Andrea Hollander

The house felt like the opera, the audience in their seats, hushed, ready, but the cast not yet arrived. And if I said anything to try to appease the anxious air, my words would hang alone like the single chandelier waiting to dim the auditorium, but still too huge, too prominent, too bright, its light announcing only itself, bringing more emptiness into the emptiness.

Long after I married you, I found myself in his city and heard him call my name. Each of us amazed, we headed to the café we used to haunt in our days together. We sat by a window across the paneled room from the table that had witnessed hours of our clipped voices and sharp silences. Instead of coffee, my old habit in those days, I ordered hot chocolate, your drink, dark and dense the way you take it, without the swirl of frothy cream I like. He told me of his troubled marriage, his two difficult daughters, their spiteful mother, how she’d tricked him and turned into someone he didn’t really know. I listened and listened, glad all over again to be rid of him, and sipped the thick, brown sweetness slowly as I could, licking my lips, making it last.

They decide finally not to speak of it, the one blemish in their otherwise blameless marriage. It happened as these things do, before the permanence was set, before the children grew complicated, before the quench of loving one another became all each of them wanted from this life. Years later the bite of not knowing (and not wanting to know) still pierces the doer as much as the one to whom it was done: the threadbare lying, the insufferable longing, the inimitable lack of touching, the undoing undone.