It had been exactly eleven and a half years, and he knew beyond all doubt that he hated her. He wasn’t sleeping well, his hairline was receding, and he wanted a convertible. When he rode in the car it felt like he was the one sitting still, and that the world was moving.
Maybe I should have an affair, he thought. With a young girl. No, not girl. That is bad. A woman. A young woman. Maybe a twenty-year-old. Someone who doesn’t have wrinkles around her eyes or cellulite on her legs. A Britney Spears type, but not Britney Spears as she currently was, no. The Britney Spears with pigtails, dressed up in a schoolgirl uniform and licking a lollipop. Everything about her screamed sex, but the forbidden type. If he was going to have an affair, he knew he’d need to do it before his hairline receded any further.
He felt a stirring in his cock, but it was only half-hearted. He was mostly asleep. He rolled onto his side and looked at his wife. She had gained weight, she farted in her sleep, and she wanted to have a baby.
My biological clock is ticking, she’d say. A euphemism for “I’m getting too old and soon my womb is gonna close up tighter than a sarcophagus.”
Abandon all hope ye who enter here, he thought.
It was on one of these nights he awoke after a dream about a naughty schoolgirl, cock standing like an obelisk, that he looked at his snoring, drooling wife.
Someone was standing beside her.
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Stop! His mind screamed. Get away from her. No, do what you want to her, but let me go. Her biological clock is ticking, but I can still reproduce. You owe it to the human race to spare me.
A voice came from the direction of the bedside. “A baby.”
He was frozen. He couldn’t even turn his head. He stared out of the corner of his eyes and saw the stranger by the bedside swipe a strand of hair from his sleeping wife’s face. It bent down and kissed her forehead. He tried to squirm, to shout. If I could just move, he thought.
He fell back asleep and dreamed of his wife when she was younger. She wore lipstick and high heels and fake eyelashes. Her skin was tight, and her breasts didn’t sag.
Maybe I shouldn’t have an affair after all, he thought the next morning while eating his breakfast of sausage links and black coffee. That week he had sex with his wife every night. He no longer cared that he didn’t drive a motorcycle or a convertible. Perhaps he didn’t need that sort of thing after all.
The stranger at the bedside didn’t reappear that week, and knowing that it all must have been a dream, he went back to believing he hated her, and considering an affair.
He flirted with his secretary, not because he liked her, but because he thought it was what an unhappily married man should do. He tried sleeping on the couch when his wife’s snoring and farting was too much for him. He still wasn’t sleeping well, and he knew it was her fault. She did it on purpose to keep him awake. She must have figured out that he hated her, and this was her way of getting back at him.
A month passed this way, and then one evening his wife met him at the door in a flannel bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. She held out a plastic stick.
“It’s positive,” she said.
“What is?”
She pushed the stick toward him. “I’m pregnant.”
He looked at her, then the stick. “Don’t put that in my face. You peed on it.”
She tucked the pregnancy test into the pocket of her bathrobe. “We’re going to have a baby. Isn’t that exciting?”
He walked over to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a glass of whiskey. Now he’d have to pay child support on top of alimony. He tried to do the math in his head, to figure out how much money he’d need to make a year in order to support an ex-wife, a child, and a young woman dressed in a schoolgirl uniform.
He poured himself a second glass.
That night, his wife asked him to sleep in the bedroom with her. She had been having trouble sleeping, she said. It was probably the hormones. He rolled his eyes. So, this was how it was going to be from now on. She would be even more demanding than usual, and blame it on the baby that he didn’t want, in order to guilt him into doing things for her.
That night, he woke at three in the morning. He couldn’t turn his head, but he could see the clock. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the figure beside his wife again, bending over her.
“A perfect vessel. What a beautiful specimen of the human race you will make.” The shadowy figure cupped her face in its hand. Still sleeping, his wife moaned softly and nuzzled her face against the hand.
Goddamn it, get your hands off my wife! No sound. He was paralyzed, unable to do more than watch as his wife was fondled by this stranger.
He woke a few hours later, rolled over, and fucked his wife. The headboard rattled against the wall. Afterwards, he rolled back to his side of the bed, and slept through the rest of the night without waking.
At breakfast the next morning, he watched as she moved around the kitchen, making sausage and eggs and brewing coffee. “Did you… have any strange dreams last night?”
She laughed. “Honey, that wasn’t a dream. I thought you were going to break the bed.”
“No, not that part. I mean before that.”
She flipped an egg and shrugged. “Not that I remember.”
He frowned and took a bite of sausage. “No eggs for me, thanks.”
After that night, the visitor appeared routinely. It caressed his wife, and murmured softly about how beautiful she was. He was awake for all of it. He no longer dreamed of Britney Spears, or of girls in uniforms with pigtails. Instead, he dreamed about his wife being taken aboard a UFO, and probed by aliens. In these dreams she cries out, “My husband never gave me a real orgasm!”
His wife’s belly started to grow. A terrarium containing the mystery of human life. It occurred to him that perhaps the baby wasn’t his after all. Perhaps it was the offspring of her nightly visitor. Maybe she’d been probed, and it was an alien baby. Does a woman need to have an orgasm in order to get pregnant? he wondered.
The next day, he asked for eggs for breakfast. The smell of sausage turned his stomach.
“But you always have sausage,” his wife commented. “You hate eggs.”
He shrugged. “I feel like eggs today. Scrambled, fried, poached, hard boiled. Make me one of each.”
She turned her back to him, tending to his eggs.
“When we make love… you do really orgasm, right?”
She laughed.
That night he watched as the figure beside his wife unbuttoned the top of her nightgown, exposing her breasts, which had grown larger in preparation for the baby. They weren’t perky breasts like he’d imagined. They were heavy, and they sagged. The bedside figure massaged them, and his wife groaned softly in her sleep. He watched from the corner of his eyes, no longer enraged as he’d been the first few times, but now aroused.
The next night as they lie in bed, he rolled over and began massaging his wife’s plump breasts. She winced at first, then relaxed and sunk her head into the pillow, groaning softly in delight. When she fell asleep, he went into the bathroom and masturbated, her moans of pleasure echoing in his ears.
In the morning, he woke bright and early, went downstairs, and made breakfast for her. He made pancakes and bacon and fresh squeezed orange juice. He brought it to her on a tray. After she finished eating, he sat at the foot of the bed and massaged her feet.
She watched him as if he were the alien. The visitor didn’t come back that night.
In the weeks that followed, he left work early and washed dishes. He swept the floor and mopped. He stopped at the library and brought his wife home large stacks of books. His wife smiled at him and ran her hand over his chest. She looked at him, no longer through him.
When he drove, he finally felt like he was moving again.
The next time the visitor came, he was ready for it. He willed his arms to move, concentrating hard on wiggling his fingers. He had just flexed his wrist as the stranger’s hand smoothed over his wife’s extended belly. He mustered the last of his strength and sat straight up and shouted “You can’t have her, she’s mine!”
It had been exactly twelve years, and he knew beyond all doubt that he loved her.
—
Holley Cornetto was born and raised in Alabama, but now lives in New Jersey. To indulge her love of books and stories, she became a librarian. She is also a writer, because the only thing better than being surrounded by stories is to create them herself. She can be found lurking on Twitter @HLCornetto.
