Common Civil Calendar and Time

A story about cheating and hypocrisy.

They have been sleeping together here. This was not a long-ago event, this was within the last three hours. I can smell it in the air, on the blue Egyptian cotton sheets that she hasn't bothered to change yet. This was not unexpected. I have been suspecting her of infidelity for years. She's getting careless, because she knows as well as I do that intercourse leaves a scent on the air. Sweat. Lubricant, both natural and artificial. The gagging, rubbery smell of latex. Under that, an elusive bottom note that I know well, slipping between the oily, salty top notes. Her perfume.

I bought that perfume for her. A thin, damp floral, with notes of juniper and lotus. A whisper of scent on her pale, translucent wrists. She must have put it on fresh for him. There's no way that the scent would last so long, otherwise. It was my first gift to her, bought three months and two days after we started dating in July of 1987.

We were married 13 months, three weeks, and four days after I bought the perfume for her. She bought me a Rolex wristwatch, with a leather band, gold detailing on the face, and quartz mechanisms that now tick away in the left hand side of my sock drawer, next to a Model CS45 Smith and Wesson .45 caliber handgun, which I bought that 17 days after I signed on the house. The house was my wedding present to her.

Now, 17 years, 8 months, and 5 days later, she has been sleeping in my bed with another man. I don't know who he is, or where she met this man. Perhaps it was at her pharmaceutical job. Perhaps it's the mailman. He is the unknown in this little problem.

I reach into my sock drawer and pull out the Smith and Wesson, then walk back and sit on the corner of the bed. I will not change the sheets. I am not sexist, but in this case it is my wife's job to change the sheets. They are her mess.

We have a daughter, my wife and I, 16 years old in three weeks and two days. She has grown up to be a remarkably average upper class teenager. Pretty, with the same eyes and angles my wife used to have. She earns excellent grades at the school we've sent her to. She plays softball in the spring, and often requests money from me for frivolous things like name-brand boots and having her hair highlighted. I  usually give it to her. Not always, but enough to consider her spoiled. We have raised her to have many of the traits that I admire in a woman- Trustworthiness, intelligence, and a wit that occasionally glimmers like cut glass in the light of a single candle. She is an interesting conversationalist, and a clever (if sometimes trite) writer. I do not love her.

I have heard other men speak of the moment that they first saw their child come out of the womb, or the first time that they held them, and almost to a man they have said that they fell in love with their child right then and there. Never did I feel that spark when I held my daughter. I have watched her take her first steps, walk up the stairs to her first day of kindergarten. I drove her to her first dance, with a boy she was convinced was her true love, with whom she separated three weeks and two days later.  I have sat in the audience for all of her symbolic graduations. I was pleased for her on all of these occasions, certainly, but I have never felt an overwhelming rush of anything towards her.

The last rush of emotion I felt was two months and three weeks before my wedding, shoving the embossed invitations into the corner post office. There was a twinge in my gut as I thought about these invitations, and the boxes in my apartment that were slowly getting filled with legal papers and British silk ties, waiting to be moved into the house in which I now sit. For a moment- a brief, calm spark of a moment, I thought of taking a lighter to all those invitations before I placed them into the box. I slipped them into the box intact. The wedding went on.

I get up from the bed and pick up the wedding photo that sits on my dresser. My wife had her hair in that uniquely 1980's style, bleached within millimeters of falling out, frizzed to triple its natural size, bangs poufed out over her forehead. That hairstyle required nearly a third of a can of hairspray. I could almost hear the ozone layer weeping. Her dress had puffed sleeves. If I squint, I can tell she wore blue mascara. I place the photo back down and reach into the sock drawer again, and pull out a silencer. The name is misleading, as nothing truly silences a handgun, but it quiets it enough that I will be able to hear after I pull the trigger.

I should be angry with her. I should be furious, enraged, despondent, even grieving over her infidelity, but I am not. It's almost as if one of the old Superman radio serials had revealed that Clark Kent was actually Superman, and expected it to be some huge surprise, along the lines of discovering who shot JR. I don't feel a thing.

I retreat to the bed and sit back on the corner, one Italian loafer-clad foot on one Armani-encased knee as I thread the silencer onto the handgun. 4:37 PM. My wife should be home soon.  I don't know what I'll do, yet. On the one side, this discovery is not traumatizing me. I cannot explain why. Yet, it does not seem right nor fair to let her walk away, safe and sound, with the half of our estate and the daughter she would be entitled to should I not shoot her, for I will not stay married to her. Besides, the law is kinder to cuckolds in the heat of the first discovery.

A sudden sound catches my ear. Her Lexus. Her key is in the lock, her stiletto heeled shoes click-click-clicking up the oak stairs. She opens the door. I cannot think.

“Hello, dear” comes out when I open my mouth. It sounds unreal, like a one-liner in a generic action movie.

Her mascaraed eyes open wide as she stares at the gun in my hand, her mouth opening to ask any number of questions, but it is too late. My arm seems to move of its own accord, reaching up to shoulder height. My index finger twitches.

The explosion is louder than I expect, even with the silencer on. My wife has slumped to the floor, and is bleeding copiously. I do not know if she's dead yet. Before I can get up to see if she is still alive, I hear the rapid thunkthunkthunkthunkthunk of teenaged sneakers on the stairs. I stay on the bed corner, still as one of Madame Tussaud's statues, as my daughter pokes her head through the doorway.

“Daddy?” She sounds nearly paralyzed with confusion and terror.

Over the iron-filled scent of blood and the various other excretions that come with a gunshot wound, and interwoven with the sulfurous scent of the gunpowder, I smell something thin, damp, and floral that fills me with horror.

My daughter is wearing my wife's perfume.

And it's fresh.