Once upon a time maybe six or eight years into the marriage, at her dad’s house in Iowa, the couple was on the sunporch (which serves as a guest room when all the guest rooms are filled with miscellaneous siblings and family members), watching TV on the foldout sofa bed, which was lumpy, as foldout sofas often are, though this one was lumpy in an inexplicable way, since it’s a decent-quality mattress with a nice quilted pillow top. There’s a hill on one side of the mattress, around where one’s shin might be, depending on one’s height. The husband was on the lumped side of the bed, switching channels, and landed on some program that caused him to ask the wife what she thought about the idea of an open marriage. It wasn’t even some sexy late-night cable show, it was some random show and maybe there were two women on the screen, maybe two women and one man. Sisters and a brother. Coworkers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. Anything from South Park to The Wire. Some random and unsexy moment, involving whatever series of thoughts gets a person from South Park or The Wire to open marriage. Almost all of the details of the story are long forgotten except for the feeling she experienced upon hearing his question, which was along the lines of having been smacked in the head, and her response was more or less If that’s what you want you can go get it with someone else. No lengthy conversation on this topic followed. The husband was only curious about her thoughts, and assured her he only wanted to be with her. The wife’s thoughts on this always fell to whatever floats anyone’s marriage boat was all fine by her but the boat she floated into this marriage on was a two-seater. Good, the wife said, I will set about forgetting this conversation ever happened. Or something like this. Or maybe she only thought this. But you know, when you get smacked in the head, even if you don’t have a headache the next day, it’s hard to say what the lasting effects are. You could have a brain injury.