The Anniversary Choice

Forty years. That's how long Mildred and I have been married. I did the math again in the shower that morning, like I do most mornings lately, and it still came out to forty. We met at a community college dance in 1981. I was twenty-two, she was twenty-one, and she asked me to dance before I could even work up the nerve to ask her. Six months later she proposed. She beat me to that too, and I've never once regretted letting her.

The early years were good. I mean really good. I won't go into details because our bedroom business is our bedroom business, but we were young and we couldn't keep our hands off each other. Then came the kids, the mortgage, my thirty years as a security guard at the plant over on Route 9, and things settled into a rhythm. A comfortable rhythm, mind you. We still held hands at the movies. We still kissed before bed. But somewhere along the line the kissing got shorter and the holding got more like leaning, and neither of us said a word about it.

I figured that was just how it went. You get old, you slow down, you watch your shows and go to sleep by ten. Retirement had made it worse, if anything. We were in each other's pockets all day with nothing new to say.

Then last Tuesday at breakfast she set down her coffee cup and looked at me over the top of her glasses.

"What are we doing for our anniversary this year?" she asked.

"Same as always, I figured. Dinner at Rosa's. You get the lasagna, I get the chicken parm."

"We're not doing that."

I put down my fork. In forty years Mildred has canceled maybe three plans in her life, all of them funerals. "We're not?"

"We're not. Friday you're going to put on the good suit, the gray one, and the blue shirt I bought you last Christmas. And I'm handling everything else. All you need to know is be ready by six."

"Millie, what did you do?"

"Nothing yet. Something's going to happen Friday. That's all you get." She picked her cup back up and hid behind it, but I could see her eyes over the rim and something in them I hadn't seen in years. It made me nervous and it made me curious in about equal parts.

The rest of the week dragged. I asked her twice more and got the same answer. Be ready by six. She was cheerful about it too, humming while she did the dishes, which she hadn't done since the kids were little. I started to wonder if she'd booked us some kind of couples retreat. Mildred had gone to a wellness thing upstate about three years back, right after she retired from the library, and came home talking about meditation and drinking water with lemon in it. It didn't stick for her, but maybe it stuck for someone she met there, and maybe that someone ran a retreat now and my wife had signed us up for a weekend of trust falls.

Friday came and I did as I was told. Gray suit, blue shirt, my one decent tie. When I came downstairs she was waiting in the hall in the red dress she'd worn to our son's wedding, and I'll tell you straight, it stopped me on the third step. Her hair was done and she had on the little earrings with the pearl drops, the ones from our tenth anniversary.

"You look beautiful," I said. And I meant it, but even as I said it I heard how it sounded, like something I was reading off a card.

"Thank you, Harold." She smiled and took my arm. "Now come on. We're going to be late."

We drove out past the mall, past the Walmart, into one of those quiet subdivisions with the mid-century houses and the big shaded lots. I figured we were lost until she pulled into a driveway beside a low house with a flat roof and huge windows glowing warm yellow. Music was coming from inside, some string quartet or other, and there were cars parked along the curb.

"A party?" I asked. "Whose party?"

"Ours. Sort of. Come inside and don't ask questions."

Inside it wasn't a house anymore, or it didn't feel like one. The furniture had been pushed to the walls and the rooms were hung with paintings and sculptures on pedestals, dim lamps here and there, that classical music coming quietly out of speakers somewhere. A couple other guests wandered from piece to piece with wine glasses. Some kind of private exhibit thing.

"Mildred," I said, "you know I don't know anything about art."

"You don't have to know anything. Look at what you like. Skip what you don't." She squeezed my arm. "There's one piece upstairs I want to show you. Come on."

She led me through the rooms, and I have to admit some of it was pretty good. There was a bronze of a woman leaning into wind that I could have looked at for an hour. We went up a narrow staircase to the second floor, where the lighting was even dimmer, and stopped in front of a tall canvas of two figures dancing under a streetlight.

"Remember that gym?" she said. "Our first dance?"

"I remember stepping on your foot twice."

"Three times." She laughed, and it was the laugh from 1981, and something in my chest went tight.

Then she turned and took both my hands in hers. "Harold. I have something to tell you, and I need you to hear the whole thing before you say anything. Can you do that for me?"

"I can try."

"Three years ago at the retreat I met a woman named Yasmin. We've stayed friends. We talk. And a few months ago I told her some things I've never told anybody, about us, about how I've been feeling. About how much I still want you, and how badly I want you to feel wanted too. Not the polite kind of wanted. The real kind." Her hands were shaking a little in mine, and so were mine. "I asked her here tonight because I want us to try something together. All three of us. If any part of that makes you sick, you say so right now and we go home and it never comes up again and I will never be sorry I asked. But I've been carrying this around for months and tonight is our fortieth anniversary and I couldn't think of a better night to be brave."

I stood there looking at that painting of the dancers and my mouth was dry. I'm sixty-two years old, retired, bad knee, and my wife of forty years was asking me the wildest question anybody had ever asked me.

"Is she here?" was all I managed.

Mildred's face did something between hope and fear. "Downstairs. She's been waiting while I talked to you."

"Okay," I heard myself say. "Let's go meet her."

She exhaled like she'd been holding her breath since Tuesday. "Okay. Okay. Harold, thank you." She kissed my cheek and we went down the stairs together, slower than we needed to, both of us stalling a little.

Yasmin was standing by the bronze of the woman in the wind. She was taller than Mildred, dark-haired, in a long green dress, and she was forty-five, which Mildred had mentioned on the drive and which surprised me because she carried herself like a woman with no age at all. She was a yoga instructor; she'd started that after her divorce, and I could tell just from how she stood, straight-backed and easy, like her spine had never once complained about anything.

She turned when she saw us and smiled, and Mildred made the introductions. "Harold, this is Yasmin. Yasmin, my husband."

"Harold. Finally." She stepped in close and kissed my cheek, and I mean properly, her hand coming up to rest on my shoulder, her lips warm and unhurried, staying a beat longer than a hello kiss between strangers stays. When she drew back her hand slid off my shoulder slow, like she was in no rush to let go of anything.

"Hello, Yasmin," I said, and my voice came out about half its usual size.

"Mildred told me you'd be nervous," she said. "She was right. But she also told me you're a good man, and I believe that part already."

Behind her, Mildred was watching the two of us with her hands folded, and I caught her expression in the low light. She looked young. She looked twenty-one again, at the top of the staircase, deciding to ask me to dance.

Mildred came over and put her arm through Yasmin's arm, and the two of them stood there like they'd rehearsed it, which knowing Mildred they probably had.

"Yasmin," Mildred said, "why don't you take Harold to see the alcove at the end of the hall. It's quieter back there."

"An alcove," I said. "There's an alcove."

"There's an alcove," Yasmin confirmed, and she held out her hand. "Come on, Harold. I don't bite unless somebody asks nicely."

I looked at Mildred and she nodded, and I took Yasmin's hand. Her palm was soft and her grip was sure, and we walked down the hall past two more paintings I couldn't have described to save my life, to a little nook with a bench and one lamp and a window looking out on the dark yard. Classical music was coming from somewhere, low, some piano thing.

Yasmin sat on the bench and patted the spot next to her, and I sat, my knee popping like it always does.

"So," she said. "Mildred told you everything?"

"She told me everything. I'm still catching up."

"Do you want to?"

"That's the question, isn't it." I rubbed my palms on my trousers. "Forty years I've been faithful to one woman. It ain't the faithful part that's bothering me. She asked. That's the part I keep coming back to. She asked me."

"And what do you want, Harold? Not what does Mildred want. You."

I thought about it honest. "I want my wife to look at me the way she looked at me in 1981. And she was looking at me that way upstairs. So yeah. I want to. God help me, I want to."

"Then come here," she said, soft. "Can I kiss you?"

"Yes," I said, and I got it out before I could talk myself out of it.

She leaned in and kissed me, and it wasn't a peck and it wasn't shy. Her hand came up to my jaw and she kissed me deep and slow, and I hadn't been kissed like that since, well, since Mildred used to kiss me like that, and I felt forty years fall off me like a coat. Somewhere in it I heard footsteps and I knew Mildred was standing at the mouth of the alcove watching us, and instead of scaring me it did something else entirely.

Yasmin pulled back an inch. "Your wife is watching," she whispered.

"I know."

"Does that bother you?"

"No, ma'am. It does not."

She smiled and kissed me once more, quicker, and stood, and held out her hand again. Mildred was there when we came out, and her eyes were shining and her cheeks were pink and she took my other arm, and the two of them walked me down the hall like I was something being presented.

At the end there was a door, and behind it a back room, dim, with a wide couch and candles somebody had already lit. Somebody had planned this. I looked at Mildred.

"How long have you been planning this?"

"Since spring," she said, not one bit ashamed. "Harold, can I take your jacket?"

"You can take the whole suit if you're careful with it. It's the only one that fits."

Yasmin laughed at that, a real laugh, and Mildred said, "Stand still then," and started on my tie.

She worked the tie loose and then the buttons of the blue shirt, one at a time, and she wasn't hurrying. Her fingers brushed my chest and I felt it all the way down. Yasmin came up behind me and slid the jacket off my shoulders, and then Mildred had the shirt off and my trousers open and she was down on one knee pulling them over my feet, and Yasmin's mouth was on the back of her neck, kissing her, and Mildred made a small sound I hadn't heard from her in decades.

"There she is," Yasmin said against her neck. "There she is."

Mildred got my trousers off and my shorts after, and there I stood, sixty-two years old and naked in a candlelit room with two women, and my body doing what bodies do when the situation calls for it, no arguments from the old fella at all.

"Oh," Mildred said, looking up at me from her knee, her hand warm around me. "Oh, Harold. There you are."

"Where'd you think I'd be?"

She stood and kissed me, and it was her kiss, my wife's kiss, the one I'd have known blindfolded, and while she kissed me Yasmin sank down onto the couch cushion in front of me and looked up.

"Harold. I'd like to use my mouth on you. Yes?"

"Yes," I said. "Please, yes."

She took me in hand first, one slow stroke, and then her mouth, warm and wet and unhurried, and I grabbed the couch arm because my knee wanted to buckle. Mildred kept kissing me, my mouth, my jaw, my neck, her hands moving over my chest, and every so often the two of them would look at each other over me and smile around the situation like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Good?" Mildred asked me, quiet, against my ear.

"Good," I managed. "Very good. Don't either of you stop on my account."

Mildred laughed into my neck and Yasmin hummed around me, and I figured a man could die happy right there and the neighbors would never know why.

* * *

Somewhere in there Mildred got her red dress off, pearl earrings still in, which I will remember to my last day, and Yasmin came up off her knees and the two of them kissed in front of me, and I decided the art exhibit downstairs had nothing on this room.

Yasmin broke that kiss and looked at Mildred, real business in her voice. "You have a condom? I did not plan to be here, but I plan ahead." Mildred held one up, already out of her purse, and I figured she'd had that in there since spring too. She opened it and rolled it on me herself, slow, taking her time, and I was not complaining.

"Harold," Mildred said, standing there in nothing but pearls and forty years of knowing me. "Can I ask you for something?"

"You can ask."

"I want you behind me. Like we used to. Do you want that?"

"God, Mildred. Yes. I want that."

She got on the couch on her hands and knees, and there was my wife of forty years, the same woman who'd stepped on my foot three times at a college dance, offering herself up like it was 1981. I knelt behind her on the rug, knee protesting, and Yasmin knelt in front of her, cupping her breasts, doing something with her mouth to Mildred's nipples that made my wife grab the couch cushion with both hands.

I pushed into her slow. She was wet and warm and she gave this low moan that I felt in my own chest. I got a rhythm going, nothing fancy, and Yasmin looked up at me over Mildred's shoulder and smiled.

"There he is," Yasmin said. "Nice pace, Harold. Steady is good."

"Forty years of practice," I said, and Mildred laughed into the cushion, and the laughing apparently felt good because she pushed back against me and told me not to stop.

"Harder," she said. "I'm not made of glass, Harold."

So I gave her what she asked for, and Yasmin kept her mouth on her, and Mildred came apart between us, shaking and calling out my name, and I held on to her hips the way a man holds on to the good thing he almost forgot he had.

I slowed down but I didn't stop, because she hadn't told me to. She caught her breath and looked back at me over her shoulder.

"Yasmin's turn," she said. "Fair is fair."

Yasmin reached into her own small clutch purse she had brought and came out with another condom and looked at me.

"May I ride you, Harold? I would like that very much."

"You may," I said. "Please."

Mildred sat beside us and watched, one hand between her own legs, and I got settled with my back against the couch arm and my bad knee stretched out, and Yasmin climbed over me, tall and dark-haired and strong from all that yoga, and sank down onto me slow. She took her time finding her rhythm, rocking, and Mildred leaned over and kissed her, and then kissed me, and then put her hand where Yasmin and I joined, which was a thing I never would have imagined and will not forget.

"Does it feel good?" Mildred asked Yasmin, soft.

"So good," Yasmin said. "Your husband is a steady man."

"He's my steady man," Mildred said, and something in my chest went warm at that, warmer than anything.

Yasmin sped up, riding me with her hands on my chest, and Mildred's fingers kept working, and the two of them started coming close together, Yasmin first, tightening around me and swearing in a way I did not expect from a yoga instructor, and then Mildred right behind her, moaning my name again, and that did it for me. I grabbed Yasmin's hips and finished hard, and the room went quiet except for breathing.

* * *

Later we were all three of us on the wide couch, Mildred in the middle, wearing my suit jacket over nothing, which I thought was a fair trade. Yasmin had her head on Mildred's shoulder. Somebody's hand, I think mine, was on somebody's knee.

"So," Mildred said, after a while. I know that tone of voice. Forty years, you learn the tones. "I was thinking."

"Uh oh," I said.

"Shush. Yasmin. Would you come back? Once a month, maybe. Dinner first, we could go to Rosa's, Harold always gets the chicken parm. Then here, or home, or wherever. If you wanted."

Yasmin lifted her head and looked at her, then at me. "You are sure, both of you?"

"I'm sure," Mildred said.

I thought about it, which took about two seconds. "I'm sure too. It'd be nice, having something on the calendar."

"Then yes," Yasmin said, smiling. "Once a month. But next time we do dinner first. I heard about this chicken parm."

Mildred laughed, that laugh from 1981, and reached over and squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back, and that was how our anniversary ended, the three of us on a couch in a dark back room of an art exhibit, my wife wearing my only suit jacket that fit.