It was in the early fall of the third year of his marriage that Hooper first began to believe that his wife was having an affair.


Since their first weeks of married life, he had called her at home every workday, usually during mid-morning, always before noon. There was no real purpose to these calls. Sometimes they would lay out the details of their evening together, or discuss a film or concert they might attend that weekend. Sometimes they would review the previous night's lovemaking. But Hooper's real reason for calling, which he unashamedly admitted to himself, was merely to hear her voice, a subtle, muted purr of which he never tired.

He had followed this routine‹arriving at the office, arranging his desktop, beginning the first work of the day, then phoning home to chatter idly and pleasantly for perhaps five or ten minutes‹for nearly three years, and these conversations were generally the most enjoyable part of his day.

"Hi. What are you doing?"

"Oh, going through a couple of these new cookbooks. Looking for something exciting for dinner I mean that gourmet market is, what, two blocks away? Seems a shame not to use it." He could hear pages turning as she spoke. "Say. Look here. What do you think about. . . Santa Fe green chile chicken? Maybe this . . . salmon with dill sauce and capers."

"Sounds delicious."

"Yes . . . well, different, anyway. I just get so bored with the same things week after week after‹"

"Ummm. Yes."

"So?"

"I'm game."

Recently, however, his wife had not answered the phone and Hooper got, instead, Hi, we aren't home right now. . . Though he did not get the answering machine every day, he heard the bland message often enough‹several times each week for the past few months‹to convince him that something was not as it should be, not right.


On those times he failed to contact her in the morning, Hooper always‹always‹tried again in the afternoon, shortly after he returned from lunch. Sometimes, she answered and their conversation proceeded along what he regarded as usual, normal lines. Other times, of course, he heard the familiar recorded message. Once, as they drank coffee and read after dinner, he asked her about her intermittent absences, and she dismissed him with a casual lifting of her chin, turning one hand palm up and saying something about errands, picking up the dry cleaning.

"You know," she said, "whatever."

Hooper saw immediately that she was not pleased, and he did not pursue his interrogation.
But he did not believe his wife.

She had always been a late riser (he nearly always prepared his own breakfast), rarely out of bed before 9:30, often later, and when he called, she often spoke in a still-sleepy half-moan, instantly exciting him and making the rest of the day pass with unbearable slowness.

But nowadays . . .

By the time he called, she had not only arisen, but had already dressed and left the house. When his suspicion had first struck, he thought in horror that perhaps she was meeting with her lover in their home, making love with him in their bed, even as the phone rang. He began to check her car's odometer each Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. The numbers he recorded in a pocket notebook were absolute proof: she was leaving the house, going somewhere.

Moreover, Hooper began to notice, during this time, that his wife had seemed, for lack of a better word, detached, distant even. Not, he thought . . . not, well, dramatically so, but in subtle ways‹small changes in her inflection when speaking certain words, a tendency to break off eye contact with him when they were talking, an . . . evasiveness in her responses to even the most innocuous questions.

But it was not merely his wife's mysterious absences or increasing emotional distance that ultimately convinced Hooper of her infidelity. There was also the parallel decline in her sexual responsiveness.

He had met his wife at a late summer wedding when he was thirty-four and fallen immediately in love with her smooth, tanned shoulders. He talked to her for only a minute‹the weather, a small joke, a smile‹and then she was gone, whisked off by a group of friends. A week later, he bumped into her on the street, half a block from his office. Just like that. "I've been thinking about you," he said. "Me, too," she replied.

They were lovers four nights later, married in a month. From the first days of their courtship, his wife had been a woman vitally erotic, playfully taunting. The line of her throat as she threw her head back to laugh. The big, deepset, wide green eyes. The way she made you feel as though she could see only you,wanted to see only you, that there was no one else in the room. The parted lips, tip of her tongue sticking cat-like from between her small, even teeth. The slight overbite, the tilted chin. A face that shot out a clear, unmistakable message of availability.


He knew, of course, about the lovers she had had before the architect, the stockbroker, the married oral surgeon‹knew their names, everything about them. But that was the past. That was all over now. He knew this.

Yet, men still found her fascinating.

Often, when they attended parties, Hooper would see her in a corner, drink in hand, deep in conversation with a man, sometimes a friend, more often a stranger. He had never thought much about this until the past few months when their once intense lovemaking had fallen off dramatically in both frequency and passion, and Hooper began to feel his marriage sliding into the boredom of mere fondness, where sexual rites were performed as perfunctorily and efficiently as dividing empty containters into assorted recycling bins. Undeniable evidence, he concluded, that there was another man.

Then there were the clothes. And the jewelry.

These episodes, at first seemingly minor things to Hooper, but nonetheless disquieting, had begun shortly after her morning absences. One afternoon he had walked through the front door just after arriving home from work early to find her holding a richly-colored scarf of burgundy and forest green and gold over her shoulder while doing half turns in front of the hallway mirror.

"Nice," he said. "New?"

She turned quickly, her mouth opening and her eyes widening ever so slightly before her face quickly returned to its normal reserve. "New?" She began to fold the scarf. "Oh, Raymond." A little laugh. "I bought this at that Ann Taylor outlet. The one in Freeport. You know, when we did that New England thing summer before last. You don't remember?" All smiles and wide eyes.

Hooper shook his head.

"I bought this scarf and a cashmere mock turtle sweater. The gray one you like so well?" Her long lashes touched lightly, then parted. "I think you were off on your own then. Wandering around in L.L. Bean or something."

He did not remember, of course, but then he paid little attention to such things. He smiled and bent forward to kiss her cheek. "Well, you must not wear it much because it still looks new. Are you sure the price tag's not on it?" He chuckled and walked past her into the kitchen, his eyes narrowed in thought.

There had been other incidents, too. Empty jewelry boxes in wastebaskets. Wadded up clumps of silk-soft tissue paper, the kind packed between folded layers of expensive clothing. Just two weeks ago, he had again surprised her, this time in the bathroom. She was taking off a gold bracelet. He had tapped the half-open door twice as he walked in and, when she saw him, she quickly dropped the bracelet into a drawer and closed it. "Old junk," she said. "I don't know why it is that I just can't part with anything." She walked past him, turning off the light as she did. Early the next morning, when he got up to dress, he opened the drawer to find that the bracelet was no longer there.

Hooper began to consider his options a few days later while sitting at his desk, looking out the large picture window to the bay beyond. He could, he thought, search the house some Saturday when she was away at the market, or one of her regular rounds of tennis with a girlfriend. Look through her closet, through all her drawers, under the cushions of chairs, under the bed, in the wastebaskets, even the garbage can. There had to be something‹a note, a phone number, an address, a time. A name.

Or he could use a phone call. A phony one. "Funny thing," he would say. "Got a call while you were gone. Guy‹well, I'm guessing it was a guy‹hung up when he heard my voice." Then he would watch her reaction.

There were other schemes he concocted, too. He worked them all out in his head. How he would set and spring trap after trap. Imagined himself doing it, imagined her response.

But Hooper did nothing. Not one trap, not one scheme. Not a single duplicitous utterance. He couldn't. He didn't want to be that kind of man. He didn't want that kind of marriage. Still, he watched her for clues, for signs, awkwardness, unguarded thoughts.

One Sunday afternoon as she worked in her rose garden, she tried to get him out of the house.

"Why don't you go for a drive?" she said. "You're hunched over that desk or locked up in this house all the time. That's what's wrong with you, why you're so grim-faced and pre-occupied lately." She smiled and moved some of her long, dark hair behind her ear. "Go on, darling," she urged. "You love to drive. It's just what you need, it will do you good."

Perhaps, he had said. But where would I go? And she had suggested a drive to the ocean‹a good hundred miles out and back.

After weeks of this, he found that his mind began to drift away from him. First, there were only short lapses, then they became longer and more severe. Once he barely missed death on the way to work. Nearly wiped out by a cement truck. He was in the wrong lane, the truck coming straight at him. Brakes squealed, horns blared, and how he missed a head-on collision God only knew.

This had to end. He had to know. One way or the other.

So it was, one morning in mid-October, that Hooper pulled out of the driveway and drove two blocks, then turned a half block up a side street and parked under a still leaf-thick maple tree, a dark shroud that would conceal him while he watched his own house. He waited there for nearly fifty minutes until he saw his wife's white Jaguar coupe back down the driveway and into the street, its nose pointed toward the side street where he waited. In seconds, she was past him. Hooper could not tell what she was wearing, nor could he see the expression on her face‹one of eagerness in all likelihood, he thought‹because she was bending forward tuning the radio or putting in a tape.


He quickly started his own car and pulled into the street and began to follow her. Luckily, another car had fallen in between them, allowing him to follow at a discreet distance as her car proceeded at a speed well below the limit for the next few miles. Strange, Hooper thought, that she would not, in her heightened state of sexual anticipation, drive faster. He was even more surprised when he saw her directional signal blinking as she turned into a large parking lot, then headed, still slowly, for its most distant section, at this time of the morning nearly empty. He looked up at the wrought iron entry arch her car passed beneath and saw that it bore the name of the city's newest, most upscale mall, a complex of expensive specialty shops and trendy boutiques.

Why here? he wondered.

Was she stopping enroute to purchase a new negligee or perfume before her assignation?

He had noticed that her scent had changed over the past few months. Several times, in fact. Hooper sat in his car until he saw his wife walk through the large glass entry. He noticed that she wore a silk dress of blue and pewter, one that he had given her for their second anniversary, and he was forced to smile ruefully at the irony.

Once inside, he found himself surrounded by chrome and glass and mirrors. Wherever he looked, he saw himself. Immediately, he moved his hand to the lower half of his face and began to slowly massage his cheekbones while he looked about frantically for his wife.

What if he walked right into her?

What if she were down one of the side aisles and had already spotted him?

He had never done anything like this before. Never in his life.

Then he saw her. A hundred feet or so ahead of him, facing several racks of men's ties. He brought his hand down, moved a few feet down the aisle to his left, and watched her. She pulled one off, inspected it, then replaced it and removed another, holding it up to the light and turning it slowly in her hand. She similarly scrutinized several others, then moved gracefully and without haste through the men's department, pausing to run her hands over a neat stack of sweaters as she exchanged pleasantries with a handsome young clerk. Hooper grimaced. So. That was it.

Shopping for a gift for . . . him. And he, Hooper, would end up writing a check for the damn thing. As he contemplated his next move, he began, suddenly, to feel like some pervert crouched at a keyhole, panting in the dark, stalking a gorgeous woman, waiting for the next rush. But he could not make himself stop, could not, though he told himself he really wanted to. Turn and walk out of the store. And then, as he stood there watching his wife, he felt something else, too. Something even more shameful. He began to feel desire, intense and sexual. Lust grew inside him, filling him, heating his blood, swelling his limbs, hands, fingertips.

Half-concealing himself behind the archipelago of gleaming glass counters and vertical racks and feeling now a little thrill of pleasure in avoiding detection, Hooper trailed after his wife, following her deeper into the store, all the while looking about, making sure to keep escape routes open, should she suddenly turn and move in his direction. But she did not. She stood now at one of several linked counters in what appeared to him to be women's accessories. He watched as she began to leisurely turn a rack from which hung dozens of belts. A young woman approached her with a smile and said something, and his wife smiled in return and shook her head. He was too far away to hear them, but saw the clerk nod, retract her lips in the familiar on-commission smile, then walk away in the direction of another customer on the opposite side of the counter. His wife removed a belt and fastened it around her waist. Then she unbuckled the belt, returned it to the rack, took down another and put it on. This time she did not take it off but, after a short pause, reached for a third belt which she also put on briefly before removing it and placing it back on its hook. Then she moved off, her fingertips casually tracing the counter's edge.

Hooper blinked several times. He glanced up toward the open mezzanine, then back at his wife, still gliding slowly along the same counter where he watched her lift a scarf from a display and, in a single, smooth gesture, sweep it into her open purse.

His brain raw and terrible, Hooper could barely breathe. His eyeballs ached.

This was a dream, he thought. An hallucination.

Without thinking, he found himself leaving his observation blind behind a rack of camel topcoats and walking swiftly in the direction of his wife who now, in a little ballet of half-turns, was moving among glass-topped tables that displayed boxed earrings and necklaces. She had just removed a pair of gold baubles and was holding them up to her ears when Hooper walked up behind her and, after pausing for a moment, reached up and touched her on the shoulder. His wife turned quickly, effortlessly toward him. She looked him directly in the eyes, her own opening wider, though only slightly. The corners of her mouth rose almost imperceptibly. Saying nothing, her eyes never leaving his, she lifted her hand and, with what seemed to Hooper agonizing slowness, placed the earrings in the breast pocket of his jacket. Hooper wanted to grab her hand, to stop her, to pull the earrings from her grasp and place them back in the display.

But he did not move.

Could not move.

He felt as if he had been plunged into ice water. Every part of him frozen. His arms, his legs, his wide-open eyes. He tried to swallow, but the muscles in his throat, filled with the pounding of his heart, refused to move. He stood there, gently trembling and mute. When the earrings were deep in his pocket, his wife extracted her hand, letting the fingertips brush against his chest. Hooper's breath left him like one long spurt of arterial blood.

His wife retreated a single step, her stare never leaving him. She leaned toward him, her mouth nearly touching his cheek. "Let's go out to the car, Raymond," she whispered, her voice quietly excited in a way he had not heard in months."Now." He could feel her breath, the tip of her tongue lightly touch his cheek. "Right now."

"What?" he asked, not believing he had heard correctly. His voice was shrill and came from high in his throat.

"The car," she repeated, huskily. "Now." She backed up another step and paused, waiting for him to follow. Hooper began to breathe hard through his mouth as he stood, feeling weightless and dizzy, before his expectant wife. He wanted to leave, to turn at this moment and run from the store. But he could not. She said nothing more, merely stood a few feet away, waiting, until he began at last to take tiny steps. Not toward his wife but circling her in a tight arc to his left, like a moon in orbit around a star.

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