“Maybe online?” Sarah said. “Maybe it’s an emotional affair.”
Marni turned her head to look at Sarah without breaking her stride. “I’m just checking. Are we talking about the same person here? Eli Danhauser, the most devoted husband in history?”
Sarah allowed herself a brief flush of pleasure at her friend’s words before letting anxiety replace satisfaction. “Something’s off. Something’s wrong. I know it is.”
Marni pursed her lips. “You don’t think maybe you’re being paranoid because everything is so…” She waved both her hands, a gesture encompassing, Sarah presumed, the pandemic, the election, the shelter-in-place orders, the vaccine rollout, virtual school, and maybe even Sarah’s father’s death, a few months before the first case of COVID was reported, an absence that still felt raw and new.
“He’s changed,” Sarah said. “He looks right through me. It’s like I’m barely even there.” That was especially painful because for years, as Marni well knew, Eli had been the very best of husbands. He’d always been attentive, solicitous, respectful, and kind. Not to mention, surprisingly sexy. For the duration of their marriage, every few months, on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, Sarah would get a text: Meet me at the bar at Towne. She’d go through her closet, selecting her clothes and, especially, her underwear with special care, feeling her pulse quickening. She’d arrive at the bar and Eli would be there, wearing something that she’d never seen—a new tie or shirt—and, always, different cologne. Buy you a drink? he’d offer. I’m Dave. Or Mike, or Mark, or Gary, from Bar Harbor, or Cleveland, or Des Moines. He’d give her a name and a job. Sarah would invent a character of her own. She’d been a journalist, on an out-of-town assignment; a painter, in town for a bridal shower; a sorority girl having her first legal drink. She and Eli would sit at the bar, exchanging details of their made-up lives. Eventually, their hands would brush, or she’d feel Eli’s hand on her leg, one sure finger crooked against the soft flesh underneath her knee. Want to get out of here and go someplace we can be alone? he’d ask, or Can I show you my hotel room?
They’d go to the room that Eli had reserved and make love, for the first time, as these invented people. Sometimes it would be tender—she’d pretend to be a virgin who’d never even touched herself, and Eli had eased her onto the bed, kissing her for long, languorous minutes, slowly pulling off each piece of clothing, asking Can I touch you here? Can I kiss you? as he led her, gently, toward her very first orgasm. Sometimes it would be rough. Eli would open the hotel-room door, and almost before it was shut, he’d have her by the shoulders, pressing her up against the wall, grabbing one wrist and tugging it down to his erection while he bit her neck, and kissed her lips, and whispered, You’re driving me crazy, you know that, right? He’d yank off her panties, pull up her skirt, drop to his knees with his face between her legs, and then he’d stand up, grabbing her hips, spinning her, making her put her hands flat against the wall, panting, I can’t wait anymore, I need to be inside you.
As good as their at-home Eli-and-Sarah sex was, that hotel-room sex was spectacular. It showed that Eli never took her for granted, how he worked to keep things interesting. How, on each one of those dates, he’d woo her and win her all over again. And now, Sarah couldn’t remember the last time they’d had any sex, of any variety at all.
She missed it. She missed him. She missed having a partner, someone intimately familiar with the details of the life they’d built together. Right now more than anything, she missed someone who would join his voice to hers and tell her stubborn stepdaughter that getting married at twenty-two was insane, and that she couldn’t, shouldn’t, do it. And Eli was completely oblivious, physically present, emotionally gone.
It would have been bad if Eli had just ignored her, but that wasn’t all. For the years they’d been married, Sarah had done her best to ignore Eli’s annoying habits: the volume at which he chewed; the way he’d leave his sweaty workout clothes in a sodden pile on the bathroom floor, and how he never remembered to clean his beard stubble out of the sink after he shaved. In the early days of their marriage, Sarah would fret about his shortcomings. She would discuss these failings with him calmly; she’d remind him politely, she’d even screamed at him a few times before realizing that she was, as the self-help books said, sweating the small stuff. Eli was never going to change. She had two choices: she could expend her time and energy on getting him to act differently, or she could make peace with his minor acts of slovenliness. Sarah went for the second option.