Part 1

I am the woman your husband is fucking.


I don't know whether you know about me already or not. I know you've asked your husband if there is another woman, and I know he is still making a general effort to deceive you on this point. But I don't know if you have figured it out. I don't know if some friend or not-friend has told you your husband has been seen entwined with me in some bar, in the lobby of a hotel near his office, in another city holding hands with me as we walk down a cold street, to dinner or back to our hotel room. I don't think he has been terribly discreet. Not married, not at risk of being found out, I make only mild efforts to keep this under wraps. In my opinion we have not tried very hard to hide our affection. You could easily know about this.

I don't write to you particularly to tell you something is going on. If I wanted you to know about us I would write you a personal letter rather than a public one. I might have remained anonymous, but why leave you nameless? What is the point of telling you about your husband's transgression if I don't tell you who you are?

Somehow I have conceived a desire to talk about your husband with you, but know I would be betraying my confidence with him to do so. Betray your privacy, too. I would never write to you, call you, tell you that I am fucking your husband. Tell you I am his lover, paramour, girlfriend. What you care to call it. That could only summon B-movie images of the "other woman," the wronged mistress making a desperate play for her lover's attention even as he is forsaking her in favor of his wife.

No. I am not desperate for your husband, not concerned that he is leaving me and returning to you. He is too completely mine at this moment. Neither do I imagine he will leave you for me, nor believe that you would leave him simply because you found out he is having an affair.

No good could come from my telling you, specifically you, that your husband is having an affair. It would accomplish nothing in my favor and probably nothing in yours. He would be furious with me, you would be furious with him, and everyone would be sick to their stomachs for all time. His sexual betrayal of you has been profound but it is nothing compared to the deception, the slaughtering of trust between you. There will be no possibility for whole forgiveness if this comes to light. So I will not speak directly to you, will not betray his confidence in me, will not betray the unspoken pact between civilized people that the betrayer does not confront the betrayed. Only the other way around. It seems fair enough.



But my desire to communicate with you remains. A desire to tell you what I have come to know about your husband. In some twisted-up, knotted logic, it seems to me that the knowledge I have of your husband, the experiences we have had together, that all this somehow belongs to you, not me. Whether this is because deep inside my monogamous self I wish your husband were enjoying you the way he enjoys me, or whether I think it is the place of a spouse to know such stuff about their partner, or whether I just hate the way women are kept from speaking the truth to one another, I could not say.

I am bound to write to you, and at the same time bound not to. Nothing is allowed. Not allowed for me to tell you to get away from him, that he is my man now. Not allowed for me to say Please, please give me a reason to give him back to you. Not allowed for me to shout "Wake up, girl! your husband is wandering off!" No. You and I are blind and deaf to one another. We cannot communicate, cannot make sense of this tangle. Only he can. His responsibility, his challenge, his row to hoe. You and I are made pawns in this way, though in truth we are both queens. We are not threatened by his choice of behavior. We are who we are regardless.

But who are we? I am the woman your husband is fucking. You are the woman he married, is married to, with whom he shares children. Absent your husband, we are two women who have chosen different paths in life, women with severely different priorities, lives that would never cross but for the fact that your husband's cock connects us more intimately, physically and emotionally, than we are connected to most of our close friends, our family. We have odd powers over each other, are capable of breaking each other's heart even though we would not know each other on the street.



So there you are. Awkward, but maybe interesting. If you knew I existed, you would care more than anyone besides my mother, and maybe your husband, what I am doing with myself, who else I may be involved with, where I have travelled and what bugs I may have picked up and can share, whether I have any nasty habits or a taste for intravenous drugs or fetishes that might compromise the safety of my lovers or other dangerous ways of being that a person might be dragged into by spending time with me. You and I both care about the same person in our different ways, are important to him in different ways. We have a mutual friend. You are the friend of my friend, the lover of my lover. None of this makes any sense to me. I do not view you as my competitor, but you certainly are. We compete queerly for your husband's attention; you without knowing, and I trying not to.



I want to talk to you about it. I have no particular goal, unless it is to convince you that your marriage might be in danger, to alert you that your husband is seeking love, true love, not just sex, outside of your marriage. Not that seeking sex outside of a marriage isn't trouble enough, but your husband wants to be in love, and believes himself to be in love with me.



I want to warn you that that your husband is careless and putting you in danger. I want to tell you these things are occuring so you might decide whether you care or not. Will you be relieved and happy to know he is finding satisfaction in my arms and my cunt? Will you feel less guilty about no longer wanting him? Or will you be concerned to learn that your sex life is not just dozing but that it has left the building? Are you hoping for a reason to dissolve your marriage anyway? I have no idea how you will feel to discover that I am your husband's lover, that he has a lover at all. Not knowing you, I cannot even speculate on your reaction to this news. Still I want to tell you everything about this, come clean on every count. Perhaps I want to be certain that I am not the one deceiving you, certain that you are being given sufficient information that you might draw your own conclusions about what is best for you and for your children. I assume that what is best for your husband is of limited interest to you; what's best for me of no interest at all. I understand. I don't give a fuck about you, either.



I don't, I really don't know why I write to you right now. By the time I get to the end of this I might know. Maybe I am being gracious to warn you. Maybe I am lonely and miss your husband and view conversation with you (even one-sided) as connection to him. Maybe I am frustrated by not being in communication with you when you have come to form such a large part of my life. Maybe I just want the deception ended. I view the lying and deceit as more criminal and injurious, to everyone but especially to you, than the sexual betrayal itself, which I am not so sure you do not welcome. I am certain though, that you will not like finding out that you have been lied to, that you were not told the truth, that you were not treated as an adult trusted to make her own decisions. I don't want your children knowing their father deceived their mother. I don't want deception in any direction.



Your husband and I have a pact that we will be honest with each other. Profoundly and cruely so. The irony of this is not lost on us and we each have laughed small, bitter laughs when we speak of this honesty between us so sharply contrasted to the background of deceit this love plays against. I know that I long desperately for the charade to be stopped, for you to be aware and to make your informed decisions about this, about him, about your children. I want him to show me and you and your children a level of integrity and generosity and courage that will astonish and impress us, regardless of how that may translate into action.



But I cannot make him do this. I cannot make this scared child confess this thing that is sure to bring great punishment down on his head. I can leave him when I tire of him being a milketoast about the whole thing. I can lose my desire for him in the mire of lies, never to be re-found. But I cannot make him come clean to you. And I cannot speak to you myself.

I am not deceiving you.

If you walked up to me and asked if I were fucking your husband, I would say yes. I hope. I hope I would look you in the eye, and hope I would be humble and hope that I would be able to withstand your reaction, whatever it might be, and to do so with compassion.

But I would not walk up to you and offer this. It seems wrong somehow, invasive. If you want to pretend it is not happening--and I cannot imagine that you do not, somewhere within yourself know your husband is cheating in his relationship to you, that he is sexually focused on another woman--that is your right. It is a strategy for getting rid of me, even. I do not want to further disrespect you by forcing you to confront this thing you might have decided strategically to ignore. I do not want to deceive you, but telling you about this unasked is a completely different betrayal. I would slip into the realm of other women who have tried to damage their lover's marriage by forcing the wife to acknowledge that her husband is fucking someone else.

I don't want to force you to do anything. Hence the namelessness. You do not know who I am, and you do not have to know who you are either. You can receive this missive, this terrible mess of information, and you can pretend you do not recognize yourself. Or you can in all sincerity not recognize yourself. You might discuss this letter with your girlfriends over lunch or at book club and talk abstractly about the device the author has used in order to draw a picture of an illicit affair. Perhaps someone in your group has had such an affair and a few glasses of wine will pull out other stories and the discussion will turn to the transgressions you all have perpetrated and move away from the details and the reality of the transgression I report here, the one between your husband and me, the one that slithers on a tide of bodily fluids into your house, into your own body. I have entered your home. Will you ignore me?





I am not deceiving you. I do not know you. I write to you as the stranger I am, write to the stranger you are. Hope hopelessly that you see yourself in this letter, hear my communique to you, this message in a bottle, even as I hope your husband will not view this letter as me reneging on promises. He can read this as easily as you can. I am hiding nothing from him, either.

I too am a whole, entire human being with the right to do as I see fit.

And I want to write to you and tell you of your husband and me.