Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017

Sipping the muddy coffee — too harsh to swallow straight — he asked himself whether any of the other couples in their development might have been better served by traveling the psychological express he and Deme had taken to reach this time and place: Althea and Herm? Nappy and Melanie? Jorge and Grace? Barb and Bobby? Barb was working on her third and Bobby on his fourth marriage, which Arte considered persuasive evidence they’d stumbled upon the same truth and were trying hard to recoup their lost years. Nappy and Melanie reminded him of a pair of snarling wolves pacing back and forth in the cage of their split-level, ready to rip out each other’s heart at the slightest provocation. At a neighborhood gathering he’d once noticed Jorge and Grace wink at each other, but Arte had been married long enough to understand you never really knew how a couple got along unless you hid in their bedroom closet. His neighborhood sampling suggested that very few couples escaped the plague of misalliance, and this tended to confirm that the gods did indeed get a kick out of hooking up the wrong people.

At one point in developing the neighborhood in which they lived, some slick architect in cahoots with some savvy town planner decided to alter the facades of these identical split-levels, as if to encourage inhabitants to imagine they were living their own unique lives. If Arte should have been residing in one of those split-levels with someone other than Deme, he knew it had to be Althea, his friend Herm’s wife. Allie and Herm kept up a reputation in the neighborhood for being a “match made in heaven.” But Arte knew better. During a bash to celebrate this heavenly couple’s tenth anniversary, the gods had seen fit to place Althea and Arte alone in an upstairs bathroom. The two of them were swaying in a kind of ostrich mating dance behind the glass door of the bathtub when he revealed his innermost feelings, and, moved by his declaration of undying love, she applied a soft, wet, lingering kiss to his mouth.

Althea and Arte had been raised in bird-scarce cities in Connecticut and Massachusetts, so it was no surprise to their spouses that each had taken an interest in the birds fluttering about their respective upstate New York backyards. Of course watching birds is not the same as bird-watching. The latter is a scientific endeavor requiring constant vigilance to identify feathered creatures suspended on branches, bathing in dust puddles, soaring across the sky. But this pair of lovebirds spied on the little egg-bearers from a romantic perspective, extracting sensual gratification from the life-ways of these song-filled, brightly hued, jittery dancers, and they shared this private passion through deceptions which went beyond the occasional Tweet. Sometimes they would meet at Stop & Shop not so accidentally, chirping in the secret language they’d devised. “Did that yellow-bellied sucker make its way into the limbs of your crab apples?”