Tort

A Story

Archie Benjamin was never there, but he saw it all anyway: It’s a late morning in July, and his wife is staring out the window of an empty apartment overlooking a river. The sun glints off its flowing surface, and on the other side is a rocky bank and the rise of a mill building the man she works for owns, a former factory that is now an apartment complex, each unit with a high ceiling and exposed oak beams. The man she works for owns the building she’s standing in as well, and beside her is her assistant, Jim. He’s eight years younger than she, his hair already gone, but he has dark skin and a lean runner’s body and they’re both pausing in their inspection of this newly vacant unit to take in the river, that and the deep red of the brick building beyond, how it is in shadow, which makes it look so very old. Which is how his wife, only forty-seven then, will tell Archie she had been feeling for years—old. And lonely. She will tell him that too.

And maybe if she had not been feeling that way for so long, and maybe if Jim had not just left his wife, his face that July morning soft with a resigned sadness that moved her, and maybe if he had not always been so sweet to her, asking her via text or email Are you conquering the day?, and maybe if he hadn’t put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close enough that she could smell his aftershave and the clean cotton of his shirt, his body so warm and solid beside her, and maybe if her own husband had not been working twelve to fourteen hours a day for months on his “big cases,” which left her feeling small and discarded, and maybe if Jim had not been so lonely himself, turning to her and smiling with those sad eyes, then maybe she would not have returned that smile with a kiss and her coworker would not be kissing her back and their clothes would not be coming off as if something larger than the two of them was pulling the fabric away from their skin.

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