What if your hands hadn’t been clammy that morning? What if you didn’t smoke so that the night before when I went out in the driveway to have a cigarette, you didn’t come, too, and what if the others hadn’t teased us about being smokers so that there was clearly nothing surreptitious about going out there, and we hadn’t joked and aped lighting up, knocking on the kitchen window so that everyone laughed hard, and what if we hadn’t had enough wine to drink to make such horseplay actually seem funny? Here are some other things I’ve thought about: what if Linda hadn’t quit smoking so very recently and had come with us? What if that very morning when I was in the hardware store, I hadn’t forgotten to buy the bulb for the motion detection light that had burned out so that it wasn’t dark in the driveway, or the week before we put in the arbor vitae along the driveway, the Hanson Group hadn’t unexpectedly paid its outstanding balance so that I had extra money in my pocket and had opted for the five-foot trees rather than the three-foot ones so that our driveway wasn’t visible from the street, and what if it hadn’t started to drizzle or if when it did start to drizzle, we had gotten in the front seat of the car with its gear shift and console rather than the rear seat, and what if we hadn’t been able to look right through the house and see the others (weren’t there others?) go through the french doors onto the back porch, and what if we hadn’t been able to hear their voices and laughter so that we knew no one was looking for us?
What if I hadn’t dropped my cigarette on the floor of the car? What if we hadn’t both leaned to pick it up and bumped our heads and laughed together and then embraced laughing, and saying “I’m sorry” and “ouch” and “what a klutz.” And what if I hadn’t kissed you then, and you hadn’t kissed me back? What if you hadn’t shaken the hair out of your eyes and kissed me back and opened your mouth just a little (I thought) and then smiled at me like that girl back in college used to smile at me? What if you hadn’t reminded me of her? And what if we hadn’t kissed again, this time deeply, and you hadn’t made that little noise that was half way between horror and joy and one of us, either one of us, had said “we shouldn’t be doing this” rather than, finally, “we should probably go back in,” but not before you had touched my knee with your fingertips very lightly but certainly not incidentally, and touched my cheek just once, just momentarily, with the back of your fingers?
And what if Linda hadn’t insisted that you and Jack spend the night because of the distance and the wine, and what if the next day Jack had not had to hurry to an early appointment and Linda hadn’t had a tennis date at eight because I had complained that the indoor court cost too much later in the day (what if I weren’t so cheap?), and what if you and I hadn’t found ourselves standing there alone trying—both of us I’ve always thought—to bring back a bit of the night before but unable to because … why? It was drizzling? (What if the sun had shown?) I had a hangover and bad breath and a sour stomach? Because when I’d taken your hand in mine, and I surely did do that, it was clammy and I knew I couldn’t make love to a woman with clammy hands, not on that dreary morning with that head and that stomach, not in our marital bed? No. And what if I hadn’t pretended to be noble and made some awful little speech about how I couldn’t do that to Jack, and I knew that you couldn’t either when in fact I would have done it in a second if it hadn’t been for the rain and my mouth and the palm of your hand? And what if through the years I hadn’t used that as an example to myself and even sometimes to other people for God’s sake of my better nature knowing all the time that it was pure bullshit?
No, what if your hands hadn’t been clammy? What if I had stepped forward rather than back? What if I’d touched your shoulders and pushed your hair behind your ears and kissed you and you’d kissed me too? What if you’d said, “I’m grubby,” and I’d started the shower for you and you’d stepped out of your clothes with your back to me just as if I weren’t standing there, and I had too, and we’d stood beneath the water naked together for the first time washing ourselves and then each other and the water had run in little rivulets off your small nipples and plastered your long, fine hair to your head so that your ears, which stuck through it, looked big, and your nose and eyes looked big? Oh those eyes. What if we had leaned toward each other in the stream of water, and I had touched my skin to yours? And while drying your hair with a bath towel, it had fallen just so across your face as it was to after swimming at a picnic a couple of years later, and I had remembered that always as I remember it now because it seemed to secrete and reveal you at the same time, and I was undone by the intimacy of it all, as I was to be sitting there on the grass beside some lake drinking wine and eating bread and fruit and cheese with Jack and Linda and probably other people? I forget now.
What if we had lain down on the bed together and you had told me, as I was to hear from someone else sometime later, that you and Jack didn’t make love, and you had put your tongue in my ear and shifted beneath me lifting me with your hips and spreading your legs and drawing me into you with a little gasp? And what if you had been a voracious, inventive lover as that someone else was to tell me you were some time later after your divorce when you were sowing your late wild oats and you sowed a few with him? What if that day had been the first of many over the next couple of months or years or more? What if we’d met in hotels and cars and even sneaked away once or twice together?
Or what if Linda had asked why her pillowcase was wet when she’d come home from tennis or found semen on the sheet and confronted me and left me and I’d been free to love you? Or what if you hadn’t wanted me then?
But what if our lovemaking had been ordinary or worse, and we had immediately regretted it, and you had wept and I had held you as I hadn’t ever held Linda, and we had made timid plans to meet again some- where, it had been better, and it had grown slowly? Or what if we had parted awkwardly and never met alone again, had avoided each other at parties for years or you had moved away or I had moved away or one of us had made some excuse so we no longer socialized?
Or what if you had called me weeks later and said that you were pregnant, and I had paid for you to have an abortion, and we could never look into each other’s eyes again, or you had refused to have an abortion because you were Catholic (Were you? I can’t really remember) and had had the child, we had each divorced and married each other to raise him or her, had had three more one of whom was autistic or could throw a ninety-mile-an-hour fast ball or got pregnant or had perfect pitch or also committed suicide, and you grew squat and heavy or developed breast cancer or left me for a colleague with whom you’d had sex in our bed because you were a serial cheater who always lost interest after the chase was over? Or what if we and our four children had been in a minivan that had hit a part that had fallen off a truck driven by an illegal immigrant who had bought his driver’s license, and we had died in a fiery crash and the governor had gone to prison because of it all? Or the children had died so the one never pitched in the minor leagues and the other never developed a drinking problem, but we had lived, as actually happened to someone, and I had developed the drinking problem or you had spent the rest of your life staring out of windows because neither of us had a religious faith as the real couple had? And had they really? And what are they doing today? Did they have other children and do they lie in bed worrying about them every night?
Or you had had our child and raised it with Jack, and once when he was eleven he’d played in a little league game against my Andy and the four of us had sat there on the bleachers together each with his or her own private love or doubt or guilt or guilelessness. Or what if that spring when I’d been asked to help coach Andy’s team, I hadn’t been offered Spiniker, and had to say no to baseball, no to Andy; “Sorry pal, I hope you understand”? And then I’d been there all season and all of the next season when his team won the championship, and I hadn’t gone to Houston for Spiniker’s annual meeting and missed the big game, and I’d tried to explain and again said, “Sorry, Andy. Really sorry. Some day you’ll understand these things”?
But you did have clammy hands that long ago morning, and I did make that awful little speech about love and loyalty, and you walked down the driveway in the rain to your car looking at your feet while I looked at your back. Then I went into work late feeling shitty, and it rained all day and about four I made reservations at Renganeschi’s and took Linda out to dinner. There I told her about what had happened. Sort of. I didn’t mention the clammy hands or the rain. I only mentioned my mistake (kissing you the night before) and your willingness (Linda was never to completely trust you again) and our temptation and how I had resisted it. How in the sober light of day I had realized how very wrong I’d been and how very sorry I was, trying somehow to make me the good guy in this thing and by default making you the villain or maybe vixen, although that had not been my intention. I also said I had realized how very much I loved Linda and how much our love meant to me and how I could never cheat on her, that much I knew for sure even though I would cheat on her later with a woman who didn’t have clammy hands, and none of this was exactly dishonest or at least purely dishonest because I really believed it or I wanted so very much to believe it. I begged her to forgive me and she forgave me, and it was to her that I made love that night with a belly full of spaghetti Bolognese, and it was Linda who got pregnant rather than you.
Perhaps Andy’s problems began that very night. Perhaps they were the product of my divided mind or dishonest heart or our romantic dinner or my forcing the moment not so much on Linda as on myself, willing something to be that wasn’t or wasn’t completely.
Peter Ferry’s stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Fiction, OR, Chicago Quarterly Review, Story Quarterly, and Fifth Wednesday Journal; he is the winner of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Short Fiction. He is a contributor to the travel pages of The Chicago Tribune and to WorldHum. He has written two novels, Travel Writing, which was published in 2008, and Old Heart, which was published in June, 2015, and received the Chicago Writers Association Novel of the Year award. Ferry’s story Ike, Sharon and Me appears in The Best American Mystery Stories of 2017. He lives in Evanston, Illinois and Van Buren County, Michigan with his wife Carolyn.
