Scaffolding

by Lauren Elkin

Honestly, you’d think he’d never given a thought to how the food got from the butcher to his plate. His mother did everything for him. Not to judge her, and she’s had her share of hardship, but the only way to make a better world is to bring up our sons as feminists. We make all the people, we should be able to make better ones.

There is so much we will never know about other people, no matter how much we love them, or how much time we spend with them. We can know all of their mannerisms, know intimately their bodily odours, the schedule they shit on, recognise the very scent of their wind. Some people think this takes all the mystery, all the magic, out of a life together, but there will remain inexorably something unreachable about them. Try as we may, we grasp and can’t lay hold of their essence; there is always something that escapes.

Is it possible that infidelity isn’t something you commit but something that creeps up, a series of inoffensive doors you open, so by the time you find yourself in front of the one that counts, the one that matters, that changes everything, you are too far gone? You are so deep in it but you got so deep in a kind of innocence. I think for a moment. Maybe the problem is the word. Infidelity. I never noticed before but it makes you an infidel, believing in the wrong god. But really it’s another kind of fidelity – to yourself, to your dream of yourself, to the other people you love. I get out my phone and look up the etymology. See? it’s an Old French word, that has to do with a lack of faith. But I have so much faith. I am full of faith.