14
Winston
Lynn faded from my life like an unfixed print exposed to direct light or as the vibrant colors of some fish dissolve into dead grayness when they are caught and pulled from the water.
Her work now entailed much more travel than ever before, with trips to the west coast or New York several times each month. More and more frequently I found myself alone in our penthouse in Cambridge, resentful of what at the time I thought was her obsessive career. When she was at home, she was always exhausted. She never refused me sex, but it was no better than necrophilia, and gradually I stopped bothering.
I deeply regretted selling the house in Tiburon because I would have surely gone there. I doubt very much that separation would have shocked her into change, and divorce would have inevitably followed. I find myself wondering if that might have been best. But such thinking is futile. I did sell the house. I did stay in Cambridge. And we did stay together, if peculiarly.
My life become one of memory and fantasy.
Memories of days, nights, experiences, with Julie and Anne, and other women, some of whose names I could not even remember, some of whom I was surprised to realize I had known twenty or thirty years earlier, were incomparably more vivid than Lynn's infrequent, wraithlike presence.
I masturbated to those memories considerably more than I had sex with my wife.
And I masturbated to rented videos, seeking out those which featured women who bore some resemblance to Julie and Anne and Lynn in bondage or being sodomized.
And I desultorily cruised the Internet, occasionally sending out the images of Lynn, but not often. I did not take any new pictures of her. That was far beyond our sex life, which consisted of my turning her sleeping body on its side in the mornings on those weekends she was home and sticking my cock in her unresponsive cunt for a few insipid minutes while I fantasized about someone else far away and long ago.
I found myself thinking that perhaps this is all that most people ever get out of life. I realized that I was no longer a young man, yet I could not accept that this was all that was left. It would have not gone on much longer, even before that evening when I came back with some Thai food for my solitary dinner during one of Lynn's California excursions and found an Email from the man I knew of as 'B.'