Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [2]
I used to love it. Now sex was a chore, one more wifely chore, and not the best of them. I’d rather iron, da frick.
To be fair, Connors had his husbandly duties too, and he came across without complaint. For example, I like to have dinner out, at a nice place that doesn’t have a salad bar. There are maybe three in Spokane. He’d rather eat at home, but he took me out once a week and he made it a pleasant thing for both of us. Why couldn’t I make my obligation just as nice, bring a little imagination to it. At the time, it somehow never occurs to me. Only afterwards, when he drops oblique hints? Because every time we did it was a reminder of what I had lost so completely. Whenever his hand dropped between my legs, foreplay was over and I was down to business, fast as I could, until he pushed me away and climbed aboard. I never knew how long the ride would last, so I’d just hold on, though it sometimes felt like my teeth were cracking.
I still loved him as deeply as ever I did. We were grown-up, we always knew that over years life would change, and some of the change would happen in bed, but neither of us ever suspected that precious element of married life would disappear completely, never to be recovered. It was unfair. We were adults, and we knew in the grand scheme of things there were greater tragedies. All I wanted was once and again to revisit where we used to be, but you can’t get there from here.
At first, Connors thought it was him, that he had lost his appeal to me—what man wouldn’t think that?—but I knew that no man would ever again light me up. Oh, I knew I was still attractive to men, they let you know, but it neither pleased me nor reassured me. Their long eyes meant nothing to me. It kind of pissed me off, to be truthful.
I stopped for a moment in the aisle, unseen, and watched Esther taking care of a customer. Connors was in the glassed-off pharmacy behind her, head down, doing his job. She was a beauty, how could you not notice, how could any man not imagine what it might be like, including my man. I used to have that. My calves, objectively speaking, are still every bit as good as hers, if maybe a little thicker, not that nice line of hard muscle she had that rose with every step. I have her beat in the boobs too, only hers stand on their own. I could have matched her in the doopa too but twenty hours of delivering Nelson along with twenty years of sitting in a squad car had spread things out a little. What a wicked inventory!
It came down to the years, though, didn’t it, the years that put her at one away from thirty and me only one shy of fifty. I had to believe that those years were to my advantage, because I had spent them all with Connors. That had to count for something.
Esther defined niceness. All of her conscious thoughts were directed to helping others in some way, preferrably small but noticeable. She saw me and acted incredibly blessed for the experience, as though now at last her day was made. It made me want to puke. All I saw was an operator smart enough to flatter the wife of the man she’d like to steal. Maybe I was too sensitive. Conners always said I was. I was the love of his life, he continually reassured me. Even when he had a dirty dream, I was the girl in the dream. He would rather have me, the way it was, than anyone else, no matter how good it could be. That’s what he said. Which went a long way toward finding some kind of acceptance of our situation. Still, it could not calm my fear that given the opportunity, he would jump it, so to speak. And why shouldn’t he? How could I be so entirely uninterested in sex and at the same time so jealous he might enjoy it with someone else? Because that’s the way I am. That’s the way we all are.
I smiled at Esther the way you do at a scooter going by, and caught Connors’ eye. He came out and met me at the end of the counter. I explained the last-minute detail.
“That’s the shits,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“The end of your