O Desejo em Silêncio

The first time I saw him, I was buying avocados.

Three of them. Slightly underripe. I pressed my thumb into each one with that particular pressure I’d learned from my mother, who could tell a good avocado from a bad one with her eyes closed. He was at the other end of the produce section, holding a single lemon like he didn't know what to do with it. Tall. Dark hair that curled just a little at the collar. A wedding ring on his finger, same as mine.

I didn't think much of it. People buy lemons. People have curls. People wear rings.

But then he was at the coffee counter next to my office. Then at the dry cleaner's on Tuesday. Then sitting two tables away at the little Italian place where I eat lunch alone every Thursday because my husband works through lunch and I have nowhere else to be.

The fourth time, he spoke.

“You keep showing up,” he said. Not a pickup line. Just an observation. Like he was as surprised as I was.

I laughed. I don't laugh at strangers. I'm the kind of woman who keeps her eyes down on the subway, who says “no thank you” before the question is finished. But I laughed, and then I said something stupid like “small city,” and then he smiled, and then I felt something crack open in my chest.

I am thirty-seven years old. I have been married for eleven years. I love my husband.

I love the way he leaves his coffee cup in the sink even though I've asked him a thousand times to rinse it. I love how he reads the news out loud from his phone while I'm trying to sleep. I love the sound of his key in the lock at 7:14 every evening, give or take. I love the mole on his shoulder blade that I kissed the night we met and have kissed maybe ten thousand times since.

I love him. I do.

But love doesn't stop your blood from heating when a stranger holds the door for you and his hand brushes your elbow. Love doesn't turn your thoughts away from the curve of a jaw that isn't your husband's. Love doesn't keep your dreams clean.

His name is Daniel. I learned that on the fifth time. He works in finance. He has a daughter, six years old, named Clara. He's been married nine years. He told me all of this while we stood in line at the post office, both of us holding packages, both of us pretending we weren't watching each other's mouths form words.

“I shouldn't be talking to you,” I said.

“Probably not,” he said.

Neither of us moved.

That was three weeks ago. Now I know his coffee order (black, one sugar). I know he plays guitar badly. I know his wife's name is Elena and she's a physical therapist who works weekends. I know he thinks about me at stoplights, in meetings, while brushing his teeth. He told me that last part in a text message I deleted immediately and then wished I hadn't.

I have his number saved under a fake name. Margaret. My great-aunt who died in 2003. If my husband ever sees “Margaret” in my phone, what's he going to think? That I'm calling a dead woman. It's genius. It's pathetic.

Every morning I wake up and tell myself: today I will be normal. Today I will think about my grocery list and my mother's blood pressure and the leaky faucet in the guest bathroom. Today I will not wonder if he's at the coffee counter. Today I will not check my phone.

By 10 AM I've checked it six times.

The guilt sits in my stomach like a stone I swallowed. Heavy. Permanent. I go through the motions of my life and feel it grinding against my insides. I make dinner. I fold laundry. I let my husband hold me at night and I close my eyes and I think about Daniel's hands.

It's not fair. None of it is fair. Not to my husband, who has done nothing wrong. Not to Daniel's wife, who probably kisses her daughter goodnight and believes in the life she's built. Not even to me, caught between what I want and what I know is right, a woman split down the middle, both halves bleeding.

I tried to stop. I deleted the contact. I went to a different coffee shop. I took a different route to work. I told myself it was just chemistry, just novelty, just the midlife crisis I'd always rolled my eyes at in other women.

But then I saw him again. Not by accident this time. I went looking.

I told myself it was to prove I could resist him. I told myself I needed closure. I told myself a hundred lies and believed none of them.

He was at the park near my office, sitting on a bench, watching children play. His daughter was on the swings. He looked tired. He looked real. He looked like a man who had made promises and meant to keep them.

I sat down next to him.

“This is a bad idea,” I said.

“Terrible,” he agreed.

We watched Clara swing higher and higher, her pigtails flying. The sun was setting. The sky was doing that thing where it turns orange and pink and purple all at once, like it can't decide what it wants to be.

“I think about you constantly,” he said. Not looking at me. His voice flat, like he was confessing a crime.

“I know.”

“It's not just physical. I mean, it is. But it's not only that.”

“I know.”

“What are we going to do?”

I didn't answer. Because I don't know. Because every answer I can think of is either a lie or a betrayal. Because I want him and I don't want to want him and the wanting doesn't care what I want.

Clara ran over, out of breath, her cheeks red. “Daddy, push me again.”

He looked at her. Then at me. Then back at her. And in that look I saw everything. The life he'd chosen. The life he'd built. The life I was standing outside of, peering in through a window I had no right to look through.

“Go on,” I said. “She's waiting.”

He stood up. He didn't say goodbye. He walked to the swings and put his hands on his daughter's back and pushed her toward the sky, and I watched them, and I felt the stone in my stomach grow heavier.

I went home. I made dinner. I let my husband tell me about his day. I nodded in the right places. I laughed when he made a joke about his boss. I kissed him goodnight and lay awake until 3 AM, staring at the ceiling, my phone face-down on the nightstand, a dead woman's name glowing in the darkness of my contacts.

Tomorrow I will be normal.

Tomorrow I will not check my phone.

Tomorrow I will be the woman I promised to be.

But tonight, I am still the woman who sat next to him on that bench, who felt the heat of his shoulder inches from hers, who wanted so badly to close the distance that her whole body ached with it.

Tonight, I am still the woman who knows exactly what she wants and hates herself for wanting it.

And tomorrow, when I walk past that coffee counter, I will not look for him.

I will not.