I see him for the first time at our school’s welcome back assembly. Neil, Joe, and I
take up our usual posts in the back of the auditorium. I’m settling in, preparing to be
bored by longwinded sermons and dusty anthems. But then, miraculously, the sky opens and Carlos beams down, sinking gracefully into a vinyl seat up front, and I spend the next hour imagining I’m up there near him, him near me, wondering what that would be like. There’s an aura about him that sets him off from the rest. Passing in the halls, clowning on the bus, high fiving at the caf. Adoring girls follow him around, but he pays about as much attention to them as a boat to its wake.
I needed to get away. I needed to sort out events of the past year, the itchy seventh year of a midlife marriage. The scabies of coupledom. Untreated, the dearth of devotion had become an unremitting infestation. The tendency was to scratch.
On the wrong side of fifty, we’d grown too gray for foolishness. We’d become inured to apathy and dissatisfaction. To the anhedonic grind of domesticity. Love takes work, but we didn’t have it in us. Over time, we’d become blind to the other and the other’s humdrum exigencies.
I’d discovered his covert online stash. I shouldn’t have been home. The gathering I’d had downtown was unexpectedly canceled. I drove back, knocked, called to him in his den, and prised a door not generally shut. I found him, pants puddled about his ankles.
“I’m glad you caught me,” he said. “Maybe now I can stop.”