As she stepped into the parlor the compunction exacerbated exponentially. Seeking to be unperturbed by conscience, she told herself that having sex with a hundred men in a hundred days was no different than being loyal to one spouse for a hundred and some odd days. She argued that one behavior was no more or less slutty than the other. It was true in a rational context; but on the other hand sexual loyalty was a way of discerning this feeling-based abstraction of a relationship which otherwise would diffuse as a cloud of smoke. She went into the family room where she saw a light ("family" seeming a misnomer since she doubted that there was such a thing).
"Hey! You are here!" she called as she went through a hallway to this room where her husband and son were standing at different sides of a billiard table. Obviously they were there to play against each other but seemingly it was as if they were together brandishing their cues, their phallic sticks, which would be used for her flagellation. As titillation and inebriation were falling flat with each passing moment, so her smile at imagining her forthcoming beating was momentary.
"What are you smiling at?" the man with the unmemorable name asked.
"Nothing." Acerbic guilt was bubbling within her.
"I decided to come back this weekend," the man said.
"What a surprise. Grading completed?"
"Some of it. I guess you are okay. Why is your hair this way? What's the word?"
He said something in Russian that she did not understand.
"Disheveled. In the car— windows down, me blowing in the wind. Guess I look a mess. Don't worry. I wasn't in an accident."
"Okay, I'm not. I wasn't."
"Seems that a late night pool game has stretched into early morning," she said. There was no response so she feigned a beautiful wide smile as she slouched into a vinyl couch —vinyl like that she had withdrawn into when parting from Nathaniel's father with his dividing cells within her—cells that were either cancerous or salubrious divisions although now it was perhaps too early to predict which or the denouement of this dabbled experiment. "Don't you think it is a little bit late for my two boys to be playing billiards like they are at a poker party?"