“Well, it’s uncomfortable,” Eli allowed, with a modest look suggesting that he was a nobly enduring, with barely a word of complaint, agony that would have reduced a lesser man to writhing and groans. As soon as she got home, Sarah had looked up his condition. Plantar fasciitis: an inflammation of the tissue connecting the heel bone to the toes. Treatments, she read, include physical therapy, shoe inserts, steroid injections, and, rarely, surgery.
“It’s a man thing,” Marni told her, when Sarah called. “Men don’t get headaches, they get migraines. They don’t get colds, it’s always double pneumonia. So Eli doesn’t have sore heels, he’s got plantar whatever. Just indulge him.”
Sarah had. Over the years, she’d heard her husband talk about his condition so often that her brain automatically shut down at the sound of its name. Then, at a dinner party on the Cape, one of Sarah’s mother’s friends turned out to be a fellow sufferer. She’d told Eli about the flip-flops she’d started wearing. “They changed my life,” she’d said with her hand on her heart. Intrigued, Eli had pulled out his phone and ordered a pair on the spot. The flip-flops, made in China and back-ordered for months after a mention in Runner’s World, hadn’t arrived until March, right before the lockdowns began. They weren’t cheap, but they looked that way, a pair of ugly, plastic-soled shoes, gray on the bottom, spongy white on top, with a black strap that went between the wearer’s toes. They made the usual flip-flop slapping sound when Eli walked, which might not have been annoying in smaller increments, or at a lower volume, or in the summertime, when the sound was part of the aural landscape of the season. But, in the midst of a pandemic, in a house with hardwood floors, the sound of Eli slap-slapping his way through his days had become maddening, especially because it turned out that Eli was a pacer who walked when he was talking on the phone. From dawn until bedtime, Sarah would hear the ssh-slap, ssh-slap sound of his flip-flop’d feet. She’d sit at her desk, back stiff, fingers on the keyboard, her entire posture telegraphing the fact that she was working, or thinking, or busy, or she’d lie on the bed, curled around her book, when she heard his footsteps coming her way.
“Just getting my book!” he’d announce as she’d hunch close to her own book or her phone or her computer screen, trying not to lose her train of thought, her body language silently announcing Leave me alone. When the pandemic began, she’d asked him not to interrupt her; to just come and go quietly if she was in the middle of something, and he’d nodded and agreed. Maybe he’d forgotten his pledge, or maybe it ran counter to his nature, but Eli seemed as incapable of not talking to her upon arriving as he did of remembering to wipe out the sink’s bowl after he finished shaving. “Just plugging in my phone!” he would call, or “Just grabbing a sweater!” or “Just going out to get Lord Farquaad’s food!” Every time her husband came slap-slapping his way into the bedroom, she’d feel her stomach muscles clench and her heart start beating faster and her fingers itch with a desire to slap him. （“Please, you think you’ve got it bad?” asked Tasha, her assistant, when Sarah had complained on a work Zoom. “I learned that my husband’s a circle back guy.” She’d lowered her voice to what Sarah thought of as a business-casual baritone. “Uh, Bob, can we circle back on that?” Then Carole, one of the teachers, shared that her husband cracked his knuckles, and Justin, who taught the trombone, confessed to daily bickering with Timothy his sax player husband over where he and Justin could each empty their respective spit valves, and about the reed parings Timothy left on the floor.）
“You don’t really think he’s cheating, do you?” Marni asked as they turned the corner, crossing the sidewalk where the park became the city.
“I don’t know.” Sarah felt wretched. “I don’t know what I think. Maybe it’s not that, but there’s something going on.”
“If you want my advice—” Marni looked sideways, waiting for Sarah to say that she didn’t. When Sarah said nothing, Marni touched her shoulder. “Just ignore it. Whatever he’s doing that’s driving you nuts, just ignore it. You don’t want to end your marriage over the small stuff.” She sighed. “Or at all, if you can help it.”
Marni was speaking from experience. She’d gone back to work six weeks after the birth of her second daughter and had fallen in love with her new editor, a single man five years younger than she was. It might have been nothing more than an unrequited crush or harmless flirting, except the editor, Jeff, enthusiastically returned Marni’s affections. He swore she was his soul mate, the only woman he had loved or could ever love. Marni and Jeff had carried on an affair for six months. Then Marni had gotten pregnant, and, because she believed that she and Jeff were meant to be, she’d told her husband that she was leaving him. Her husband, Jonathan, had begged her to stay, to go to counseling with him, to think of their children. He’d even promised to raise the baby as their own, but Marni was resolute.