At seven-fifteen, Sheila left our Madison house with her hair still damp. I stood in the kitchen holding a cup of coffee I’d already stopped drinking, and I noticed the deadbolt. She didn’t lock it behind her. I’m a locksmith, and open doors are the only kind that make me look twice. I didn’t have the phrase stag-vixen for what we were becoming, but I knew the door was still ours.
The stag-vixen distinction is often described by what it refuses, but the useful part is what remains: a confidence that doesn’t need the relationship tested to prove it, and that grows when the door opens.
Wade’s account from Madison, Wisconsin comes from a profession that traffics in access. He installs, repairs, and rekeys the mechanisms that determine who enters and who stays out. The irony isn’t lost on him. His confession is a stag-vixen story, told in the plainest available language by a man who handles metaphor the way he handles a deadbolt: practically, with a suspicion that anything decorative is probably covering a flaw.
***
Before We Had a Name
I’ve been a locksmith in Madison for twenty-two years. Commercial mostly. Office buildings, property management companies, the occasional panicked college kid who locked herself out of a dorm at two in the morning. I drive a white van with my name on the side that isn’t as clean as it should be. Sheila teaches seventh-grade earth science at a middle school on the west side. We met at a friend’s Labor Day cookout in 2007 and I liked that she argued with me about whether the Packers’ defensive line was overrated. She was wrong, but she was specific about why, and I’ve always trusted people who are specific about why they’re wrong.
Nineteen years. Two kids, now sixteen and thirteen, exactly old enough to be annoyed by both of us at once. Our weekends look like this: Sheila grades lab reports at the kitchen table with a podcast playing too loud while I work through the list. The list lives on a legal pad held to the fridge by a magnet from a cheese shop we visited in Door County. The list never gets shorter. That’s the nature of houses and marriages.
***
The Conversation in the Van
The conversation happened in the van.
I was driving Sheila home from a dinner party in Middleton, December, two years ago. One of her teacher friends had been telling a story about meeting a couple at a resort in Cancún who were open about seeing other people. The friend told it like a curiosity, not a scandal. Sheila listened. I listened to Sheila listening.
In the van she said, “That didn’t shock me.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“No, I mean. It didn’t shock me on a personal level.”
I drove for about half a mile before I said anything. That’s the distance between the Beltline on-ramp and the Verona Road exit, and I know this because I’ve driven it six thousand times and because when I’m thinking about something I count things. Locks, pins, miles.
“What do you mean?” I said. I knew what she meant.
“I mean I’ve thought about it.”
I wanted to say something useful and what came out was, “Like, recently, or…” and she laughed and said, “Wade, I’ve thought about it for years. I just didn’t know if it was a thing real people do.”
We sat in the driveway with the engine running for twenty minutes. I asked what she was imagining. She told me. I waited for the part where I was supposed to feel sick, and it didn’t arrive. She asked if I was okay. I said I was. She said that was the part she hadn’t expected.
I said, “Sheila, I lock things for a living. If I felt like I needed to lock this, I’d tell you.”
That’s the closest I’ve come to saying something poetic in nineteen years of marriage.
***
The First Test
The first time was three months later. A guy she knew through a running group. Marcus. Mid-forties, divorced, elementary school gym teacher. Not what the internet would call a specimen. Just a normal guy who made her laugh at mile markers and asked her to dinner and she said yes and I said yes.
She left at six-thirty on a Saturday. I stayed home with the kids. Made frozen pizza. Helped the oldest with an essay that was bad in the specific way that seventeen-year-olds write badly, which is to say she felt everything and punctuated nothing. I went to bed at ten-thirty. Sheila came home at eleven.
I heard the front door open and her keys land on the kitchen counter. Then the deadbolt turned from the inside. She came upstairs, brushed her teeth, got into bed, and put her cold feet on my leg the way she has done every night for nineteen years.
“Hi,” she said.
“How was it?”
“Really nice.”
“Good.”
That was it. I waited for the follow-up feeling. The tightness, the inventory of questions, the need to know exactly what happened in what order. The forums said it was coming. The feeling didn’t arrive. What arrived instead was this: I was lying in bed next to a woman who’d just done something we’d been afraid to talk about for years, and what I felt was simple. She was home. The door was locked. Everything worked.
I’m a locksmith. I test mechanisms for a living. A lock that’s never been tested isn’t secure. It’s untested. You can install the best deadbolt on the market, but until someone puts torque on the cylinder, you don’t know if it holds. You hope. You spec it out. You don’t know.
I know now.
The second time, two weeks later, she told me more. Not because I asked, but because she wanted to. She talked about how Marcus asked about our kids. She talked about the pasta being overdone. She talked about how strange it felt to be on a date at forty-two and how she caught herself checking her phone out of habit, then laughing because the person she would’ve texted was me.
“He asked about you,” she said.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you’re a locksmith who isn’t as funny as he thinks he is.”
“That’s fair.”
We were lying on our sides facing each other, which isn’t how we normally fall asleep. Normally she faces the wall and I face the ceiling and our feet meet somewhere in the middle like a treaty neither of us remembers signing.
“Does it bother you at all?” she said.
I thought about it. Genuinely thought about it, the way I think about a lock that feels slightly off. Is the spring weak, is the cam misaligned, is there something I’m not seeing? I ran the assessment the way I run it on every mechanism I touch.
“No,” I said. “But not in a stoic way. Not in an I’m-fine way. It just doesn’t.”
“I keep expecting you to be lying.”
“I know. I’m not.”
She studied me in the dark for a long time. I could feel her looking even though I couldn’t see.
“That’s the part I wasn’t ready for,” she said. “I was ready for all the hard parts. I wasn’t ready for you to just be okay.”
***
Leaving It Open
We’ve been doing this for a year and a half. Not often. Not on a schedule. When she wants to see someone, she tells me. We talk about it the way we talk about everything else, over coffee, half-distracted, with one kid yelling about the Wi-Fi.
The thing I’d tell someone considering this: don’t prepare for the feelings you read about. Prepare for the ones you actually have. I read four forums and twelve articles, and every one told me the stag fights something: pride, jealousy, control. I was ready to fight all three. None of them showed up. What showed up was something I still don’t have a good word for. Not relief. Not permission. Closer to recognition. I’d just never turned the key.
Sheila and I still go to our place on Saturdays. She still orders the same thing. I still leave a too-big tip because the waitress has been there since before we were married and I like being a regular in a place where someone knows my name.
Last month Sheila said, “You’re happier.”
I said, “You think so?”
“You don’t check things as much.”
She’s right. I check things less. Not the locks. I still check those; it’s literally my job. But the other things. The temperature of a room. Whether she’s happy. Whether I’m enough. Whether the structure is holding. I check those less because I already know the answer. The pins align. The bolt throws clean.
I lock everything else. This, I leave open.
***
The stag-vixen dynamic can be a confirmation of trust already present but untested. The stag-vixen guide gives couples language for it, while the feeling that lacks a clean English name lives somewhere between pride and certainty. VEX is available on iOS and Android.