Clue number one: Furtive, whispered conversations on his cell phone over the past three weeks, some of them very late at night.

Clue number two: A box of six pink French-tickler condoms she’d found buried in his underwear drawer, beneath his novelty boxers, two days ago.

Lucinda hadn’t been snooping. She just couldn’t remember if she’d bought Bob Fourth of July boxer shorts before. With Independence Day coming up in a few weeks, she had seen a pair at Target with the Stars and Stripes on the front and an Uncle Sam Wants You poster-picture on the rear. Holiday underwear was one of her and Bob’s things, a cute little intimate secret.

While it wasn’t unusual for Bob to have condoms—Lucinda had experienced a bad reaction to the Pill early in their relationship, and after that, they had always used condoms—never in their six years of marriage had Bob ever bought anything other than plain old dull Trojans. So the French ticklers, combined with the late-night clandestine phone calls, Lucinda found suspicious as hell.

So yesterday—Thursday—she had called in sick to work and followed Bob. She wore a shapeless, mouse-brown, ankle-length smock-dress he had never seen before (her hippie dress, she had called it in college), a floppy straw hat, and oversized dark glasses. She kept her distance on the freeway, and when he went into the twenty-story Maxim Life building downtown to work, she hid her car on a side street, went to the park across the road, and monitored the front doors and the parking-garage exit from a bench there.

Bob came out the front doors a few minutes past noon, and she trailed him as he walked briskly down the street. After traveling four blocks he entered the glass revolving door of the Propensa Hotel. By the time Lucinda got inside he was nowhere to be seen. She bought a newspaper and sat in the lobby, holding the paper in front of her face while surreptitiously watching the banks of elevators. Forty-five minutes later she saw him, although she was almost certain he hadn’t come off the elevators. He was standing about fifteen feet out from the reception desk, talking to a woman their age or a little younger with brown shoulder-length hair, dressed in a gray wool skirt and a white blouse. She was pretty, Lucinda thought, in a cheap sort of way.

Lucinda was happy there was no overt show of affection when they parted. She had dreaded what her reaction might be if they hugged or, worse, kissed.

She followed Bob back to his office and spent the rest of the day in the park to see if he left again. He didn’t—until five o’clock. She had to rush to her car to get behind him on the freeway. When she saw that he was headed home, she took the off-ramp before their exit and broke the speed limit getting to Penny Jacobs’s place. She borrowed a pair of jeans and a top from Penny so Bob wouldn’t see the smock-dress and possibly make the connection.

Now, the next day, five o’clock on Friday afternoon, sitting on Penny’s eggplant-purple leather sofa, Lucinda said, a hitch in her voice, “He’s cheating on me, Penny.”

Penny sat on a matching chair across from her, holding a cup of coffee. “You’re jumping to conclusions, Lucinda.”

“How else do you explain it?”

Penny took a sip of coffee and looked at her.

The murky late-night cellphone calls, the French ticklers, and now Bob’s rendezvous at the Propensa Hotel were all the evidence Lucinda needed. She choked back a sob.

“The bastard! Six years of marriage and this? I turn thirty next week, Penny. I don’t want to start over.”

“I’m sure it’s all innocent,” Penny said.

“Innocent? He’s fucking her, Penny!”

“Now, Lucinda. You don’t know that.”

“It’s as clear as… as the dick between his legs.”

Penny gave her a pained half-smile. “Don’t do anything rash, dear.”

“Would hiring a good divorce lawyer be rash?”

“Now, now. Promise me you’ll let things simmer down for a week before you do anything.”

A circus train of thoughts paraded through Lucinda’s head. Ugly elephant trunks. Demonic clown grins.

She shrugged. “Okay. How many more fucks can he squeeze in in a week, anyway?”

***

Walking down the sidewalk the three blocks from Penny’s house to hers, Lucinda answered her own question. “Too many fucks.”

She had hated lying to Penny but she didn’t intend to take this stoically. The main thing now was to keep a poker face around Bob until she had all her ducks in a row. There were options. She could hire a private investigator to follow his cheating ass around and try to come up with some hard goods on him. Or perhaps she could find a tech service in the Yellow Pages to set up recording devices in the rooms where he usually made his calls. And she should get on that divorce lawyer ASAP.

Back in her living room, she sat on the sofa, put her face in her hands, and began to cry.

“Why, Bob? Why?”

The place where her heart had once been now felt like a bloody gaping hole. The feeling was worse than any physical pain she had ever endured. She wished she had broken a leg instead or contracted cancer. Some mild, curable form of it, anyway.

Maybe revenge is the answer, she thought. Maybe that would make her feel better, salve the pain. She wasn’t unattractive when she fixed herself up, she knew, though she didn’t do that often. There wasn’t much cause to. The most she and Bob ever did was go out to dinner and a movie, or occasionally to casual get-togethers at friends’ or neighbors’ homes. Hanover High School discouraged its teachers from wearing makeup or dressing provocatively, so she always wore conservative dresses, or knee-length skirts and no-frill blouses, to teach her tenth-grade class.

Once a year, for Maxim Life’s Christmas party, she treated herself to an expensive new dress, something feminine and fancy, something that showed a bit of cleavage and thigh. She would go to the salon and get her short blonde hair styled, spend an hour applying foundation, eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick, spray on a bit of atrociously expensive perfume, and be a lady for a change instead of Honey or Mrs. Marshall, as the kids at school called her. At Maxim’s parties, she invariably noticed Bob’s work colleagues and bosses eyeing her covertly, and she would feel good about herself.

She never flirted—that wasn’t her—but she couldn’t fail to notice the flirting done by the women at the Christmas parties, and by the wives at the friendly neighborhood soirees. The casual touches, the coy smirks. After one Christmas party, she and Bob had actually caught a couple having sex in the venue’s parking garage. The look on Bob’s face had told her he knew them…and that they weren’t married…at least to each other. She had watched in stunned fascination as the woman gripped the hood of a silver Mercedes coupe, the skirt of her black evening dress flipped up, while the man pounded into her from behind.

Lucinda had been amazed at the man’s energy, and at the woman’s feral moans. She and Bob had never made love that way—doggy-style, she knew it was called. Bob had never shown interest in anything other than the missionary position, and she loved being face-to-face with him, feathering soft kisses onto his lips and whispering sweet words. She wasn’t naïve, she knew there were other positions, but they all seemed so impersonal. You could be making love to anyone. That wasn’t for her. She loved to hear Bob’s gasps in her ear when he climaxed, to see the pain-like grimace seize his face. He always looked near ecstasy. Her orgasms, the few times she had them, were never that intense. Usually just a little flutter in her belly and then a quick shiver skimming through her body. Nevertheless, she enjoyed making love with her man.

Her man.

She began to cry again, shaking with her sobs. He wasn’t her man anymore. Now he belonged to someone else. At least his heart did.

The bastard! How could he do this to her? He didn’t care about her anymore, that was obvious. He didn’t love her.

“Oh God,” she whimpered. The faint ghost of life that remained inside her seemed to seep out through her pores. She had never felt this empty, this alone.

Maybe she wasn’t attractive. Maybe she just flattered herself. If Bob found her attractive why had he strayed? She would show him. When he saw other men drooling over her, maybe that would smarten him up, make him love her again.

But…could she take him back? The thought of him sticking his penis into another woman made her almost physically ill. Would she ever be able to touch it again, fondle it the way Bob liked before they made love? She certainly would never put it in her mouth, as he had tried to coax her to do during their six years of marriage, and for the two years they had known each other before that. No, that would make her sick.

She checked her watch. Almost seven o’clock on their Friday dinner-and-movie night. Where the hell was Bob, anyway? He had called her at school to tell her he had to make a client presentation at four o’clock that might run a little late, but three hours?

“He’s probably at the Propensa Hotel giving that slut his long presentation,” she said to herself, and sniggered with a humor she didn’t feel.

She heard a car pull into the driveway, and Bob came in wearing his navy pinstripe suit and a red silk tie. “Hi, honey,” he said. “Sorry I’m so late.”

“Where have you been?” Lucinda asked.

“The presentation took a little longer than I expected.” He set his briefcase on the foyer floor, pushed his silver-rimmed eyeglasses up on his nose, and bent over to untie his shoes.

Cool it, Lucinda told herself. No inquisition. Don’t arouse his suspicions.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked.

“I just want to change.”

“Me too. And take a quick shower.”

She followed him upstairs. While he showered she rummaged through her walk-in closet, sliding hangers back and forth. On their Friday-night excursions she usually dressed casually, but this was Day One, Ground Zero for the new Lucinda.

She found a wine-colored crushed-velvet dress she had worn to the Maxim Life Christmas party two years ago and draped it to her body. Bob had looked shocked when he’d seen her in it. The bodice was cut low enough to show the top swells of her breasts, and the hemline was a good seven inches above the knees. The dress had seemed to pique the interest of many of the men at the party that night. She had had to avoid Bob’s boss, John Sherman, whenever she was under one of the many sprigs of mistletoe that dangled around the room. He was grabbing any woman close to him to give her a big unboss-like smooch.

Bob also had been unusually touchy-feely that night, and his hand caressing her thigh under the table had her so excited by the end of the evening that she almost attacked him when they got home.

Lucinda took off her slacks and top and tried on the dress. Looking at herself in the full-length mirror on the closet door, she thought it still seemed to fit well. She turned her back to the mirror and peered over her shoulder. Even approaching thirty, and without a regular exercise regimen, her butt still looked round and firm. But seeing the dress’s short hemline again, she understood why Bob had been shocked. It wouldn’t take much to inadvertently flash herself—sit the wrong way, or bend over a little too far, and Exhibitionism City, here I come.

Good. Maybe it was time she showed a little skin. She wouldn’t be trolling tonight with Bob beside her but she would have to soon enough. After the divorce.

She swallowed a sob, the life ebbing out of her again. The self-centered prick! Maybe she would troll tonight. It would serve him right, let him know what he’d be missing.

She took off the dress and slipped into a robe. She wouldn’t put the dress on until she had her turn in the bathroom. Then she would emerge with her makeup perfect and dressed to the nines. Before Bob had time to ask any questions they would be out the door and off.

Bob came out of the bathroom in tan cotton chinos and a white golf shirt. Lucinda went in, hiding the dress by her side. She closed the door, put the dress on, and began applying makeup. Bluish-pink mascara and a shade of lipstick that set off the red of the dress.

When she came out Bob was gone. She put on lace panties, thigh-high stockings, and high heels, all in black, and went downstairs. Bob was sitting on the living-room sofa, his briefcase open on his lap, studying some papers. When he looked up his jaw dropped.

“Let’s go,” she said, and walked out the front door.

She was sitting in their blue Toyota Cressida when Bob came out. He didn’t say anything for a few minutes as he drove, just kept glancing at her.

“You look really nice tonight,” he said at last.

That was as effusive as Bob’s compliments ever got. At least with her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“What’s the occasion?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know—the dress, the makeup.”

“Am I not allowed to look good once in a while?”

The sharp edge in her voice clammed him up. He probably thought she was hard into a bout of PMS. He knew not to tangle with her when that happened. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

They arrived at their favorite restaurant, La Seduzione di Alimento, and Giovanni, the owner and maitre d’, eyed her appreciatively.

“Ah, Mrs. Marshall! You look very beautiful tonight.”

He grabbed two menus off the podium by the door and led them to their usual table in the far back corner. Lucinda was surprised when he pulled out her chair for her. He had never done that before. She smiled at him as he pushed her in. “Thank you, Giovanni.”

Giovanni was in his fifties. A large paunch bulged out his black double-breasted suit jacket, and his thin graying hair was combed to one side. Lucinda had met his wife once. She was a stout Italian woman with great hanging breasts and a mist of fine dark hair above her upper lip. Lucinda had seen Giovanni flirt with some of the women in the restaurant before, but never with her. Standing behind her, he placed his hands casually on her shoulders while he recited the day’s specials. To her embarrassment, Lucinda felt her nipples harden when his thumbs began rubbing against her bare flesh. She hadn’t worn a bra because of the dress’s open back and fought the urge to look down to see if she was showing.

Giovanni finished and said, “Paolo will be right with you.” His hands lingered another second on her shoulders before he took them away.

They studied their menus in silence for a few minutes before Paolo showed up with two tall glasses of ice water.

“Thank you, Paolo,” she said, smiling at the boy. His eyes were saucer-wide.

“Y-you’re welcome,” he stammered, a trace of accent in his voice. “W-would you like anything to drink?”

“I’ll have a glass of the house red, Paolo,” Bob said.

“White for me,” Lucinda said.

Paolo left and returned shortly with their drinks. “H-have you d-decided on your orders?”

He had served them many times before, but Lucinda had never seen him like this. He seemed frozen to his spot, gulping as if he had swallowed his Adam’s apple. He wasn’t really a boy; he was in his early twenties, Lucinda guessed, dressed in his usual long-sleeved white shirt, black bowtie, and black pants. His eyes seemed to flick between her face and cleavage.

Bob said, “I think I’m going to try the New York strip tonight, Paolo. Medium rare. Baked potato.”

Lucinda looked at the menu again to remember what she had picked. She turned her head to Paolo standing beside her, and her eyes almost stuck below his waist. She jerked them quickly up to his face, disbelieving what she had seen. It had looked as if the boy had stuffed something in the front of his pants, like a roll of socks or something. Surely his package couldn’t be that big.

Package? Where did that come from? She must have heard it in a movie, or read it in a book.

“I’ll have the stuffed sole, Paolo,” she said, fighting the urge to peek at the boy’s crotch again. “With the rice pilaf.”

Paolo’s eyes were no longer flitting between her face and breasts. They had locked firmly on the creamy swells spilling up out of the vee of her bodice.

“A-any appetizers?” he asked.

Bob looked at her. “Garlic escargots and bruschetta?” It was their usual pre-meal fare.

Lucinda nodded.

Paolo left, and a monotony of silence followed. Lucinda finally spoke to break it. “So, how did the presentation go?”

“It was a hard sell.”

Lucinda almost chortled. I’m sure something was hard, she thought.

“We had John Sherman and me, and one of the actuaries from the top floor if we needed to carve down the premium a bit.”

“A big policy?”

He nodded, sipping his wine. “Twenty million. An estate-preservation package.”

She knew he wouldn’t say much more. He took his corporate confidentiality agreement very seriously. She found insurance talk boring, anyway.

“How did your day go?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Same as usual. Sixteen-year-old boys with their testosterone cranked to high and their brains turned to low.”

She wouldn’t tell him about Ricky Gillespie. The boy had given her a hard time since the start of the school year, and now, in mid-June, nothing had changed. His torment of the girls in class was normal, she supposed—rude whispered comments causing angry red faces; little notes passed with crude sexual drawings. All that was nothing out of the ordinary. No, it was the way he had begun to look at her that she found unnerving. Whenever she stood at the front of the classroom, his eyes seemed to lock onto her body, unfocused, as if he were seeing right through her clothes. The first time it happened she dismissed it as her imagination, but it had persisted since, to the point where she felt uncomfortable under the boy’s eerie gaze. When she had told Penny Jacobs about it, Penny had laughed and said, “I’d take that as a compliment. I wish I had some smooth-skinned young stud ogling me every day.”

She didn’t think Penny had meant that. She had confided to Lucinda that things in the bedroom had turned a bit stale lately. Penny was thirty-six, her husband Greg ten years older, and she said Greg seemed to have suddenly become ancient.

They ate their meals in uncomfortable silence. Lucinda knew she should be talking more so Bob wouldn’t get suspicious, but she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to talk about…other than the only thing that mattered to her at that moment.

They finished their entrees and Bob ordered dessert. As he forked a piece of fudge brownie and ice cream into his mouth, Lucinda excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.

After she had finished, on her way out, she thought she heard noises coming through an open door at the rear of the restaurant, between the washrooms and the kitchen. It was a warm evening and the door to the back alleyway was open, probably to dispel some of the heat from the kitchen, she thought. She was about to turn away when she heard the sounds again. This time she thought she had heard her name—Mrs. Marshall. She walked toward the door, looking around to make sure no one noticed her. She poked her head outside the doorway, into the alley, but didn’t see anything.

“Oh, Mrs. Marshall!” A low, tortured groan coming from a concave in the back of the building about fifteen feet away, behind a large dumpster. She walked carefully toward it so her high heels wouldn’t click on the asphalt.

“Oh yes, Mrs. Marshall!”

She peered around the corner of the dumpster and almost gasped. Paolo was facing the far wall with his back to her, his right elbow jerking crazily. His hand was hidden in front of him, and his hips were rolling in an awkward motion.

“I love you, Mrs. Marshall! Please…”

The boy turned slightly, and then Lucinda saw it—a long brown penis gripped firmly in his right fist.

“Oh fuck, yes!” Paolo gasped.

Lucinda watched, mortified, as a large glob of semen shot out the end of his penis and splattered against the wall in front of him. She started to back away, and accidentally heeled a can lying on the ground. Paolo spun around, a horrified expression on his face. His mouth gaped open, his hand still clutching his penis, semen dripping from the tip. Lucinda’s eyes fixed on it for a second, and then she turned and bolted back into the restaurant. As she passed the washrooms she slowed her gait and tried to walk normally to the table.

Bob looked up at her. “Everything okay?”

Lucinda sat down. “Yes. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I don’t know. You were gone quite a while. And your face is flushed.”

“I, uh, I washed it in the ladies’ room. The water was hot.”

What a lame excuse, she thought. If she had washed her face her makeup would have been ruined. But Bob didn’t seem to notice the lie. He was checking the bill.

“Are we ready?” she said.

“Yup.”

Bob held up the leather-bound folder with the bill and his credit card inside toward Giovanni at the front door. He came over and took it.

Lucinda wanted to get out of there before Paolo came back in. “I’ll meet you at the car,” she said.

Bob looked at her funny but didn’t say anything.

Sitting in the car, the image of Paolo in the back alleyway, squeezing his penis and moaning her name, returned. She had never thought of the boy sexually and certainly had never suspected he thought of her in that way. But he obviously did. Everything this evening had seemed so hyper-sexual—Giovanni stroking his thumbs on her shoulders; Paolo masturbating and calling her name. It was as if she were throwing off pheromones or telepathic messages, some cue to men that she was interested. It wasn’t intentional. Sure, she had had thoughts earlier about trolling, but it had only been anger talking, hurt.

Bob opened the driver’s door and got in. He started the engine and looked at her. “You okay?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I don’t know. You seem to be acting strange.”

Lucinda forced a smile. “A little Prehistoric Monster Syndrome, I guess. Sorry.”

“I thought it might be that. No need to be sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“I’m fine,” Lucinda said, although she wasn’t. All through the movie—some sappy romantic comedy with Kate Hudson, the kind of film Bob thought she liked—she fidgeted in her seat, seeing in the face of the male lead on the screen Paolo’s boyish features and imagining his long brown penis. She had to fight the urge to masturbate with Bob sitting beside her. It was crazy. She had never felt like this before, had never wanted to do anything so daft.

At home, getting ready for bed, she watched Bob undress, but still, she saw Paolo. By the time they got into bed she wanted to jump Bob’s bones, but poison thoughts of his infidelity invaded her mind and scared off the moment.

When she was sure he was asleep, she slipped out of bed and went down to the living room. Lying on the sofa with her nightgown raised to her waist, she fingered herself, eyes closed, imagining it had been her hand gripping Paolo’s penis, slowly stroking it while he told her how much he loved her. In her mind’s eye, she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and fed that long brown penis deep inside her, kissing the boy and rolling her tongue in his mouth. She pushed her fingers hard against her clitoris and came in a gush, hips hunched up, gasping and moaning Paolo’s name, feeling that hot wad of goo she had seen splatter on the concrete wall now splatter inside her womb, drenching it.

Afterward, she lay there spent, too tired to even pull down her nightgown. She began to cry softly. She felt barren inside, so unhappy she wanted to die. This wasn’t what marriage should be—frigging herself off to fantasies of some boy she didn’t even know while her husband snored upstairs.

Or maybe fantasies were all she had left.

Her soft whimpers turned into aching, muffled sobs. Maybe she would never love again.

She got off the sofa, walked up the stairs, and crawled into bed.