September 2000, Hoboken, New Jersey

By John McCaffrey

I tossed my wedding ring into the Hudson River, its cheap metallic gold finish sinking without a glint in the steady churn of the muddy water.

I tossed it sidearm — as if skipping a stone — from a jagged slab of cement that pushed out of an industrialized section of shoreline. I tossed it after speaking with my wife on the phone (we were recently separated, and she was staying at a girlfriend’s apartment). I tossed it after she admitted that she was seeing someone else, a man recently hired at her job. I tossed it after she said she was more sexually attracted to this new work colleague than she ever had been with me, her husband of six years.

Let’s begin with my question, “Are you sleeping with him?”

I laid it out as if casting a fly on a still pond, daring a strike, encouraging the thrashing bite of a fish’s jagged teeth against its delicate feathers and hidden hook.

“Yes,” she answered. The barb was set, the stinging metal ripping through flesh, splintering bone.

But I already knew the answer. The idea had been building inside me from the moment my wife started to talk glowingly about a male colleague at work. And it grew larger and larger in my psyche as she began coming home later and later from the office, her eyes absent, her touch vacant, her thoughts elsewhere.

I finally confronted her one night, after waiting alone in the apartment for hours, having cooked a dinner I hoped would lighten the tension between us, help us talk and laugh, enjoy one another again - even have sex. She’d dragged through the door near midnight, looking disheveled, almost drugged.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked, my voice cracking.

“Out with people from work.” The words slid out of her mouth, settling on the cold food in front of me on the kitchen table. I’d cooked some Thai-style dishes. Had researched recipes on the Internet, purchased the ingredients at a series of specialty stores and burned the hell out of everything.

“Why didn’t you call?”

She ran her fingers through her long hair. It was blonde and fine, and I could see her crimson-colored nails through the strands.

“I didn’t think I would be so late.” Her eyes darted to the food on the table. “I didn’t know you were going to make dinner. I thought you had a basketball game tonight.”

“I skipped. I wanted to surprise you — we haven’t eaten together in a while.”

She said nothing. I walked into the kitchen with the plates and scraped the food into a wastebasket. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her sit down at the table and rest her head in her hands. She seemed small and delicate, like she would crumble with the slightest touch. I placed the plates in the sink and walked to the table. I pulled out a chair and sat, facing her.

“What’s going on?” I asked, trying not to sound accusatory or desperate.

She looked up. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but there were no tears.

“What?” I whispered.

She reached out and grabbed my hand. Massaged my knuckles with light strokes and then squeezed my palm. “Don’t you ever feel like starting over?” she asked, her voice low and woozy, “just start out with a clean slate?”

I swallowed and pulled my hand away. “What do you mean?”

She creased her bangs behind her ears. “I don’t know what I mean. I’m just tired.” She paused. “Tired of us.”

My stomach flipped. Anger surged through my body. “Who were you out with?” I asked, slamming a fist on the table.

Her eyes sparked. A look of defiance filled her gaze. “No one,” she said, rising up out of the chair and heading to the bedroom.

She denied an affair, even after we separated, but I knew she was lying. I was tempted to go to her job and confront this man, but the idea of such an encounter felt beneath my dignity, even pathetic.

Instead, I retreated into denial and brooded and wondered if she was sleeping with him, knowing all the time that she was. And I dutifully wore my wedding ring, carrying on as if my wife was just on vacation — and not in love with another man.

Denial, however, began its inevitable fade, bits of it flaking off me like plaster until I was exposed, and the thought, the image, the piercing reality of her infidelity, hurt me too much not to accept.

I then asked the question, received her answer, and like a marionette, walked to the river and tossed my wedding ring away forever.

John McCaffrey’s stories have appeared in numerous literary periodicals, including the anthology Flash Fiction Forward, published by W.W. Norton & Co. To read more of his work, visit his Web site.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 | Email This Post

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