Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Don’t be that guy
, I thought. 
The guy who pants
over where the pendant ends
.
‘What flavor you feel like?’ I asked.
‘Whatever you give me, I’ll like.’
It was that line that caught me, the simplicity of it. The
idea that I could do something and it would make a woman
happy, and it would be easy. 
Whatever you give me, I’ll
like
. I felt an overwhelming wave of relief. And then I knew I
didn’t love Amy anymore.
I don’t love my wife anymore
, I thought, turning to grab
two tumblers. 
Not even a little bit. I am wiped clean of love,
I am spotless
. I made my favorite drink: Christmas
Morning, hot coffee and cold peppermint schnapps. I had
one with her, and when she shivered and laughed – that big
whoop of a laugh – I poured us another round. We drank
together an hour past closing time, and I mentioned the
word 
wife
three times, because I was looking at Andie and
picturing taking her clothes off. A warning for her, the least I
could do: 
I have a wife. Do with that what you will
.
She sat in front of me, her chin in her hands, smiling up
at me.
‘Walk me home?’ she said. She’d mentioned before
how close she lived to downtown, how she needed to stop
by The Bar some night and say hello, and did she mention

---

how close she lived to The Bar? My mind had been primed:
Many times I’d mentally strolled the few blocks toward the
bland brick apartments where she lived. So when I
suddenly was out the door, walking her home, it didn’t
seem unusual at all – there wasn’t that warning bell that told
me: 
This is unusual, this is not what we do
.
I walked her home, against the wind, snow flying
everywhere, helping her rewrap her red knitted scarf once,
twice, and on the third time, I was tucking her in properly
and our faces were close, and her cheeks were a merry
holiday-sledding pink, and it was the kind of thing that could
never have happened in another hundred nights, but that
night it was possible. The conversation, the booze, the
storm, the scarf.
We grabbed each other at the same time, me pushing
her up against a tree for better leverage, the spindly
branches dumping a pile of snow on us, a stunning, comical
moment that only made me more insistent on touching her,
touching everything at once, one hand up inside her
sweater, the other between her legs. And her letting me.
She pulled back from me, her teeth chattering. ‘Come
up with me.’
I paused.
‘Come up with me,’ she said again. ‘I want to be with
you.’
The sex wasn’t that great, not the first time. We were two
bodies used to different rhythms, never quite getting the
hang of each other, and it had been so long since I’d been
inside a woman, I came first, quickly, and kept moving,
thirty crucial seconds as I began wilting inside her, just long

---

enough to get her taken care of before I went entirely slack.
So it was nice but disappointing, anticlimactic, the way
girls must feel when they give up their virginity: 
That was
what all the fuss was about?
But I liked how she wrapped
herself around me, and I liked that she was as soft as I’d
imagined. New skin. 
Young
, I thought disgracefully,
picturing Amy and her constant lotioning, sitting in bed and
slapping away at herself angrily.
I went into Andie’s bathroom, took a piss, looked at
myself in the mirror, and made myself say it: 
You are a
cheater. You have failed one of the most basic male tests.
You are not a good man
. And when that didn’t bother me, I
thought: 
You’re
really 
not a good man
.
The horrifying thing was, if the sex had been
outrageously mind-blowing, that might have been my sole
indiscretion. But it was only decent, and now I was a
cheater, and I couldn’t ruin my record of fidelity on
something merely average. So I knew there would be a
next. I didn’t promise myself never again. And then the next
was very, very good, and the next after that was great. Soon
Andie became a physical counterpoint to all things Amy.
She laughed with me and made me laugh, she didn’t
immediately contradict me or second-guess me. She never
scowled at me. She was easy. It was all so fucking easy.
And I thought: 
Love makes you want to be a better man –
right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you
permission to just be the man you are
.
I was going to tell Amy. I knew it had to happen. I
continued not to tell Amy, for months and months. And then
more months. Most of it was cowardice. I couldn’t bear to
have the conversation, to have to 
explain
myself. I couldn’t

---

imagine having to discuss the divorce with Rand and
Marybeth, as they certainly would insert themselves into the
fray. But part of it, in truth, was my strong streak of
pragmatism – it was almost grotesque, how practical (self-
serving?) I could be. I hadn’t asked Amy for a divorce, in