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satisfied with what I had heard in our house, so I continued on through the bedroom every morning, taking samples from anything that resonated. Each fragment of my wife’s memory left a hole where another one started. One by one they began to pull me along into the other side of her life, the part that happened before I had started greedily busting it up at every available opportunity. I’m not sure what I expected to find — probably some clear confirmation that the time in which she had known me was intense enough to invalidate her past experience. I did not know the people that had trespassed into her life before me, and was interested in what they had to say for themselves.
    One morning, after a few cursory passes around the bedroom, I found exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. In one of her closets, wedged in behind a box of china, was a red plastic sandal. It resonated at a near perfect B-flat, though the signal was tainted by frequent, intense arpeggiated bursts of vibrato. The sound was my wife, before she was my wife or even a person I had ever known, sitting next to a baby pool, inside of which were the kid, Janet, and her father. I had met this man a few times in real life — he was the kind of thing you’d expect to see — underbaked, corn shaped, toothy. He made a lot of money in the city designing cloud advertisements, so that everything he said was either from a commercial or soon to be one. He was already into his twenties, and hadn’t yet been unwelcomed. My wife, this person she was, you could see she was trying to hold things together. She held Janet’s hand to keep her balance and poured water over her back with a small plastic cup.
    I didn’t like what the sound was doing to my body — I went cold, and there was a spot in the center of me that glowed like a car lighter, but it didn’t stop me from listening. I held a finger over the teardrop-shaped mute button in case there was something I didn’t want to hear. There were lots of things that I might never want to hear. When I was a schoolboy I took this girl up to the city to make a dirty movie. Only I wanted it to be a silent film. I told her she wasn’t allowed to make a sound — not even the rustle and bond of her skirt and top as she peeled them slowly from her body, a noise that I can only refer to as “stez.” I put a belt around her neck and worked at her pasty, splotched body from behind. The headboard kept banging into the wall, so I had to stuff some pillows in the crevice between. She parried and lurched like an understudy for some lanky, newborn animal, skinny legs canted in the hideous lamplight. Watching that tape now, after about ten years, is a shameful and embarrassing procedure. Seeing myself swagger around in silence, holding my breath, cock dipped and pitted, my hands in places that hands shouldn’t go, is like having your own worst time in your life and someone else’s all at once.
    The family sat in the pool for a long time. This father had a little squirt toy and started to use it on the child and my wife. “Honey, she seems thirsty,” my wife said to the father. He turned and squirted my wife’s upper thigh, marking a trail up toward her crotch. He stretched out his arm, holding the nozzle of the gun over her midriff, soaking the entire region. There was something sad and groping about the sound of the water splashing against her beige stove pants — a lostness, the collapsing wheeze of a flaccid and forgettable overture. My wife only looked at him. The father continued spraying her crotch, grinning like the wide, unseemly grille of a truck. I had never heard of someone so completely oblivious to his surroundings.
    But I promised myself, there in the bedroom, sound machine in my lap, that I would not malign the father. I would keep my feelings to myself, where nobody has any business with them anyway. I don’t like it when people can tell what I’m feeling, and I don’t like it when they try. That is