It showed Danny on the happiest day of his life. I remembered his astonishment that Michelle, who he loved like a puppy loves its new owner, had agreed to the marriage. I remember him banging on my apartment door in the early hours to tell me the news; Danny breathless, excited, suddenly large in the world.

"We would be spitting on this" she said, holding up the photograph. I sat silently, my heart now thumping. "And, you know, Paul, if we do this we would have no control over how it will end." Then she spat onto the photograph, the gob of her saliva sliding down the glass across the face of her husband. "Your turn," she said, turning to me, her eyes flaming with a mixture of anger and desire. I couldn't look as she held out the blasphemed image, waiting for me to take it. Suddenly, I felt the tables had turned with Michelle now in charge. "What's wrong?" she asked, a flare of disdain in her voice; "Second thoughts?"

I took the photograph, careful to avoid the cold spit pooling at the bottom of the frame. My mouth was dry, spitless. I didn't want to do it but I couldn't see how I could avoid it. I understood her logic. I could contemplate fucking Danny's wife but I couldn't spit on a photograph of her husband. It was dark outside now, the room reflected in the black glass of the windows. I heard the neighbor's back door open and a child's voice call for the cat. Somewhere a motorbike briefly revved before roaring off into a distant silence. Still I held the frame of the photograph, immobilized by this brutal dilemma.

"I thought so," she sneered, "I knew you were weak, a nothing, and a nobody." She bent down and scooped up the red panties and her skirt from the floor, already tidying up and ready to dismiss me. I felt a surge of shame; shame for not having the courage to spit on the image of my best friend and the shame of appearing weak in the eyes of Michelle. With my free hand I reached out a grabbed her wrist, twisting her skin cruelly, pulling her close to me. I raised the photograph to my mouth and licked her cold spit from the glass, took it into my mouth and combined it with my own and spat our treachery into her astonished face. We danced in a mad embrace across the room until we fell onto the bed in a puff of dried marijuana leaves. Her hands fumbled with my pants, reaching for me as I drove my fingers into the split of her fleshy wetness. Moments later we were fucking, tearing at each other's clothes, desperate for the other's nakedness. There was no gentleness in this, no redemption or salvation. This was the rawest of new love; a love that is angry and would destroy the world for its own satisfaction. We exhausted ourselves, bruising and scratching and biting. Our orgasms were fists driven into the flesh of the other. Afterwards we lay on the bed sprawled like battlefield corpses in the heavy air of our sweat.

From high above I looked down on Danny's house with its neatly arranged flowerbeds, shrubs and winding paths. The neighbor's house was in darkness like all the others. Only the luminescent green eyes of the cat looked up at me through a window, a silent judgment in its expression. Through Danny's roof I could see Michelle breathing slowly, the smirk ripped from her face and replaced by beatitude of her recent ecstasy. I watched as her fingers reached across the quarter inch that separated us on the bed and, like beggars at the feet of royalty, approach my arm. She said something so softly that only a lover could hear, and I saw myself reply. I looked down on her matted pubic hair, her twice violated pussy. She had played with her desire, skating off on the thin ice of her secret needs and accepting the mouth and fingers and cum of her colleague in her husband's car. Exhilarated by the freedom of sliding across the world without friction she pushed on further away from the safety of the shore, further out on the ice. When the ice broke and she tumbled down she expected the hypothermic cold of deadly water but beneath the ice was fire, a consuming love fire that would turn her life to ashes.

My own improbable love for Michelle kept me floating high above the world. The guilt that would eventually pull me down to earth was no match for the buoyancy of new love. I was so high I could see right across the country to where Danny sat in his hotel room; the Monday night game over, he flipped through channels lying on the big bed, a beer in his hand. From up here I had dropped a bomb that was traveling at a steady, uniform speed down towards him, primed to detonate and explode Danny's small world. Watching him wriggle his toes in his socks and burp softly I thought of the residents of Hiroshima washing cups, making love, gossiping, patting the behinds of their children as the bomb fell silently; all those thoughts and plans, and hopes and loves were not enough to stop the bomb in midair, suspend it above the earth as the not-yet-happened. I tried to imagine Danny's Hiroshima. The bomb would come down, BAM! How would Michelle do it? A note left on the kitchen counter? – "I'm at my mother's. We need to talk." Or would Michelle be braver and wait for him to bound in from the garage, hefting his bags behind him and then tell him. She wouldn't beat about the bush – "I'm leaving you. I'm in love with Paul." And then he would know he was right all along; he wasn't good enough for her, he would never be good enough for someone like her. He would ask how long? And he wouldn't believe her when she said since yesterday.

I watched as we slipped into each other's arms like summer swimmers slowly submerging into a still pond. I watched as Danny, now stripped to his shorts, hugged a pillow beneath the duvet, holding on to a happiness that was already a shadow, falling into his final night's sleep before the explosion that would rob him of all his sleep.