Swimming with the Sphinx

The cable bill sat on the kitchen counter like a third person in our marriage. I've stopped opening it. Elena screens everything — news, movies, our shared life — through her own encrypted filter. She answers none of my questions directly, responding instead with looks, half-smiles, or silences that feel like both surrender and accusation.

She is something like a sphinx.

My best friend Roberto, who swears he's mastered the art of decoding Elena, says I'm not trying hard enough. We swim laps at the Y three mornings a week — a ritual that feels like a confessional where the water absolves everything but changes nothing.

"You could solve those riddles," he said this morning, treading water beside me. "If you actually asked the right questions."

He's betting everything on a baseball game tonight. World Series, Game Seven. Two hundred dollars on the Cubs.

"The Cubs haven't won a Series in over a century," I said, flipping onto my back.

"Exactly. That's why the odds are so good." He grinned. "Sometimes you've got to bet on the impossible outcome."

That's when it hit me — I'd been asking Elena the wrong questions for ten years. I'd been asking what was wrong, what she needed, what we were becoming. What I should have been asking was what she was hiding.

I drove home and cut the cable line to the house.

When Elena came home from work, she found me sitting in the dark living room, the severed cable dangling from the wall like a dead thing.

"What have you done?" she asked, and for the first time, her sphinx-like composure cracked.

"I'm finally asking the right question," I said. "What are you watching in there every night when you think I'm asleep?"

Her face changed. The riddle dissolved. Something else took its place — something ancient and wounded and finally, finally visible.

"Baseball," she said softly. "I watch baseball. My father used to play. Before he..."

"Before he what?"

"Before he forgot who I was."

I'm learning that some riddles have answers you don't want to know. But at least now, we're swimming in the same water.