Mike was having an affair; Janet was certain of it. She had been suspicious as far back as the Sundance Film Festival. Through the winter and early spring, the suspicions had multiplied into certainty. She knew all the signs. She watched Oprah and Dr Phil. The guests on Oprah in particular, and the books Oprah recommended, made the details of her own life seem wretchedly trite. The long hours Mike put in at work (where he was often unreachable, supposedly in editing or dubbing rooms with his cell phone off); his increasing emotional distance, his lack of interest in sex. There were other clichés, also: the telephone hastily hung up when she walked into the room, the callers who disconnected when they heard her voice. She tried star 69-ing them; but they must have had caller ID. They didn’t pick up the phone and the read out on her spy-box was ‘anonymous’: star-67 versus star-69: such was the thrust and parry of privacy technology.

She tried to talk about it, she tried to puncture the integument of his blank cordial smile. The most recent attempt was two days ago, over a hasty breakfast:

“Is something wrong?”

“No, no, I’m fine. More coffee?”

“I mean it Mike. Is something bothering you?”

“Hey, I’m sorry Pinky. I’m just really slammed right now. We’re trying to get Jim’s movie into theatres by June and we don’t even have a usable sound mix yet. Plus I’m trying to figure out how much per print I can ask for in ad money and how many theatres we can get for the opening week-end, and dividing that by the page rates for the newspapers in fifty different cities.” He shrugged. “People always say ‘do the math’, until you actually start doing it. Then their eyes glaze over.”

She had smiled at him, then, and patted his wrist. “But no one ever said ‘Do the math out loud,’ Mike.”

“Good point.”

 He finished his coffee in a single gulp; then he was up from the table and out the door.

And she still knew nothing.

So today she had decided to confront him directly.

They were having breakfast. It was a bright, sparkling day in March after a week of rain; her favorite weather in this bleak desert city. It was a day for calling sick at work, a day for long drives and beach picnics. But such ordinary idylls seemed more and more remote: postcards from someone else’s life. Her life was cheerless mornings with the glum workaholic who was becoming more like her absentee father every day. It was this helpless sense of disconnection that gave her the strength to speak up.

She pushed her coffee cup aside, and leaned forward with her elbows on the table.

“Who is she?”

Mike looked up. “What?”

“Who is she? What’s her name? I’d really like to know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Is it a secretary from the studio?”

“Is who what?”

“Is it that Lucy Talmadge person? I know you think she’s pretty.”

“Yeah, she’s pretty. She’s also married.”

“So are you.”

“Well, there you are.”

“And where is that, Mike? Fill me in.”

“I don’t understand this conversation. You’re here. You’re married. So am I, and so is she. We’re not having affairs. We’re all sitting around having breakfast. Drinking coffee and accusing each other of infidelity.”

“No. You’re not accusing me. Because you know that would never happen.”

Mike was disoriented. Normally they had their awful conversations at night. He couldn’t think coherently at this hour. He needed two or three more cups of coffee.

Janet was watching him with near-sighted suspicion, as if he was a speck on the table. Was he a crumb or a bug? She had the fly swatter clenched in her fist, waiting for a movement. Superstitious dread skittered through him: she could read his mind. She knew all his secrets. He had covered the tracks that led to his interior with the craft of a true woodsman; but he was being hunted by dogs. They trampled his futile camouflage tricks and bounded across his false trails, yanked forward by their noses, crazed with the stink of illicit romance.

But that was impossible. There was no way Janet could know anything about Rachel Scanlon. He didn’t talk in his sleep or write in a diary. There were no phone records, no unexplained Visa bills: he had made one local phone call (to someone else) and no purchases. There wasn’t even any time unaccounted for. The fact was, he was almost never alone. He had an airtight alibi for every moment of his day, except the commute to work. And he wasn’t having sex in his car: no matter how bad the traffic got on the 405, it never stood still that long.

All Janet had was a feeling. She knew something had gone awry in her marriage. By denying it Mike would be making her feel paranoid. It was so obvious: it was a slime on every surface. It was a noise like those leaf-blowers; a smell like unwashed clothes; denying it was crazy. But admitting it was out of the question.

It was private, it was unreal: a blizzard in a snow globe. He was trying to be a good husband, just as he had resolved to do at Sundance. He was ignoring whatever feelings he might have had and hoping they would go away. It made sense; love was something that occurred between two people. It wasn’t a solo act. Unrequited love was an oxymoron. Masturbation wasn’t making love. Coming clean and treating this aberration seriously would be like applying for veteran’s benefits after being injured in a Civil War re-enactment. This wasn’t Gettysburg; this was just a bunch of middle aged-suburban history dorks wandering around in baggy costumes pointing toy muskets at each other. It was a joke. It was early male menopause. It was bogus. It was thinking that Monica and Chandler were really your friends. It was expecting to be cheered up by a MacDonald’s Happy Meal. It was feeling rich in a rented limousine.

The solution to it was denial. Mike believed in denial. It had always worked for him. His grandmother had died three years ago; he still didn’t admit it. His mother had denied she was dying until the morning she died. The night before she had been reading scripts, thinking about making a comeback. A TV show about cancer survivors; a sit-com where she was going to play the crusty old aunt. He loved her for that.

If he could successfully deny to himself that he had fallen in love with his favorite screenwriter, he would be easy to stonewall his wife. Besides, they had other problems to talk about.

“It’s the job,” he said. “That’s what you’re really jealous of. I think you’d prefer it if I really was slipping off to some motel somewhere. You know how to compete with another woman.”

“That’s ridiculous. I’m not competing with your job.”

“It’s where I go when I’m not with you. It’s what I do when we’re not together. It’s what I’m thinking about when I’m not listening. It’s what I dream about; and I mean actual dreams. I’m on a movie set every night, back with Doug Troy and Rick. Usually it’s a disaster. But sometimes I’m actually making it work. It’s what I aspire to. It’s what I regret. It’s my past from before I met you, it’s what I was running away from when we got married. It’s my present even when we’re together and it’s my future whether we’re together or not. It’s my life. It’s the life I chose. It’s my priority. It has demands, you can’t do it part time. You can’t even do it full time, forty hours isn’t enough. That’s why there’s so much divorce in Hollywood. People don’t have time for the people in their lives. I don’t blame you for being jealous – you’re right to be jealous. But what you lose track of is, it’s a means to an end.”

“And what end is that? I get thanked in an Oscar acceptance speech? I’ll pass.”

Mike sighed. At least he had managed to change the subject. Not that the new subject was much of an improvement.

“You get a hell of a lot more than that,” he told her. But he wanted her to tell him. She knew the answers as well as he did. It was like explaining to a stubborn five-year-old why we stop at the red light and go at the green. “We’d be rich. We’d be successful.”

She looked down, into her empty coffee cup. She wasn’t buying it. “No,” she said. “You’d be successful. It’s your life, Mike. It’s not mine. All it means to me is more parties with people I hate and more screenings of shitty movies I can’t walk out of, and a bigger house to take care of and you getting more arrogant and preening in the spotlight and more time alone to practice the piano and realize that I’m not good enough. The life you’re talking about … it would just be this life, with leather instead of vinyl and gold leaf on the cracked china. I’d get to drive a Miata. But it doesn’t matter because I have no place to go.”

“Pinky, that’s just not true. You’re not thinking clearly about this stuff. Money is freedom. It’s – mobility. You don’t have to live in some creepy trophy house and go to bad movies. You can do whatever you want. You can fly home and go to Tanglewood, you can quit your job, you can go back to school, we can travel, I can take big chunks of time off and we can just be together. Okay, you’re never going to be a concert pianist? So what? You can still enjoy playing. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? You can take serious lessons with the best people in the world, you can spend all the time you want doing it. And that’s the important thing, isn’t it? You can’t sit around sneeering at success and people preening in the spotlight then be suicidal because you’re not going to be playing Beethoven sonatas with Yo Yo Ma. In the old days everybody played an instrument. There was no TV so they just did chamber music. Do you think all those people wanted to be on the Time Magazine list of – whatever it is … the ‘Thirty Most Talented Musicians Under Thirty’?”

Janet looked up with a rueful smile. “It would have to be the ‘Forty Most Talented Under forty’ now.”

“The point is, you’ll be able to do what you want instead of what somebody else is telling you to do. Your time will be your own. You can sleep late or just read War and Peace on the beach, or do walking tours of Rome or study Yoga or whatever, it doesn’t matter. You get to choose. That’s what ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the human race has wanted since we crawled out of the slime six million years ago. You can’t get that and then complain about it. Locusts will come. God will send plagues and you can’t even blame him. No one likes an ungrateful child. Come on, you have to admit it sounds good.”

She smiled again. “But I’ll have no excuse to be miserable.”

“That’s true.”

“If it happens. If you wind up being successful.”

“Right. But this is how you do it. This is how you get there. Nobody gives it to you. And even if they did you’d still have to wait on line for months. Like those geeks waiting to see the new Star Wars movie.”

“I know, I know.”

She reached over and took his hand.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

“And there’s no other woman?”

“Absolutely not.”

Janet let out a long breath, released his hand and sat back, smiling.

Denial worked.

There was no other woman; and his mother might still land a part in that cancer survivors TV show.