by Kim Wright
(6/6/07)
When you were a child you read the superhero books, just like everyone else, and you decided that the power you would most like to have is invisibility. This would have to be the ultimate freedom, you thought, far greater than the ability to fly or walk through walls. This power that would let you move through the world unjudged and unseen.
What you couldn't have predicted is that some day you would have that power. It's easy. Get married, give birth, put on certain clothes and drive a certain kind of car and then, somewhere just before the age of forty, you awaken one morning to discover that your childhood wish has been granted. You've become invisible. You can walk down the street holding hands with your lover and no one notices the handcuffs at your wrists. You have connected his left wrist to your right and you move through the city like this, unnaturally joined, first him pulling you and then you pulling him. You marvel that no one seems to notice. But then no one ever really notices anyone, do they? Having an affair will teach you this, if nothing else.
You go into a nice restaurant. You ask for a banquette and you sit there, side by side, thigh to thigh, your left hand holding one side of the heavy leather menu and his right hand holding the other. You order things that are easily cut. When the food comes you eat slowly with your left hand and you think later that you must remember this for the next time you try to lose weight, that if you eat with your left hand it slows everything down and you find that you are not as hungry as you first thought yourself to be. You find that you can make do with a little less, that it does not vex you when a bite of salmon or a triangle of red pepper slides through your fork. He feeds you at some point. It is awkward, not like a movie. His tine jabs the corner of your mouth, and when he raises the wine for you to drink the rim of his glass clanks against your teeth.
On the walk back, that Springsteen song comes into your head. The lyrics are sad and they come to you intact, here on these darkening and windswept streets of Philadelphia. And you wonder if his kiss is faithless or if he will leave you soon, because you have to wonder these things, don't you, walking here as you are in an unfamiliar city, chained to another woman's husband? Anyone would tell you, if you asked them, that this would have to end badly, but you do not ask them -- and besides, you know your kiss is faithless too. The odds are just as likely that you'll be the one to leave. The doors slide open as you approach the hotel lobby.
Later, up high in your room, you pull him toward the bed. And here, in the center of this big white mattress with its pillows of every size and shape, you lift your arm. It's curved slightly, like a question mark. He reaches toward the bedside table. And here, just at the point where most people would bind each other, just here, with his clothes half off and your clothes half on, he slips the key into the lock and releases you.
