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.“Please tell me the story of the worst thing you’ve ever done.”“Excuse me?”“Please tell me—” Alice began, but Jane cut her off.“Why would I tell you something like that?” Jane asked, raising her voice and taking great pains to enunciate.“Why do you need to know that?”Alice paused, though her eyes kept moving.“I understand your question,” she said.“May I refer you to FAQ 217.7 in the Polaris Applicant’s Handbook?”“May you?” Jane asked wearily.“You may.” The box appeared next to Alice’s chin:Q: Are you trying to make me feel ashamed?A: Of course not.In the future, there won’t be any shame.We ask these questions not because we are looking for people who have never done anything wrong, but because what you tell us will help us know you better.And we want to get to know you very well indeed.“Oh, Jesus,” said Jane.She considered various easy anecdotes—a neglected goldfish, a cruel playground taunt—but suspected Alice would blink away those stand-ins.Polaris already had her husband.They’d already taken away the meaning of her marriage; now—of course!—they wanted everything that was left of it, the secrets and memories that were its substance.I’ll give it to you, all right, she thought.Just wait.“Shall we begin?” Alice asked, after thirty seconds of silence, and then after thirty more she asked again.“Wait!” Jane said.“I’m thinking!” Then Alice waited two minutes before she asked again, but still that could hardly be time enough to consider an answer, unless you were one of those people who walked around barely able to restrain yourself from telling people how terrible you were, or one of those people who had done so few terrible things in her life she could pick the worst one in a snap.But finally she responded, “Sure.Yes.”“Voice input or keyboard?” said Alice, but Jane had already started typing.She hadn’t particularly meant to cheat on Jim, but neither was it something that just happened.Part of finally figuring out how they were going to make it together was them both committing to tell the other if one of them felt suddenly compelled to try to destroy the marriage.This was almost never a confession of desire for some (essentially random) other person, but a confession of the perverse desire to be fundamentally alone, to withdraw from their shared life, with all its benefits and obligations, to an easier loneliness they each sometimes preferred but neither really wanted.There was nothing wrong with this.It was, in Jim’s annoying chaplain parlance, allowed.You might even, as they both sometimes did, announce that you were thinking of taking a vacation, and (after some back and forth on the nature and duration of the trip) be wished a bon voyage, and then retreat for a few days, or maybe even a week, into a kind of sullen impersonal detachment.That was fine.You just had to let the other person know what you were doing.But this time she didn’t tell Jim what she was doing.She barely even let herself know.And so the promise she broke was much bigger than a mere contract of sexual fidelity.And that, Alice, was the worst thing she had ever done.But Alice didn’t need the details.She couldn’t possibly comprehend them.Polaris couldn’t possibly comprehend them.In fact, Polaris was the very antithesis of those details, which only convinced Jane more and more that Polaris was hiding something from her, that they had tricked Jim into signing up, or that he had signed up with them long before he and Jane had ever met—because he was always better at holding up his side of the bargain than she was at holding up hers.This kind of total withdrawal was something that he simply wouldn’t ever do to her.So she didn’t even mention the promise, or the baby funerals.Instead she wrote, His name was Ben.They met in the or, over a frozen section.Or they might have one day said that was how they met, if she had run away with Ben into a different life, into some kind of temporary happiness that would (she did not doubt) congeal into a permanent and familiar unhappiness, an unhappiness that would look just like the one that had motivated her to cheat in the first place, except it would be worse.Because now she would no longer have Jim to help her manage it.Or because now she wouldn’t get to enjoy any longer the sovereign remedy of helping Jim with his own constitutive and situational unhappiness, which sometimes was the only remedy that ever really helped with hers.So running away with Ben was never really an option, though she wrote to Alice as if she had actually been tempted to do it.It was his eyes, she wrote, though of course it wasn’t really his eyes that attracted her.Maureen had actually flirted with him first, but they both had or crushes on him, and when she came to Jane’s office to prove her point about what color Ben’s eyes were by Googling cornflower blue, Jane saved the image on her desktop and let it sit there, one little square among a hundred others.She moved the image around, a marker denoting exactly how important Ben was in the daily sum of her thoughts and feelings—she supposed it reinforced her feelings of control over things, and helped delude her into thinking that there wasn’t anything to tell Jim yet.But by the time she and Ben were fucking in his office twice a day she’d made the cornflower her wallpaper, and though she sat in front of it for half of every afternoon she barely saw it anymore.It was Jim and his pathetic baby funerals, she wrote, adding (but only in her head), he cheated on me first with those grieving almost-mothers.Of course it wasn’t really that, either, but that was what she and Jim talked about, once it was already too late to talk about it.She had sex with Ben for the first time the day after the evening that Jim came home and told her, in excruciating detail, about the service he had performed for a stillborn baby on the tenth floor of the children’s hospital
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