The Quiet Game of Truth

I sat at the kitchen table with a glass of red wine and no good reason for drinking it.

It was a Thursday in November, and Carl was working late again. The apartment was quiet except for the radiator doing its clanking routine. I'd been home since six, eaten leftover pasta standing up, and now I was just sitting there, forty-two years old, sipping wine and thinking a thought I'd never let myself finish.

Here was the thought. In fourteen years of marriage, I had never once asked my husband what he actually wanted in bed.

Not never as in we never talked. We talked plenty. We talked about his library budget and my mortgage clients and whether the landlord would ever fix the stairwell light. We talked about sex too, sort of, in the way couples do. Was that good. Do you have time. Sorry, I'm wiped.

But what he wanted. What he maybe lay awake wanting. I had no idea, and worse, I realized I'd never asked, and he'd never asked me, and we'd built a whole marriage on top of that silence like a nice house over a hole in the ground.

I swirled the wine. I took another sip.

When I was twenty-eight I married Carl because he made me laugh at a college bar and because he read books I liked and because being with him felt like coming home. All true. Still true. But I was twenty-eight. I didn't know what questions to ask yet. Now I was forty-two and I had a whole list and no one to read it to.

The door opened at nine forty. Carl hung his coat on the hook, which he actually used, thank God, and came in smelling like old paper and cold air.

"You're still up," he said.

"I couldn't sleep." I moved the wine glass so he wouldn't count how full it still wasn't. "Rough night at the reference desk?"

"Someone asked me to find a book on the history of buttons." He got himself a beer. "Actual buttons. Two hours, Frances. I found three books."

"Hero."

He sat down across from me and looked at my face too long, the way he does.

"Okay," he said. "What's going on?"

"Nothing."

"Frances."

I turned the glass in a circle on the table. Fourteen years, and I still couldn't just say things.

"I want to have Tracie and Melvin over," I said. "For drinks. This weekend."

He blinked. "Okay. Sure. We haven't done that in a while."

"And I want to play a game."

"A game."

"Truth or dare." I held up a hand before he could laugh. "Only the truth part. No dares. I just... I want to hear people answer real questions for once. Tracie will love it, she studies people for a living. And Melvin will act like he hates it and then stay till two in the morning."

Carl was quiet for a second. He turned his beer bottle label around and around with his thumb.

"Truth or dare," he said. "We're forty-two and forty-three."

"I know how old we are, Carl."

"I just want to be sure you know." He smiled a little. "What brought this on?"

"Nothing brought it on. I just feel like we do the same four things every month. Tracie's book club. Melvin's movie night. Dinner at the one good restaurant. And my work thing you attend and hate."

"I don't hate your work thing."

"You hate my work thing."

"I mildly dislike your work thing," he said. "Fine. Let's do it. Saturday?"

"Saturday."

He got up to throw his bottle cap away and stopped at my chair and put his hand on my head, which is his version of affection when he can't figure out what I'm actually upset about. He's not stupid. He knew something was under the wine. He just didn't push, because he never pushes, which is one of the things I love about him and one of the things that's kept that hole under the house nice and dark.

"Hey," I said, before he got to the bedroom. "Would you ever want to know something about me even if it was weird?"

He stood in the hallway with his hand on the doorframe.

"Is it weird?"

"Maybe."

"Then Saturday," he said. "Save it for the game. Seems only fair."

He went to bed. I sat there a while longer with my wine, heart going a little fast, and I didn't know yet if what I'd just set up was brave or stupid. I aim to be honest about that part. I didn't have a plan. I had a curiosity with a hook in it, and I'd just baited it.

Saturday came cold and gray. Tracie showed up first, at seven, carrying a bottle of cheap bourbon like it was a hostess gift and a dare at the same time.

"This is terrible bourbon," she announced from the doorway, thirty-nine years old, scarf still on, snow in her hair. "I bought it specifically because it's terrible. Where's your glasses?"

"Cupboard. Tracie, it's seven."

"And I'm a grad student, Frances, we keep different hours than God intended." She kissed my cheek and pushed past me. "God, it's warm in here. Carl! Your wife is letting me in! Nobody stopped me!"

Carl came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a towel. "We could have stopped you?"

"You could have tried." She went straight for the cupboard like she lived there.

Melvin arrived at seven thirty with a six-pack of the fancy beer Carl likes, and stood in the doorway doing his usual thing, which is hovering, as a man waiting to be told the building is on fire before he commits to entering it.

"Come in, Melvin," Carl said. "You've been here twenty times."

"Right, yes." He came in. "Tracie. Carl. Frances. Hi."

"Hi yourself," Tracie said. "Sit. Drink. We're playing truth or dare tonight and before you say anything, there are no dares, only truths, and Frances invented it, so complain to her."

Melvin looked at me with actual alarm. "Truth or dare?"

"Truth only," I said. "You can pass a question. One pass per person per round. That's the whole rule set."

"That's a terrible rule set," Melvin said, and sat down, and poured himself bourbon from Tracie's terrible bottle, and stayed, which told me everything about Melvin that mattered.

We ate the cheese I'd bought and drank for an hour first, normal talk, the landlord, Tracie's dissertation, the button book. Then Tracie lit up in the middle of a sentence and smacked the arm of the couch.

"Oh, I have to tell you this. It's actually relevant, this is the weird part." She sat forward. "There was this old sociology study, fifties or sixties, married couples, and they'd put pairs of couples in a room together and ask them intimate questions in front of each other. Sexual history, fantasies, all of it, on the record, spouse sitting right there."

"That sounds like torture," Melvin said.

"It sounds like it would end marriages," Carl said.

"That's what I thought too, first," Tracie said. "But the follow-ups were kind of amazing. Most of the couples reported feeling closer afterward. Years later, some of them still cited it. The act of saying the thing out loud, in front of your person and witnesses, apparently does something. The secrets weigh more than the truths ever do."

I felt something in my chest go very still and very awake at the same time.

"Because you can't un-hear it," Carl said slowly. "That's the risk."

"Because you can't un-hear it," Tracie agreed. "And apparently most people, most of the time, are glad they heard it."

I looked at my husband. He was looking into his beer. And I thought, there it is, there's the hole in the ground, and here I am standing at the edge of it with a bottle of terrible bourbon and four adults in the room and one pass per round.

"So," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. "Should we try it?"

Tracie grinned at me like I'd finally shown up to my own party.

"That depends," Carl said carefully, turning his bottle label around and around. "On the questions, I guess. Who's asking?"

"The group asks," Tracie said. "That's how the study did it. Anybody can ask, everybody answers or passes. Honest answers only." She looked around the room, and for a second her face did something softer than the grad student act. "I don't know about you three, but I could stand to say some true things."

Melvin laughed, one short nervous burst. "This is either going to be great or a disaster."

"Those are usually the same night," Tracie said.

Carl looked at me across the coffee table, and I looked back, and we'd been married long enough that whole paragraphs can happen in that look. I couldn't read all of his. He couldn't read all of mine. That was sort of the point.

"Okay," he said. "Truth only. Who goes first?"

Tracie pointed at Carl before he'd finished asking.

"You. You asked the rules question, so you go first. That's tradition now."

"I just made that up," Carl said.

"Traditions have to start somewhere." She settled back against the couch arm. "Melvin, ask Carl something."

"Me? Why me?"

"Because you're the newest and you'll be polite, and polite first questions bore me. Then it gets real."

Melvin thought about it with his beer tipped against his lip.

"Okay, Carl. What's something you've never told Frances?"

"Oh, that's a terrible first question."

"That's the game," Tracie said. "One pass on the table. Use it or answer."

Carl was quiet for a while. The radiator clanked