Lit Riffs by Matthew Miele Read Free Book Online Page B

fact that would have seemed absurd to me at the beginning, if some time traveler had come back to whisper it in my ear. The break was mutual—mutual enough to give it that name—and I’d be helpless to guess who is the more scarred. We won’t be friends, but we were never going to be. Dissolving a secret affair is eerily simple: A. and I only had to quit lying that we didn’t exist.
    Did I tell you about “The National Anthem”? I don’t think so. This was the first night we stole together from her husband, the first intentional rendezvous, at a bed-and-breakfast outside Portland, Maine. A. always traveled with a Walkman and a wallet of CDs, and that night, as we lay entwined in a twee canopy bed, she insisted on playing me a song, though there was no way for us to listen to it together. Instead she cued it up and watched me while it played, her ungroggy eyes inspecting me from below the horizon of my chest, mine a posture of submission: James Carr singing “The Dark End of the Street.” I recognized it, but I’d never listened closely before. It’s a song of infidelity and hopeless love, full of doomed certainty that the lovers, the love, will fail.
    “I’ve got a friend who calls that The National Anthem,’” she said.
    I gave her what was surely a weak-sickly smile, though likely I thought it was a cool and dispassionate one. She didn’t elaborate, just let it sink in. I didn’t ask who the friend might be—the unspecificity seemed as essential to the mood between us as the dual rental cars, the welcoming basket of cookies and fruit we’d ignored downstairs, or the silent fucking we’d enjoyed, our orgasms discrete, in turn. To press one another back into the world of names, of our real individual lives, would have seemed a rent in the shroud of worldly arbitrariness that enclosed our passion. Of course this was morbid, I see it now.
    “There’s a Bob Dylan song,” I said then. “‘Ninety Miles an Hour Down a Dead End Street.’ I think it’s a cover, actually. Same thing: We’re on a bad motorcycle with a devil in the seat, going ninety miles an hour down a dead end street…’”
    “Yes, but this is ‘The National Anthem.’”
    By refusing the comparison, A. put me on notice that this wasn’t a dialogue, but a preemptive declaration. She’d be the one to manage our yearnings, by her foreknowledge of despair. Fair enough: her jadedness was what I’d been drawn to in the first place.
    Of course you know, M., because I’ve told you stories, how we rode her jadedness—our bad motorcycle—down our own dead end street. It wasn’t kept anonymously cute, with baskets of cookies, for long. The perversity of the affair, it seems to me now, is that under cover of delivering her from the marriage she claimed to be so tired of, A. and I climbed inside the armature of that marriage instead. By skulking at its foundations, its skirts, we only proved its superiority. However aggrieved she and R. might be, however dubious their prospect, it wasn’t a secret affair, wasn’t nearly as contemptible as us . Certainly that can be the only explanation for why, in a world of motels and with my own apartment free, we so often met at her place—at theirs. And I think now that though I mimed indifference whenever she predicted immanent destruction, I’d lusted to destroy a marriage, that I was far more interested in R. than I allowed myself to know.
    But I don’t want to make this letter about A. You’ve written at length about your uncertainties in your own marriage—written poignantly, then switched to a tone of flippancy, as though to reassure me not to be too concerned. Yet the flippancy is the most poignant of all—your joshing about your vagrant daily lusts in such an unguarded voice makes them real to me. Having never been to Japan, nor met your wife and child, I’ve been guilty of picturing it as some rosy, implacable surface, as though by moving from New York to Tokyo and entering a