Howard drove Anita to the park in his Suburban. When they arrived, they got out and walked for a while in the park holding hands. The last gales of winter sang through the empty branches of the trees, giving Howard an excuse to draw Anita close to him and wrap his arm around her as they walked. The park was utterly deserted. Nary a jogger was to be seen as they strolled through the leafless lanes. Occasionally the smell of burning wood from someone’s fireplace wafted by them and reminded them of the pleasures of homelife during winter. When they arrived at the children’s playground, it was empty. The weather was too cold to bring a child to the park to play. The steely grey sky of winter still lay like a blanket over their part of the world, making them feel alone and unloved in each other’s absence. It was a time when small furry mammals huddled in their dens and cuddled against their fellow den-mates for warmth and solace against the biting wind that robbed them of their energy. Anita and Howard sat next to each other on the swings and held hands as they talked about their respective weeks at work, enjoying the simple pleasure of each other’s company. A half hour later, they walked back to the Suburban and went home to warm themselves by the fire and drink hot chocolate. They went to bed early and made love before descending into a serene sleep in each other’s arms.
Howard began spending evenings out with the executives from work when he wasn’t visiting his mistress. He’d stagger drunkenly into the house after spending the evening at a local “Gentlemen’s Club” reeking of the cheap scent that the exotic dancers at the “Club” favored. He loved to have the dancers perform “lap” dances on him and they’d invariably rub themselves against his suit. Howard passed off the smell with some silly excuse each time, explaining that he had brushed up next to a woman in a crowded elevator or whatever he could think of at the spur of the moment. Anita would look dubious, but seemed to accept his thin excuses. His evening rendezvous with his mistress became increasingly difficult to pass off as innocent tardiness. Anita almost caught him on one occasion after he spent a most satisfying evening with Barbie. After staying “late at work” one night, he came home with his dress shirt reeking of perfume. When Anita mentioned it to him, he hastily changed clothes and buried his shirt and underwear in the bottom of dirty clothes hamper. When Anita took them out of the hamper to wash them, she immediately noticed that his underwear stunk of women’s cologne as well as his shirt and demanded an explanation. He hemmed and hawed for a moment, then told her that one of the secretaries had been looking at a bottle of perfume she had bought for her sister and had accidentally spilled the bottle of perfume on his lap. Anita had looked incredulous for a moment, but after a tense moment of obvious disbelief, she seemed to grudgingly accept his story. Nethertheless, for the next three days, Anita’s attitude was considerably cooler towards him than it should have been. Howard thought that the incident with the perfume was to blame, but he couldn’t be sure how much she suspected about his extramarital activities. Just to be on the safe side, Howard canceled two evening trysts with Barbie over the next few weeks, hoping to allay Anita’s suspicions with the appearance of propriety. After a month however, his urges got the better of him and he found himself back in Barbie’s bed more often than before. He took the precaution of undressing completely before indulging himself in Barbie’s pleasures to keep the reek of her perfume from insinuating his clothes. After coition with Barbie, Howard would take a hot shower at Barbie’s apartment to remove any traces of his carnal activities. Poor smiling Anita never seemed to catch on to his peccadilloes. Whenever he came home, she was always her concerned, helpful self. Howard noticed that she appeared more distant when he described his successes than she had in the past, but ascribed it to professional jealousy or “some woman thing”.