Infidelity Knocks

by Jeff kozzi

Mildred was going to kill me.

I’d already driven around the block a few dozen times. The morning sun had risen above the rooftops, shining her brilliance upon my guilt. If I procrastinated any longer, Mildred would wake to our empty bed. I had no other alternative but to park the car in front of the house. Yet even then I hesitated, sitting in the car, fearfully watching the windows as the morning sun spread golden rays through the late spring leaves. I hadn’t been so afraid to come home since the time I used the f-word at my sixth-grade teacher, and knew my father, called home from work, would be waiting for me at the door.

Now as in then, I was the cause of my own situation. I clearly demonstrated a failure to learn from my best friend’s mistakes. Marital infidelity caused Bernie and Gloria to divorce. The friendship between Bernie and me reached back to high school; his divorce had affected both our lives. Before the divorce, he and Gloria and Mildred. and I would go out every Friday night, sharing our love in bonds I thought unbreakable. After the divorce, it was just him and me, because Mildred always said, "I feel like a fifth wheel! You boys just go on out ahead."

No good came of that. Bernie had thrown himself into a single lifestyle, in apparent ignorance of the dangers of our times. But last night, after a few Wild Turkeys that turned me into a wild turkey, my moral resolve weakened. Bernie had pushed me to this beautiful bimbo, with a buxom smaller but seemingly more realistic than Dolly Parton’s. My feet conspired with my legs, shaking knees and all, to lead me to her place in the Armory District within minutes.

Visions of Mildred, holding a rolling pin and looking suspiciously like her mother, danced through my head. I needed an excuse, a damn good excuse. The freedom of separation could too often tempt the noblest of men; I repeated the catchwords of the average not-so-happily married American man: cheaper to keep her.

I’d tell her I had fallen asleep at Bern’s. He was my best friend. He’d cover me. He could do so easily, since his caller ID monitored his calls in avoidance of "another one of Gloria’s rampages." I could trust Bern to have ignored any calls from Mildred. After all, he had facilitated the barside meeting that would destroy me if this young and fresh skeleton fell out of my closet.

This was the first time I ever cheated on Mildred, before or after our marriage of eight years. I would never do it again. That’s what I kept telling myself, in shaking whispers.

Nerves gnawing at my gut with the tenacity of a retriever trying to dig his way under a fence to a bitch in heat, I sat in the car. I needed something better than that. "I was at Bernie’s" is such a simple lie, so easily shattered. What if Mildred had talked to him last night? I hadn’t expected to stay out all night. There’s no place like home. I needed a better lie, something grander and more elaborate, yet simplistic in its ultimate plausibility. My black-rung eyes glossed over into the street. The fetid boozey smell of my own breath started to nauseate me. My mind drifted to nothingness, obviously the state it had been in last night for me to do something so potentially hurtful to Mildred, my beautiful frumpy Mildred. I remained with absolutely no idea of what to do until a familiar sight invaded the street: the 1974 Ford Wagon with false wood trim that was missing on the driver’s door. I sunk down into the seat, making sure the slob wouldn’t see me. In its usual morning routine, the decrepit car ran up then off curb with bald tires scraping into the lawn patch we’d planted last weekend. It stopped with a squeal, sitting in front of the house with sinister patience, slowly targeting us, targeting me for exposure. I gasped, and held the breath in my lungs, afraid the slob would hear and shout. Finally the silence broke with metal scraping glass as the scraped window lowered further into the door. The morning paper issued from the driver’s window like a projectile shot out of some science fictional cannon. It struck the picture window, shaking the entire frame, then bounced into the shrubs. That slovenly man, kept by neither soap nor manners, snapped his greasy fingers with what I can only assume to be his continued disappointment at not having broke the two-hundred-dollar sheet of glass.

I sat in the car and started to curse the slob’s existence just as I did on any other morning. He had broken three windows in as many years. His driving had claimed four mailboxes in the front of my house alone, the Grayson’s Persian cat, and various neighborhood shrubbery and lawn ornaments. From his continued state of employment I could only assume that he was of some relation to the newspaper owners, an inbred cousin, maybe. Then, for the first time in my life, I blessed the greasy little bald scab. His attempt at my window maintained that this was indeed a typical Saturday morning, and it fostered the idea to me, that this could remain a typical Saturday morning. My lie would be perfect, an old truth, created from the black heart of that filthy little vandalizing freak.

I am a comfortable conservative banker. Married but childless, I had a set routine that could not be broken. Every Saturday, after waking I immediately foraged through the shrubbery for my morning paper while Mildred slept late. It was a given routine, and, judging from the fact that nothing seemed amiss in the house, I would thus gain my entry all but guaranteed that Mildred remain unaware of my overnight absence.

I grinned ear to ear while I stripped down in the car. Yes, this was the best, most believable plan, precisely because I had indeed let the door slide shut behind me once or thrice, and ended up then as I did when I stepped out of the car that balmy July morning: locked out of the house and on the front lawn in my underpants, calling for my wife. Habitually sealing my car, I streaked to the bushes, grabbed the paper, then moved to the front door, where I pounded and called for Mildred to wake.

After ten minutes, I grew concerned. I reminded myself that Mildred did occasionally sleep heavily, and convinced myself that nothing was the matter with her, and that she positively did not know of my non-return the previous evening. She was a heavy sleeper who slept through the knocks and the doorbell and my call with the sleep of the blessed woman she was.

Sweat beaded my brow. She was all right, she just had to be, because I wanted to tell her I was sorry. She could not be held captive by some assailant, or in a hospital bed in critical condition because something happened to her because I, the man of the house, was out cheating instead of being home with my wife like the good husband I would be forevermore. Nothing could be wrong, I told myself.

Yet the possibility that she knew haunted me. I felt as though I could see her, there in the window, watching me and laughing. Gloria was there beside her, whispering in her ear how faithless husbands would always prove in the end. If she wasn’t there in the window taunting me, she was in the bathtub, where she’d slipped, and hit her head, and died of a mild concussion, or of electrocution if she pulled the hair dryer in after her.

I pounded on the door again, futile and vain. I had to control my panic. Gloria had not spoken with Mildred since the divorce. She couldn’t be there. We had those little friction footprints on the basin of the tub. The house was in the good order as my beautiful, dutiful Mildred always kept it. I cursed myself for my overactive, guilt-induced imagination. "I am a banker," I told myself. "I have no need for an imagination."

But she could be lying in bed, listening, crying, telling me to burn in hell. I couldn’t escape that viable explanation. I decided that I had best go in, stick with the sleeping at Bernie’s excuse. My panic had been stupid; in reality, after all, I was not locked out.

Frantic, I lifted the handle of the car door. I nearly ripped the piece from its place as the lock held firm. My head fall against the window, eyes longingly looking at the clothes in the backseat. Safe behind the locked doors, the arm of my jacket was twisted over my pants, conspiring with the balls of my socks to make a sneering face that taunted me with its consumption of my keys in the jacket pocket. I cursed my habitual precaution.

I strode to the end of the driveway and turned to the house and screamed "Mildred!!" at the top of my lungs.

She did not answer.

Was she hurt, or did she know what I did?

I leaned against the car, fighting tears. How could I feel like such a baby, when I’d felt like such a man just a few short hours before? What could I do, go up to the neighbors in my underpants and ask if they’d seen Mildred or heard screams from the house the night before? That would be sure to get me in the Sunday Society pages, all right.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have much choice. I had to place Mildred’s well-being above my vanity. Gossip or rumor, reaching the wrong place, would blow my chance for promotion. Not every husband would place their wife first with such a choice. I could have held out a few hours, until she woke. Many might humble themselves as soon as soon as I was sacrificially willing, if it was cold out. But the June morning was beautiful, weather-wise, and my motive rode only on a carriage drawn by altruism in all its concern and love for my wife.

I’d go to my neighbors, the wonderful people in the community-driven neighborhood, always free of the plagues of society that lurked always outside our town limits. But I had to decide which neighbor. Ordinarily, the Graysons, our best friends aside Bern and Gloria, would be my salvation. But they had moved the week after Easter. Their house stood vacant.

I turned to the house left of ours. My stomach sank, overpowering my nerves. I never got along with the Hendersons. As if they and their ratty children weren’t uncouth enough, they owned this creature they dared call pet, this Harry from hell, a hideous thing had developed the habit of soiling my lawn. Not that we got along like neighbors should even before they brought this thing home, we no longer spoke civilly, and the damn Harry from hell messed on my lawn with increased frequency.

The people across the street were new to the neighborhood. Mildred and I had met them once, at the Grayson’s bon voyage barbeque. I couldn’t remember their names, and maintained the belief that they might object to opening the door to a half-naked man they barely knew before eight on a Saturday morning.

Old Mrs Fletcher lived next to the new people. I couldn’t disturb her. She’s been so traumatized since her fall down the stairs. Maybe if someone had heard her agonized old-lady screams sometime in the first two days, as she sprawled with feebleness beyond her ability to get herself back up, crumpled at the foot of the stairs in oversoaked Depends, she might not have been so traumatized. The poor old biddy never grew accustomed to being wheel-chair bound.

Mildred and I were childless. We did not attend P.T.A., Scouts, 4-H, or any other mindless needs children create. We had no cause to know neighbors beyond those immediately surrounding us. The only other person in the neighborhood we knew was David McKenna, but I could not bring myself to the minister’s door in my underwear. He’s always given me that look as it is; I just wouldn’t be comfortable. You’re supposed to be naked before God, not his agents.

I returned to ring the door bell again, but still Mildred did not answer. The thought that harm had befallen her renewed itself, but the concept that she knew what I’d done, and was watching me, remained unabated.

I tried the windows, circling the house in search for one that might be unlocked. My infallible defenses against the lurking and slinking thieves of society had protected us against everyone but the government. Now it was my enemy. I wished I had allowed Mildred to plant a key in one of those fake rocks. I’d have to break one of the garage windows.

I returned to the front of the house. Red and blue flashing lights strobed the yard, casting hues across my whites. Two cops stood by the mailbox.

I took an embarrassed step back. One of Harry’s messes squished between my toes.

"Freeze, buddy," the fatter of the two donut-devourers said.

The other was a comedian. "Hands up--we’re not gonna get shot by any concealed weapon you might have."

"I’m Grant Farand! I live here! I locked myself out! I got keys in the car, but I’m locked out of that too. My ID’s right in the car."

Leno there got a slimjim from the cruiser.

"My wife hasn’t answered," I said. "I’m worried about her. I’m glad you guys were in the neighborhood."

"Mister Henderson called," the round one said. "Thought he saw someone streaking in the neighborhood."

As I scraped my foot on the curb and tried to shake out my toes, I decided that Harry from hell would shortly be introduced to a BB gun.

The cops had the door open in seconds, despite the distracting discussion of their hopes to win the "Best Report of the Month" dinner pool at the station.

I fumbled through my wallet and gave them my driver’s license to look at while I pulled on my pants.

"You sure that’s him?" the comedian cop said. "He looks different with his clothes on."

The fat one snorted. "Sorry for the delay. We’re here for your protection, you know. Now let’s check on Mrs. Farand."

I complimented them for a fine job and sprinted to the door. I heard snickering behind me. Keys safely in hand, I unlatched the door and swung it open. Calling for Mildred, I ascended the hardwood stairs, barely relying on the ornate rail nor keeping my soiled foot off the Persian runner rug.

Still, she did not answer. The house sounded like shrouded silence of the funeral of someone no one liked but had to pretend they did, like my last boss’. The grandfather clock clicked the seconds away like a mallet driving nails in my heart.

The bedroom door was closed. My heart skipped a beat. She never closed the door before I was home. "I’m sorry I hurt you, lovey," I whispered, stepping cautiously. With one hand unable to steady itself against the glass knob, I knocked again, just in case, then swung the door open.

The well-made bed was empty. The closet door was open, half-empty. There was a note on the bed.

Grant,

Bernie and I are in love. Been having affair for years--why Gloria left him. If Gloria didn’t think you were so conceited--especially for a redhead--she would have told you. You get the house, because the place my Bernheart bought on the shore is so much nicer. My lawyer will be in touch for alimony.

Love always,

Mildred.

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