I turned away from the laptop and slipped my finger into my bag, found my tin, put the pills I knew I’d be needing—two Percocet, courtesy of my dentist, who was still prescribing them for the wisdom teeth he’d taken out six months ago—underneath my tongue. Then I called Sarah.
“It’s great!” I said. I’d meant to sound cheery, but I thought I sounded closer to hysterical.
“I told you it was NBD,” Sarah answered. I took a deep breath.
“I guess I’m just worried about what Dave’s going to think.”
“Ah.” Sarah’s boyfriend, an architect ten years her senior, was unswervingly supportive and, as far as I knew, completely unthreatened by a girlfriend who wrote about threesomes and bestiality for a living.
“But it’ll be fine,” I reassured her. “Hey, I should get going on my post. Call you later?” We hung up and I scrolled, idly, to the bottom of the Journal’s story, where twenty-three comments had already appeared.
I clicked, and began to read. LOL the one in the pink looks like Jabba the Hutt. No wonder she needs sex toys! “But I’m not the sex-toy writer,” I said, as if my computer could hear me. I shook my head and kept reading. I’d hit that . . . the second commenter had written, followed by three blank lines that I scrolled past to read, . . . with a brick, so I could get to the hot one. The third left behind the topic of my looks to consider my credentials. This is why the terrorists hate us, added commenter number four.
I closed my eyes. I told myself it did not matter what a bunch of strangers who, clearly, could hardly read and who would never meet me had to say. I told myself that it was ridiculous to get upset by comments on the Internet . . . It wasn’t as if the people could reach through the screen to actually hurt me. It wasn’t as if I was real to them; I was a name, a picture, a thing: Feminism, or Women Today. I told myself that I looked just fine and that the people who’d written those hateful things were probably idiots who played video games in their parents’ basement, putting down their joysticks only long enough to spew a little hate online and then masturbate bitterly.
Dave’s computer gave a soft chime, the same noise my laptop made when an e-mail arrived. Reflexively, I toggled to the e-mail screen and double-tapped the link that would let me read the incoming missive. Which turned out to be for Dave, from one [email protected]
/* */. Happy birthday!
Okay, I thought. Totally benign. Except that when another e-mail arrived, I clicked it open again, almost without thinking. This one was from Dave, asking, We still on for lunch?
Absolutely, wrote back L. McIntyre. I ran through lists of male names that began with “L.” Larry. Luke. Lawton. Lonnie. Then I scrolled to the next line. I wouldn’t miss it!
Hmm. Possibly still innocuous. Dave’s reply, See you soon, was also perfectly proper. But, in addition to his usual e-mail signature—David Weiss, Reporter—he’d used an emoji, a winking yellow smiley face, the kind that subliterate fourteen-year-old girls would text to their crushes, the kind Dave and I rolled our eyes at and had vowed to never use. “We’re word people,” Dave had said, and even though I was more of a picture person myself, I’d agreed with him that these silly symbols were the height of the ridiculous, turning adult conversations into puppet shows and ruining the English language. Except, if I could believe what I was seeing, here was my husband, using emojis, with someone named L. McIntyre.
Don’t do it, a voice in my brain mourned. The computer chimed again, and here was L’s reply, another smiley-face emoji, only hers had lipstick and long eyelashes.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” I cried.
First things first. I pulled my hair into a ponytail and literally rolled up my sleeves. I’d never acquired the ninja-level Googling skills that Examiner reporters took for granted, but I didn’t need them. A quick search revealed that L. McIntyre was Lindsay McIntyre, and she was an assistant United States attorney, and she had gone to UPenn and law school at Temple and she looked—I would ask Janet to confirm this—like a younger, paler, mousier version of me. We both had shoulder-length hair, and similar features, only my face was rounder and her complexion was lighter. But there was a definite resemblance. Except she was single. And young.
It was just after ten o’clock in the morning, but it felt like my wet-the-bed wake-up call had happened to a different person, possibly a century ago. I was considering another pill but decided that I didn’t have the luxury. No matter what was going on with my husband, I had work to do.
I sat in front of the laptop. I opened a new window and typed a single word: Exposed. The word seemed to expand and contract, throbbing like an infected tooth at the top of the page. I think my husband is having an affair, I wrote, then, as if typing them might make it real, I erased the words, then wrapped my arms around my shoulders, sitting in front of the computer and rocking. I thought about calling Sarah and asking for a sick day, but I knew that, today of all days, with traffic probably at an all-time high, there was no way I could afford to go dark.