Electric Marriage

The first time I heard the word Hotwire, I was standing in the kitchen with a wooden spoon in my hand, stirring a pot of red beans that didn't need stirring.

"It's a lifestyle," Marcus said, leaning against the doorframe the way he did when he had something to sell me. He'd been home for twenty minutes and hadn't taken off his jacket yet. That should've told me something.

"Like keto?" I said.

"Not like keto."

He came over and put his hand on my back, right between my shoulder blades, and I remember thinking his palm was cold from outside. It was February. He'd walked from the train. He always walked from the train, even when it rained, because he said the cold woke him up.

"Come sit down," he said. "I want to tell you about something."

I turned off the burner. The beans were done anyway.

We sat at the table we'd bought at a flea market in Jersey eight years ago, back when we were still the kind of people who went to flea markets. The table had a water ring on it from a party we threw when we first moved in, and I'd never been able to sand it out. Marcus put both hands flat on the wood and looked at me with this expression I couldn't place. Not nervous exactly. More like he was already somewhere else and his face was just catching up.

"So," he said. "Hotwire."

"Is that a company?"

"It's a community. A philosophy, really. It's about radical honesty in marriage. About not hiding anything. Ever."

I laughed. I actually laughed, because Marcus was the man who lied about finishing the yogurt and then put the empty container back in the fridge. He was the man who told me he'd called the plumber when he hadn't called the plumber. Radical honesty from Marcus felt like a joke with no setup.

He didn't laugh.

"I'm serious, Naomi. I've been reading about it for months. There's a whole network of couples who live this way. They share everything. Their thoughts, their desires, their, you know. Their attractions to other people."

The kitchen clock ticked. It's a cheap clock, the kind you buy at a drugstore, and it ticks loud enough to hear from the next room. I've asked Marcus to replace it a hundred times.

"Their attractions to other people," I repeated.

"Not acting on them. Well. Sometimes acting on them. It depends on the couple. The point is transparency. No secrets. You tell your partner everything you're feeling, everything you're wanting, and they do the same, and you build this incredible trust. This intimacy that most couples never get close to."

I got up and went back to the stove. I didn't need to stir the beans. I needed something to do with my hands.

"Who told you about this?" I asked.

"A guy at work. Gerald. You met him at the holiday party."

I remembered Gerald. He wore a lot of cologne and talked about his boat. His wife had stood by the punch bowl all night, nursing one drink, looking at the door.

"And Gerald and his wife do this?"

"They've been Hotwired for three years. He says it saved their marriage."

"Saved it from what?"

Marcus didn't answer that one. He got up and came to the stove and stood behind me, close enough that I could smell his jacket, which smelled like the train and like somebody's cigarette and like the cold.

"Just think about it," he said. "That's all I'm asking. Read some of the stuff I've been reading. There's a whole philosophy behind it. It's not just about sex."

"Nobody said anything about sex."

"You know what I mean."

I didn't know what he meant. That was the problem. I stood there with the wooden spoon and the beans that didn't need stirring and I felt the kitchen get smaller, the way it does when you realize you've been having one conversation and your husband has been having another, and neither of you noticed the switch.

That night I lay in bed and listened to him breathe. He falls asleep fast, always has, like a man who's never had a thought he couldn't put down. I stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out what had just happened to me.

Here's what I knew. Marcus had been unhappy. I'd known that for a while, maybe a year, maybe more. He'd get quiet at dinner. He'd stay late at work and come home smelling like beer and say it was just one drink with the guys. He'd scroll his phone in bed with the screen tilted away from me, and I'd pretend not to notice, because noticing would mean saying something, and saying something would mean admitting that we'd become the kind of couple who needed to say something.

I'd thought it was work. I'd thought it was his father's health, or the mortgage, or the fact that we hadn't taken a real vacation in four years. I'd thought it was me, if I'm honest. I'd thought maybe I'd gotten boring, or let myself go, or stopped being the woman he married. I'd made a list in my head of things I could do. Join a gym. Learn to cook something besides the six meals I rotated through. Wear the red dress more often.

It never occurred to me that the problem was the whole structure. That he wanted to knock down the house and see what was underneath.

The next morning he left a book on the kitchen counter. It had a plain cover, black with white letters, no picture. *The Open Marriage: A Path to Radical Intimacy.* Inside, someone had underlined passages in blue pen. Some of the underlines were Marcus's. I recognized his handwriting in the margins, the tight leftward slant, the way he circled words he wanted to remember.

I made coffee. I drank it standing up. I read the first chapter, then the second, then I put the book in the drawer where we keep the takeout menus and the batteries and the tape.

At noon my sister called. She wanted to know if we were coming to her daughter's birthday party on Saturday. I said yes. I heard myself say yes in a voice that sounded like mine, and I thought, this is how it happens. You keep saying yes to things and nobody knows that inside you're standing in a kitchen with a wooden spoon in your hand, stirring beans that don't need stirring, while your husband tells you he wants to set your whole life on fire and call it honesty.

Saturday. The party was at two. I had until then to decide what I was going to do about the book in the drawer, about the man who'd put it there, about the word Hotwire, which I could already feel settling into my life like a splinter under the skin, small and invisible and impossible to ignore.