PROMPT - a secret

I didn't know she was home. The apartment was quiet. Her bags weren't in the usual place beside the sofa. So I thought I was alone. I sat on the sofa and settled my feet on the ottoman; there's a fresh issue of Architectural Digest on top and I shoved it to one side. There was an eerie quality to the quietness, but I supposed it's the gray of the skies reflecting through the windows.

I shut my eyes and for the first time in so many days, I felt I could fall asleep. I was on the verge of this sleep when I thought I heard faint sobbing. I opened my eyes and got up. The sobbing came from Jeanna's work room. I walked slowly towards it and the sobbing gradually became more audible. It was Jeanna.

I pushed open the door and I saw her kneeling down on the floor, in front of the lowest drawer of the tallboy, the drawer that was always locked and only she had the key. Her head almost touched the floor, her back to me, her shoulders moving as she sobbed. I heard her speak, as if in prayer. Then I heard the words "I love you!" I noticed she was hugging something.

"Jeanna? What's wrong, darling?" I reached down and touched her shoulder.

She jumped in surprise. She turned her face towards me, eyes red, face wet with tears. Then I saw what she was holding. An old frame. It dropped from her hands in her panic. The glass broke into small pieces. I reached for the light switch and flipped it on.

The man in the photograph was smiling. The photograph was old. This was the secret hiding inside that locked drawer. I looked at Jeanna's face. She had wiped the tears and I saw that her eyes blazed.

"What are you doing here at his hour? Do you not know how to knock?" There was no mistaking the coldness in her voice. She was a different person than the Jeanna I knew as my wife.

"Well," I started. "I heard a noise, sobbing really. I didn't know you were home." I could feel her intent gaze as I spoke, my eyes focused on the photograph on the floor, at the smiling man. "Who is that?"

She darted towards me. I heard broken glass cutting into flesh, her feet. There was blood on the floor. Her eyes still blazing, she started to pound my chest with her fists. "You have no right!" she yelled. "Why can't you leave me alone? You have no right to see me like this! You're not supposed to see me like this!"

She pounded and pounded and I stood there. Now I understand. All these years, there's a man in a locked drawer in my house who actually had her affection, her heart. All these fifteen years. She had it well hidden in that locked drawer. I respected her privacy and even when she had left the drawer keys dangling from the lock that one afternoon in May, I fought the temptation to open it and find out her secret. Yes, I had often seen her, on her knees, staring inside that drawer. To me it looked like she was saying some kind of devotion to a hidden diety. But she said she loved me, so many times, and I believed her, even when sometimes I knew the words were empty.

She stopped pounding and fell on the floor. The pieces of broken glass unkindly cut at her knees, her legs and her hands. She wailed as she looked at her hands, blood running like little rivers down her arms.

"Who is this person, Jeanna?" She reached for the photograph, palm right smack on the man's face, now all bloodied. "Goddamnit, I demand to know who this is!"

"No one," she said. "No one!"

"But you're crying because of him. Why?" I thought of the "boyfriend from another lifetime who had died"; at least that's what she had always told me. What was his name? Erick? Jandrick?

She held the blood-stained photograph to her chest. On the floor, broken pieces of glass scattered like diamonds and rubies.

"I loved him so much. He was the only one. HE IS THE ONLY ONE," she muttered. "And now he's gone. He died last night."

It doesn't make sense.

"I thought you said Jandrick died a long time ago."

"No, I lied. He's been alive all this time."

And I thought I was competing with the memory of a long ago dead boyfriend.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked. That was when I felt the stab in my heart. It had been there for a long time and I only noticed the pain now. Maybe I had died, too, a long time ago and I just didn't know it. It was then I realized my marriage was a farce; or maybe there was even no marriage at all.

I left the room. I pulled out an overnight bag from the hall closet and went inside the bedroom. I threw in some clothes. I refused to stay in this house of pretend love and dead emotions.

As I opened the door, I heard her say, "Where are you going?"

I looked at her and said, "When I come back in two days, I want you out of here. Bring the photograph with you."

I started to leave. "And oh, yes, you should call your lawyer."

I walked out and didn't look back.