her own affair, taken up with someone new. It would have been easier back then, when the world was full of all those grungy, love-hungry boys in their twenties. But whom could she have an affair with now? Matthew, of course, the murderer next door. Hen laughed out loud, then quickly scanned the street to make sure no one had heard her. She checked her watch—it was a little after three o’clock, and she did wonder if Matthew was coming home soon. She realized that that was part of the reason she was out on the porch, watching cars go by and leaves fall. And it wasn’t an affair she wanted—again, the thought almost made her laugh out loud—it was that she wanted to talk with him some more, find out how exactly he’d known about Lloyd.
The gusting winds began to produce rain, sporadic bursts that pattered in the leaves. She began to sketch a tree, a flock of birds lifting off from its branches, but every time a car drove by she looked up.
At four o’clock Matthew pulled his Fiat into the driveway. Hen watched him, wondering if he’d seen her on the porch when he drove by. He got out of the car, reached back in to get his briefcase, then turned and looked toward Hen. Through the porch’s screen and the now steady rain, she couldn’t make out his face, but she waved toward him, and he waved back. He went into his house, and Hen wondered if she should go over and talk with him, but then he was coming back outside, wearing a crewneck sweater instead of a tweed blazer. He walked the short distance to the steps that led to Hen’s porch, then stopped.
“Can I come up?” he asked, and Hen thought of vampires, how they needed to be invited in.
He sat across from her, on the old wooden rocker that had come with the house. He looked different today, paler, almost frightened. Maybe it was his hair, damp and pushed off his face, revealing a sharp widow’s peak. Hen thought of vampires again.
“Why did you say what you said about Lloyd?” she asked.
He looked confused for a moment, then said, “So he is cheating on you.”
“No, I didn’t say that. I’m just wondering why you think he is.” Hen felt a sudden lurch in her stomach, that maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned Lloyd at all. Had she just confirmed to Matthew what he already thought?
“I didn’t know. I guessed. He has that look.”
“What look, exactly, is that?”
He pushed his lips together, thinking. “He looks like a man,” he finally said, and smiled, almost sheepishly.
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Hen said.
“It means that every woman he meets—every woman he sees, really—he instantly decides whether he’d have sex with her or not. He strips them naked in his mind. He wonders if they’re thinking the same thing. I’ll bet that the night after the dinner party your husband concocted an elaborate fantasy in his mind about my wife, wondering what would happen if I was out of town at the same time that you were out of town. Maybe they’d have dinner together, decide to have sex, promise to never tell another soul. He imagined every detail. Specific details. He pictured what my wife’s breasts looked like, what her vagina—”
“Okay, I get the point.”
“Well, that’s what men do.” He sounded a little defensive.
“That’s what you do, you mean,” Hen said.
Matthew rocked forward in his chair. “No, I don’t, actually. I’m different.”
“Then how do you know that men do it?”
“I just do. I had a very bad father. He was a . . . a sexual predator, and a sadist. And my brother, now, he’s just like my father except for the fact that he doesn’t have a wife. He doesn’t have anyone to torture, but if he did, then . . .”
Hen placed her feet on the painted wood floor of the porch and leaned forward. “But still, that doesn’t mean that every man—”
“That every man is the same? No, but it’s a spectrum and every man is on it. Your husband is probably statistically average, not a bad man, but when he looks at a woman he just sees what he wants to do to her.”
“So where are you on this spectrum?”
“I’m not on it.”
“You don’t objectify women? At all?”
“No.”
“What did you think when you first looked at your wife, before you ever talked with her?”