What the Sphinx Knew

Marcus found the hair on his pillow—long, dark, and definitely not his wife's. Sarah's hair had been fire-red in their twenties, now salt-and-pepper at forty-five. This stranger's hair was midnight black, impossibly straight, the kind that belonged to someone who hadn't yet learned that some things can't be fixed with conditioner.

He'd known Sarah was having an affair. How could he not? She'd become a sphinx these past six months—inscrutable, distant, speaking in riddles when she spoke at all. Her riddles weren't ancient Greek mysteries but domestic ones: "Why do you think I started taking yoga at 7 AM?" and "Have you noticed I'm wearing perfume again?" Questions whose answers he'd been too cowardly to speak aloud.

That night, they ate papaya at the kitchen island. The fruit was overripe, its flesh the color of a bruise, sweet and cloying on his tongue. He watched her slice it with practiced precision, her wedding ring catching the light. The papaya had been his grandmother's favorite—she'd believed it cured everything from heartbreak to hypertension. It hadn't cured her loneliness, and it wouldn't cure his.

"The Sphinx didn't have secrets," Sarah said suddenly, as if continuing a conversation they'd never started. "She just had a riddle nobody could solve."

Marcus stared at her. In seventeen years of marriage, she'd never once referenced mythology. "What riddle?"

"What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?" She met his eyes, hers clear and devastatingly calm. "The answer isn't a man, Marcus. It's marriage."

The papaya turned to ash in his mouth. Four legs: the awkward, needy beginning, both of them crawling toward each other. Two legs: the long middle, walking side by side. Three legs: now—third wheel after third wheel, secrets and compromises and the cane of resentment you leaned on when you could no longer stand on your own.

"She killed herself for knowing the answer," he said quietly.

"No." Sarah sliced another wedge of papaya. "She killed herself because everyone assumed the riddle had a happy ending."

The black hair on his pillow burned in his pocket. He wondered if the other man—whoever he was—understood that Sarah would never leave. She'd rather become the riddle herself, eternal and unsolved, than face the messiness of an answer.