“Husband?! Wow!” I said to her the next day across my kitchen table.
“Who did you think he was?” she asked with a broad grin, savoring the absurdity of the situation again.
“I dunno. A roommate I guess. Just a… nosey… ill-tempered… roommate.”
She laughed. “He was furious after you left.” A mischievous grin grew into more of that delicious laughter. Then she was suddenly serious. “He had no right to be mad. I’ve been telling him for a year I was going to move out.”
After I stopped kissing her in the kitchen in front of her husband, she quickly and deftly walked me to the front door while I stuttered, “God, if. . . if. . . if I had any idea… I promise, I swear, I’ll pay back every cent. I got burned. We got burned. The money for the kilo is gone. I. . . . . ”
All the while she said in soothing tones, “Don’t worry about it. . . It’s not important. . . I’ll come over tomorrow and we’ll talk about it. You’ll see. There’s no reason to be upset. . . Believe me. . . “
Breaking the silence at my kitchen table the next day, I asked, “So you don’t love him… or anything like that?”
“Him? No! He’s. . . he’s. . . un. . . unliveable… with…” she said, chuckling at the phrase.
“You’ve been planning to move out for a year?”
“Yeah, well, he’s… comfortable. He puts up with my insanity.”
“You keep talking about how insane you are, but I’ve never seen any insanity in you, not anymore than anybody else anyway.”
“I know what I’m talking about. Remember my mother is a psychoanalyst. I could be committed for what goes on in my head.”
“I still say you’re the sanest person I know.”
She thanked me with her eyes, and I took her hand.
“Why don’t you move in here?” I asked.
She looked toward my bedroom and said, “It’s kind of small.”
“Then stay here while we look for our own place. I was going to move anyway. They raised the rent.”
“O.k.”
There was a ruminative moment when all this sunk-in.
“God,” I said, “it must have blown his mind to have some stranger come in off the street and start kissing his wife. ”
She guffawed at the image and said, “Oh, he knew about you. I told him when I started seeing you. I don’t think he believed me, and I didn’t care enough to try to convince him.”
“Well, I still want to pay him back for the kilo.”
But I never did.
