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You find your husband in the library. Both the newspaper and his morning coffee are left untouched on the silver tray, which Lurch has brought him. He is smoking in silence, staring into the dark emptiness of the hearth.
Last night left you raw and spent and bruised, completely satisfied in the most delightful carnal way. Your husband, on the other hand, seems to not have gotten what he wanted from living out his darkest fantasy.
It bothers you, yet you keep your calm.
You wait with the angelic patience you reserve for him and him only, leaning casually on the door frame.
Eventually, he has to say something.
“I wouldn’t have chosen that man if I knew he was hung like a toro,” he blurts out, still not looking in your direction.
Tempted to laugh despite the bleak expression on your husband’s face, you bite your tongue.
You didn’t see that coming. You are not sure what you expected to hear, but it wasn’t this kind of banality. You would have been extremely naïve if you for a second believed the size of your lover’s private parts to be the main source of your husband’s torment.
Yet the conversation must start somewhere.
“I dare say the gentleman was rather average,” you reply, in your usual diplomatic manner.
You might be serving your husband something as rare as a white lie, all the time you still can feel the said gentleman’s effect on your body.
Eager to get to the core of his torment you ask him in your softest tune: “Can’t you tell me what’s really bothering you?”
His posture is the very epitome of defeat. The way his shoulders slump makes his tailor-made smoking jacket look like something ripped off a Walmart sales rack. He leans his elbows on his knees, hiding his face in his hands.
“When I saw you with him a part of me died.”
His words sting somewhere deep in your heart, and you can feel yourself blush.
As soon as the sensation appears in you, it makes you angry.
(Or ashamed, but you won’t even admit that to yourself. You never feel shame.)
You had talked everything through, over and over again. Rehearsed the rules, the hard limits, the safe word.
Do you really want to try this? Darling, are you sure?
And you had believed you where okay, that last night’s debauched escapade would go down in history as another glorious dark memory for you to cherish.
You do not say anything, as you don’t know what to say to him right now, yet your silence speaks louder than words.
“I know, querida, it was my idea, I know you tried to talk me out of it. And I thought I could handle the situation—"
“A lot of men wouldn’t handle seeing their wife with another man,” you interrupt your husband, not too pleased to hear the stinginess in your own voice.
“If you don’t enjoy these kinds of scenarios there are no reason to keep arranging them.”
He refuses to meet your eyes. Your heart starts beating wildly. You cross your arms over your chest, suddenly feeling cold.
“We have a stop-word Gomez, why didn’t you use it?”
Your voice is barely above your usual speaking level, yet you feel yourself coming apart in a way that frightens you.
He is taking the role of the victim in a game you had played together, and what does that make you?
He shrugs his shoulders, and heat flashes through your body.
“You want this, don’t you?”
You gesture towards him and his empty whiskey bottle, his full ashtray, his air of woefulness.
And you know all too well what he needs from you, yet you are not willing to give it to him.
Not this time.
“It’s not you, cara” he says, finally looking at you. His eyes are large and wounded and glassy. The sight of them softens your heart to the point where you are tempted to give in to your basic instinct, which is to comfort him.
Always comfort him.
“You have done nothing wrong,” he says, his voice throaty, his eyes brimming with unshed tears.
“I know.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you or trust us—”
Usually this is where you would come to his aid, help him sort out what’s broken and put the pieces together again.
For once, you are not doing that.
For once, you spare yourself from the exhausting task of trying to understand how the root of his issues, in some bizarre way, always is linked to the disappearance of his brother Fester.
“We risked something,” you say, and he nods, lightning yet another cigar.
You watch the smoke as it swirls upward in the dense air, creating a grey veil between the two of you.
“You put yourself in a vulnerable position,” you continue, relieved to have regained the control over your voice.
“And it’s clear to both of us, but Gomez….”
You pause, long enough for him to cast a sore-eyed glance at you.
“I’m not sure if you’re aware of the fact that I did that too?”
You are not entirely sure of where you are going with this, and you realize that your timing might be horrible. Still, you cannot stop yourself.
He wanted to see your hunger unleashed. See how very able you are of treating men as nothing else than usable, disposable playthings, there for your momentary pleasure—then gone and forgotten. How easy it can be for you to step out of the boundaries of love and marriage and revel in your darkest desires.
You did so with his consent.
And now you feel as if your husband is punishing you for showing him something that you might have wanted to keep to yourself in the first place.
“You make me feel cruel,” you say, and as you are speaking the simple truth it feels like an invisible burden is lifted from your shoulders.
“And that’s unfair. There’s a fine line between relishing in your degradation kink and relishing in your self- destructiveness.”
You breathe in, and your eyes meet.
“And Gomez, last night you used me as a tool for the latter. Don’t you ever dare doing that again.”
You wonder for a fleeting moment if you have been too hard with him. Yet the way your heart is flooded with relief shows you that you said what you needed to say.
He closes the space between the two of you in a heartbeat, kneeling at your feet.
“Don’t leave me,” he begs, clenching your hand in both of his, pressing it to his lips. You sigh inwardly as you pray for your patience to stay with you just a little longer.
“For exactly how long have we been married, Gomez, hm?”
You run your fingers through his unruly hair, feeling a sudden urge to just go back to sleep with him in your arms, forgetting last night ever happened.
“Eighteen years, five months, three days and—” he pauses to look first at his pocket watch, then the one on his wrist”—ten hours and fifteen minutes.”
“Exactly.” You produce a pale smile, tugging gently at his hair.
“Then why would I go? Why would I bother to even tell you how I feel if I were planning to leave you?”
You avoided falling down the Fester rabbit hole, but you guess you can’t have it all.
“Morticia, mi vida, mi diosa, I’m so sorry,” he rasps, pressing your hand against his hot forehead.
He is close enough for you to catch the sweet, chemical scent of liquor on his breath, and you almost regret you didn’t wait with this talk until he had sobered up.
That would have been a wiser strategy, but you acknowledge that sometimes even you let your heart’s desires triumph your brain’s calculations.
“You don’t need to apologize to me. What I need you to do is reflect upon why you are doing this to yourself. However pleasant these games might be…I don’t think they’re good for your soul.”
He breaks then, clinging to your gown while he sobs, begging for you to fix him, save him, show him a way out of his misery.
And once again you feel yourself sinking underneath the weight of your husband’s emotions, your own undermined and muted, made insignificant compared to his grand despair.
You draw in a ragged breath, making one important decision.
“I’m going to make that phone call we talked about.”
“I’m not going back to the straitjacket again.”
He sniffles and dries his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Not to the asylum, darling. That…other place.”
You feel yourself hesitate, the thought of letting a stranger analyse (and judge?) the dynamics of your marriage doesn’t sit well with you. You are an extremely private person. Nevertheless, you realize that something must be done.
He nods weakly.
“Okay.”
Your heart aches and you fight the urge to embrace him, to tell him that everything is going to be alright. That all the two of you need is a few more hours of sleep and some coffee.
Could it only be that simple, but it’s not.
“I love you, Gomez,” you say, as you look over your shoulder, your hand on the cold brass handle.
“But I cannot save you from yourself. You must do some of the work.”
You manage to keep it together until you have closed the door to your study. You make sure the door is locked before you allow yourself to cry.
You shed your tears in silence, waiting patiently until you are sure you have cried yourself empty.
Then you dry your eyes with the sleeve of your gown, dialling the number on the small, black business card which lies beside the telephone.