She set the timer on the treadmill for twenty minutes and dialed up a speed of 2.5 miles per hour, a comfortable walk. Her only goal was to have shown up at the gym and done gym things to demonstrate that she was the kind of person who took care of herself because she mattered, regardless of whether she could wear Lululemon leggings without calling attention to those extra pounds that wouldn’t go away no matter how many salads she ate.

            As she paced, her eyes wandered to the free weights, where only the ambitious ventured, and then to a particular man who was cute but not unattainably handsome.  After watching him for a bit, she decided to name him Dave, because he was working out in a Dave Matthews Band shirt. He was striking enough to deserve a name, the way a shell on a beach is striking enough to pick up. You look at it, see if a relationship develops, and then feel that tingle in your breadbasket that signals conversion of some formerly indeterminate piece of the environment into mine. Dave’s biceps looked like softballs as he curled the heavy dumbbells. He wasn’t bodice-ripper ripped, but ripped enough that you would mention it if you were describing him to your BFF.

She saw Dave squat, dropping the dumbbells to the floor with a clang, and then sit on a padded bench to recover. His eyes were focused down, as if there were a bug crossing the floor in front of him. She felt like a voyeur, hiding in his closet, waiting for him to undress. He had a manly face with a dash of feminine vulnerability in the eyelashes and a shock of black hair so thick he must shampoo it with Miracle-Gro. She had black hair, too, but fine, not coarse like his. What would their children have? Her hair or his? The boy should have his, the girl should have hers. It would be a thing people would remark upon.

She imagined this Dave coming over and introducing himself on some lame pretext, like Hi I’m Dave. Did we go to the same high school? She would call him David and from that moment forward she would never call him anything else.She would become the only person in world who could call him David, except perhaps his mother, a way of marking him with her scent, delineating his relationship with her as different from all other relationships he’d ever had. On another level, she’d be exercising control over him so that, beneath appearances in which she allowed him to strut the way a man wants to, David would subconsciously understand that this relationship was co-equal from the get-go. She would praise David’s fitness, contrasting it with her own need to lose a few pounds, and he, without thinking, would blurt I like women who look like real women!  Then he would blush, embarrassed to have shown his cards so quickly. She would hold David’s eyes for a moment, the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, letting him know she knew, letting him know it was okay, but he would continue to apologize as if it were about him objectifying her. Fine. She would pretend along with him. Buy me lunch and we’re even, she’d say. David would grin at his unexpected luck. They would agree on a time to meet at the little Mediterranean restaurant near the gym. Years later, it would become the story of how they came to have their first date. In recounting it to their friends, the story would never be the same. David’s versions would have him increasingly smitten in each retelling.  In her versions, she would alternate between remembering herself a little smitten with him and coy about it or miffed at his impertinence but pleased after he accepted her challenge and it worked out so well.

She watched as Dave rose from the bench and carried the dumbbells to the rack, thoughtfully returning them to the correct slots. She bet that Dave was the sort of guy who never missed a day of work, probably some sort of mid-level manager with a bright future. She imagined having a flat tire, phoning David, then apologizing for disturbing him at the office. No, don’t call a tow truck, David would insist. He would dash to wherever she was, and she would sit in the car, smiling as she watched David change her tire in the pouring rain, ruining his pants and dress shirt. But then, when she gave him a new suit for his birthday, they would share wine in front of a roaring fire, unable to finish the bottle because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. David would pick her up, carry her to the bedroom, and she would be light as a feather in his muscular arms, whether or not she’d managed to lose those extra pounds. His brown eyes would be merry as he whispered in her ear this is really what all that training in the gym was for!

Her gaze followed Dave as he went to a different weight bench, one with uprights for doing bench presses, and placed a barbell in the upright supports. She watched him systematically load stupendously large plates on each end of the barbell. Then he reclined, wiggling between the uprights, and reached up to grasp the barbell. He lifted it, groaning just a little, and slowly lowered it to his chest, then pushed it back up, his face becoming red. He did it again, settling into a rhythm of up and down. She imagined David having that kind of rhythmic strength in their marriage, as life added weight plates of responsibility to the family barbell – a home and a mortgage, the first child, then the second. David would work long hours to advance his career and make a name for himself so he could realize his inner potential and so they could afford private schools (Catholic or secular? They would go round and round on this), music lessons, braces, and a mortgage on a bigger home. Yet he still would find time to coach their son’s soccer team and drive their daughter to piano lessons. But on their anniversary, David would insist that they deposit the kids with the grandparents and slip away somewhere for a few days, maybe a cabin near Asheville or a beach in Bermuda, and work be damned!

 She watched as Dave struggled on his last rep to press the barbell high enough to return it to the supports at the top of the upright, but he managed. He lay on the bench, breathing slowly, his eyes closed, his shirt wet with perspiration and hiked up above his waist, exposing his navel – he was an outie – and a hint of definition in his abs. His legs were spread so that there was a little opening between his workout shorts and his inner thigh, nothing improperly visible, just mysteriously inviting. She imagined the basement in their second home, part of it converted by David into a workout room, and she would be descending the steps with glass of lemonade for him and find David sprawled out, just like that. She would assess the situation, decide what he needed. Lemonade and more working out? Someone to tell him he’d done enough? Her hand sliding up his thigh, the first bar in a song of surprise sex? Her decision always would be the right one, because she would know David better than he knew himself.

She watched Dave wiggle out from under the weights and sit up. He stood and began unloading the barbell, carefully returning each weight plate to its proper place in the storage rack for the benefit of others who would bench press after him. David would be that way, careful, always thinking ahead, starting a 529 plan for the kids’ college education while they still were in kindergarten, buying enough life insurance, making sure there was gasoline in the gas can for the lawnmower.

Some random guy, far more overweight than she was, joined Dave at the weight

bench. Dave’s face lit up. She couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but Dave’s face softened. Socializing agreed with him. Men were too linear and purpose-driven. They needed time to relax now and then, especially someone who worked as hard as David would. She would make it her self-imposed duty to guide David to his me time, giving him the permissions that he wouldn’t give himself. She would fix brownies for his poker night group and make sure a case of beer was chilled for them to drink while they smoked their smelly cigars. She would buy David that rod and reel he’d circled in Field & Stream. She wouldenroll him in that fantasy tennis camp with retired pros in Florida. On their tenth anniversary, she would insist that they fly to Wimbledon, where David could watch a stupid ball batted back and forth, enthralled, while she watched David, her body thrumming with contentment, Mother Teresa doing a good deed.

The overweight guy left, and now Dave was eyeing the kettlebells. But no, that wasn’t what he was eyeing at all. It was thegirl, over by the kettlebells, bending over, her ass up in the air like McDonald’s golden arches. She could see that sort of thing happening to David after the marriage, too. Given that the basement would have a ping-pong table and a couch and TV for the kids, there would only be room for a weight bench and maybe an elliptical machine, so David would keep up the gym membership. He would be at the gym one day – no, one night when she was out of town on a trip with the kids to visit her mother – and he would be lonely, exercising to take his mind off missing her, his anchor, when a hussy would bend over the kettlebells and wave it in his face, planting the idea in his mind, then bending over again the other way to show off her cleavage, as if the skanky top wasn’t enough already.

Would David resist an opportunity like that? She would have tried to keep herself up, but with diapers to change, and a house to take care of, and a full-time job to boot, she would barely keep her head above water. Even David, with his feminine vulnerability, was a man, and to men, sex and love were different things. Men didn’t go to strip clubs because they loved the woman in a G-string – they loved the boob job she was shaking at them. David would tell himself it wasn’t infidelity because it was just sex, just this once, a fling that wouldn’t mean anything. But once the hussy got her talons in David, she wouldn’t let go. There would be a second time, then a third, and it would become routine. David would start slipping around, downplaying the moral significance of what he was doing to something not much different than sneaking a cigarette, more than offset by his contributions as a provider.

She would notice a change in David’s behavior. He would pass it off as pressure from work, inventing some stressful situation in the office he knew she would be unable to verify. His lovemaking would change, too, becoming more urgent. Initially, she would welcome it as a re-quickening of desire for her. Then she would notice that it didn’t feel right. It would be as if he had something to prove. She would never dream that it was because he had something to hide. And finally, on the fated day, at the appointed hour, the lurking abomination curtained in shadows would leap into the broad daylight of her innocence and stare her in the eye.  

It wouldn’t be because she’d spied on him. She could never spy on David. What was marriage but the ultimate gift of trust? And it wouldn’t be that one of her friends had spotted them together at a restaurant, because they would have been careful. Careful David, so careful about the life insurance, so careful about gas for the lawnmower, and so very careful about betraying his wife.

The hussy would be the one who slipped. It would be a text or, God forbid, a sext, sent when David was separated from his phone, taking his morning shower, she still in bed, reading the Sunday paper, sipping coffee, content, secure, having a blessed day. His phone would be on the bedside table, and when she heard it buzz, she would pick it up, mistakenly thinking it was her phone because their phones were identical because they’d bought one of those packages where the whole family got new phones plus a deal on the monthly charge for the first year.

And there it would be. At first, she wouldn’t understand. Maybe it was spam, some phishing ploy, like the Nigerian Prince always giving away $7 million dollars in broken English to random email addresses. But then it would sink in. She would feel pain knife through her midsection, the knotting of her stomach muscles. When she heard the shower turn off, she would return his phone back to its place on the nightstand, and when David came out of the bathroom, naked as a jaybird and with a face as guiltless as a newborn, she would summon a smile, something any woman can do in an emergency if she has to, a necessary survival skill in a patriarchal world.

For days she wouldn’t mention what she’d discovered. Each time he left the house on another purported errand – he’d be going to the hardware store a lot for reasons he never could quite articulate – she would smile, holding back the tears, thinking of the children. She couldn’t tell her girlfriends, because they would say cut off his balls and call an attorney. Finally, when the kids did an overnight with one of the grandmothers, she would confront him. David wouldn’t deny it. He would cry, as if he were the victim, and beg her to forgive him. He would promise that it would never happen again.

She would insist that they go to counseling. The counselor would be an attractive and intelligent woman, earnest, caring, who would try to appear neutral but secretly would be on her side. Counseling wouldn’t work, though, because trust, once broken, can’t be restored. After putting it off and putting it off, finally she would make the call to the attorney and her life would become a cliché, a trope, a line in a twangy country song. She would be just another single mom waiting at the mailbox for a pittance of child support. David would remarry. The children’s new stepmother would be the very hussy who’d destroyed Daddy’s marriage and broken Mommy’s heart.

The treadmill slowed, signaling that her twenty minutes had expired. She stepped off, leaned on the handlebars for support, and looked at Dave. He was swinging the kettlebells up in the air, then down between his legs, not a care in the world. She shook her head. You think you know someone.

She turned, not looking back, and walked out of the exercise area. As she pushed open the door to the women’s locker room, she thanked her lucky stars that she’d dodged a bullet. There was no hurry to lose those extra pounds.

This story by Mike Wilson appeared in Apeiron Review, Spring 2020