the people stomping on the floor above us at all hours of the day. How many times have they jacked up the rent on us here? They think they can screw us over anytime they want. I can’t stand it.”
We look every day of the following week, and the results are the same. Nothing. Insanity. It’s a seller’s market.
Ellen gets grumpier each day. Short-tempered. She spends more and more time at night on the phone with her best friend Ruth Grayson, her sharp words muffled through the bedroom door.
It is two weeks later that I arrive home after work to find my wife sitting on the couch with a serene look on her face. She turns to me as I enter.
“I’ve found a home.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I mean I bought one. It’s ours.” She ignores the stupefied look on my face. “Ruth introduced me to a real estate agent yesterday.”
“Ruth?”
“The first place he showed me was perfect. I hope you don’t mind, honey, but I had to act quickly.”
“Couldn’t you have called me?”
“I told you — I had to act quickly.”
A little something about Ruth Grayson; she makes me sick. I hate the way she boasts of her conquests, of how easy it is to seduce a happily married man, the simplicity of getting him to betray his wife and children. I don’t like the way Ellen responds to this nonsense. She laughs, as if it were all some kind of joke.
Ruth once tried to seduce me. One night when Ellen was gone, she came over and asked for her.
“She’s out,” I told her. “I thought you knew that.”
“Oh, that’s right.” She laughs. Walks into our house, brushing past me. Turns and winks. “I did know that.” She unbuttons her blouse and pulls it open.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?”
She reaches over and brushes her hand over my crotch.
“It’s time for you to go.”
“Oh, come on now,” she says. “Ellen’s not here.”
“She’s your best friend.”
“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
She reaches back for my crotch. I slap her hand away. Grab her by the shoulders and turn her toward the door.
“Seriously,” I say. “Get the hell out of here.”
“Oh, come on now.”
“Out.”
“Prude.”
“Slut.”
She leaves, buttoning her blouse, laughing.
I hate her. And what’s more, part of me thinks it’s some game she’s playing with me, a game that Ellen is in on. A wager, perhaps. I can just hear her bragging to Ellen how she can seduce any married man she wants to.
And Ellen says, “Not Roger.”
And Ruth says, “Oh, no?”
“Just try it.”
“You’re on.”
And as I imagine Ellen laughing, I feel like I want to throw up.
Jealousy is a dangerous emotion. It clouds the mind. It influences us irrationally and blinds us from the truth. I become suspicious that Ellen is having an affair with our real estate agent.
“Ruth recommended this guy?” I ask.
Ellen nods. She has trouble looking directly into my eyes.
“You were lucky,” I say, testing her. “To find a place so easily with this guy, even in this current housing market.”
Ellen nods again. I try to get her to look at me, but she won’t.
“He just showed you this house. Said it’s yours if you want it?”
Ellen yawns. “I’m tired,” she says. “I had a busy day.”
“Sounds like it.”
Then she snaps. “Look, what are you trying to imply?” Her eyes flash. “I got the house fair and square. It’s a nice house, and now you’re accusing me—” She stops.
“Accusing you of what?” I ask.
Her eyes smolder. My heart races.
“You should thank me,” she says.
I leave the room.
It doesn’t matter that she is four months pregnant. All I can see is the beauty she radiates. All I can think of is how desirable she is, how another man’s eyes would smolder at the sight of her, how lurid fantasies would slink through his head.
The next day, my suspicions are reinforced. I hear a voice-mail message left for Ellen. It’s Ruth.
“
I erase the message and say nothing. It feels like a tourniquet has been placed around my heart and Ruth’s voice tightens it with every word.
The movers we hire are fast and efficient. We spend the first week taking down wall-paper, painting, cleaning, arranging furniture. We start with the living room, then the master bedroom. We move on to the baby’s room. The paint we choose is a bright, sunny yellow. We buy a crib, bedding, a changing table. My mother sends us a mobile to hang above the crib, a mobile of tiny stuffed bears and tigers and birds. When it turns, a song plays. I can picture the baby reaching up with her tiny pink hand, wondering what these little creatures are hanging above her. The thought makes me smile. The thought takes some of the anger away.
There is one room in the basement that we’re not quite sure what to do with. It’s a small room, only five by five. An old well room, we think. But now it’s only an empty cement cell, bare and dingy. Its door is paneled like the rest of the basement wall, and is hard to see unless you look closely. Then you see the small metal latch that opens it and its faint outline in the wall. It will make a good storage room, perhaps.
I meet some of the neighbors. Ken and Linda Hughes who live next door bring us fresh baked bread as a house-warming gift. John and Lisa Solomon from down the street pass by nightly while walking their German shepherd. Betty Sandford, an elderly widow who comes by on our seventh night here, asking if we’ve seen her cat, Princess.
At work, my imagination runs rampant. It’s hard to concentrate on the balance sheets, the expense reports, the reconciliations. Instead, I see my wife driving away from our house and meeting up with Mr. Wishlow at some cheap hotel, fulfilling her part of whatever bargain they struck as she’s down on all fours, letting him inside of her. The brashness of it, the audacity of him, placing himself so disgustingly close to our unborn child.
I have to get up from my desk often, take short walks around the office building to keep myself from yelling
