The tape sits before me on the desk. The cassette player sits next to the tape, the door open, inviting, waiting for me to insert it.

Dare I play it? Do I really want to know? Was it worth all the effort, finding a quiet audio-activated recorder, hiding it carefully under my bedside table, testing it from all positions on the bed?

For weeks there has been nothing on the tape. This evening when I got home from work it was full. Somebody, or something, or somebodies made an awful lot of noise in the bedroom today.

The tape sits. Quiet. Too quiet. It wants to tell me what it knows, to transfer all its emotional potential energy into me, all its hopes and fears and exhilaration.

But I do not know if I am ready.

Downstairs my wife is cooking dinner, bustling happily. She looked oddly content when I got home. It is a good thing for her to be content, isn't it?

Somehow I knew when I saw her that I would find the tape full. I assumed cause and effect, which is never a safe thing to do, but my hypothesis was proved correct, at least this once. A good scientist would try multiple experiments, build more of a case for correlation, prove as close to a statistical certainty as can ever be reached.

I do not know if I am a good scientist. Besides, this is home, not the lab, my wife and life are not experiments, and proving some correlation between my wife's apparent happiness and the length of content on the tape is not the same as actually listening to the tape, which is what I've been sitting here avoiding.

She is calling me to dinner. I go. We sit. There are candles on the table. There are never candles on the table. I interpret the candles as forced romanticism to mask her obvious distraction.

I watch her as she eats. She is beautiful in her own small round way. A candlelit dinner with a small round beautiful woman should be a shared experience, an opportunity to lose myself in the moment, to enjoy her company, the wine, and the food she has prepared for us. But I am more observer than participant, more scientist than lover.

Which is probably why the tape is full, why noise is made in the bedroom while I am at the lab, why my wife looks extremely satisfied quite apart from anything I might have done.

After dinner I will listen.

Or maybe I will just burn the tape, disburse all that potential energy, anger, tension and lust into the atmosphere to disturb the dreams of unsuspecting strangers. I do not need to listen to know what she sounds like in the throes of ecstasy. I can easily extrapolate what she would sound like coming harder than she does with me. Nor do I need the tape to imagine the voice of another, urging her on and coming with her.

But I also know, and do not want to know, that the destruction of the tape will solve nothing, that I am already changed forever by the knowing of the full tape and the not knowing of the contents, by the decision to buy the recorder and by my unwillingness to listen.

I stare at her hungrily, wanting her more than ever before.

She looks up, stares back, almost alarmed, definitely concerned.

She asks me what the matter is.

For several seconds I say nothing, unable to find the words, to even understand what it is I want to communicate.

We sit, completely vulnerable in the moment, before I raise my glass in half salute and return to silent eating.