Names Changed to Protect the Guilty

by Susan Jensen Sweeting

Remember that time in college when you realized you were madly in love with your next-door neighbor Vinny? How you two met in art school, became best friends, and you never thought of him that way until he moved house? You didn’t know where he was, and not knowing where he was was so unbearable that you called everyone you both knew until you found him. And remember how this revelation happened on Valentine’s Day? You expressed your feelings by finding him in studio class, laying a single red carnation on the table before him with a note reading “Happy V-day V, love S,” then slipping away before he could say anything. You thought you were so smooth. Remember how it was thrilling and slightly dangerous because you were already married?

You told yourself that it was harmless because of course, you were married and you and Vinny were just dear friends. You could be dear friends with another man and still be married, right? It was the 80s. People did that. It wasn’t cheating if you weren’t sleeping together, right? You were just friends. You only ended up neighbors in an apartment complex that rented to art students because you went to the same art college. He had his roommate Mikey and you had your roommate Inez because you had to leave your husband back home in the Bahamas since he didn’t have his papers yet.

Remember how you thought he was a total geek when you first met him, a little round Italian with one eyebrow? How the very first time you all went to a school concert together he got drunk and tried to kiss you and you told him to back the fuck off? “I’m married,” you hissed, giving him a shove. But that was before.

After your revelation, you let that high school lovesick feeling simmer for months. You never came out and said anything to him but you got the blood rush whenever he walked into view and you found yourself making up reasons to seek him out. Oh my God, you would pine. You would daydream and pine like a fourteen year old girl.

Things were getting tense with your husband because you wanted to go have fun with your college friends, but, from the other end of a phone line in another country, he would insist you stay home. Remember how angry that made you, how your whole life you had been a trustworthy person? How having fun with your college friends meant being designated driver because you never drank, and the idea of screwing around never entered your mind since you had spent nearly four years apart in a long distance relationship never once cheating, and that was before you were even married? You had always been as solid as a rock.

Remember how it crept up on you? How surprised you were to learn that you could not breathe until you knew where Vinny was? When you finally found him, you turned up on the doorstep of his new apartment with his two roommates Amy and Wendy and you were a little envious of them. You had a bag of frozen lobster under your arm and you swept inside and made them all lobster dinner, but you were really only cooking for him.

And those “not dates”, like that time the Art Museum was hosting an International Film Festival and the two of you went to see Bergman’s “The Magic Flute,” but you could not tolerate the opera so you left at intermission to get ice cream instead. And that time a bunch of you helped your friend Stephanie move from Miami to Pompano Beach and it was the best time you ever had. Exhausted at the end of the day, before you left you said to Vinny “give me a kiss,” which he did, in front of everyone. “What’s up with them?” Wendy asked Stephanie, she told you later. “Haven’t you just ever wanted to kiss someone you shouldn’t kiss?” she said.

And then that time you all went out for dinner to celebrate the end of term and you and Vinny went outside. You had a moment, a confession of love. You loved him and he loved you, and it was like that scene in the movies with the music and the circling wide shot and the kissing. And then you said that even though you loved him, you didn’t want to do anything about it because, well, you know.

Remember how even though it’s been over thirty years, you’re still married to the same husband who finally got his papers and you haven’t seen Vinny or spoken to him in twenty years, but just remembering the story still fills you with a kind of longing?

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Cited work:
The Magic Flute. Directed by Ingmar Berman, Svensk Filmindustri/Svenska Filminstituet, 1975

Susan Jensen Sweeting is the author of countless short stories ranging from fanciful to thrilling and she’s currently working on her first novel – a ghost story but with real live people. She’s the wife of an aquaponic farmer and the mother of two bona fide adults, but she’s also a massage therapist, an artist, a teacher, a Scottish fiddler, an intrepid traveler and a community builder in Freeport, Bahamas. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. You can also find her on Instagram @sjensweet.