“I don’t think Charlie will forgive me.”
“Would you forgive him, if he’d been the one who cheated?”
Anne shrugged, cleaning up the last of her eggs. “I have no idea.” She looked at her neighbor. “Will you help me? Will you help me talk to Charlie?”
Michael walked in, his hair still wet from the shower. He opened his mouth to speak to Frances, but paused when he saw Anne. Two seconds passed, then he glided onward. His unflappability was one of the things Frances enjoyed about him. “Hi, Anne, sorry to hear things are all fucked up right now.” And his honesty, Frances enjoyed that, too.
Anne blushed. “Yeah. I messed up. Sorry.”
Michael grabbed a travel mug from the cupboard and filled it with coffee. “Don’t say sorry to me, dude, no need. We all make mistakes.” He added cream, put on the lid, and said, “Last night, for example, I behaved like a total dick to my lovely wife, who has punished me terribly by simply not smiling at me this morning.” He stood in front of Frances and added, “I am such a phallus, I am so sorry, please smile at me again so I can go on with my life.”
Frances narrowed her eyes at him. So. Fucking. Annoying. He would behave badly but then apologize magnificently, so she would have to forgive him. She smiled a small smile, which broadened once he’d bent down and kissed her. “Go to work, total dick,” she said, and he turned to leave. As the front door closed Frances could smell her shampoo in the air. He bitched about her “fancy” Aveda shampoo that cost too much, but used it himself, the hypocritical swine. She felt a sudden swoon of gratitude that she wasn’t in the same boat as Anne, that she and Michael were making it OK, despite hating each other from time to time, and not having enough sex, and not having much to talk about besides the kids. It wasn’t a sexy marriage, it wasn’t a fun-filled romantic romp, but it was solid. She felt a flicker of concern at the back of her mind that if a few glasses of wine were revealing Michael’s real feelings about her, then maybe they were in more trouble than she realized, but she couldn’t face thinking about that now. She had other people’s lives to think of. And yes, she was aware of the irony of that.
“I’ll help you if I can, Anne,” she said, reaching across the table for her friend’s hand. “But I don’t know what I can do.” She paused, treading carefully. “Were there problems between you two before?”
“Before?”
“Before you started the affair?”
Anne looked out of the window, noticing how untidy Frances’s backyard was, wondering why Frances had no standards at all. “No, things were fine. Just the same as ever. Richard just made me feel young again.” She turned to Frances suddenly, her face flushing. “You know that feeling you had when you were twenty-two and you met someone and fell in lust and spent days and days in bed, fucking and talking and laughing and fucking and it felt like there was only the two of you? It was like nothing I’d experienced for years. It was wonderful.”
Anne laid her head on the table and cried, her fingers curling around Frances’s. OK, thought Frances, well, this I can do. She squeezed Anne’s hand and sat there thinking about what her friend had said and how scared she suddenly was that her husband felt that way about someone else.
• • •
The store was called Please Come Again, and it was on Hollywood and Western. Frances had driven past it a thousand times, idly reading the list of offerings: bedroom toys, massage lotions, DVDs, fun bedroom wear. Every single time she read the list she’d gotten an image of her husband on a scooter, naked, rolling gleefully across the bedroom with a jester hat on his head. She’d never seen this in real life, of course, but the combination of the words toys and fun bedroom wear met up in this way in her imagination. Clearly her imagination was nine-tenths of the problem.
The lady inside the store was a middle-aged Latina with a friendly face and a surprisingly vanilla approach to sex. She liked it straight down the middle, missionary, with her husband and no one else, no need for anything more exotic than an extra Dos Equis on Friday nights. However, there was nothing she hadn’t heard or seen in her twelve years in the store, and as she saw Frances walk in she knew she could sell her a vibrator, a self-warming massage oil, and maybe, just maybe, a pair of fur-lined handcuffs. She further knew that Frances would maybe use the vibrator once or twice, the self-warming oil the next time she had a sore neck, and the fur-lined handcuffs never. Then she would ignore them in her bedside table for a year or two until she suddenly realized the kids could find them and would struggle to think of a way to dispose of them without scaring the cleaning lady. She’d put it all in a paper bag and drop it in a trash can on the high street somewhere, thinking as she did so of the surprise of the next homeless person who’d hoped for a half-eaten sandwich but ended up with so much more. But all this was in the future. Araceli was ready to focus on today.
“Good morning, how can I help you have better sex today?”
Frances was unable to stop a nervous giggle. “Does it have to be today?”
Araceli nodded and smiled a smile that suggested they were talking about knitting, rather than sex. “It should be every day.”
“Really?” Frances felt tired suddenly.
Araceli nodded. “It is like any form of exercise: A little each
