smile.
“What is?”
“Wrestling with words.”
Her placid satisfaction in wrestling with words was a thorn in his side, though he tried—and failed—not to let it bother him. But Rachel, for her part, rarely assumed that her own process was at all similar to his. If anything, she was insecure about her writing, deferring to him on everything from syntax to word choice with almost comic humility. Even after the disappointment of his second novel, a critical darling but commercial flop, Owen remained the official writer of the household.
He saved a new version of the file on the computer, even though nothing substantial had been written or changed, and peeked out of the doorway to make sure there was no light showing through the crack under the bedroom door.
Inside the room, Rachel was asleep, only half covered by the quilt, her lacy nightgown slipping down from one fine, pale shoulder. His side of the bed was still made, and he slid like a knife into the sheets without untucking them or nudging the bare arm of his sleeping wife.
* * *
By the time Owen awoke, Rachel’s side of the bed was cold. It was a Tuesday, one of Rachel’s teaching days, which meant she went into campus early. He dressed quickly and picked up his gym bag and car keys.
On a day like this—clear and cool—he felt a strong call to the water. He’d taken up sculling in college and had been doing it ever since, though no longer as part of a team. When Rachel was first hired at Lansdowne University and they’d relocated to the town of the same name, he’d joined the rowing club in the next municipality up the river. Two years ago, she’d surprised him with the gift of his own refurbished ocean shell. Not the fastest boat, she’d said, but one of the safest. In the absence of children, all of Rachel’s solicitude had been directed towards him.
At the rowing club, he got changed in the locker room and retrieved his scull from the boathouse. The stretch of the river outside the launch was still and wide, unlike in Lansdowne, where it was quick and narrow.
As Owen was pushing off from the dock, a quad racing scull was being taken down the boat ramp by four women. The one closest to the bow was studying him closely, as if she recognized him.
“Nice day,” he said, catching her gaze head-on.
“It is,” she said. She was in her early thirties and wore grey and fuchsia shorts that clung to her athletic form. “Enjoy yourself.”
Owen steered away from the dock and soon put several boat lengths between him and the club. As he fell into a rhythm, his thoughts drifted back to the woman on the crew boat. The glance that had passed between them had been electric. He was sure she had felt it, too.
Ever since he and Rachel had stopped having sex, he’d been looking at other women without bothering to hide it. And he had been told more than once that the way that he looked at a woman was tantamount to a proposition. He remembered a locker room conversation in high school, when two of his buddies from the wrestling team were discussing their best pickup lines. “How about ‘hello’?” is what Owen had said. When pressed, he’d offered up a partial list of the girls it had worked on, and it had gone down in legend as the ballsiest invention of any braggart seventeen-year-old. His friends still brought it up at the pub when he went home for the holidays, though he wondered what they would think if he told them the real tally he’d racked up over the past twenty years. Likely, they wouldn’t believe him.
There were also certain women, he was sure, who would be surprised to know he’d gotten married. But Rachel, in the sheer, undeniable beauty of her person—both body and soul—would have been answer enough. And though at this point he took her intelligence for granted, it was her mind that had attracted him in the first place. She was now an associate philosophy professor at Lansdowne, and her research had been radically interdisciplinary even before the concept became a buzzword. She had a third book coming out in the spring, an elaboration on her dissertation, which had taken longer than expected only because Rachel had not wanted to publish it without expanding its scope to a significant degree. Owen knew that it was dedicated to him, though he did