top of page

What Might Not Happen

by Jan Chu

When I walk into our bedroom on that December night, ready to shake the snow off my sensible corduroy skirt and melt the icy fog with the warmth of home, what is it about her expression that will make my chest seize up, that will make my scarf feel like a noose, that will turn my hair to snow from that day forward, that will bring about the end of time?

​

She’s never been a great keeper of secrets, in either sense: she’s never had many to keep, and she’s never been good at keeping them. 

Is that why a glance at her, at the curves of her body, standing there at the top of the stairs, will tell me everything, while time has stopped, before either of us can move?

​

She rarely goes fully nude. Even for bed, she wears a long T-shirt, and a pair of pajama bottoms with a drawstring at the waist. This time, I will be surprised that she is wearing only a pair of leggings and a sports bra against the chill. They will be my leggings; whatever other heartache two women in love must face in our lives, we at least have the consolation of being able to share clothes. I will be watching her heart beat, and I won’t immediately notice the fading flush on her neck. 

​

When I enter our bedroom and she glances, faster than I can blink, at the closet door – the closet! could anything be more prosaic, more absurd, than hiding a lover in the closet! – will I immediately grasp the full gravity of the situation? Will our minds, naked to each other, know? Will she realize that in the moment that time stopped, I have absorbed, suddenly and staggeringly, the long-term implications of what she has done? Like a medieval saint in the howling darkness, I will experience terrible visions. I will see the future – legal battles over our property, over the custody of the two younger children, over the cat, the fish. In my gut, I will feel, like a sucker punch, the loss of enormous sums of cash, the money we will have to spend on lawyers, on real estate brokers, on mediators, on counseling. I will already begin to experience, physically, guilt for being able to afford such things when so many others can’t. I will still think of it as “our” money. I will be in shock, but in this tiny fraction of a second, when time has begun again, I will be able to remain calm. It will be important to me that I can remain calm. 

She won’t try to prevent me from opening the closet door, although she’ll spasmodically, reflexively stretch out her hand for a moment.  She will stop, and let it fall. I will – already, yes, that quickly – I will already become furious. Furious at the years of retirement she will be cheating me of, with our savings all spent on this disaster. I will think of myself: menopausal, sick, alone, poor.

​

What I won’t know, of course, is whoever the young man in the closet might be. Will he be a stranger to me, shivering, and terrified? I will pretend not to know why: surely just my face, a woman’s middle aged face, tortured with emotion, could not be so frightening. Maybe he will be slim and pale, his hairlessness an affront to my furry legs and pits. I hope I will be able to stop myself, but perhaps just barely, from spitting out “A fucking man!” – and I know I will weep with shame that I even want to say it. 

​

Wait. Stop. All of this might never happen. 

​

There was, after all, a secret my wife kept. She didn’t keep it for very long. Twenty-five years ago, not long after we said we were different, that we would commit to each other no matter what society said, and that monogamy was real and precious, she went on a business trip. 

When she got back, she told me, very fast. She blurted it out the minute we were alone. I taught myself to think of it as the last gasp of her wild, cold-hearted single years. I had conversations with myself, silent, intense, and reassured myself that it was nothing to do with me, that it meant nothing, just as she said. And I locked it away, in cold storage. But I did so too quickly. 

​

We never speak of it now. This 50-year-old woman, who shops for extra-large cardigans, whose tits sag more than she wants to admit, has very little to do with that twentysomething thrill-seeker in her jaunty scarf, that charismatic, irresponsible kid with a trendy buzzcut, who was just getting used to the idea of being committed for the rest of her life, who was attracting attention at her first real, professional job, who was excited, enormously excited, to travel for work for the first time, so fucking excited that she got down on her knees a thousand kilometers away from her soul mate and sucked a man’s cock until he came.

​

After time starts again, when I open the closet door, I won’t blame this young man, who has been thrust out of the warm covers of our marriage bed and into this cold reality. My wife will have told him some version of the truth: that her marriage is important to her, but that she has been living in limbo, that she hasn’t truly been satisfied physically in a decade, that I have frozen her out, that she is flexible in principle but that she has never felt so alive as when she’s with him. 

​

Instead, I will ask the marvelous youth, with his magical, life-giving schlong, very simply to get dressed, and to go, to go away. I will be so very proud of controlling myself, of responding coolly, of not breaking down. My wife will be grateful. I will once again freeze time, carefully and neatly, and I will divide my mind, and I will observe myself, my imaginary self, screaming and hitting anything within arm’s reach, letting inhuman, guttural noises rip from my throat and spraining my shoulder trying to rip apart my wife’s favorite button-down shirt, but none of this will happen outside my divided mind. 

​

Maybe none of it will happen at all.

​

But when the pale young man has packed himself back into his briefs and his sweater and his coat and his gloves – my unrelenting, unlustful gaze as he does so will be the most I allow myself to punish him – and when he has left - I will turn to my wife.

​

I will look at her, at her face as full of anguish as my own, and everything will rush again. I will remember every wonderful moment we have had, all her little gestures, the gifts and the text messages with hearts and smiles made of ASCII characters the way we did then, the messages she had to type in number by number on an old Nokia phone. 

​

I will remember the first time she saw our youngest after she’d been hit by a bicycle messenger walking back from the park and gone to the hospital and ended up with only a broken rib, but after she’d seen her face covered with blood, but known that it was not life threatening, and when she held me tightly, too tightly, for longer than I would have believed, and cried as I had never seen her cry. I will remember the time we carried a new mattress up nine flights of stairs because we couldn’t fit it in our tiny elevator, and that the first thing we did on that mattress, before we even hauled it onto the bed frame, was to fuck as fast and almost brutally as we had ever done, and I will remember how we collapsed back onto it and laughed, then, until we hiccoughed, and how we congratulated each other, full of hilarity and innuendo, for “moving the mattress” and how we could still mention “moving the mattress” to this day and instantly know what it meant, but how we never seem to mention it nowadays –

​

And then, I will –

​

And God help me, I will love her.

Jan Chu is a digital native, who first published on Telnet in the 1990s. Based in Hong Kong, Jan writes mainly political allegory and science fiction. 

bottom of page