Monogamy had its perks

There are planets that orbit two stars.

This was in my mind as I cast around for a metaphor, for a way to explain myself, traveling to meet up with a man who was not my husband, but with my husband’s full knowledge and consent. For a few months, I dropped out of my life once a week and into the snug burrow of Steve’s place on the ocean, on the bristled chin of a headland shaped like a pig’s head. At the beginning, I stayed overnight once a week, eating, fucking, talking, sleeping with our limbs entangled, or spine to spine, neatly. Rarely, we emerged from this hibernaculum; once we went to the grocery store, having run out of food. I was giddy when we surfaced, walking beside him in public, performing quotidian chores, standing close to him and brushing his shoulder with mine. All the shoppers kept to their own tasks, choosing bananas and comparing the price per fluid ounce on laundry detergents. Steve worried someone would notice the wedding band on my hand, the lack of one on his, and figure us out. I knew that no one pays that much attention to anyone else around them, but wished they would. If they chanced to glance at us, wouldn’t they see how luminous we were? How incandescent?

My phone figured out the pattern, and on the right day, would suggest Steve’s address to me unbidden, with a note about how traffic was light, and that it would take me 26 minutes to arrive. The trip back home the next day traversed the marshes, the coastal plain, and then climbed imperceptibly into the oak-hemlock woods where I live in a small Cape, Puritan white, clapboard and trim. Each time, on the drive home from Steve’s, I had a sensation of sloughing, as if he were coming off me like a dust cloud. I couldn’t focus on the news or a podcast much in those months, so I listened to music, coming and going, on my travels. Sometimes, as I approached either place, I would wish the drive were a little longer. Long enough to finish the song, long enough for me to stay in the liminal space between, not to have arrived yet, to be fully and only with myself. I ferried between places, serving as both passenger and ferryman, and I wondered who was placing the coin in my mouth to pay my passage.

Whichever space I enter, the stars I orbit, there is a man there. Sometimes they would converge, Steve coming to our house, and we all shared a meal together. I would stand in my kitchen while Steve cooked for us, and Witt stood in the doorway, both diffident, keeping a respectful distance from me for the other’s sake. Two male animals, sniffing. I was the vertex between them, the hinge it opens and closes on, watching them, wondering who’s thinking what, who is right now imagining how the bodies fit together, the parts, the sex. After dinner, Witt would head up to bed while Steve and I sat together on the couch, or had respectfully muffled sex in the basement. There is no accepted structure for this. Judgment is heaped on this. We tell friends, and some suck their teeth and tell us they don’t understand. Some cry, convinced the bonds of our marriage are dissolving. Some grin.

One morning at home, I looked down at the table where I was drinking my coffee and saw an opaque, sparkle-rimmed circle. It was the dried splash where my miserable tears had fallen the night before, when Witt looked at me and said, weakly joking, “So I’m just the old pair of shoes?” and I sobbed, having spent the entire day holed up with Steve, the shiny new pair that pinch.

Melancholy bleeds in at both ends. Our stories, our songs, our poems, are hyperbolic, singular. One and only, a solitary pinnacle, once in a lifetime. How can I convey the dimensions of either love without this language? But to deploy it would be faithless, untrue. I orbit them both. The character of every love is particular. For a while, I am buoyant with Steve, but sadness starts to overlap the gunwales of my little boat. First, it is the ordinary sadnesses, the list of things I can never be to him; there are decades of history we cannot share, and, at best, a few decades left that we can. We won’t know each other fifty years when it’s all over, no matter what. I can’t be his high school sweetheart, first love, present for the afflictions visited on the crucified teenage heart. We won’t ever be together in a darkened ultrasound room watching the shade of the quickening organism we begat. Then there are the absurd sadnesses, like when, while listening to him speak of a now ended relationship, I grew mournful that he would never speak wistfully of me that way, because I was certain we would always cleave to each other, that I would never be his past lover.

The weeks pass and the sadness laps at me higher, more often. I hold myself in reserve, keeping a perimeter. I think of my soul, my heart, my self as the glass cabinet in my house where I keep curiosities: turtle shells, birds’ nests, a rabbit skull, a knuckle of driftwood barnacled and burred. I fear he will rummage in it if I admit him fully, that I will find it a mess, and not be entirely sure whether something is missing—a vertebra or feather he pocketed and spirited away. I cannot make myself trust him. His imagination wanders, he is never slaked, spent. He seeks novel attentions, begins making awful decisions, admits he’s been callous. Traveling between houses, I feel like a trapeze artist, released into space. When I reach Steve’s, I brace for his grip, his catch on my forearms. Our timing is not practiced; my shoulders jolt in their sockets when we meet. Going home again to Witt, I slip from the air easily, painlessly, full trusting. I don’t look down.

Steve makes more terrible decisions, risking not my heart only, but denying me my bodily autonomy and safety. We miss our catch, and I freefall. I strain the metaphor, thinking for several days what Witt is then. If he is the catcher on the other trapeze, then there’s nothing for him to do as I fall. And if he is the net below, then we were never flying together to begin with. If he is one of the doubled stars, and I am hurtling, centripetal, out of orbit, he cannot follow me.

At night, I worked on the sweater I was knitting for Witt over the early months of my relationship with Steve. Every stitch is a knot made by my fingers, a whole, man-sized garment made by organizing a continuous strand against entropy. And then I have it, the metaphor. Lying in our bed that night, we are each whole, separate, continent. We are the trapeze artists after all, but it’s our marriage that is the net. We made it, knotting it sure at each corner, in the more than two decades we’ve trusted each other, loved, been lovers.

Steve is learning the knots now. He didn’t have a history like mine, but he’s a quick study and we’re making our own net now. The sadnesses are new and different ones than they were early on. My wishes are impossible—that I be entirely with Witt, and entirely with Steve. Instead, among the three of us, someone is always missing someone. I am always missing one of them. If this arrangement had been described to me at the outset, I don’t know if I’d have accepted it. Instead, it happened bit by bit, knot by knot. Relationships declare themselves regardless of what constraints or labels you think you can place on them. I could not keep things casual with Steve. I wanted the whole thing. We are still finding out what shape things will take.

I trust the net better now, wherever I am in the air, whatever formation. We fly, sometimes joined, sometimes solitary, and if one of us falls, the net will receive us, give beneath our weight, ease us back again, shaken, but determined again to climb the ladder up to the sky.