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about Jack again.”
    â€œWe never talk about Jack.”
    â€œYou have to let it go, Thomas.”
    â€œI’m not the one who brought him up just now. You did.”
    She looks at me strangely, as if I’m not making sense.
    â€œBaby, I didn’t bring up Jack just now. You did. Don’t you remember?”
    I don’t remember that at all. I try to rewind the conversation to the point where Jack was introduced, but Gloria interrupts me.
    â€œBaby, this isn’t going to work.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI can’t do this anymore. I can’t fight with you anymore. If we keep doing this it’s going to make me want to leave and not come back. I love you to death and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but I can’t do it like this.”
    â€œJunior, what are you saying?”
    â€œI’m asking you for the last time to let it go. Let Jack go. You are my husband. I love you, not him. Yes, I loved him once, and I know it’s bizarre and uncomfortable that I report to him now, but I’m with you. You’ve always been my rock, baby. You’re my solid ground. I love that about you. So trust me and find some peace about this. Please?”
    â€œOkay,” I say. “I promise not to bring him up anymore.”
    â€œThank you. Come here and give me a kiss.”
    I walk over and bend down and touch her lips with my own. I know she’s right. We can’t go on like this.
    I don’t know when I’m going to tell her about what I saw today.
    I don’t know if I should.
    These lips don’t feel like Gloria’s.

FIVE
    I grab a beer from the fridge and sit down to watch the game. It’s been on for a little more than an hour, so I start at the beginning and watch it in high speed, fast forwarding through the commercials and only watching when the Cowboys are on offense. It would be nice if real life were like this, wouldn’t it? Skip through the boring parts? Only live the highlights? I wonder what would happen if I could fast forward to this evening or tomorrow or next month? What will Gloria and I be doing then? Are we going to make it? It’s Sunday and she’s in the study and I’m in the living room, and though I know all couples have their routines, we weren’t always like this.
    I’m sure to you it seems like we’re the most obvious and boring couple in the world, two young kids from middle America who met in college and married too young. But it wasn’t really like that. After high school I had this idea I would move to the west coast and write screenplays and date actresses. I had no intention of getting married at all, or at least not for a very long time. But then I met Gloria and everything changed.
    She’d been dating Jack for almost a year the night I first saw her. It was the fourth of July and most of the student body was home for the summer, yet there must have been three hundred people at this party. Some fraternity house, I can’t remember which one. There was booze everywhere. Cases and cases and cases of beer, kegs stacked like barrels of oil, rows of cheap vodka bottles (an occasional Smirnoff or Absolut hidden among them), and more whiskey than I’d ever seen in my life. Plenty of food, too. Acres of pizza, bags of corn chips and potato chips, cookies, several boxes of Twinkies. I was moderately buzzed and craving sugar for some reason, so I took two of the little yellow cakes and smashed them together to make one big one. If you’ve ever been drunk you understand the logic. And just as I was about to take a bite of my creation, someone cleared her throat behind me.
    I turned and saw Gloria, blonde and tan and stunning, and felt my face flush red. She was one of those college girls so gorgeous that anything you did or said in front of them felt foolish. You never expected someone like her to approach a guy because she didn’t have to. The guys all came to her. They