Please enjoy Daniel Kenitz’s story which will appear in NDQ 93.1/2! 

Coquine
by Daniel Kenitz

It was eleven o’clock and I was still reading in bed when my husband started whispering my secrets aloud. Coquine. Eight-thirty. Corner table. Coquine.

That he was already asleep was no surprise. We’ve always been uneven in that way, separately circadian, one in Atlantic time and another in Eastern, joking while mattress hunting that twin beds would make more sense if the idea didn’t seem like antiquation and—oh, I don’t know—capitulation. What startled me was that word: Coquine. It wasn’t a word from the blunted routine of our lives. There was only one time I’d heard it used, the name of the restaurant downtown, and yes, I had been there at eight-thirty one night, and yes, at one of the corner tables. I had the duck leg confit. I still remember the pleasure of the skin alone, how it burst with schmaltz and salt. I was already breaking the implicit promise of all spouses: never to enjoy myself too much at too great a distance.

“Coquine,” he whispered again. A dry little mumble from him. A bolt of static charge in the chest for me. “Eight-thirty. Coquine…”

An exact time and an exact place. Usually his sleep talking was a murmur like snoring; if I ever could make out a word, it would have that silly surrealism that only exists in dreams, moaning about school or for his late mother not to wake him up. Earlier in our marriage I liked to poke him awake and ask where he had just been. He rarely remembered. Eventually I numbed to his mumbling and read my books all through it; he became part of the white noise of marriage, like football Sundays or the sensation of entering the shower second, when it was already dewy and warm and possibly urinated in. I couldn’t imagine poking him at night anymore. Nor could I imagine how I ever felt bold enough to interrupt any bodily function on a 210-pound man. Still. Coquine specifically?

“Coquine,” he groaned, as though answering. He pulled in a long sniff, sat up, rubbed his closed eyes, and zombie-walked into the bathroom. He closed the door.

A minute later, his phone buzzed on the nightstand. An overwhelming urge to read his texts bloomed between my fingers, like a rash that would burn if it wasn’t scratched. I let it burn.

 

2

 

The Krav Maga had been my idea, and, in my several years as a wife, not one of my brightest. But what else could I get him? Brendan is hard to shop for. On a car ride home from a dinner party—in that red-wine afterglow when it feels healthy and life-affirming to razz on all the friends we just laughed with—he once asked why any man would wear a watch when they couldn’t even unglue themselves from a smartphone. I felt like an idiot returning the Rolex Oyster Perpetual I’d gotten him.

So: five lessons in Krav Maga, traceable to some comment he made about finding a way to stay in shape past the age of forty. I knew nothing about Krav Maga, but I could show I’d been paying attention to him. A friend of mine, Cadence Fuller, had pointed out that he constantly talked about wanting exercise that didn’t have the hamster-wheel quality of a treadmill. Well, here it was.

“Neat,” Brendan said, distantly, when opening the little envelope I’d made. “Neat.”

“It’s perfect for when I have book club,” I replied, hearing my voice turn its alto into a high-pitched tone of apologetics, finishing an argument we never had. “Something to do.”

That he went to the first lesson already felt like a victory. But Brendan came home from it sweating and raving. He gushed about his instructor, how he was a grinder and no-nonsense and had seen action, whatever that meant, and, “how easy he pins me. I’m like a helpless little crab.”

It was hard to imagine Brendan becoming a helpless little crab with anyone. That was one reason I married him. My mother had taken one look at his broad Scandinavian shoulders and concluded, whispering separately: “Well, dear—at least when you go out, you’ll always feel safe.”

Brendan wanted me at his orange belt ceremony, which fell on a particularly cloudy Tuesday. I packed my purse tight—in case I needed a quick exit—and headed to the “dojo,” which was on the fifth floor of a clay brick cube that had been a textile warehouse in the last century. Just outside the lobby, I almost knocked into a man who was setting out chairs.

“’Scuse me,” he said pleasantly.

I froze a minute, admiring the smiley, cupped ribbons of his lips. “You’re excused.”

“Oh. Am I?”

“Just don’t let it happen again.”

His lightning-crack smile at least meant he could handle me at my driest. Then I watched him leave. He was tall and charcoal-haired, and his square polo shirt bared enough skin to show collarbone. It seemed to me he’d gotten off at the wrong floor. Should he be at a dance studio, maybe? Something about him was exquisitely Rococo; I could imagine him in a painting, oil-on-canvas, lolling as the ivory fingers of some water-nymph dropped grapes into his mouth.

He walked away and I cleared my throat and I imagined how I might describe him to Cadence over text. Life-sized thoughts. You know how men say they might see a woman in an airport for ten seconds and think about her for the rest of their lives? I no longer think they’re full of shit.

Then class began.

Brendan’s cohorts were not a herd of bespectacled ten-year-olds; they were students in various stages of middle age, particularly on the older end. Brendan was the giddy youngster of the group. He hopped nervously on the pads of his feet and raised his eyebrows when he saw me take my seat in the rows of cafeteria chairs someone had laid out. I gave him my best yes, honey wave, fighting the gravitational pull of my phone. If there was ever a time to get lost in a level of Candy Crush…

Then out he came: again the charcoal hair, again the cupped lips, again the lithe figure of a dancer. He had changed into combat shorts and a black T-shirt. As he spoke (“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time you see where your bi-weekly ACH transfers have been going” to a polite wave of chortles), we made eye contact. I rolled my wedding ring in my fingers. For years I had a habit of twisting it on the bone, like picking at a well-corked bottle of wine.

The students went through a presentation of skills—chopping at air, submitting each other, fending off back-alley attacks from other middle-aged men with swollen midsections—and then the instructor pulled Brendan to the center of the mat. “This is what they’ve been learning,” he said as he handed Brendan a rubber knife. “Attack me.”

From the nervous expression in my husband’s eyes, I gathered they hadn’t practiced this. But he did as he was told, lunging impotently with a handful of rubber, spinning into the vortex of the instructor’s twist and shoulder shrug, then flipping over with a profound smack on the mat that echoed through the room’s high ceilings. The instructor gave his neck a fake chop and my husband’s limbs spread out in submission. Like a helpless little crab.

And I couldn’t shake that image—the fleshy smack on the ground I could still feel in my molars, the visual of all my husband’s meat going loose—even as the class broke for an afterparty of store-bought brownies and Diet Cokes. I made a beeline for the instructor. His name was not something seventeenth-century European like Giovanni Battista or Étienne, but a rather disappointing Drew. We made small talk, his eyes glowing, me holding the bubbly soda in both hands the way I clung to red solo cups at parentless parties in the tenth grade.

“You should come,” Drew said. “First one’s free.”

“I should,” and my thought was just the same, I should come.

I never told Brendan about this lesson, which happened the following day, in the date-night hours of a Friday, a lesson to which I wore makeup and lacey black underwear and nothing remotely suitable for an hour of Krav Maga. I never told Cadence Fuller, either. Some words don’t belong in your phone’s history.

The entire fifth floor was empty that night. I walked uncertainly across the blue mats, kicking off my kitten heels, lathering up a faux-curiosity in case Drew really meant to teach me self-defense. Plausible deniability has always been important to me. I will test the perimeters of the world, walking into strange rooms, sticking my fork into someone else’s cake as long as I can still stay credible by saying oopsie. Living around Brendan has only exacerbated this quality. Aren’t a lot of marriages like that? A husband who has you by nearly a hundred pounds can turn your life into a constant search for exit ramps.

“No,” Drew called across the room. He stood outside the lobby door, waving to a side-office. “Back here.”

I never needed the oopsie. After, we tangled together on an office couch that could barely contain our limbs. We did the catch-up chat of people now justifying themselves. Our goals. Brendan and his lessons. Where we had been born—New Rochelle for me, and not Milan or Rotterdam for him, but a small town called Fishkill. Nothing made me feel especially disappointed in myself. I liked how different we were. He was strong, scheduled, disciplined; I had a habit of flipping my eggs too early. He had the congenital sort of optimism that comes from finishing a workout by dawn, and with my being a therapist, my life was more of a study of human disappointment. That line made him chuckle, even if I was being entirely serious. I told him we shouldn’t have done this—because that’s what you say when you’re married, you justify these things, and I told myself that once Brendan had flirted with Cadence Fuller on New Year’s and he had this coming—and Drew, shoulders bare and sweat-glazed, cupped my chin in his palm and told me even great things start as mistakes. The bliss of this one moment had me reconsidering the purpose of these last several years, as if the journal of my life had just come out in a bright new translation.

Brendan remained my husband. We still shared the same bed. The same shower. An interlocking schedule for dog-walking duty. One morning Brendan asked me what was different about me. New makeup? Different rouge, I said: how observant. I started clenching my hip muscles any time my phone was out of reach. So Drew and I agreed we’d leave no digital trail, keep our messages tight, a Morse code of dates and locations and times. In my phone, he was “Drea.” A woman I’d met at Krav Maga, in case Brendan ever saw.

First he texted: Next Thursday. Eight? Then: Ever been to Fishkill? And, most recently, most intensely, my phone had blinked with the latest text from “Drea”: Coquine. Eight-thirty. Corner table.

 

3

 

Brendan was taking his time in the bathroom. I heard a loud sniff under the door: good to know he was breathing. Had mumbling in his sleep woke him up? Maybe it didn’t matter. A word as specific as Coquine couldn’t have bypassed the conscious mind entirely. So he knew. At the very least, he knew something he shouldn’t know.

The bathroom door opened with a whine. I pretended to be asleep. Our marriage taught me that the key to a good pretend-sleep is not to be silent, but to let yourself breathe loose, even ugly—the air should make an embarrassing sound as it slags out of your throat. A person fast asleep has no concept of pretty breathing.

“Do we have any magazines or something?” he asked. “I think I have a battle in front of me.”

On I went: the slag in my throat. Saliva pooling in my cheek.

“I know you’re not asleep.”

Ugly breaths.

“C’mon. You’re awake. Admit it, you’re awake.”

But the gentle, pathetic dip of his sentence as it caught in his tongue was encouraging: he wasn’t entirely sure. And his tone had been so sharp, I was ready to respond to allegations of my bitchhood, though he hadn’t actually used the word this time.

Dissatisfied, he slammed the door. A frame holding a photo of my mother—her trip to the Grand Tetons—shook on my nightstand. There was a G2 pen under the photo. Sharp, prickling. Practically a needle, if I had to defend myself with it. That was something. I brought it under the covers and clicked it unsheathed. Then I pulled the sheet up to my lips and chewed.

All manner of conversations started foreshadowing in my head: Besides, I could say, it’s not as if you have no secrets. How many times had he been out for cocktails with Cadence Fuller without either of them telling me? Years ago, yes. But I had been the fire marshal of his drinking, from the early days of our head-in-the-toilet honeymoon through the sloshy way he’d sneak an arm around my waist, but only if he stank of gin. He liked me best through beer goggles. Then his mother died and Brendan gave up drinking, just like that, for some other woman and not for me, and overnight he became a spouse who was far more predictable and far less fun.

The sheet was turning soggy in my mouth. I pulled it down, evened out the stapled texture of my bite marks. Cadence Fuller was not a flame-retardant topic, I decided. Something else. Something domestic. The renovation! The great scab of our kitchen that gave us both so much pleasure to pick. Brendan could come out of the bathroom, ask me what Coquine was all about, and I could keep flipping through a magazine, one brow raised ever-so-casually, and turn to all my soft nags, farmhouse faucet again, how I had settled once more on eggcream gray for the cabinets. And of course he would roll his eyes and say it was just gray, he didn’t understand what eggcream meant, and somewhere in that old debate he would forget all about Coquine, eight-thirty, just as we had forgotten every other screaming offramp of our lives. I could put the pen away and sleep safe for one more night.

Little distractions like these had soothed me during the lead-up to our wedding. Nerves were normal, my mother said, and she encouraged me to drown them in incessant waves of decisions. Centerpieces: peonies or hydrangeas? Martinis: dirty or dry? As long as there was always a tiny problem to solve, the wedding, and by extension the decision to get married, kept its forward momentum. I always called it that—having a wedding, not getting married—which made it feel like having a birthday party without the chore of growing a year older. And that I could accept. What I couldn’t accept was the long trudge between wedding day and old age. My mother’s second marriage, after my father died early, has been like that. “The first marriage is for love,” she told me when I first asked about the man she was set to marry. “But at this stage, I’m fine to settle for company.” That she chose the word company stayed with me. The potential split of it: good company, bad company. Had I settled for Brendan’s company? When I first met him, my skin ached around him. Now the primary sensation he left in my skin was a dull sort of dryness, a need to moisturize before bed. And so what, my mother would say, wasn’t that a good thing? In relative terms, maybe. I am a woman in constant search of life’s loose wires. Would he bungee-jump with me? I wanted to mulch his old routines into something presentable, something marital and Instagrammable, couples hiking and rock-climbing up steep ravines. If we did them together, these little adventures should have been affirmations of life. How could a woman so desperate to have her husband join her at Skydive Sussex really hate being married? The question came up during couples’ counseling. Shouldn’t a man want to do things with his wife? Yes, he said, but these little gifts of mine were like Valentines wrapped in tripwire, and the implication was obvious: dangerous, do not open. And once I knew that even my most honest efforts felt poisoned to him, it became our last session.

So I settled for lesser adventures: renovating a kitchen. Rather than torture him over how often he stole looks at friends like Cadence, I tortured him to smaller degrees. How could he say he didn’t like the eggcream gray when it had been his idea? I lost track whether I was teasing him over that or if it was really his idea. I had made a private vow that before we ever saw a drop of that eggcream in our house, I would be gone. With Drew? With my mother? Someplace random? Undecided. But that didn’t matter. What mattered most was my absence here. The cabinets still unpainted.

The phone buzzed on his nightstand again. My fingers squeezed in dark temptation. What if I picked it up and read it, only to see some ESPN notification while Brendan opened the door and saw me sprawled over the bed with his phone in my fingers? A pen-jab to his eye, if I was lucky. Maybe I’d find out why his parents got divorced. If I was unlucky—far more likely, given things lately—he was getting drunk late-night texts from Cadence Fuller who knew enough about Drew and I to fill the limits of her conscience. Either way. It was a risk.

Buzz, buzz.

I picked it up.

DREW

Hey man so you arent gonna wanna hear this but i cant keep going on and on to you about character and integrity while living this whole other life. Its eating me up. So here goes.

Two clicks in the bathroom, bare feet, skin unsticking to tile. The whistly cracking of forty-year-old knees. The faucet started running.

DREW

So yeah. Coquine is a restaurant. I was gonna meet your wife there. Weve seen each other a few times now. Coquine is where i was gonna break it off. I swear.

I worked my thumb through the phone until an X spun into a trash icon. Delete, delete.

The only thing that bothered me was that Drew was never much of a texter. Our conversations had a certain microwaved satisfaction to them: quick responses, yes, but never fully cooked. He was big on yesses and nos. Logistics. Addresses. Coquine? Coquine. See you there? Thumbs-up. In written form, it was as if he filtered everything through a lawyer; anything he wrote could and would be used against him. So why the confession?

?

Delete.

When I was done deleting texts—and Drew apparently done sending them—I clacked the phone to the nightstand and rolled back to position in the bed. At this point the faucet was running and the bathroom door gave a painful wail on its hinges and I couldn’t say how long Brendan had been standing under the doorway, if he had seen me put it away or not.

Under the sheets, I clicked the pen. Just to make sure it was ready. Just in case.

 

4

 

“Was that my phone going off?” he asked.

“No.”

“I heard buzzing.”

“You feeling all right?”

“Better now.”

Under the sheets, I ran my fingers down the pen, felt the sharp wetness of the tip. “Close the door. It’ll waft.”

“I just want to make sure I’m hearing you right. There was nothinga…”

“What, on your phone? No. There was nothing.” I poked a tablet to life, pretended to read. “It’s the middle of the night. There’s usually nothing in the middle of the night.”

“So if I check my phone right now, there will be no new texts.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Strange.” It was at this moment I realized he’d been leaning, shoulder pressed into the door frame, with one arm behind him. He lifted his free hand into the air and twiddled a tiny silver phone between his finger and thumb. “Because I’ve been sending myself texts from this for like half an hour.”

He brought the phone to his nose—he was without his glasses—and tapped it. The phone on the nightstand buzzed. I didn’t need glasses to see the push notification from DREW pop up from the top, then slide back away.

“Which means,” Brendan said, “you deleted a bunch of texts from ‘Drew’ just now, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

I’m not a liar by habit, but the instinct for self-preservation is dearer to me than the truth. “No. If you’ve been texting yourself from a burner for some reason, this is the first I’ve heard.”

“Coquine. Eight-thirty. You know what I mean?”

I picked at the tablet with one hand. Pinched the nib of the pen with the other, under the sheet, thinking suddenly of how stupid it felt, this tiny nib, my enormous husband, I am trapped, I have been trapped by him for years. The moon was bright, and the color silver rolled in like a sharp spotlight on our bedroom carpet. An almost medical light. It made everything seem so hollow and skeletal.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, good.” Brendan shrugged, then lolled over to the bed, the weight of it almost bouncing me up. Then he enveloped himself under the covers with a single flick of his wrist. “You should know I had sex with Cadence Fuller. Several times. In fact, she broke it off.”

“Why are you saying this?”

“She was going to tell you. Thought it’d be better if I did. We had an argument, and she dropped something about you and Drew, and when I texted him—well, anyway. We’re even, right?”

“That’s why you’re doing this? This is all just to break some news to me without me being mad?”

His shrug was calm, brief, victorious.

As he climbed into bed, my grip loosened around the pen. Not completely.

“Tomorrow we have the cabinet guys coming,” he said.

“Yes. Nine o’clock. I’ll be here.”

“We still haven’t settled anything, you know.”

“We’ve settled things.”

“The gray cabinets, then?”

“If you like.” On the tablet, I brought up the app for the bedroom lights, swished my thumb, and the world went dark. “They’re eggcream, actually.”

 

THE END

~

Daniel Kenitz is the author of The Perfect Home (Scribner, 2025) and the forthcoming thriller Don’t Look Away (Scribner, 2026). In addition, his short fiction (“A Hand to the Plow,” Red Rock Review) has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.