What happens when a married woman feels seen by another man.
11 September
Tonight, her husband puts their son to bed and then comes downstairs to sit with her at the table. He sits where Kaito had sat just a few days before. He stares fixedly at the wooden surface. Her eyes run over his familiar contours and the frown on his face.
“There’s something that I have been really worried about these last days,” he says.
He takes several moments to continue. She is holding her breath.
“I think that I have found another one of those bumps.”
Not cancer, not emphysema, not sudden death. But still, he can hardly meet her eyes. She knows this look. The boy-child. Ashamed and stuttering.
“It’s in a really awkward place.”
He shows her the bump. She can feel it, she thinks. She consoles him and they agree he must quickly go to the doctor. The last time he ignored one of these strange, harmless cysts, it burst, became infected and was agony for weeks. His grandmother had them, on her knuckles, her arms, her face. Everywhere. At least now, they can be removed cleanly. The skin will heal. But no one wants to have a scalpel taken to their soft parts.
She hugs him and he holds onto her, like a child. She tells him he shouldn’t feel ashamed. It’s just a thing his body sometimes makes. It’s not a big deal. It could be so much worse. Awakened to sympathy, she feels her resentment beginning to evaporate. He is sharing a painful secret with her. And she tells him that it is good, to share these things. That it makes her feel closer. But she catches herself and lets her words about honesty and openness peter out. Because she has not shared. She has not disclosed to him her secret. She will not do that.
A marriage will have secrets. How could it not? Total transparency and total knowledge is impossible. Isn’t it in the private self that we have our freedom? And isn’t this the thing that makes us attractive to the other – the unknown parts, the stranger inside?
In bed later, before they sleep, he holds her. But his hand on her waist makes her squirm. He has been up drinking beer. Too much. A repeat occurrence. She judges him drunk. And she notices that she could embrace the vulnerable child, but she can’t yet embrace the man.
12 September
Kaito comes over to pick up his things. He is leaving for London. He will go and stay with art school friends and check up on his studio. She does not invite him to sit down for a cup of tea. Anyway, the biscuits in the pink box are finished. She keeps her distance, washing dishes and talking across the room. She can look at him, but not for long. She doesn’t want to get lost in his attention, or find it gone.
And when he leaves, she thinks: There is nothing there, from him. He is only polite and curious and kind and nothing more. He is with me as he is with others. She releases her desire for him, like a fly in a jar, set free out of an open window. She will not seek out destruction. She does not want to burn her house down, or wound her husband and child. At the most, she might have risked a kiss. He is polite and curious and kind. He is a man. He would have kissed her. Or would he?
Maybe he would have been horrified. Maybe from the start she was only a mother to him. Someone’s mother. Someone’s wife. Maybe he would have drawn away and apologised, as if he were responsible, and she would never have seen him again. She doesn’t want to risk that.
She goes back to the dishes. The house is quiet, her husband working, her son at pre-school. Yes, she desired him. There are so few moments like this. She is married. She has grey in her hair. She does not feel attraction as she used to. Like a wave, like electricity, a magnetic force, whatever metaphors you like. She does not feel seen like she used to be seen, as a woman who could choose which way to turn, where her eyes rested – a woman who had eyes on her. Eyes that wanted something, wanted it all.
All they did was talk. And drink tea together. He is a friend. When he messages her, from Istanbul or London, or around the corner, she will reply. She will invite him over. He can sleep on the couch. He is welcome, anytime. She will tell her husband he is coming. But she won’t tell him everything.
A postscript from Blue Jay
Several months after the preceding events, which are semi-fictionalised for Anonymiss, I sat my husband down at the table. I was sweating, my heart racing.
“I need to talk to you about something.”
He was dead still. I had his full attention.
“I have been working on a piece of writing…”
I proceeded to explain, circuitously, clumsily, that the writing was about a crush that I had had. That the crush was our mutual friend. That nothing had happened, it was all in my head. That the piece of writing I was working on was to be shared online, anonymously.
“So, you didn’t sleep with him, or anything like that?”
“No, no, not at all!” I yelped.
When I finished talking my husband sat quietly. In contrast to me, he takes a while to formulate his thoughts.
I was dead still. He had my full attention.
“Well, I don’t believe that you should censor yourself. I don’t believe that we, as artists, should censor ourselves in any way. If you need to do it, you must do it.”
I felt a rush of relief and gratitude … and attraction.
We talked for a long time about the conditions of that long weekend. I told him how disconnected I had felt from him at the time and how our friend’s quiet attention had undone me. I told him how much the strain of childcare had affected me and our relationship – it had been a very rocky moment. Some of this stuff I had voiced before, but not quite like this. We acknowledged that crushes will happen. And it wasn’t just about a crush, was it?
We talked about the private sides of ourselves, the stuff we keep hidden. And since then, we’ve continued talking more openly and curiously, and with a bit more risk. We each have unspoken things, hidden things. I wouldn’t want to bare it all, or all at once. I don’t need a full confession or a litany of secrets. But paradoxically, sharing something secret, something at the edge of fidelity, brought us closer to each other.
And turning a moment of private intensity into something else, something public, something beyond our domestic life, was important for me. So – thanks for reading. And may you lean into desire, no matter where it arises, and see what direction you travel in.
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