Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart

He’d written ten times over a period of about a year, between the last time I’d seen him and my wedding. And then once about two years ago—a brief, belated congratulations on Mattie’s birth. Then, a year ago, I’ve been rereading you . Then nothing.
    Dear Fan of Me , he’d written once, in reply to an e-mailI’d sent, congratulating him on acceptance of one of his films to a festival, a piece of news I’d gotten from Helen. Thank you for your adoration. Though Central Headquarters of Rajiv Asthana are closed today in observance of Labor Day , I nevertheless labor in this response to cast a little of my light on your life , as do my brief but dazzlingly intense films. If you have not yet experienced the profundity of my work , my wisdom , go now , to festivals across the land , and seek it out. May it be an incredible journey full of twists and turns , peaks , valleys , and plains in between. And may you , in the end , discover that the very thing for which you had been searching was right there in front of you all along. Yours ever so sincerely , R.
    And then he’d written, all alone at the very end, the small word hi .
    Didn’t he have a serious girlfriend now? Wasn’t that what Helen had said? I quit the account. I had things to do. At work it was just a normal day.
    But, no. There was no normal anymore. There was no safe. Because as I was doing my job, catching up on e-mail, my throat relaxed without my having noticed it, I was all at once visited by the memory of my drunken confession to Smith at the wedding. My throat seized shut again. Smith knew. In my own effort to forget what Nathan had told me, I’d forgotten Smith knew. And who might he have told by now? His Hitchcock girlfriend, that psycho gal? Was the word even now speeding along a network of Web designers and part-time painters and NPR fund-raisers and editors, on its way to everyone I knew? If everyone knew, and Nathan found out that everyone knew, he would crumple, and our fragile experiment would come to an end. There were few things Nathan feared more than other people thinking badly of him, and under the combined weight of guilt andjudgment he wouldn’t be able to function, he wouldn’t be able to stay. He’d realize, if he hadn’t already, that publishing the book or not publishing the book was not just about me. He’d realize that he couldn’t endure a book tour if everyone knew, couldn’t endure standing behind a table piled with books that announced Infidelity , couldn’t endure the questions about how much was real, how much was true. Or could he? Could he endure that?
    I started three or four different e-mails to Smith, but it was too delicate a thing to phrase properly, and finally I surrendered to the inevitable and looked up his number at work. I didn’t have it—why would I have it? I’d never before felt the need of any communication with him that couldn’t be dispatched by e-mail. We didn’t have a phone-call friendship. At home, when I saw his name on the caller ID, I didn’t answer. I said, “It’s Smith,” and Nathan picked up the phone. Dialing his number now, I was as nervous as a twelve-year-old girl calling a boy in her Spanish class with a made-up question about the homework.
    He picked up. “This is Smith,” he said.
    “It’s Sarah,” I said. “I need to talk to you about the other night.”
    A brief silence while, perhaps, he absorbed not only what I’d said but the fact that it was me on the phone. Then he said, cautiously, “OK.”
    “I don’t really want to discuss it,” I said. “I just want to make sure you don’t repeat it.”
    “Repeat what?”
    I had failed to consider that he might have been too drunk to remember. I could have smacked myself in the face for my stupidity. “If you don’t know, then we don’t need to talk,” I said. “Are you saying you don’t know?”
    “No,” he said. “I know.”
    “Well, then why are you pretending you don’t?”
    “I’m