Field Notes

“I want to sleep with someone else,” I said. “Once. With your blessing. While I still feel like it.”

Paul set his mug down. The kitchen clock ticked. He looked at me the way he looks at a gauge that has just moved.

“All right,” he said. “I need two days.”

He took them on the ferries. I didn’t push. On the second night he came in with his coat still buttoned and stood in the doorway of the bedroom.

“Yes,” he said. “And I want to hear about it. All of it. Write it down, if that’s easier. I want the notes.”

I pulled the small notebook out of my bag and opened it on the quilt between us. The first page was blank. He touched the corner with one finger, dry and careful, and then he smiled.

“Fieldwork,” he said.

“Three coffee dates,” I said. “They’ll know the situation. Nobody gets lied to. I choose. You get the report.”

“I’ll be home for the reports.” He leaned over and kissed my forehead. “Don’t pick a boat guy just to be polite.”

The first coffee was on a Tuesday, a window table, rain on the glass. He was nice. He asked if I wanted the corner seat and he meant it. His name was Alan. He talked about his boat for most of an hour, the varnish, the bilge pump, a weekend he was planning on the sound.

“Do you sail?” he asked, once.

“I sample mud,” I said.

He laughed, kindly, and went back to the bilge pump. I drank my coffee and listened, and when we stood up he shook my hand.

In the car I wrote two words. Pleasant. No.

Paul read them that night in bed, glasses on, the lamp low. He got as far as Pleasant and snorted.

“You gave him a whole adjective.”

“He paid for his own coffee. He was decent. I am not spending a night with a bilge pump.”

He took the glasses off, wiped his eyes, and put them back on. “Next.”

The second one was on Thursday, same shop, a man so handsome the barista forgot my order. He talked about a gallery, a trip, a jacket he’d had made. He did not ask me a single question. Not my name beyond the first minute. Not what I did. Not why we were there, though I had told him in the message, plain as a soil report.

I finished my coffee. I said, “I’m going to go.”

“Already?” He looked surprised, as if the hour belonged to him.

In the car I wrote No. and underlined it.

Paul read that one standing at the sink, glasses sliding down his nose. He laughed until he had to take them off and set them on the counter.

“He didn’t ask you anything.”

“Not one thing.”

“And he was handsome.”

“Very. It didn’t help.”

He put the glasses back on and looked at me over the rims. “We’ve never talked this much.”

“We’ve talked.”

“Not like this. Not with you choosing out loud.” He closed the notebook and handed it back. “I like the notes. Keep them honest. I can take honest.”

The third coffee was a week later. Terrence was already there when I came in, a paper cup in front of him, another waiting. He stood, not too fast, and he didn’t try to take my coat.

“Tea,” he said. “You said tea in the message. If you want coffee I’ll start over.”

“Tea’s right.”

We sat. He had a quiet way of filling a chair. He asked what I did, and I told him. Soil. Core samples. The way a field holds water after a wet spring, and the way it doesn’t. I heard myself go on. Ten minutes. Then twenty. He didn’t fill the gaps. He asked one question that proved he’d been in the first answer, and then another.

“And your husband,” he said, when I stopped. “What does he think.”

“He knows. He asked for the notes. He reads them at night with his glasses on.”

Terrence nodded, as if that were an ordinary fact about a marriage. “Then tell him I said hello.”

I looked at his hands on the cup. Broad. A nick on one knuckle. A piano mover’s hands, I thought, and then I thought: I am noticing his hands. I put my own around the tea and felt the heat come through the paper.

“I might,” I said.

“All right.” He didn’t reach. “If you want another coffee, say so. If you don’t, that’s an answer too.”

We talked until the shop started stacking chairs. Outside, the street was cold. He walked me to the car and stopped a step back.

“Good night, Monique.”

“Good night.”

I sat with the engine off and the notebook on my knee. The entry came out longer than the others. I wrote that he had listened. I wrote that he had asked about Paul. I wrote hello in his words. I wrote that I had looked at his hands and noticed that I had looked. Then I drove home with the radio off.

Paul was in the kitchen, late shift still on him, glasses already on for the small print of a manual he’d left open. I set the notebook in front of him and poured water I didn’t drink.

He read. He turned the page. He went back to the top and read it again. The clock moved. He didn’t laugh.

“Paul.”

He kept his eyes on the page.

“Are you all right?” I said. “We can stop. The whole thing. I mean that.”

He looked up. His face had gone red, high on the cheeks, a man of fifty caught at his own kitchen table. He took the glasses off and held them, and it took him a while to find the sentence.

“I read it twice,” he said. “The other ones made me laugh. This one sat me down.” He turned the glasses in his hands. “I wanted you while I was reading it. I still do. That’s what it did. I didn’t expect the notes to do that.”

I went around the counter. The tile was cold under my feet. I put my hands on his face, warm from the blush, and I felt how still he was trying to be.

“I’ve never loved you more,” I said. “Not once. Not at the start, not on any ordinary Tuesday. Right now.”

He let out a breath that shook. “Say it again later, when I’m less red.”

“I’ll say it when you’re red.”

He picked up the pen. His print was small and square, the way he labeled a log. Under my last line he wrote one of his own and turned the notebook so I could see it.

Recommend proceeding.

I laughed, and the laugh broke into something warmer. I kissed him across the counter. He kissed me back. His hands came up into my hair. I held his face and then his wrists, and he caught my hands and didn’t let go until the kiss ended and we were both a little out of breath, foreheads touching over the open page.

“Thursday,” I said.

I got my phone off the counter. He watched me, glasses back on, the blush not quite gone. I found the hotel, a quiet one downtown, a room with a kettle and not much else, and I put my own card in.

“I’m booking it myself,” I said. “You’re going to want to be home by eleven.”

“I’ll be home.”

The confirmation came up. I typed the note I would send in the morning, short, no performance in it: Thursday. If you still want to.

Paul closed the manual. He didn’t close the notebook.

I hit send.