Truth Ate The Gods

Vinaigrette Adultery (short story)

He pushes his glasses up his nose with his right index finger. His fingerprint clouds the lense as he stares ahead. The gold of his wedding ring burns cold in the dark. A marriage over, yet spilling into the new year with a sad necessity.

His wife is Catholic, smooth tight lips and a tolerance patented by saints. Does she love him? Hard to say. She tolerates him, as wives should, refilling his glass with some sour wine brought by faceless neighbours. He has fulfilled his need, the children fed and grown, and now she watches the window as he rots away in the chair.

I make love to her in hot sacrilege, silent as the television blares against his throne. She kisses my neck with a rigid necessity, hands hard with a desire to sin. She does not shut the door, and from downstairs the cold light flashes across her yellow hair, now streaked with grey. I imagine him, entombed below before the box, and wonder if he’d care.

She is raw, absolute, unpeeling my dress like feathers from a bird. But nothing compares to that first numbing sensation of want. The weight of your lungs will turn anything else you experience to ash. You will replay those moments in the silence of train stations and empty rooms, the taste of red lipstick and the texture of crosses and cloth against your mouth.

I had a conquest in his wife, or maybe she had me, on the blue print wallpaper of the spare room. She never shut the door. There is a silence in the love of women, the secrets of sinning. It is barely spoken, soft in glances and the brushes of hands. The television blares in my memory in front of that God.

Eventually, she stops, cool forehead on mine, a kiss, a stare. She rebuttons my dress, smooths my hair, and departs, lipstick still brazen on the arch of her neck. I follow. His eyes don’t look up from the screen as he raises his glass and she fills again. The room is filled with green gloom and long silent laughter.

There is nothing in her eyes but a blue resignation.