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Years ago, before I knew her, my wife fell in love with a woman. Now she jokes about it. She does not say "in love." At parties, after she's drunk enough, she leans forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands cupped around her wineglass. Her shoulders are bare and brown. She admits then, for the pleasure of all, that she really wasn't cut out to be a lesbian. She says, smirking, "I never did like the taste."

My wife is a beautiful woman. Let us be clear about that. When she has something to say, people pay attention. They listen as they would listen to a famous film director or to a rebel leader helicoptered in from a country oppressed by cruel dictatorship.

She is a painter of sorts, my wife. She paints landscapes in a watered-down, impressionist style. She paints big-breasted mothers embracing waif-like children, and horses tossing their heads in heavy-handed sunsets. Shlock, to be honest. But these pictures sell. Maybe because you can hang them over a couch, and they don't really bother the room. I mention this only to illustrate that when my wife speaks it is not with any particular genius. She says what most other people say, but you listen, enthralled, for her beauty makes you believe that what is being said is wise or titillating, or at the very least, that it isn't dull. At parties I have seen men listen with rapt, shining faces to her tell a story about having her oil changed. You can see their desire like a flush of blood below the surface of their skin.

It doesn't bother me anymore. I have loved Matilda for many years, despite her beauty. You learn to leave your jealousy alone. What other choice to do you have? At first I almost went mad wondering whether she was faithful. Believe me, I understand that beauty is impermanent. I even went so far as to have an affair in order to stop up my fears. But that was years ago. Three, at least. We have had our troubles and found our way back. That time, Matilda went to France for a month by herself. She said, "When I get back I'll have made a decision." She also said, "you fucking bastard I wish you'd rot in hell." Anyway. Afterwards I found a snapshot of a man in a raincoat standing with his back to the Seine. At least I think it was the Seine. I never asked about him because I figured, well, that's what I get for going to a motel in Scarborough with a woman not half as beautiful as my wife.

Since I was a child I have wanted to confess. I had a friend in grade school who was Catholic and he told me all about the body of Christ and the priest and Hail Mary. "Can I come with you?" I asked. "You have to be Catholic," he said. So at supper I told my mother I was going to become a Catholic. "Like hell you are," she said.

As a boy I was guilty of the usual sins. I threw a stone through the dappled light of the yard and killed a crow. I stole ten dollars from my mother's purse. I stole five more dollars from between the cushions of my aunt's couch. And at night in the dark I recollected with shame and excitement a certain picture I had seen hanging at the garage where my mother took her car. After I killed the crow I went to the candy store and bought a bar of toffee. I sat outside on the curb and ate it, and later that same afternoon I came down with the stomach flu. Lying on the cool floor of the bathroom I could think of nothing but the dead bird tipped over in the grass like a bowling pin and the toffee clinging sweetly to the roof of my mouth. I was fevered and confused and in my mind I could not distinguish between the candy and the crow's death, so that as I vomited I thought there was a crow in me, and that its feathers were gagging up my throat, and that its eyes were still and staring black, like the eyes of an all-seeing God.

But this is not a story about a crow or about the ordinary trespasses of childhood. Who wants to hear me blab on about some damn bird? And really, who missed that bird after it was gone?

No. The story I want to tell begins one evening after dinner. Matilda was washing the dishes when she said, in an offhand way: "Oh, Charlotte phoned today."

"Charlotte?" I asked, lowering the newspaper. The name troubled me.

"She kept making noises about how it had been so long since we'd seen each other. So I thought, why not ask her up? It'll only be for a few days." At the bottom of the sink the cutlery moved with a sound of dragging chains.

"Charlotte?" I asked again.

"I'm sure I've mentioned her before - " Matilda put down a plate in the drying rack and half-turned in my direction. "You know, my quote-unquote 'lesbian lover'?" And she flexed the middle and index fingers of her sudsy hands.

Well, what are you to do when a woman arrives in your house with the intention of stealing your wife? For that's what was going on, I knew it from the moment Charlotte arrived. She was one of those tiny, curveless women who with the right hairdo and from a distance could pass for a ten-year-old boy. Her black eyes rarely smiled. She had a wide mouth, too wide for her face. She looked Mediterranean to me. I could see her slipping androgynous and olive-toned into the hot blue of a southern sea. "Haunted," I whispered that night while Matilda and I lay in bed and listened to Charlotte unpack her things in the next room. "That's what she is." "Well, she's been hurt," answered Matilda. "Hurt? Hurt how?" I don't like such vague, romantic phrases. "By love," murmured Matilda. I could feel her breasts pressed against my back. "You know, I don't think she ever got over me." I lay and listened. The sounds of unpacking went on for longer than you might expect. The dresser drawers kept opening and closing and her little slippered feet pattered back and forth on the carpet. "So," I said at last, as if it didn't matter, "how long is she planning to stay?"

Behold me: I am that new kind of man who has understood since infancy that he should never block the way of what a woman wants. Neither should he stand up over a woman, or make her feel threatened or afraid. My mother carried placards in the streets and made sure I comprehended at an early age all the crimes I might some day be guilty of. She was capable, in the words of my aunt, of "eating a man alive." As a small boy I took this phrase literally and figured, well, that must be what happened to my father.

I saw how Charlotte looked at my wife. I saw her small face grow strange with longing. It began that very first evening. Did she think I was an idiot? A fool could see that she had carried this longing about like a dead weight for years and that now it was starting to come alive again. It was blooming right there in my kitchen, as my wife chopped garlic in an apron that said "Don't Mess with the Chef," this woman's private hunger, it was opening itself up like some exotic jungle flower. The shame! I wanted to come out with guns blazing. I wanted to say, So you think I don't see?

Instead, I told another joke. "Okay, so there's this octopus..."

"Oh you'll like this one," chuckled my wife.

We ate dinner in the kitchen with the back door standing open. It was July and the air was warm. I sat with my back to the open door and the city night with its noise and its wild, impossible promises pressed in on me. Such nights make you wish you were still twenty-four. Matilda had set candles down the length of the table and in the low, flickering light she appeared flushed and happy. Charlotte looked like a character from a fairy tale, her black eyes staring, her wide mouth chewing. You know those little tricksters who come down from the mountains or out from the forests to steal away the bride or claim a first-born child? I pretended to drop my napkin and when I bent down under the table I saw that her feet didn't even touch the ground.

"Alright - " said Matilda, after she had finished eating. I was still pursuing a few rogue peas around my plate with my fork. She put her chin in her hands. "I want to hear about Spain."

"Spain?" I asked.

"Charlotte had a lover in Spain," amplona, where the bulls are."

"I've been there," I said. As I said this I saw a small room, bare except for a low dresser and a single bed. The bed was covered in a nubbly green blanket. There was one high window and it was open. The night outside that window was not unlike this night.

"So - " Matilda made her voice sound low and flirtatious. This is the voice that drives men wild at parties. But Charlotte looked at her with her melancholy eyes.

"I wouldn't exactly say 'lover,' " she said at last.

"I ran with the bulls in Pamplona." This is not entirely true. As a young man I went to Pamplona with the intention of running with the bulls.

"Why not 'lover?' " asked my wife.

"Well, for one thing he was impotent."

"Impotent!" Matilda sat back, surprised. "Impotent!" she said again, her grey eyes laughing.

"I fell. The crowd trampled me. Actually, it's lucky I survived." I insist on this lie. Even if no one's listening. It's a compulsion, really. Whenever someone says "Spain" or "Pamplona" or "bull," I trot out the same old story. The fact is, I lost my nerve and ended up watching the whole thing from that hotel window, high above the street.

"Impotent?"said Matilda again. "But what did you - I mean - " she giggled. "What did you do?"

That night I saw Charlotte in the room in Pamplona with the green bedspread, standing naked by the open window. I could count her vertebrae. Behind her a man was reclining on the bed. I was going to ask him where the bulls were but then I saw that he had hooves instead of hands.

The next day was Friday. In the morning I left Matilda and Charlotte together drinking coffee and went to the office. I am a copy editor at an educational publishing house. When I first met Matilda I still thought I was going to make it as a novelist. I think that's why she fell in love with me. But what can I say? There isn't one person living who hasn't been betrayed by a desire. Back then I lay awake at nights and dreamed up plot twists.

Anyway, I didn't want to leave them alone like that, in their pyjamas cross-legged with the sunlight spilling in. When I went past the window I could see Matilda's head and shoulders. But only the top of Charlotte's head was visible, that's how short she is. All day I was haunted by the image of that tiny sad woman crawling all over my wife.

I called twice. The first time Matilda answered and I had to think up an excuse.

"Ah, I was just wondering if I could pick up anything on my way home. For dinner I mean - "

"Well this is a surprise," she said.

The second time there was no answer at all.

I left the office early. When I got home Matilda was sitting on the couch with her feet tucked under her. She was reading a book. Recently she has started to wear reading glasses. This, and the few grey hairs I have found, are the first signs of our defeat.

She didn't look up. "Charlotte's in the shower," she said.

Sometimes I pretend that I've only just met Matilda, that I know nothing about her beyond her beautiful face and her slim, indifferent body. I pretend nothing has changed. That wind is still coming in off the lake. A gibbous moon still rides low in the sky. Someone has a guitar and is down there in the darkness, singing. And I am ten years younger and in love again and the future still burns about me with the brightness of what might be. I pretend this just as we are about to go to bed, and then it is with utter, self-destroying passion that I give myself up to her.

That evening I noticed a change in Charlotte. The night before her hunger had been desperate - with what wounded, wanting eyes she had looked past me at my wife. But this evening she appeared entirely content, like a cat after a kill. She leaned against the counter with her thin arms loosely folded, and for the first time she chatted with me amiably. All weekend I was tormented by her satisfied face. Worse was the way Matilda's beauty seemed with each moment to intensify.

You don't need to be a mathematician to put two and two together. But I kept my jealousy secret. It spread out like bare dark branches against a pale winter sky. It dug down like a blind burrowing creature. I should have killed that creature.

On Monday I went to work as usual and in the afternoon I faked a migraine and left at four o'clock. I didn't park the car as usual in the driveway, but left it at the end of the street. When I reached the house I crept across the lawn and peered in at the front window. The woman who lives across the street was out in a housedress watering her garden. When she saw me creep like that up to the window she turned off the hose and went inside. The living room was empty. A pair of Matilda's shoes were lying on the floor. They were the black ones with the high heels. Once, years ago, she wore those shoes with a maid's uniform I'd bought and she bent over and pretended to dust behind the couch.

I went around to the side of the house. Here the windows were higher up and I had to grab hold of the window ledge and hoist myself up. There was no one in the kitchen. Two coffee cups sat on the table. On a plate there was half a piece of toast left over from the morning. That piece of toast was like a sign of their guilt. The wall clock said four-thirty.

I dropped back down onto the gravel and leaned thinking under the window. Then an idea came to me. If I climbed onto the roof of the back porch I would be able to see into both bedrooms. I dragged the ladder out from behind the tool shed and propped it against the house. I tried to be quiet. From the height of the ladder I stepped without trouble onto the narrow, slanted roof of the porch. I reached up and held onto the eaves trough for support. In the yard next door a boy was digging a hole. He stopped and looked up at me. "Did your cat get stuck?" he asked in a loud voice.

The first window looked into the guest bedroom. I edged myself along and peered in. The bed was unmade and the room was empty. A pair of blue panties lay inside-out on the pillow. These panties had the same effect on me as the half-eaten piece of toast. I took a few more careful steps.

The boy was still watching me. "If your cat's stuck you can call the fire station and they'll come in a truck," he offered.

I gestured at him to be quiet.

The boy looked at me. My tie had lifted with the wind and was flapping in my face. "My dad usually wears old clothes when he does work on the house," he said, after a pause.

At this I let go of the eaves with one hand and made a gesture across my throat as if I were slitting it. This was meant to indicate what I would do to him if he kept talking.

"I'm just say-ing," said the boy. But he dropped back down onto his knees and resumed his digging.

I was almost to the second window. I thought I heard voices. The low murmured voices of women. I heard the squeeze of bedsprings. I stepped in front of the window. What I saw there impressed itself upon me in perfect, vivid detail. Charlotte was sitting naked on the edge of my bed. Her back was to me and it was like it had been in my dream. I could see the individual protrusions of her vertebrae, the prehistoric progression of her spine. This spine is like another side of the story, the side I can't put into words. Her shoulder blades jutted like the stumps of wings. I could see the top of her buttocks, the white, sagging folds of her elbows. In the doorway stood my wife. She was naked too. In her hand was a glass of water. The light from the window cut through the glass and little fragments of sun broke over her belly and breasts.

Her eyes met mine as I stepped into view. I wanted to yell but no sound came out of me. So I pounded on the window. And then for some reason I turned and jumped off the roof.

My mother and a man who played the harmonica conceived me in a stairwell in the early hours of a summer morning. My mother made sure I knew exactly how little my father meant to her. They had met only hours before in a bar around the corner. "He used a condom for Christ's sake," she said. "I certainly didn't expect - " I asked her what his name was. She paused and examined the fingernails of her left hand. "Something beginning with P," she said at last.

But remember that we, as boys and men, are seldom innocent. For instance, the time I killed that crow? I knew what I had done. In the instant I released the stone, I knew. Just as my mother must have known when that harmonica player whose name started with a P pulled back from her and did up his fly. Death and life weigh about the same. The stone turned through the shadows and hit the crow square in the head. It died instantly, I think. There were other crows in the yard, and the moment that the stone made contact they rose up cawing as if they guessed what I was guilty of. In the high branches of the mulberry tree they resettled with a coarse rustling of wings. So it was under their eyes that I walked through the grass and bent over to inspect my kill. I did not yet regret what I had done. I did not yet understand that death in connection to myself. I turned the bird over with a stick and poked the still-warm body.

So. I jumped off the roof of the porch and then I ran back around the front of the house and down the street to my car. I had twisted my ankle when I landed and so I limped a little as I ran. That woman was out watering her garden again and she watched me with narrowed, suspicious eyes. With the sun behind her I could see the outline of her fat thighs through the frail fabric of her housedress.

I sat in the car with all the doors locked and rested my forehead on the steering wheel. I didn't know what to do next. I thought of my wife. I thought of her bare torso and of the pale globes of her breasts. I saw the dark patch of her pubic hair and her nipples, pink like the inside of a shell. It was as if I had never before seen a woman without her clothes. I was a boy again, standing in the hall as my mother rose dripping from her bath. With my eyes shut I recollected each detail of her nakedness.

Finally I drove down to the beach and sat on one of those benches that looks out over the lake. By then it was evening. A man threw a stick and a dog chased after it. My rage had vanished. It had vanished almost at the moment that I jumped. Where anger should have been there was only dull indifference. Not caring is a kind of rest. I looked at the lake. Again and again the water reared back and laid itself on the shore. Take me, it seemed to say to the sand. And the sand said no, and no again. The water slipped back silver. Go away, said the sand. It cannot be, it said.

Night came. There must have been a sunset, but I don't recall it. Along the boardwalk lamps came on and formed pools of yellow light at intervals throughout the darkness. People strolled, alone or in twos and threes. On this soft night I could not belong to them, or they to me. I thought of nothing.

It was after midnight when I at last drove home. A couple lights were still on in the house. I kept driving. I drove around the block three times. Finally Matilda came outside and stood on the lawn. I could see her in the light that spilled from the house. She was wearing a long skirt and a blouse that buttoned all the way up to her throat. Perhaps these modest clothes were meant to indicate atonement, I don't know. I stopped the car. Matilda crossed the lawn with her skirt billowing up behind her and put her face against the window on the passenger side. "It's late," I heard her say through the glass.

So I got out of the car.

She touched the collar of her blouse. "I told Charlotte she could stay the night," she said. "There's a 9 am train. We - we both feel terrible." She seemed to hear her words and find them insufficient for after a pause she added, emphatically, "really."

I nodded.

"Well - " Mathilda shrugged. I guess she didn't know what she was supposed to do next. There was a long pause in which I looked at the pavement. My wife glanced back at the house. I imagine that Charlotte was there, watching us from a window. "Well, are you coming in?" she asked at last.

I didn't answer. I don't know why I didn't answer, why I couldn't answer, except that even the most common and reliable words sometimes slip their leash. But I could tell that this silence annoyed my wife. I could tell by the way she suddenly shifted her weight and made a very slight sound when she exhaled. "Coming?" she said again, and this time her voice wasn't softened with regret.

***

In another version of this story, I simply get back into my car and drive away. I don't say another thing to my beautiful, unfaithful wife. I don't have to. I drive out through the silence of the suburbs and into the greater silence of the country beyond. Out there the night is thorough.

But I am not that kind of man. No. I have been tamed and trimmed. Isn't that what you wanted? I look good in a suit jacket, and I'm happy to do the dishes. I won't get in your way. And isn't that what you asked for? A good man, one you didn't have to fear?

Only you forgot one thing. You forgot how one afternoon I threw a stone through the yard and killed a crow. You thought that would be an easy death. You thought, what's one crow in the grand scheme of things? But you didn't foresee how that death would stay in me. Or how it would lead to other deaths. Or how one day in Pamplona I would sit in a small, bare room while the bulls charged by below me.