I’d been having an affair with Tammy for six years when it happened.
But maybe “having” wasn’t the word-- we’d never really had anything. There was the time that I accidentally saw her coming out of the shower through her open bedroom window while I mowed the lawn on the other side of the property line, and one sloppy, drunken kiss in the kitchen at a Christmas party… but apart from that, we had been completely faithful to our respective spouses-- more or less. Tammy and I weren’t having an affair so much as we were planning to have one, eventually, at a later date.
At first, it had been a joke, a running gag that we laughed at over phone conversations, text messages, the occasional email or two. But at some point, the dirty talk had progressed and the laughing about it had stopped. For a while, we had talked about doing it-- finally, really doing it-- when our kids graduated high school, but her youngest had gone to Berklee last year, and nothing had changed. For as long as I’d entertained the idea of making love to Tammy Tompkins, the charming, beautiful housewife next door, actually doing so had been like standing on the edge of a cliff, too scared to jump but too proud to back away.
And then they announced the comet.
I heard it from Tammy first, before the newsrooms-- or god forbid, my wife-- could brief me. Karen was at work and I’d been fucking with a painting, one that had been giving me trouble for months. I could tell it was supposed to be the face of a beautiful woman, but every time I painted in the features they always came out wrong-- haughty, harsh or insincere. My artist’s studio was in the back of the house, a little office filled with canvases and paint fumes, and I almost always left the door shut and my music on loud. Fewer people bothered me that way. All things considered, it was a miracle that I even heard Tammy ring the doorbell.
When I answered it, her tears were making her mascara streak her face.
“Let’s do it, Bobby. Let’s leave,” she’d said as I cradled her against my chest in the living room. On the TV screen before us, a stone-faced man in a suit had mouthed words that I couldn’t seem to hear. My body had gone into lesser form of shock; all I could manage to do was read his lips.
Six months.
“You’ll leave Karen and I’ll leave David. We’ll pack up your RV and go somewhere new-- anywhere you want, anywhere we can drive to,” Tammy had said. “You can paint me in the desert, naked in Nevada with flowers in my hair, just like you said you wanted to.”
I had said that, I remember thinking. The message was probably still in her phone, unless she had deleted them to keep David from seeing. My inbox was still full of Tammy’s words, teasing thoughts and promises, hopes and dreams. I didn’t even have to worry about Karen catching on. She never even bothered to look.
“We’ll do it, won’t we, Bobby?” she had said, and at a loss for what else to do, I had said, “Okay.”
But I hadn’t been thinking about Tammy in that moment. I’d been thinking about my life, the fragility of it all, the inevitability of my own demise. And I’d been thinking about that damned painting, layer after layer of pastel mouths and piercing eyes, and how I’d probably never finish it now, because I wouldn’t be able to get it right in time.
♦♦♦
I sat on the front porch while Karen weeded the flowerbeds. There had been rioting elsewhere, protests and orgies elsewhere still, but somehow, our neighborhood didn’t seem to have changed much. Same quiet suburbs. Same slow, lazy days.
“You don’t have to do that, you know,” I told her.
Her hands worked through the dirt like they’d braided our daughter’s hair: meticulous, harsh, no nonsense… but at the same time, oddly loving. Karen threw herself into gardening like she threw herself into anything, full force and holding nothing
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