“Shh,” she said. “Just turn around. Let me hold you.” Cherilyn scootched up to Douglas from behind, and the heat of their bodies beneath the covers, the stick of their sweat, was almost too much for him to bear. He kicked a foot from under the blanket. He fluffed the pillows under his head.
“You know,” he said. “Biologically, men aren’t really built to go twice in a row.”
“I know,” Cherilyn said, and gently ran her fingers through the patch of hair above his ear to calm him. “I was just enjoying it. Take it as a compliment.”
“Our hormone levels drop pretty drastically is all that I’m saying,” Douglas told her. “It’s not about interest. You know that, right? It’s about science.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” she said.
Douglas closed his eyes as Cherilyn traced her fingertips down his neck and to his back, where she began drawing unknown shapes along his shoulders. “How about this,” Cherilyn said. “Pop quiz. Are you ready?”
Douglas sighed. “I’m ready.”
“Did you know,” Cherilyn asked him, “that those Arabian kings, like we saw in that book, have these things called harems? And that all those women are kind of like royalty, like princesses?”
“I did know that,” Douglas said. “Though that definition may be a bit problematic.”
“I was wondering,” she said. “How does a person get chosen for something like that?”
“You know,” Douglas said, “maybe if I just got a drink of water.”
“Oh, Lord,” she said. “You did great. Let’s get some sleep.”
The two of them lay spooned together like question marks after that, each trying to match the other’s breathing while Douglas stared across the room, the flickering night-light in the bathroom looking to him like a lonely candle left to peter out in a cave. After a while, Cherilyn took a deep breath and said, “I do love you, Douglas,” and rolled over on her back to cool off.
Douglas did not reply but instead feigned sleep, slowing his breathing to become almost imperceptible. He continued to do this even as he felt the slight shaking of the bed beside him a few minutes later, even as he heard the quiet sounds of his wife’s unmet desires that, for some reason, on this night, he did not feel the right to interrupt.
But these were yesterday’s problems.
Douglas had new quandaries to consider.
For one, when he tried to leave for work that morning, his car wouldn’t start. After he showered and got dressed, Cherilyn still asleep under a mound of pillows, Douglas grabbed the trombone for his lesson after school and went to put it in the back seat of his car, the door of which was ajar. He then noticed the overhead light was out. And, sure enough, when he sat in the driver’s seat, the engine wouldn’t turn. Crime was so uncommon in the heart of Deerfield that Douglas didn’t even suspect it, instead figuring that he’d likely not shut the door hard enough the evening before, another small failing to add to his ever-growing litany. Rather than waking Cherilyn up to tell her, Douglas took her keys and her Subaru.
On the short drive to school, Douglas smelled the faint odor of tobacco coming from his wife’s air-conditioning. They had both been social smokers when they met, mainly buying a pack on a whim after they’d had a drink or two and still felt young and invincible, but they’d decided to quit that whole business on their wedding day. Cherilyn was known to occasionally stray from this pact, and the scent that sometimes followed her actually comforted Douglas. It was a quick memory of their courtship, a reminder that his wife was a casual and imperfect being, complete with her own version of a small, secret life. A life similar, Douglas realized, to the one he himself had carried on in the form of a slick and golden trombone, his name on a flashing marquee. So, who was he to judge? Instead, he turned down the radio and took in the scent, recalling all the good things he felt about their lives together, and whistled to himself as he drove, a lesser-known composition by Copland.
When the smell of tobacco faded, Douglas turned down the air-conditioning and opened the compartment on the dash to see what she was smoking these days, to see if she had her customary pack of skinny Benson & Hedges stashed in there, but she did not. In it instead were a number of what he first thought to be receipts. The papers were blue, however, and folded neatly together, not in the way a person disposes of trash. So, Douglas became curious. He pulled into the school parking lot and removed the small slips from the tray. The paper was waxy like that of a gas-station pay pump’s and, after he parked, he unfolded the slips from the middle. He had seen something like this before, he sadly realized, from the student who claimed he would grow up to play with plutonium.
At the top of the first slip was the outline of a man, arms and legs spread like da Vinci’s model. On his chest, in dark blue ink, was a double helix: the drawing of DNA. Underneath this was the word DNAMIX.
He then saw his wife’s name, Cherilyn Mae Fuller, her maiden name, and Douglas found himself the reluctant master of a puzzle. Why he hadn’t put together that his wife had tried this ridiculous new machine at the store, and why he didn’t ask her about it the night before, became to him a looping wonder, a reason to second-guess his every move from there out.
Listed beneath her name was a series of numbers in incredibly fine print, as well as things such as eye color, hair color, and potential height. This is when Douglas recalled everything from the previous night, triggered by that word potential, which Cherilyn had said was the whole point. He remembered her fork and its carefully speared pasta, the way dimples showed up in her thighs when she sat Indian-style on the sofa, and the way she held him close with her ankles when he had finished making love to her that first time.
Her potential height read 5'6", and Douglas thought that was about right. The potential number of children she could have read 12, which seemed to Douglas outlandish and insulting, especially since they were childless after several early years of trying. And then Douglas saw another category, which listed Potential Life Station.
It read, in bold print: ROYALTY.
Douglas shook his head. How Cherilyn could put any stock into this contraption unnerved him. It seemed totally unlike her and yet, as with many surprises, he could not tell if this delighted or depressed him. He moved the first sheet aside and looked at the one behind it, an exact copy of the former. Again and again, all in all totaling ten different times his wife had entered this machine. Each one of her responses read the same: Royalty, Royalty, Royalty. One of the final slips said SURFER, but Douglas saw that this was not his wife’s reading at all, that it didn’t even have a name at the top. Still, he cross-referenced the series of small numbers of this readout with Cherilyn’s and they were not a match. Why would she subject herself to something like this? he wondered. What was she hoping it would say? And who even knew how this thing worked? It was outlandish. He looked at the Surfer readout again and saw that it had been soiled, likely discarded, as Douglas felt he might do with anything that told him to jump in the ocean. Still, he folded all the slips back up and put them in his pocket. He then walked into the school building, strolled down the hallway to his classroom, and found Rusty Bodell swatting away at a drone.