Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

She said: “I found the letters.”

For a moment he couldn’t think of what she meant.

“What letters?” he asked. She didn’t reply. Then it came to him.

When he’d been a young man, shortly after he was married, he had developed an infatuation for a woman at the insurance office where he worked. There had been letters exchanged, a brief affair conducted in hotel rooms around town, then contrition and a return to his marriage from which he had never strayed again. Shortly after the affair, his former mistress had moved to another state. Lucinda had never even suspected anything as far as he could tell, and he had not felt compelled to confess to her because the affair had never meant very much to him and was not a sign of any deep unhappiness at home so much as an accident of circumstance and immaturity — in other words, a mistake.

But for some reason he had kept the letters. He did not know why, but he had kept them locked in the top drawer of the desk in his study through all his and Lucinda’s subsequent years together. And sometimes when they were fighting or when they were at odds with each other, he would go into his office and touch the handle of the drawer where the letters were and this would make him feel stronger, separate from his wife, a person with a secret. He felt the need to do this less and less as they aged, until he almost forgot about the letters altogether. Sometimes he would think of them and say to himself that he really should get rid of them, but he never got around to actually throwing them away; it just never seemed that important. In fact, the letters and the affair they chronicled seemed so insignificant that, when they moved the last time and he sold the desk, he had not felt it necessary to take any special steps to hide them. At their age, what did it matter? It was so long ago that he could not remember the woman’s face, only that she’d had dyed red hair and a birthmark down near her collarbone; sometimes he could not even recall her name right away. So he put the letters in a box along with other books and papers; he had not thought of them again until this minute.

“Is that what this is all about?” he asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

Lucinda shrugged. “I knew that would be what you’d say. I knew the children would say that too. That’s why I didn’t tell you until everything was arranged for us to separate.”

Fred persisted: “But don’t you see? It doesn’t matter now — it didn’t even matter at the time. Why didn’t you tell me that was the problem? Are you really that angry at me for something that happened so long ago?” He paused from speaking and an idea came to him: “Are you angry with me because I didn’t tell you? Because I kept the secret all this time?” he asked.

“No,” Lucinda said. “That isn’t it, either. I was unhappy to find that you’d had a love affair, of course. And I was also upset that you kept it secret for so long. But those things I could have forgiven, I think.

“It was when I saw that you had stopped trying to hide the letters from me that I knew you no longer thought that I was a person capable of jealousy. You had stopped thinking about me as a woman and had begun to see me as just an old person who shouldn’t feel the same things as other people. If that is true then what is the point of being married?”

“For companionship,” Fred said. “To keep us from being alone. Because it’s better than nothing.”

Lucinda looked at him but didn’t answer. Then she stood up and smoothed down her skirt with both her hands. Without speaking another word, she turned away and walked along the lakeside path back toward the apartment building where she now lived and she did not turn around to look at him again.

2.

Karen and David were considered by their friends and families to be as close to a perfect couple as any of them had ever known. Both attractive but not so beautiful that it overwhelmed their other qualities, both clever but not unbalanced by a particular extraordinary talent or passionate calling, they met in college in New England, where they were students at a prestigious private school with a reputation for its programs in foreign languages and literature and for its proximity to wonderful ski resorts which the students often visited when they weren’t busy studying. They met in a class on Russian literature in translation. They dated during their final year as undergraduates and found that they had many things in common. They both liked hiking and tennis; they both had studied French and liked to travel. After they graduated they went together to do a year of social-service work in a school in rural Senegal, then moved to New York, where David began law school and Karen got a job in the editorial department of a women’s magazine. With help from their parents they bought an apartment in Manhattan. They married the fall that David took the bar and got his first job working for a big law firm headquartered in midtown.

They lived like this for several years, David working at the law firm and Karen editing articles about interior design and fashion and women who ran nonprofit organizations in countries in the developing world. They had lots of friends in the city who had gone to the same college as them and whom they often met for drinks or dinner and with whom they went away for long weekends at the beach or up to Vermont to ski. They visited with Karen’s parents Lucinda and Fred at their house up in Connecticut often; David’s parents, who lived out in Colorado, did not like New York and did not come to visit much. David worked longer hours than he would have liked, and Karen felt from time to time that her job did not provide enough of an intellectual challenge for her. But generally they considered themselves to be very happy. They talked in a noncommittal way about starting a family in a few years’ time.

One day, Karen was at home in their apartment by herself. She was looking for a page she’d forgotten to bookmark on the browser of the computer in the second bedroom, which they used as a home office/exercise room when they didn’t have guests staying with them. The page she was looking for had the pattern for a sweater she was going to knit for David for his birthday and she couldn’t remember the name of the site where she had seen it. She was scrolling through the history file when she noticed an address that made her stop her search. The name in the URL was so strange and unexpected — www.pleasehitme.com — that she clicked on it before she thought about what she was doing. The screen winked and shifted and the site began to load, background first, then rows of images popping into view one after another.

What she saw upset her right away. The page was filled with pictures of men and women, naked or nearly so, displaying various kinds of injuries on their faces and their bodies: black eyes, split and swollen lips, torn skin. Some of their injuries had obviously been inflicted by other human beings — bruises the size and shape of fingers, parallel gouges left by fingernails — while others were just maps of unexplained damage. Some of the men and women wore handcuffs or were tied with rope. But the pictures she found herself looking at most intently showed just expanses of blued and purpled flesh, lacerations and incisions in the smooth sheet of the skin, in which the faces of the subjects were not even visible, only the pale or dark angles of their bodies with their hair and creases, the shapes of the flesh and the bone beneath and the saturated colors of the wounds.

Karen stared in disbelief. She was not naive about the existence of pornography online and she would not have been especially shocked to find a link to a site showing posed and naked women that her husband had been looking at. She would not have been pleased exactly but she would not have been surprised; in fact, she would not have cared about it very much at all. She might have closed the window feeling mild annoyance or disappointment; she might have forgotten it by the time David came home later that evening.