Isa

One day was all right. Two days was fine, too. That was a weekend. Three days had gone by now and I was starting to worry.

Lorenzo was a big boy. He didn’t need me to take care of him. He could take care of himself. I didn’t need him really to take care of me either, but we were married. A big part of that was living under the same roof, and frankly, underneath this roof was getting a little lonely.

I missed him. Plain and simple. I hadn’t seen him in a few days...and I wanted to see my husband.

I was also a little paranoid that us being apart was somehow stunting our momentum with how well we had been getting along. It would have been nice to have him around. It would also have been nice to be able to touch him and let him touch me instead of talking about what we wanted to do to each other over the phone.

I still didn’t even know where the hell he was.

There was part of me that was extremely upset about this and another part that felt nothing strong in any particular way. Indifferent. That was it...indifferent. If he wasn’t telling me, then maybe it was because it was safer for me not to know. How about that? If he wasn’t telling me, maybe there was a chance it was illegal and he didn’t want me to know about it so I couldn’t testify against him in court or have charges brought against me. I was his wife though. I was already spared from that if the situation ever came down to legal trouble.

The fact that I was so chill about it had to mean that it was totally kosher. Or at least a little bit kosher. It was something that wouldn’t turn my stomach or make me hold it against him. I didn’t have that much room to talk. I was as much in the shit as he was without being in the inner circle. Whatever it was that he did, it was the same thing that my father did, and it was what had supported my family my whole life. It had paid for culinary school. It was a part of me whether I wanted it to be or not. Someone had been trying to kill me apparently, and that was a part of it, too. There was very little he could say that could really shock me, but I was glad that he was making the choice to spare me.

It was probably more confusing than I even cared to puzzle out. Besides, it was the money that mattered, and I needed the money to be enough to support the baby. If Lorenzo had seen the charges on his credit card for the crib, bath, and car seat, he was not affronted by the price.

I had found things to do while I waited for my husband, all of them baby related. None of the items had come in yet, but it felt great to finally be able to direct myself in some way that was productive. I was in the kitchen when the mail came, so I brought it in. For some reason, it wasn’t our usual mail carrier, it was a courier, and they had one letter, apparently for me.

The envelope was large, and there was an address on it that I didn’t recognize. It was addressed to the house, which was Lorenzo’s house, but to me by name. It wasn’t even the bank or anything. Someone had genuinely sent me a letter. An extremely long letter, judging from the heft of the envelope. I went upstairs with it and entered Lorenzo’s home office to use his letter opener—because why not. He had invited me to use the room and the computer in it to make the purchases that I was making through Amazon. The invitation to use his private computer unmonitored didn’t go unnoticed, but I just used mine. I sat at the huge desk and cut the envelope open. There were a number of sheets inside which I pulled out, looking at the first one.

My stomach felt like it was on fire. My throat felt dry—like I had just eaten sand—and my hands began to shake. The sheet was printed with a picture that looked like it was taken in fairly low light. Lorenzo was in the image. It wasn’t the best picture quality, and it was in profile, but it was definitely him. Next to him, looking up at the camera with a smile on her face, was definitely Elissa Lazzerini. Lorenzo’s ex.

I asked him not to have her over. I asked so little of him, why didn’t he give me that one thing? I didn’t know the location, but it didn’t matter where it was. The fact was that they were together somewhere, apparently naked. The images only got worse from there. There were seven images in total.

Elissa in various stages of undress, kissing, touching and straight up fucking Lorenzo. There was even a picture where Lorenzo kissed Elissa while some woman I didn’t even recognize sucked his dick. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. Once I had recognized Lorenzo in them, I wanted to see what he was doing. Maybe if I looked hard enough, it would stop being him. Maybe if I looked closer, it wouldn’t be Elissa he was with. Was it really going to make a difference whether it was Elissa or another woman?

Even worse were the shots where both of them were looking right at the camera, as if they knew it was there. This wasn’t a case of revenge porn. This wasn’t stills from a sex tape that one of them, Elissa most likely, had surreptitiously filmed. They had taken the pictures on purpose. They wanted evidence of the fact that they had been together.

The worst part, because yes, it got worse was the eighth sheet of paper. It was about half the size of the rest, and it wasn’t printed like the rest of them. Instead were the five most ominous words I had ever read in my life: ‘He’s with me right now.’

Handwritten...in what I figured was Elissa’s handwriting.

My body must have stopped. I hadn’t died, but I didn’t feel all the way there anymore looking at the pictures. Two warring camps of my psyche immediately opened fire on each other. The pictures were fake. They had to be. No, they were real, and this was the reason he hadn’t been back home in three days.

I felt torn. I felt drunk on a sick cocktail of jealousy, anger, and insecurity. How could he do this to me? Why would he do this to me? What had I done to him to make him go back to his ex and document the evidence? I knew I hadn’t been the most open to sex with him in the beginning, but he couldn’t hold that against me, could he? Sure his conjugal rights were important and I was his wife, but we were strangers in the most literal sense. We knew close to nothing about each other—and we had been thrown into living in the same house, forced to act as a couple though we hadn’t been out even once together.

Was I even allowed to be this upset? We were married, and the marriage was legal, but we weren’t a couple. We had been set up by our parents, and both of us had been tremendously against being together, in the beginning anyway. My pulse quickened.

Was that when this happened?

During those awful first two weeks? He had obviously sought her out, or her him at some point during the last month or so that we had been together. Had it been then? He was never really clear about where and what his work was. She had come to the house more than once, and she had been all over him both times, him not exactly doing much to discourage her. Would I have been this mad to see these pictures back then?

I resented him so much, but I didn’t want to think that he would actually do something like that. It wasn’t a matter of respecting the marriage, it was a matter of respecting me. It wasn’t regular, but we had been having sex back then. What if he had put me in danger of catching something? Was Elissa even the only one? If he could cheat on me with her, he could do it with anyone.

Even if he didn't care about me, didn’t he care that I could have tried to use the incident against him and his family? Didn’t he care that I could present these in a court and have our marriage dissolved? It stopped being about my hurt feelings briefly and became about how careless Lorenzo apparently was with his extramarital sex life.

There had to be more than a single person involved in this. Maybe Lorenzo had even done this himself. Or better. He had sent them to me so he could get me to file for divorce first.

I got out and fled to our bedroom. I felt sick. I felt like there was somebody standing on my chest. I wanted answers. There was only one place that they were coming from. We had been calling each day that he had been gone so far. Today’s conversation was going to be one for the history books.

I held the phone to my ear listening to it ring. It kept ringing. It kept ringing and eventually stopped. Somewhere, Lorenzo was listening to his phone ring. It was in his pocket, and he had peeked at whom the call was from and decided against answering it. He was in conversation with someone, or at a meeting, so it had to be kept on silent. He would see later that I had tried to call him. He was with Elissa right then, and he and she were debating on whether they should answer the call just so I could hear them go at it. The perfect audio aide.

I ended the call.

I typed a text message.

“Get over here now.”

Marina was at work so she literally wouldn’t be able to come to me for hours. Not until the dinner service was over. Thinking dark, fucked up thoughts at this point was becoming something at which I was a professional. I was dwelling on everything negative that could happen with my husband and me so much that I could have spun them into movies and gotten someone to make films about them. They ran the gamut from just a little bit fucked up, to completely fucked up. For instance, in the newest state of my marriage where my husband’s ex was sending me images of the two of them naked, having sex, the least fucked up thought was that they were doctored and Lorenzo would be back any day now. He would kiss me, tell me Elissa was out of her mind, and sue her for defamation.

The most fucked up thought was that they must have been planning to use the images together, too. They had sent them to his isolated little wife over in Manhattan while they fucked their days away. With any luck, she had been really starting to fall for her husband, and the images would stress her out so much that she would end up losing the baby.

If that was his angle, then I hated him.

Marina and I sat on the bed, and she asked me what had happened. I watched her face as it broke in disbelief and she bloomed red in anger.

“Wait, wait, wait. You get this letter from someone you don’t know, and it’s addressed specifically to you, so they know who you are and the fact that you are married to Lorenzo.”

“Mm-hmm. The address is somewhere in Upstate New York. Never even been there before. None of my family or Lorenzo’s family live out there that I know of. Once I opened it, it was pretty obvious who they were from.”

“Who?”

“You’ve never met her. Her name is Elissa. Elissa Lazzerini—and she is Lorenzo’s ex.”

“And you’re sure it’s her?”

“I’ve only seen her a couple of times, but I’m sure. She’s got this very distinctive look. Thin and tall, a very plastic sort of pretty, but she’s gorgeous.”

“Ugh, I hate her already. How bad exactly are the photos?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Bad enough that I have now seen not one but two women that I hardly know completely naked.”

“Two?!”

“Let’s just say this. Lorenzo told me that he always used condoms in the past with other girls and that, I can say with confidence, is true.”

“Let me see one,” she said.

I had the envelope on the nightstand on my side of the bed, and when she asked to see a picture, I froze a little. They were obviously pictures of a private nature, but they had been taken in the first place. By sending them to me, Elissa was giving me the right to use them or not use them however I saw fit. Lorenzo was naked in them though, and I sort of didn’t want to expose him like that. I mean, there wasn’t absolute confirmation that this was what I thought it was.

“Isa? Let me see one.”

I sighed.

“It’s... I can’t.”

“Why not? Are they that bad?”

“No, well, yes they are but... I don’t want you to... I haven’t heard his side of the story yet.”

“Are you defending him, Isa?”

I shrugged.

“I mean, the envelope came from Elissa. For all I know, the bitch hates me and she was trying to get under my skin.”

“That may be the case, but it does not change the fact that he is in all those pictures fucking her.”

“I don’t want to believe he did that to me, Marina.”

I started welling up and something told me it was not the pregnancy hormones.

“All the evidence at this point is against him, Isa,” she said gently.

“It was finally starting to work. He left and I missed him. I would see one of his ties or smell his cologne and I would think about him. I wanted to know where he was and what he was doing, what he was thinking about. I wanted to call him just so I could hear him that day, Marina.”

“Isa... you’re falling in love with your husband.”

“And then this happens and I don’t know what the hell to do. It’s all ruined. I can’t unsee any of this stuff, Marina. We have a baby on the way. I don’t have anywhere to go if this falls through.”

“Isa, if you need anything, you can come to me, okay. Fuck this guy. You don’t need him, all right. Your father needs him. This is not something he can come back from. If he is really out there with that woman, then let him stay there. You don’t have to take it.”

“I know. I’m just sad. I really wanted it to work between us. He was actually making an effort in the end.”

“But now he’s obviously shown you his true colors.”

“I need to talk to him first. I need to at least give him that, Marina.”

“Do you, though?”

“Yes. I don’t know what it is. I can’t just accept that he has had this one-hundred-eighty-degree shift in just a few days. I was crushed after he left the morning after I revealed the pregnancy, but he sent me flowers and said he really wanted to give us a shot. He wanted to be a good husband to me and father to our baby. Don’t you see it? Maybe this is all a setup and this crazy bitch is trying to make him leave me somehow.”

“All right. All right. There’s nothing worse than a jilted ex-lover.”

“I just want to talk to him first.”

“You do that then, but you need to stop obsessing. It’s just making you anxious. If not for you, then for that kid.”

I put a hand on my stomach. Of course. The baby.

“I’ll wait to hear what he has to say.”