What the Sphinx Knows

The dinner party had been dying for hours before anyone acknowledged it. Sarah watched Richard laugh at something the marketing director said, his head tilted back, a strand of spinach lodged between his front teeth like some small green accusation. She had loved him for twenty years, but lately she found herself cataloging these small indignities—the way his hair had thinned across the crown, how he chewed with his mouth open when he thought no one was looking, how he'd stopped asking her what she thought about anything that mattered.

"You're quiet," Richard said later, in the car. Streetlights flickered across his face, illuminating the deepening lines around his eyes.

"Just thinking."

"About what?"

"About the sphinx," she said. "You know, the one at Giza. We talked about going there for our tenth anniversary. Remember?"

He paused at a red light. "We decided on Paris instead."

"Yes. Because Paris was easier."

"Sarah—"

"I'm just saying. There's something about that creature. Half-lion, half-woman, wearing that inscrutable expression. Asking riddles no one can answer." She reached over and touched his thinning hair, something she hadn't done in months. "I keep wondering what happens when you finally solve the riddle. When you figure out what you've been holding together all these years, and whether it was worth it."

The light turned green. He didn't move. Behind them, someone honked.

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I found the spinach in your teeth three hours ago, Richard. And I didn't say anything. That's what twenty years does. It teaches you to let things rot rather than make a scene."

He pressed the accelerator. Neither of them spoke again until they were home, and by then it was too late for riddles or answers or the undoing of small silences that had somehow become everything.