The Librarian's Double Shift

My name's Marshall Wayne, I'm forty-three years old, and I've been teaching high school history for long enough that I can grade a stack of essays with one eye on the TV and still catch every lie a kid writes about the Louisiana Purchase. My wife Kelsie is forty-one, a librarian at the public branch over on Belmont, and we've been married fifteen years now, together since grad school when I was twenty-five and she was twenty-three and we argued about Faulkner until the bar closed. It's a good marriage. It's a solid marriage. It's the kind of marriage where you know what the other person is going to order before the waitress shows up, which is comforting right up until the night it isn't.

The night it wasn't was a Tuesday, and we were eating spaghetti at the little table by the window of our apartment in the Alphabet District, the one with the creaky hardwood floors and the fire escape that overlooks a street busy enough that we never really need a radio. Kelsie was telling me about her week, and she got to the part about the writing workshop she runs on Saturdays, and then she got to Roxie.

"Roxie's the new one, right, the editor from Chicago," I said, twirling noodles. "The one who moved here after the divorce."

"Two years ago, yeah. She's thirty-five, she's funny, she's actually serious about the craft stuff. Anyway." Kelsie pushed a meatball around her plate and got the look she gets when she's deciding how much of something to tell me. "She's writing a novel. About an open marriage."

"Huh," I said, because it was Tuesday and that's the level of response I was working with.

"And here's the funny part, she wants to do research. Real research. She asked me, all casual, over coffee, how couples even negotiate that stuff, and whether I knew anybody I could talk to about it, and Marshall, I almost choked on my latte." She laughed, that snorty laugh she tries to hide in public. "Can you imagine? Me, the librarian, sitting across from some poor husband while she takes notes."

"So volunteer," I said, before my brain cleared the check. "We'd be perfect. Fifteen years of material. I'd bring snacks."

I meant it as a joke, mostly, but Kelsie stopped moving her fork and looked at me, and I've been married long enough to know that look means she caught something.

"You're half serious," she said.

"I'm like forty percent serious," I admitted. "Sixty percent on a good day."

We did the dishes without talking about it, which is how we do the first draft of every big conversation, and then we went to bed and did talk about it, lying there in the dark with the neighbors' TV bleeding through the wall like always.

"Okay, talk to me," she said. "Forty percent. Walk me through it."

"Through what, the fantasy or the logistics?"

"Marshall."

"Fine. The fantasy. You read that spicy novel last month, the one you hid in the nightstand like I wouldn't find it, and you've been different since. Not bad different. Awake different. And I've been thinking that maybe the routine is eating us a little, and that maybe what you need is to feel wanted in a way that's not just automatic, and I don't know, Kels, the idea of watching a man want you, or watching you want somebody, it does something to me that I did not expect and I'm still examining." I turned toward her in the dark. "That's the forty percent. The other sixty is me being terrified you'd like somebody else's hands better than mine."

"Oh, Marshall," she said, and she reached over and found my hand in the sheets. "You absolute dork. That's not how I'd ever score it. It's not a competition, it's a, I don't know, a seasoning." She was quiet a minute. "Roxie would have to be the one, if it ever happened. Nobody else. And it would be once, an experiment, and we'd talk ourselves half to death before and after."

"And you'd wear a condom, Roxie would, I'd insist on it, we'd have the whole testing talk first, boring and clinical and I don't care," I said. "Rules first. Feelings second."

"God, you sound like the syllabus!" But she was smiling, I could hear it. "Let's not decide anything tonight. Let's have her over for wine first. Research wine. We can talk about jealousy and fantasy like adults and then laugh about how awkward it was."

"That's my girl, the librarian, scheduling desire like a storytime hour."

"Shut up and go to sleep."

* * *

Roxie came over that Friday. She's thirty-five, tall, dark hair she keeps shoved behind her ears, and she brought a bottle of something red and a notebook, because she's the kind of person who brings a notebook everywhere, which tracks, she's an editor and she wants to write her own book. Kelsie met her at the workshop three months back and they hit it off fast, and I'd met her twice at library things, so it wasn't weird, or it wasn't weird yet.

We sat in the cluttered living room among the mismatched furniture and the towers of books, and Kelsie poured the wine, and Roxie got that notebook out and then sheepishly put it away.

"Okay, I feel ridiculous," Roxie said. "I'm interviewing my friends about their marriage. Dennis would've had a stroke." She caught herself. "My ex. Never mind him, he's a whole chapter I'm not writing."

"So ask us things," Kelsie said. "We're not experts. We're just two people who've been sharing a bathroom for fifteen years."

Roxie asked real questions, though, good ones, and we answered them honestly because the wine helped and because it's surprisingly easy to be honest with somebody who's taking mental notes on your life for fiction. She asked about jealousy, and I told her about the time a guy at Kelsie's conference put his hand on her elbow and I spent a week sulking about it, and how we fixed it not by making rules but by Kelsie just telling me everything, every time, until there was nothing left to sulk about because I already knew it all. She asked about fantasy, and Kelsie, God bless her, went a little pink around the ears and said, "Well, we've been reading up on that lately, haven't we, Marshall," and I choked slightly on my wine.

"You've been reading?" Roxie said, leaning forward, eyes lit up. "That's great, that's exactly the arc I want, the couple that thinks they're vanilla and discovers they're, what's the word, curious."

"Curious is a good word," Kelsie said, carefully.

And here's where the night bent. Roxie set her glass down and looked at us both, and her tone stayed light, conversational, but her eyes were doing something else entirely, something focused and steady.

"Hypothetically," she said. "If a couple like you two ever wanted to test the research in the field. Like a trial. Would you consider it? Once. Just to see."

The room got very quiet, in the way our apartment gets quiet, meaning the neighbors upstairs picked that exact moment to stop