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By Root 647 0

’t it? To sleep with your husband, a thirty-eight-year-old woman and a thirty-nine-year-old man, and never a breathy sound of sex. He’s your ex-husband who was never technically ex, the stranger you married in another lifetime. She dressed and undressed, he watched and did not. It was strange but interesting. A tension did not build. This was extremely strange. She wanted him here, nearby, but felt no edge of self-contradiction or self-denial. Just waiting, that was all, a broad pause in recognition of a thousand sour days and nights, not so easily set aside. The matter needed time. It could not happen the way things did in normal course. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, the way you move about the bedroom, routinely near-naked, and the respect you show the past, the deference to its fervors of the wrong kind, its passions of cut and burn.

She wanted contact and so did he.

The briefcase was smaller than normal and reddish brown with brass hardware, sitting on the closet floor. He’d seen it there before but understood for the first time that it wasn’t his. Wasn’t his wife’s, wasn’t his. He’d seen it, even half placed it in some long-lost distance as an object in his hand, the right hand, an object pale with ash, but it wasn’t until now that he knew why it was here.

He picked it up and took it to the desk in the study. It was here because he’d brought it here. It wasn’t his briefcase but he’d carried it out of the tower and he had it with him when he showed up at the door. She’d cleaned it since then, obviously, and he stood and looked at it, full-grain leather with a pebbled texture, nicely burnished over time, one of the front buckles bearing a singe mark. He ran his thumb over the padded handle, trying to remember why he’d carried it out of there. He was in no hurry to open it. He began to think he didn’t want to open it but wasn’t sure why. He ran his knuckles over the front flap and unbuckled one of the straps. Sunlight fell across the star map on the wall. He unbuckled the second strap.

He found a set of headphones and a CD player. There was a small bottle of spring water. There was a cell phone in the pocket designed for that purpose and half a chocolate bar in a slot for business cards. He noted three pen sleeves, one rollerball pen. There was a pack of Kent cigarettes and a lighter. In one of the saddle pockets he found a sonic toothbrush in a travel case and a digital voice recorder as well, sleeker than his own.

He examined the items with detachment. It was somehow morbidly unright to be doing this but he was so remote from the things in the briefcase, from the occasion of the briefcase, that it probably didn’t matter.

There was an imitation leather folio with a blank notebook in one of the pockets. He found a stamped envelope preaddressed to AT&T, no return address, and a book in the zippered compartment, paperback, a guide to buying used cars. The CD in the player was a compilation of music from Brazil.

The wallet with money, credit cards and a driver’s license was in the other saddle pocket.

This time the woman showed up in the bakery, mother of the Siblings. She walked in just after Lianne did and joined her in line after taking a number from the dispenser on the counter.

“I’m just wondering about the binoculars. He’s not, you know, the most outgoing child.”

She smiled at Lianne, warmly and falsely, in a fragrance of glazed cakes, a mother-to-mother look, like we both know how these kids have enormous gleaming worlds they don’t share with their parents.

“Because he always has them lately. I just wondered, you know, what he might have told you one way or the other.”

Lianne didn’t know what she was talking about. She looked into the broad and florid face of the man behind the counter. The answer wasn’t there.

“He shares them with my kids, so that’s not it, because their father promised them a pair but we haven’t gotten around, you know, binoculars, not the highest priority, and my Katie’s being supersecret and her brother’s her brother, loyal to a fault.”

“You mean what are they looking at,