Was Tvist trying to knock me off my axis? Showing me that video had been a cheap move. And all the while he had smiled, and all the while he had expressed concern. It was misdirection, I thought, pure and simple: Trust me. Doubt your wife.

I found a bench in the shade of a tree. I would wait here for Elsa, and she would have an explanation. As Elsa always did. We would not allow this man to divide us. There was a strength in Elsa and in me that Tvist could not hope to understand.

I half turned, sat watching the smokers at the entrance of the police station as they laughed and flirted in the sunlight. I could almost taste their smoke in my mouth, could almost feel their nicotine coursing through my veins. Perhaps Elsa would have cigarettes. Perhaps we would sit here together, smoking, as we planned our next move.

Eight

Fidelity was Elsa’s religion. She insisted that it become mine.

We must each focus on the other’s left eye; we must put all desire from our minds. We must make love. We must not fuck.

And so in the early days of our relationship we tried not to fuck. In numberless positions. Time and again. We would manage for a while to fill our minds with thoughts of respect and of peace, to listen to our partner’s breaths and to hear our own breaths reflected. But desire took over every time, and we would laugh, and kiss each other deeply, and I would feel the orgasm begin to build within me and Elsa’s spine would arch and she would push back hard, and we would forget tantric breathing and ignore inner peace, and one of us would begin to thrust, and we would agree—breathless now—that we should slow down, and neither of us would, and oh, her breasts and her lips, and oh, and the strength in her supple thighs.

And in the stupid way that young men do, I asked Elsa the most stupid of questions:

“Do you ever think about other people?”

“Do I ever think about other people?”

We were lying naked on Elsa’s bed, legs entwined, exhausted by an afternoon of whisky and failed tantric sex.

“I mean, sexually.”

“I understood that, Cal.” She reached across me for a cigarette, which she lit.

“And?”

“If you don’t withdraw the question, I will be forced to answer it.”

We locked eyes.

“You seriously want me to withdraw the question?”

“You seriously want me to answer?”

“Yes,” I said, because I was twenty and stupid. “I seriously want you to answer. Do you think about other people?”

“Okay, Cal. I do think about other people. Sometimes I long to be touched by other men. Sometimes. But this is a fantasy, and you are a jealous man, and I do not want my fantasies to hurt you. Please do not ask me more such questions.”