Her husband came home and, right from the doorway—without taking off his shoes or coat—blurted out, “Lena! We need to have a serious talk…” And then, in the same breath, eyes already huge and now opened even wider, without the slightest pause:
“I’m in love!”
“Well, well,” Lena thought, “so the midlife crisis has paid our family a visit. Hello there…” But she said nothing aloud—just looked closely at her husband, something she hadn’t done in five or six years (or was it already eight?).
They say your whole life flashes before your eyes before you die; well, Lena’s whole life with her husband began flashing before hers. They’d met in the most banal way—online. Lena shaved three years off her age, her future husband added three centimeters to his height, and in this simple fashion—though just barely—they managed to squeeze into each other’s search criteria and… find each other.
Lena no longer remembered who messaged whom first, but she distinctly recalled that her future husband’s first letter contained nothing vulgar and had a touch of self-irony, which greatly appealed to her. At thirty-three, with average looks, she assessed her prospects on the marriage market soberly and understood perfectly well that she was, if not in the very last row, then in the next-to-last for sure. So she firmly decided that for the first date she would bite her tongue, perk up her ears, put on rose-colored glasses and lace lingerie, and slip a bag of homemade cookies and a volume of Turgenev into her purse.
Their first meeting went, surprisingly, easily (that’s what dressing the part will do!), and their romance developed so rapidly and impetuously.
They enjoyed being together, so after six months of regular dates—and the constant pressure from parents who had lost hope of ever seeing grandchildren in this lifetime—her future husband took heart and proposed. They quickly introduced their families; the bride and groom’s condition to keep the wedding to a small family circle was accepted by the parents unconditionally and unanimously; and, fearing that someone might suddenly change their mind, they booked the very first available date.
They lived, as Lena saw it, well. The climate in the family was tropical, with slight seasonal temperature shifts—no sweltering African passions, but warm and respectful. Isn’t that happiness?
Her husband, being a typical member of the male tribe—simpler and more straightforward—shed his tight costume-image of the “empathetic-tender-romantic teetotaler with golden hands” just a few weeks after the wedding and appeared before Lena as he was: a simple, hard-working, caring guy in comfy house sweatpants.
Lena, as a representative of the more complex female tribe, loosened the tight corset of her image—the “mute-deaf-blind sexy homemaker-intellectual”—bit by bit, almost imperceptibly. A speedy pregnancy hastened the process dramatically, and so, within a year, she too—quite happily—said a final goodbye to her splitting-at-the-seams persona and, with a sigh of relief, changed into a cozy house robe.
The fact that, despite mutually parting with their images, neither ran from the relationship nor even presented claims against the other finally convinced Lena that her decision back then had been the right one and strengthened her faith in their little social unit.
The daily grind and the raising of two children—born one after the other—rocked their family boat at times quite strongly, of course, but there was no shipwreck. And later, when the storm subsided, they would once again drift calmly and decorously over the waves of their family life.
Overjoyed grandmas and grandpas helped wherever and however they could; at work the two of them crept—slowly, yes, but steadily—up the career ladder, without forgetting to travel, devote time to their hobbies and, of course, to each other, all while staying within the bounds of the average.
And now they had been married twelve years, and in all that time her husband had never once been caught cheating or even noticed lightly flirting with anyone, though Lena was not a jealous woman, and he might have allowed himself such a prank without any ensuing scandal. She pictured her husband flirting and involuntarily smiled, because the image that popped into her head was just too funny—even ridiculous. The thing was, after several failed attempts at giving compliments the traditional way early in their relationship—and realizing it wasn’t his forte—Lena’s husband decided to change tactics and now gave compliments exclusively in silence (or with ultrasound Lena couldn’t detect?), simply bugging out his eyes like a tarsier.
Over the years, by the degree of roundness of his eyes, Lena had learned to recognize the whole palette of his emotions: from wild admiration, to satisfactory approval, involuntary surprise, unexpected bewilderment, profound incomprehension, and outright indignation. And now she imagined her husband paying one compliment after another to some rat, opening his eyes wider and wider and wider…
Lena’s throat went dry. Still picturing her husband’s transformation into a tarsier, she smiled nervously and croaked,
“So… what’s your rat’s name?”
Her husband’s eyes now really did climb onto his forehead, and, patting himself all over with frantic little motions, he stammered, rattling:
“Wha—what? How did you… how… how could you possibly… guess that I fell in love with a rat?! Wow, you’re something… You understand, I just couldn’t pass her by, I was blown away when I saw her… just look how awesome she is, how soft, how beautiful… how much she looks like you…”
Her husband pulled from inside his jacket a little gray rat with pink translucent ears, a pink nose, and shiny black bead-like eyes.
After that Lena heard nothing. She admired her husband, his new girlfriend, their mutual smooching, and she was endlessly happy that he had fallen in love with precisely this rat—one who looked so very much like her…
