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.

Part 2

First of all, it should be said that I have no interest in taking anything away from you. I don't. In fact, if I had my way your husband would give you everything he possibly can and walk toward me, if he walks toward me at all, empty-handed. Ready to re-address life from a less cynical and materialistic point of view.

Of course, you might argue, that would mean I am taking him away from you. I would disagree. I found him alone at a bar on a Saturday night during a holiday weekend. An accident. I went to meet my cousins and they had mostly already left and your husband was still there, drinking with the remains of my extended family. He was abrasive and vulgar, a hulking, hunched thing at the bar, but there was a force pulling me in and I did not expect it and I was not prepared to resist and so didn't. I didn't take him away from you. He was sitting out for the taking like a couch on the curb. My life is not so regimented in its style that I cannot incorporate a beautiful thing when it presents itself.

We can agree to disagree. And you can remember that I do not necessarily want him wholecloth anyway. He comes with too much attached shit, you for example and your spoiled children, and I do not know that I would accept him if he did leave you.

In any case, whatever my plans for the future may be, your husband is currently spending time and energy on me, and so it is possible you could be interested in what I have to say. There could be something I have to offer you of value regarding him, some clue you do not already have as to weak spots in your marriage, vulnerabilities in your relationship with him that could allow the whole thing to come tumbling down with a slight push. Perhaps I think I can tell you how to get your husband's attention back. Perhaps I have tools and instructions that will help you rebuild the deep structure of your marriage, to re-create a bond between you that could not be threatened by the likes of me. Perhaps I have the clue you need to put a stake in the heart of a bitter marriage.


Arrogant of me, I know. Who am I to tell you anything? I am nothing. I do not know him. Certainly I do not know you. I know nothing of your marriage.



All true. But I do know this much: I know that he will stay with you. One way or another, he is yours forever. Even if he were to leave you, he is bound to you by the children you share. Nothing will get rid of you. You are anchored in his life and in his world. You are tethered to each other. From my point of view, you might as well take care of the children and go to his dull dinners and entertain his friends in your well-appointed home. But from your point of view, as long as you are stuck with him, wouldn't it be better to also own his sexual attention? To enjoy a home filled with the tenderness of a sexual bond rather than the tensions of resentment and deception? Wouldn't that be better for your daughters? Better by far than anything you can buy for them. That is my point, not my point of view. If a marriage is held together for the benefit of the children, then shouldn't it benefit the children?



You are well-compensated for your role as his wife. I know that much as well. Perhaps that is enough for you. Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to think that you would want more from your marriage, that you would even want your husband's carnal attentions. Perhaps you have tired of him, no longer find him attractive and are happy to enjoy the material aspects of your world as long as you can present a reasonably happy union, a successful life and marriage to family and society. He shows up at all the right events, you have dinner with friends for his birthday, for yours, you go on a date for Valentine's Day. You are lucky it was Valentine's Day, as it happens. I had planned to come to town that day, but remembering the holiday I cancelled, not wanting him torn between his Hallmark obligation to do something with you and his now hallmark desire to be with me.

I am well-compensated for my patience and flexibility and my lack of regard for holidays. When I see your husband he has nothing on his mind but love and sex. Perhaps he will grow tired of me, this fervid thing may very well grow cold and quickly. But another will take my place now that he knows he can do this, that he can bring love and fresh sex into his life and you barely notice. Or if you do, you are too fearful of losing your comfortable nest to make a fuss about it. Whichever. If it is not me, it will be someone else. He is unlikely to return to the dry, suburban marriage bed having remembered what sex is like at lunchtime in sparkling-white hotel linens when there are no children around.



Yes. I agree that may be much of it. When I have asked what happened to his sex life with you, he doesn't really know but he does acknowledge that it is very difficult to have erotic attention for another in a house where children live. That is a cultural phenomenon, and one I find heart-breaking. I wonder, being an artist and a designer, if architecture and interiors aren't at the root of the problem. Being an activist and social theorist, I also wonder if the media isn't to blame for the sentimental overemphasis on children of affluence and the difficulty of keeping the focus on the richness of a marriage, on the web of sexuality between two people, when all the trappings and commitments of child-rearing are so invasive and enveloping, sharp scissors to those delicate strands. Carting children to and from their many activities alone seems enough to keep a person from remembering what their spouse looks like. And then one does come into contact with so many other adults doing these childish chores that one is perhaps not so dependent on the companionship of their spouse.

I can't know, of course, though I observe it constantly from my perch as aunt and friend. There are children I have known from birth who are headed for college, and there are toddlers not yet forming words. I have watched many couples do many different things for many different children. My nomadic inclinations have placed me in countless family settings over the past two decades, at every point on the economic and political spectrum. My understanding is broad, detached and long-term, rather than built of personal anecdote, and I have noticed the forest of domestic details that strangle sexuality and I hear the complaints, sometimes cloaked and sometimes not, the discontent which starts playful and becomes more resentful and eventually goes underground to hide its own ugliness and then resurfaces everywhere as anger and impatience and sometimes the couple completely forgets that sex has disappeared and thinks the problems are all the small things that are now so daily asserted, and that it is those problems that have squelched sex. The situation gets turned around and the source is viewed as symptom and the couple is helpless and confused and grows angrier with one another. "She needs to get laid," is a cultural joke that is not at all funny in the truth of it. She does, we do, he must, and it is all very serious. I prefer laughter to be taken during sex rather than instead of.



Did you know that the neglect of sex within marriage was the source for the invention of vibrators? Doctors once "cured" "hysteria" in women—the 19th century medical term for the nervous disorder associated with denying one's sexuality for too long—by massaging the patient's clitoris to orgasm. Which is not the same as having the sexual attention of one's beloved, but it is certainly better than nothing and might in many cases have been better than the attentions of a sexually ignorant or brutish husband to begin with. I imagine not a few women learned how to please themselves by way of this treatment and did in fact get much better, calmer. The vibrator was developed by doctors who found the procedure too strenuous or tiresome to do manually. Really. This all is true.



Anyway. The trouble with children... It seems widespread if it makes you feel any better. There are books on the subject. I haven't read them as it doesn't really have anything to do with me, but I imagine someone has been bold enough to analyze the fetishization of children. Someone must have examined the degree to which placing them as the most important thing in a family, its reason for being, can damage the original bond between the parents, the bond which is itself the source of the children. In a perfect world. The whole picture is very complex, always and of course. I don't mean to simplify things or suggest I know what goes on in your house. What I know is that your husband seems to be both de-sexed by the atmosphere of children in the home as well as chained to that same home by their existence. He is at once desperate to escape, to regain his whole self with sexuality intact, and terrified of anything threatening his domestic position with regard to the children.

It is not very surprising that he should have ended up on anti-depressants. Ironic that those very medications crumple the erection that might contain his salvation on this count. It's fortunate he makes plenty of money. The added stress of financial difficulties would probably be more than he or the marriage could take. Who knows, though. Maybe if he were less successful he would be less dismissive of your lesser successes in the workplace, which would be a positive turn of events for the home, I would think.




You two are fortunate, safe and snug in all ways, yet you reek of fear and discontent. Anger. What went wrong? Why do I find myself in a position of writing to you? Do I not have better things to do? My life is not so set and luxurious as yours. I have chores of desperate importance to attend to, yet I am equally desperate to communicate to you what I can. Desperate to offer you something of substance that will give you the ability to love your husband so that he can love you back. I don't know if you love him now, but I know he doesn't love you back. It has nothing to do with me. All I am is evidence that your husband is capable of great and romantic love, of driving desire, is able to throw himself upon the task of making a woman happy in every possible way, from sweetest licking to fat jewels. He is sensual and he is garish. He is. Can you displace me as the woman he wishes to please? You can trust me on this. It is in my best interests for you to steal your husband away from me. I can never have him and he is completely distracting and absorbing to me. He, more than my compulsion to spend this time writing to you, keeps me from my own work, steals my attention away from my self. I need you to get him back. I need for him to tell me that he has found a way to be happy with you, that he must do everything he can to honor and sustain this new hope for your marriage. I need to believe he will be happier with you, without me, or I cannot let him go.



So the letter proceeds. I continue to trudge through the things that might be keeping your husband from bringing his hardened self home to you, from finding sweeter hardness in your glance, your touch. This isn't particularly fun for me. I would not blame you if you threw the rest of this letter away in disgust. Another reason it is not addressed to you. Like anyone, you are careless and unthinking, believe you already know everything, that no one has anything to tell you of importance, and you would throw this away. By not addressing it to you, there is a chance that one of your friends might read it and bring my words to you through her own understanding of them. Perhaps you will in this less direct way still profit from this information I struggle to offer you. In any case, whatever you choose to do, I continue.





Children. Their absence and presence are an obstacle, one that is apparent to everyone but no one seems to have come up with a good approach, a fool-proof way of incorporating children into a marriage without the erotic aspects of that marriage suffering. The cultural prudery of our sexuality demands that we hide sex from children, that we keep sex and children in completely separate parts of our brains and bodies and houses—if we ever admitted sex was there in the first place rather than sneaking it in like some shameful thing behind our own backs.

No mystery then that the mere existence of children in a marriage might chase away, even negate, sexuality.

But sexuality seemed to have a hard enough time taking very deep root within us to begin with, even under the best of circumstances. Here in the modern and westernish world, where sex is demeaned constantly by a torrent of mean-spirited jokes, music, movies, where sexuality in an individual is denied from its very inception in the child's body and mind, where the impulse toward sexual pleasure is crimped and cramped and trampled in the directions it wants to grow even as it is force-fed on pornographic images of over-inflated bodyparts and airbrushed flesh, here is where we live. Sex lies on the surface, sexual arousal reduced to a response to a pleasing exterior, a topography not appreciated for its own pleasing qualities but rather for how it compares to other, more and less pleasing options. Now we have conceived a societal fascination for, an overwhelming absorption with, the technical aspects of sex and how "good" it might be with one person or another. The deep sexual connection that arises between two people, either magically at first sight or over the course of time as they build a history of love and sex between them, come to know each other as no one else will, that bond... what happened to it? It must have disappeared from the vernacular, no longer be standard issue for our culture. The divorce rates signify: Who, after all, would leave a person they were sexually bonded to?



I cannot give you advice on this matter. I have no idea how to make your home more warmly sexual, how you might to re-introduce the marital bed and bond, but I am pretty sure that it would be good for the children if you could figure it out.



Maybe you need to look at the house itself and see if it is not contributing to its own failure as a place for love and sex. I haven't been to your home, and know only that it is in an affluent suburb of a prosperous city. Not a good start. Studies show again and again that more sex happens in more modest surroundings. Trailer parks, for example, and the back seats of unregistered cars. Since both you and your husband seem committed to maintaining a moneyed lifestyle, it is worth noting that ownership of a house as such can be a terrible and debilitating burden on the sexuality of a couple. The demands of a home, especially if the property is responsible for presenting an image of success to the world, a pretty picture of domestic something or another, the demands of the building, its upkeep and the money needed to maintain it can mangle a marriage. I have seen sex disappear between unmarried lovers who take on a property together when that property is more demanding than giving. I have seen this phenomenon occur among gay men and between lesbians. No one is safe. There is something very wrong with the way we live as couples, something that dissolves the very thing that made us become couples to begin with. The weight of adhering to a version of coupledom, its expected togetherness, the arrival of children, the imperative to present a vision of material success to the rest of the world, the constricting conventions of the comfortable life, the seduction and acquisition of luxuries that create still more weight, all that is heaviness and distraction.

The life of a couple is supposed to be one of support for each other, helpmate and companion for whatever life may hold for that couple and for the individuals within the couple. But not for us in this time, in this industrialized world. We have other priorities and forget that all there is at the end of the day is the love we have carefully built with another, their body and the warmth it holds for us as we become old and our hearts grow fatigued from a lifetime of bruises. Soft kisses, the embrace of sex however it has transformed over time, this is finally sustaining. And the house itself too often is at odds with that.



Why?



One of the things I've noticed is the inclination of couples to find themselves living in buildings extremely different from the place where sex originally took hold for the couple, let alone where love was learned in the hearts and minds of the individuals. It is tempting to give you a slew of examples, stories, anecdotes, but somehow I doubt you have the patience. The idea is only this: That in this age of great mobility, terrestrial, social and economic, the likelihood that we will be having sex when we are fifty in a place that in anyway reminds us of the place we had sex when we were sixteen or twenty is slim. The associations are destroyed and we find ourselves adrift in interiors that are either the random fantasy of some designer, or fantasies of ourselves, or the hodge podge of a lifetime of mediocre furniture decisions, but in any case are not a careful and solicitous, intellectual, emotional and material evolution of the room where love first took root into the home of greater maturity and comfort that a life well-lived might produce.

So for example, the couple who began their sex life in a Chevy van and tents might do well to construct a bed that offers them once again the confined intimacy of those original interiors. I am not making this up. They have a new van with a piece of foam in it, thirty years into the marriage, and that is the "bed" they prefer, the place they prefer to sleep, and where they are most likely to have sex. The conventional thinking of what a house is, how a bedroom is furnished, etc. is in this way often at odds with basic elements of a couple's sexuality. Sexuality is a secretive thing so it doesn't occur to us to create a space in one's house that is specifically about sex. How could we explain such a room? Who can afford it? Stupid. Unbelievably stupid. It is easier to get Viagra from the doctor than to face unlikely, inconvenient truths about oneself.



We are all of us adrift. I don't know what to do about it. There is something wrong with the architecture we have opted for as a culture, something wrong with our relationship to it. To then layer children and the manic-compulsive attitude toward them that is so rife in the suburban sub-culture on top of that, to have the house which was not condusive to sex to begin with be transformed into a nursery by the paraphrenalia of childhood... it is too much. Too many of us do not have the will or the power of imagination to make a bedroom into a bower, a santuary for the sex that needs to exist between a couple. We litter our bedrooms with paper and plastic and computers and domestic detritus and bad paintings and sentimental photographs and ugly furniture and laundry that needs to be folded, so much so that only teenagers would have enough hormonal momentum to ignore the clutter and fuck anyway. Failing to create even one room, one part of a room, that speaks clearly to sex and love, how much more impossible is it for us to create a whole home that supports and encourages, honors and re-inspires the first wet bond that made the home possible to begin with?



Do I overstate the effect of a house on a marriage? Surely you can point out marriages that lived very happily in extravagant or disastrous houses. I submit that those houses and those marriages should be studied. Still, whatever clues those houses and their inhabitants may hold to the secret to marital happiness, there is a mountain of examples to the contrary. When a house is interpreted as a manifestation of the success of the marriage, when a display of material luxury is more common than a display of affection, when clutter and filth make every task herculean, when a couple is required to feed the needs of the house, the needs of the individuals and the sex between them are necessarily neglected, and the house itself suffocates the union.

But then, any occupation with how the world will view the life and the marriage might be deadening to love, any chronically distressing situation will poison a relationship. Discount and neglect the sexual union (however it may have evolved over time) and it will die and so goes the marriage itself. The individuals will survive. Love only is lost.



The trick is being honest about what will nourish the union. The more I look around with this in mind, I fear that for most couples the very things they think will make their life better are the exact things that strangle their sexuality. Dream houses too large to allow intimacy, interior spaces built to impress a buyer with fantasies of grandeur rather than to sustain the daily private and social life of an aware and intelligent resident. The financial, emotional strain of a house at the end of one's means. Houses too large to furnish effectively or to keep clean. Rooms arranged to deny real privacy or with no allowance for the fluid mechanics of social gatherings. Or a house may simply not be in harmony with the interior lives of its inhabitants. Unlivable, in very real terms.

These are all things good architects try hard to address. But if an architect is more concerned with something other than the real, whole life of the residents, or has no idea who the residents are to begin with, then those noble goals get quickly pushed to the side and are not addressed at all in the rush to create something that will impress the most arrogant and sentimental aspects of the affluent homebuyer. You.

Such a house overwhelms a marriage as easily as a giant wave crushes a sand castle, and as carelessly.



But again, to go back, it could simply be that a house is too unlike the interior spaces where the sexual union was formed and so does not ever feel like a place to make love, to be entwined in that manner. Soulfood, architecturally speaking. The house may be a place for entertaining, for raising children, a house possessed of all the amenities that an earlier house—the one where children were conceived—did not have, but then for small or large reasons sex sneaks out the back door. Our forebears might have been fortunate in arriving at marriage young and to find themselves living in the family home where they could expect to die. Sex between two people is born, grows, lives and dies a natural death in the same house, perhaps moving to a different bedroom when someone from another generation moves on. The same kitchen where young lovers shared post-coital omelettes and coffee becomes the kitchen where children are fed, where life is wrestled and resolved, where love settles when troubles subside. The memory of a frantic fuck against that very wall over there as present as the memory of a dinner party, a tragedy and its grief, the chaos of children, cakes baked and roasts roasted, ten thousand conversations adding up to a life in a room, in a house.

That is not how we live anymore. Not that we miss it so much, not that we aren't generally grateful for this freedom from the shackles of tradition. We make our own homes and enter them with our lover, make love in a place where we never were with anyone else, no memories, no relatives.

And too often no grace. Unprepared, uneducated and generally incapable, we are asked again and again to create spaces that will support us as individuals and as lovers, but it almost never happens. Not in this country anyway, this country of protestant priggishness, where the architecture itself is the equivalent of a whipple. And when it is not, it is a whore's costume, garish and meant to quickly delight, to sell at first glance, to please long enough to get the cash and then it is done. Merchants prey upon our sentimental fantasies, stores pop up filled with decorative particulars, from the lowest discount wholesalers of cheap towels and candleholders to the mass marketing of nominal classics to the overweening and baroque or snootily spare knick-knavery marketed at enormous mark-up to the nouveau richest. They assist us in sustaining the fantasy. But it's the wrong fantasy. Furniture is designed to trick the eye into thinking the body has entered a gothic castle or provincial farmhouse; but the chairs are cruel and hard on the body, impossible to sit in, the beds flimsy, and with nowhere to tie things, couches constructed of creepy synthetic materials devolve to dorm use in a matter of years. It is all so much set design for a shallow drama in which your whole, complex, long-lived, somatic self has no role.





Did this happen to you? It is so easy. "O ye of fast cars and master baths!" I tease your husband, and he doesn't hear the humor. "Yes, I do have a master bath," he says. And it is there that I worry you might see the bruises left on his body. "Don't worry," he reassures me when I notice what I have done. "The kids climb all over me. Bruises can be explained." Not hickeys so much, but that is his business. But I do wonder when you see his body, if you look at him, regard his nakedness, I wonder if you notice him, bruises, anything. I do wonder what goes on between you, if you embrace and kiss, or kiss thoughtlessly, briefly, a peck on the lips, no more than I get from a girlfriend, or do you share much much more. I cannot know, will never know, don't want to know though I might wonder. Your husband and I are new lovers so we kiss like that, as though we have been starved and will die if we do not drink all we can of the other. In a way our desperation, our starvation, precludes more meditative and powerful sorts of kissing. But I do kiss him with stillness and stay there and he does understand so maybe we have that too.



My apologies. That is not really the point. Houses. In the past several decades, maybe even the past few hundred years, there has been such swiftness of architectural change, so much creativity, so much bravado, the cult of the architect, the cult of the anti-architect, so much desire to find the solution to our architectural malaises, so much so that we are awash in built suggestions, most of them very bad. Ideas that should never have seen the light of the builder's on-site trailer are built and then someone has to live in them. Cruel ideas for work and for homes, for public places and for places of ritual. Very few deeply considerate buildings, buildings that are sublime and divine in their submission and respect for the complexities and simplicities of living and working as a human, the actual demands of human life in the different climates and ecosystems where we attempt to live, insist upon living. Fewer still the homes intelligently and sensitively padded with colors and fabrics to support rather than undermine the inhabitants. Can you imagine a home that could heal your marriage and make me unnecessary? If you can, why don't you live in that place?



I browsed this morning through a book of black and white photographs of apartments in Paris. The dwellings of contemporary, fantastically successful figures in design and fashion and literature who either are French or have chosen to live in France. The photos have none of the gross extravagance of living rooms in the United States today. The rooms are differently luxurious, full of stuff to support the emotional and intellectual lives of the inhabitants rather than gilded with things that scream extravagance to new visitors. Surely the apartments were selected for those qualities. Still, I was surprised, and surprised to be surprised. I have lived in Paris. I knew this. Too long here and I had forgotten. You have as well, I imagine. I notice your husband drives a needlessly extravagant car and knows nothing of art or music. He dresses beautifully, though I don't know how that happened. He is heavy and he is moneyed, so I suppose it is mainly a matter of going to the right store and submitting to a sales person. Is your home dealt with in the same fashion? Go to the right store and spend enough money with the guidance of a tasteful salesperson? Poof, you have a house suitable for showing off to your friends and co-workers.

It is a life I do not understand. Do you care about your home? Do you do what you can to make it a sanctuary for your family, for the eroticism between you and your husband? Does he? Or does it conform to the magazine photos of our time and so you think it is a home and are oblivious to the manner in which it might be poisoning your every day?





Your husband speaks only of a room where he likes to read, because we discuss reading and because he wants to winterize the room so he can use it all year. Apparently it is too cold in winter. A place to read is all important. I think I once left a man for a lack of such a place. It was as though food were being kept from me. Your husband took up with me as the chill of winter fell. Could it be that he no longer had his place at home and so felt he no longer had a home? Is it possible that if such a small thing had been different that everything might be different? You don't know. I recently rearranged my livingroom to accomodate a perfect reading chair, perfect light, music. Perfection. But for me, too, winter is cold and I stay in my office in another part of the house, and instead of reading for a couple hours a day I am on my computer writing erotic fictions to your husband. If my livingroom were warmer, if your sunporch were good for the fourth season, if all these things were in place, would your husband and I be sequestered in hotel rooms at every opportunity?



What is your feeling about your house? Are you happy there, are you careful to note the way your children relate to their rooms, their play areas, their sleeping areas? Are they happy? Do they have more room than they know what to do with? Too many things? Are their rooms decorated to manifest your own fantasy of girlhood, or are they furnished to nurture the growth of their best and truest selves? Is there art that challenges and soothes in your house, or are the only paintings on the wall things you thought would go nicely with your decorative scheme? If you could live anywhere, is your house in your neighborhood in your city where you would live? An interesting question because you and your husband and daughters could probably live anywhere. Why are you there? Right reasons or wrong? Remember, I am a stranger to you and you are anonymous. Answer truthfully, for no one will know. The only danger is that you might then know the truth, and then you will have to explain to yourself why you deny it.





It takes a great disinterest in a house, a willingness to let it go at any moment, for the love within a marriage to withstand its callous force.





So your husband and I fuck in hotel rooms. Plain, furnished rooms with no evidence of our lives outside of each other. Obviously there are no children or animals braying at the door, either. We fuck ourselves into an embarrassing tangle of damp sheets, spilling crumbs and wine and an assortment of other fluids and then I call housekeeping to make it perfect again before your husband returns for some later taste of this thing he has made up for himself. Me. I am a collaborator, but he has made his fantasies of sex and love, apparently dormant within the walls of your home, come true, fairytale-like, with me in the heroine's role and he king, prince, dragon, stableboy and toad, all at once in the tall castles of downtown hotels.

I let him do this for my own reasons, mainly because I fell in love with him one night, late, at a bar, and he reached between my legs and pulled the barstool and myself closer to him and I touched his forearm to punctuate a point and was shocked by a current of life and intelligence and sex, smoldering like frayed wires inside a wall. So we embarked within the week on this affair and I am aware that much of what is attractive to him is that I am not in that big house, there are no children, and I do not in anyway remind him of any other part of his life. I am just sex to him, and our sex exists in rooms designed for the purpose. A bed and a bath, with endless hot water and infinite clean towels.



On the other hand, he might really be in love with me. I am beautiful and intelligent and I am attracted to your husband like a moon to a planet. He pulls me in. And he confesses his love for me enough that one is tempted at least to believe he believes himself to be in love with me. Discount it as you will. He does not. He fears that I will break his heart, is ready to hear at every moment that I am tiring of this complexity, tired of not being first. I interpret this as a sign of love for I feel the same way myself. Fearful at every moment that this has become tiresome to him, too difficult, that he has decided to subtract me from his life. My fear that I might love him too much and scare him away feels like sharp evidence of my having succumbed to him completely. His parallel fear may be evidence that his heart is mine.



But let's leave that possibility to the side for the moment. We will assume your husband does not love me. That he is simply straying, having an affair, that it is all about sex and that he cares nothing for me. It may very well be true, anyway. So. Why on earth would he be having sex with me rather than with you? Why would he be throwing me and not you on a hotel bed and tearing off my panties rather than yours? Why am I and not you saying goodbye to him in the morning, my body like bread from an oven, naked or nearly so, kissing him goodbye in the hallways of hotels whose names I have already forgotten. Me warm and sleepish, he clean, damp and dressed and rushing off to the life you know about, either to home or to work. Whichever, or something else. I don't particularly care. I am exhausted, satiated. It appears to be a matter of pride for your husband. I go back to sleep in sheets rumpled from our night or afternoon. Or pull myself into soft clothes, thinking of him, whether he will like how I look, what his delight will be when he pulls these same clothes off me, and I go out, alone into the world, get coffee and try to remember what it is that I do when I am not making love to your husband.







Oh yes. I am a writer and a designer. I have no employer. I am an impoverished artist, by some standards, and though the life has drawbacks they are nothing compared to the richness of freedom I possess. I suppose I should work today, but perhaps I will instead shop for wine for this evening and spend the afternoon in the tub, shaving my most complicated parts. He asked me to and why not? It's his birthday. Whether or not he loves me, he behaves as though he does, and I do love him, with the fickle and fast love of a teenager perhaps though you can't know for sure, and there is nothing I would not do for him. His requests challenge me, make me stretch and press open my own sexuality, which was not exactly prudish to begin with. We nudge and beg each other for more and better ways to please the other like children wanting to impress a parent, out of the sincerest admiration for the other and the most innocent desire to give pleasure to another. We rush at first, desperate when we have had to spend time apart, but then we do not rush. We no longer worry that this will burn out shortly and we must make the most of it. I tell him we have all the time in the world, even if it may be spread thinly over months and years. He tries to make me understand that he does not see an end to this, that I do not need to worry that I will lose his devotion.



No. The only thing that will stop this now is you. You could do something to stop it. Will do something. Should do something. I don't know what it should be, will be, but it must be something and it will have to be you.



This is perhaps why I write to you. To tell you what I think you can do to destroy this affair, how to destroy it in a manner that might serve rather than further injure your own marriage. My thoughts on how things could transpire, how you might choose your course of action to best benefit yourself. You could choose to harm me as much as possible, even at your own or your husband's expense, but you know such a vindictive choice will be revealed and you will pay for it in the end. Maybe. Maybe your husband would be impressed by your mad revenge, take it as proof of your wifely affection. Maybe. That wouldn't be my style. I don't deal in evil or purposeful harm. You will have to come up with your own plan if you will be vicious and vengeful. I will rather tell you how to get your husband back with sugar so that there is no evil scattered about that might later find its way into your bed.

You should listen to me. I might know things.



This is an extraordinarily interesting challenge. What can you do to take my lover away from me?



A few things suggest themselves. The first, obvious thing would be for you to discover our affair and to put down some ultimatum in which you threaten to take his children away from him. Everyday I expect this, it seems so certain that you will discover us and so certain that this will be your reaction. Like a beaten dog, your husband would leave me and return to the prison of your home and do whatever he thought you required of him. He loves his children extremely and his responsibility to them is whole. I have heard of wives who have used this strategy to good effect. I would think it better for using on a man who is a habitual philanderer, who does not have one lover but many or a chain of them. The strategy is to shorten the leash almost to non-existence, and then to hold it very very tightly. I have been given to understand that most men will heel under these circumstances, and that sometimes the marriage does revive. I don't really understand the mechanics of it, but I am told it is so. Men who are under the thumb of a corporation or other institutional employer, who have already sold themselves into such servitude, apparently are good candidates for this technique of husband retrieval. I think it sounds like a lot of work for you, and very little fun. And there is always the chance that his obstinance and arrogance will suggest a different response, one not good for either of us.



The second thing, and something I would be quicker to suggest to you, would be to somehow revive your interest in him, to develop over time a dialogue about sex, to re-learn what you can of his sexuality, things you might have never known or things you might have forgotten. Men get older and they do change, so there is no doubt something for you to discover. In any case, slowly and imperceptibly get him to associate sex with you rather than with me. It won't be easy. I assure you that a day does not go by that his cock is not made hard by contact with me, his mouth waters at the thought of my lips, he cries out for my sex, his eyes go into a trance, his breathing becomes shallow, and I am not even there. His sexuality is all I have of him, and it is all I want. You will have to work to coax it back to you. As it stands, he pulls into the garage of your house, still talking to me on his phone and mildly concerned because his cock is up and he cannot get out of the car and go inside right away. I don't do this on purpose. Apparently just talking to me arouses him. Why wouldn't it? He associates me with nothing but sex. We do not negotiate child care or household chores. I have never been angry with him for a real or perceived slight. I have nothing to nag him about.



In truth I cannot imagine living with him full-time. He is a pill and a brat and I am sure I would tire of him as completely as you have and he of me and he would find himself betraying me with some other slutty piece of trash soon enough.



For the time being, though, he associates sex with me, not you. My voice, my laughter, the very idea of me is associated with sex for him. If you want him to stop responding to me, imagining me, plotting to be with me, if you want him to return to attending to you as a person and as a woman and a lover, then you must displace me. Replace me with yourself.



Really. Understand that your husband has come to despise you. That he associates you with all the things that chain him from his physical, sexual self. The demands of affluence, the reasonlessness of an extravagant life. Convention. Constriction.

Perhaps you are indignant to hear this. He is the one who wanted the big house. He is the one who bought the expensive sports car. He is the one who works all the time and puts money ahead of everything. You are right about all that. But there is a part of him that went and hid away and is boyish and randy and it wants sex and it wants it to be removed from the scene of the crime. No big house. No puffy, bloated furniture. No children. Just the bodies of two people compelled toward each other. He wants to feel desired, wants to feel desire, feel embraced and cradled, wants to feel that free fall of love and sex that the speediest sportscar failed to reproduce. From me if not from you. If not from me, from another and then another.



Can you imagine feeling this way with him again? I am told that you have taken to sleeping in a different room, that you do not care for his snoring. Yes he does snore, it is true. And as we have established, I can care less than you do because I do not have to get up in the morning and take care of children or go to a job.

Furthermore, I never wear pantihose and hardly ever wear wool and when I do it is lavender and periwinkle and lined with silk or it is cashmere and goes into the wash not to the dry cleaner. My clothing is soft and slips closely along my body, falls off accidentally to reveal my shoulder, snuggles around me in such a way that others are compelled to touch and to hug me, keeps me wonderfully warm but still slides easily off me. Hands can get into my panties or cup my breasts without much effort.

This is not because I am your husband's lover. It is because I do not have children and do not work for a corporation, because I am an artist, a writer and a designer, and it is my job to explore clothing and to never submit, as you do, to the conventions of the day, to the tyranny of tailored clothing and fit, let alone the larceny of the dry cleaner. Nope. Never. No one even asks me to anymore. I dress as I please, and lately I have been dressing to please your husband, not in ways he expects but in ways that will be nonetheless pleasing. I love surprising him with himself and his own desires. I love experimenting with clothing, to see how he responds to different shapes and colors, undergarments, dresses, shoes. He is a delightful subject, responds viscerally and with animation, noticing how the silk of my robe accidentally rubbed against his testicles as we were fucking, begging me to wear transparent things, things he can rip off, teasing me about what panties I might be wearing, admiring a kimono as though it and I were a work of art, but then in the end not caring at all, my body and his made naked and that being the only thing.

Are you willing to do that? Would you be willing to dress toward desire? To provoke his desires? Wear things simply because they make him think of taking, tearing them off you? Are you at all interested in regaining interest and in regaining his? You could, I should think. After all, you live in the same house. You have every opportunity to speak softly to him, to reveal glimpses of luminous underthings. To accidentally reveal too much shoulder or breast. To tell him how sweet and beautiful he is. To coax from him his fantasies, to laugh with him and to caress him for no reason and with no intention, just caress him as a communication of love. Get in the shower with him. Wash his hair. Make him a drink. Adjust the lighting so that you are beautiful to each other. Be in love, or at least act that way. How good would that be for the children to see their parents treating each other like lovers? What excellent lessons would they learn about what to expect from their own lovers and husbands?



"Oh, stop," you are saying. Why should you have to do things for him, pet him, tell him he is lovely to you. God knows it is his turn to do something for you. Yes, well god also knows I tell him that and encourage him to do just that and perhaps he occasionally does fuck you or take you to dinner, I certainly assume he does, but generally he is not very receptive to my ideas about being more kind and respectful of you. He has come to hate you, it seems. And he doesn't like you much either. He thinks you are greedy and materialistic, that you have a "demanding" sexuality, and I keep meaning to ask what he means by that. He thinks you are cold to the children, that you are careless of their little selves and unaffectionate and that you yell at them for insufficient reason. He only sees that you disapprove of him, that you think he drinks too much, which is true, but still, and that you have deceived him and tricked him into marrying you for your own agenda.



He may be right. I know you were at the very end of your childbearing years and were anxious to have a family and he, as he put it, probably was your "last, best chance." He might be right about all that. But he is equally to blame. He too was getting older, wanted to have a family, and he is guilty of what is perhaps a worse crime, of marrying someone he knew was not right for him because it was good enough, suited his purposes. I am told you are proficient at fellatio and that you use it to good effect. I know him to be a pig, so perhaps that is all he was considering. He also tells me he likes your parents and grandparents, that he was, is very happy to be included in a warm extended family, his own family being so difficult and not warm.

For no particular reason, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and grant that you might have believed you were marrying the right man. Of course, you should keep in mind that I only offer you that allowance because I am myself in love with your husband, find him completely lovable and can easily imagine someone, in all truthfulness, marrying him and believing it was the love of a lifetime. I fabricate this story and attribute it to you. But I have seen a picture of you in his office and you appear to me to be a stiff, formal person. I doubt you look at love as I do and I doubt you did not know what you were doing. I think you did know. I think he also knew. I think the two of you will have a lot of explaining to do if there is an afterlife, to have been so unbelieving in love, the only thing we have of the divine on earth. You were probably going to church the whole time, too, worshiping your false idols even as you betrayed love itself by marrying a man you knew did not love you and whom you loved with a false and selfish, untrue love.



You did not expect me to not be at all bitter, did you? Your husband and I push against each other in bars where we know no one, in theory though we are not all that careful, and we curse my cousin for not having introduced us sooner, soon enough that your husband might have known me before he married you and in our reverie of love we imagine that we would have known then that we should be lovers and that your marriage would never have taken place at all. "We should kill your cousin," is sometimes the way your husband greets me or says good-bye. Not always. Usually he just says, "I love you."

Sure. Your husband tells me a ten times a day that he loves me and I do a hundred things I hope will communicate my love back to him, reluctant to utter those words exactly because it just doesn't seem right to tell a man that you love him when he is married to another woman. Seems wrong. I don't want the chronology to be revised in our minds later and for anyone, especially not him, to think I declared my love for him in order to tempt him from you. I did not. I do not want to tempt him from you. I wonder sometimes if perhaps I should try to do that for the backward reason that it might be just the thing to jolt him out of this romance, to turn him against me as a thing that threatens his life and his children's home, and so be a way to push him back toward you.

I haven't tried that strategy. It seems convoluted and dangerous, and of course I have no desire for him to turn against me. I want him to turn toward me, at every moment he can steal from you and your organized and notated life. Every moment he can spare I want him oriented toward me, reaching toward me, allowing me to push against him, hard and with intention. We stay at the bar only to prolong the minutes of anticipation because once alone we do not wait at all. We are teenagers. You cannot hear this enough. Your husband, though possessed of the physiology of an overweight and middle-aged man, has the romantic and sexual inclinations of a college athlete. Maybe we all do, and it is just buried with time and commitments until we forget even that it was ever there.



Commitment. I am glad that word came up on its own. I am going to get to that. Not now though.

Part 3

I'm back. A day or two has passed. I am beside myself not knowing when I will see your husband again. I live in a different city than you, so one or both of us must travel. Would you be happy to know that I have resisted allowing him to visit me at my home? I have. It would be easiest in some respects, but I do not care to have him walk into the intimate confines of my home, to see up close the details of how I live and what my life is composed of when I cannot know that of him. It seems to me it would create an imbalance between us. And when this does end, I do not want memories of his presence in my house.

At this very moment you are out of town for the weekend with friends. I did not go to your city today to spend time with your husband, though we are starved for each other and talk every day and exchange love notes and long letters all day long. No. I even planned a party for Saturday night to make sure that I would not weaken and rush to him. All this because I did not want him tempted to take me to your house. He would have. He wants me there. Dreams of finding me there when he comes home from work. Fantasizes of fucking me in your bed, on every couch, in the bathroom in the bath in the shower, taking me every which way, wet all the time, sleep and do it again. Your home is not sacred to him, as I would have hoped it would be. He calls me from there. We talk sex and love and everyday things as well. We laugh a lot.

Anyway, had I gone to your city in your absence he would have coaxed or tricked me into going to your home, and there is no way we would not have made love to each other. And I would have seen your intimate sphere. And I don't want to. The betrayal is already overwhelming to me. I have heard nothing about you that makes me think I would like you, but there is the sisterhood to consider. I never planned to be in this role. I am myself deeply monogamous, have been as though burnt by acid when a lover of mine fucked another woman, and would never consider betraying a lover by taking another one.

Or so I think. This whole thing with your husband is making me mistrust that logic. What sort of commitment of fidelity can I have to a lover who is married to someone else? What do you think of another woman pondering her sexual fidelity to your husband? We are intimately connected, you and I. Do not imagine that your husband and I practice safe sex. Your health is right now completely dependent on my sense of propriety. I could fuck anyone later today, pick up any old disease and it would be brought right home to you. Further, your husband is not nearly as concerned that I not get pregnant as he should be, as I am. He speaks of it wistfully, presents the idea, repeats that it would not be such a bad thing, asks me if I want children.



What kind of hell would that be to your life to find out that your husband has fathered children with another woman while living with you and yours? That would be one cold wake-up call. Do you now see the imperative for you to steal your husband back from me? Will you not listen to me? Will you not take my advice? The bad truth is that a man who wants sex and love can have it. If not with you, then with me. Even if with you, still with me unless you do something to stop it. You are lucky I am not the kind of girl who wants a husband, because I would already be pregnant and be plotting the overthrow of your marriage. If children are the only reason he is not divorcing you, and if I have his children as well, the math becomes very complicated and the playing field made slightly level.

You should not be depending on my goodwill in this way. You should be playing dirtier than I am, and I can tell you I am playing very dirty. I have made it a sort of artistic agenda of mine to satisfy your husband's every desire, every fantasy. Not for any reason, but because he is so sweet and he accepts these gifts from me. It will be very difficult to compete with me since I have all the time in the world to attend to him, to invent new things for him to consider, to change his view of sex and bodies and love itself to a degree that when you reintroduce yourself to him as I hope you do, you will find an entirely different man.



Why am I doing this? Fucking your husband, that is, when there is no hope for a relationship of substance. It's beginning to look like there is an arrogant, philanthropic part of me that wants to think the things he is learning with me will make his happiness within his marriage to you greater when he returns to it. Which I always assume he will. He tells me he will never leave you, and I believe him. Come to think of it, though, he doesn't tell me that anymore. He told me several times when we first began this affair, and it was a point of negotiation when we were considering the contract for our correspondence. He was concerned that he had nothing to offer me since there was no promise in this entanglement. I said that I did not care, and I don't. To tell you the truth, I don't know whether that stands, as I assume it does, or whether he is rethinking that posture. He says quizzical things that I have been choosing to ignore, but which reveal decreased concern with whether the marriage survives. I don't want to think about it, though you probably should. In any case, time will tell.



So, I find a man unhappy in his marriage, and vainly imagine that I can make that marriage better by flinging myself into a steamy sex affair with him. Wow. That is messed up. What I am doing instead is creating a point of betrayal that will never heal. You will never be able to trust him again not only because he betrayed the sexual contract between the two of you, but because he lied systematically about it over time. You will never untangle the fiction in your head, the things you thought and what turns out to be true. Everyday, you will remember another thing that was not as you thought it was. Worse, where he might be spending time and energy paying you the attention that might draw you back into love with him, he is instead dreaming of me, scheduling himself to have time to be with me, fussing over hotel reservations and graciously volunteering for errands at home so he might have opportunities to call me. Cell phones are not your friend. If I were a wife, I would not let my husband have one. The phones give our rendez-vous a military precision and we can find each other anywhere. And we do. We are in love.



I imagine you are smug. I suspect you are thinking, "She knows nothing." Thinking I am a little tart and totally deluded and your husband will tire of me and be back with you soon enough. You hold all the cards. You might even be thinking that I am plain stupid to think that your marriage is in poor condition, would argue that your husband is very attentive to you, that he loves you, is in love with you, that you are in love with him and that this is just a rocky stretch and it will pass. You could argue that the fact that he hasn't told you anything about our affair means it is nothing to him and when it fizzles he is hoping to pretend it never happened. You could argue there is no reason for you to do anything, mean or nice, to get him to sever his entanglement with me. That it will become dull like all sex does eventually, and you will still be the mother of his children, his legal bride, and everything will be just fine.



Yes. Maybe. No. I suppose there are men who stray from the marriage bed just because they can. Because some hotty was willing to believe she had a chance of stealing him away from his wife and willing to have sex with him for as long as it took to realize she was wrong. Stray because they see no reason not to. I hear there are men who have affairs just for the sex and do not form an emotional bond with their lover, view their wives as security, a cosy barrier between them and whatever the women they fuck might want from them.

I'm sure it is true. Not your husband though. He wants love. Wants sex, but also wants love. Wants to fall asleep in my arms, wake next to me, listen to my voice wash over him and ignore the words. Wants to know what I think, how I see things. He loves speaking of love, announcing his love, presses me to speak of it, to tell him I love him, insists that it is important to hear the words. He loves love, loves being in love, loves viewing himself as the lover and as loved. He is just plain silly in love. And while you might be right that he will tire of me or I of him, or both of us of the deception, he has learned the earth-shaking truth that he can be married to you and get love elsewhere. Either you are fine with this, are willing to risk that love might spiral out of control, or you are going to have to do something to get his sexual attention, his in-lovedness, directed again toward you.





A girlfriend called and interrupted that last paragraph. She tells me she has had several affairs with married men. "How so?" I ask. She tells me several quick tales, remembering more incidents as she is recounting the first two or three. She is a very different person than I am. Her affairs are generally of this quality: there is some attraction of some sort or a flirtation over time with some guy, perhaps they find themselves drinking, perhaps they find themselves with opportunity, and they fuck. And maybe it happens again. Not many times though. Nothing lasts long. One of the stories involved a man she had met in a book discussion group online and with whom she had a steamy email conversation for long enough that he came to town one weekend to fool around with her. My girlfriend reports that man was a little disturbing, that she more or less felt like a prostitute, that the guy came to town expecting sex and that is what he got. "Did you like him at all?" I ask. "Until I met him," she replied. His expectant arrival, his sense of entitlement to a weekend of sex because of a flirtatious flurry of messages turned her off, but not enough for her to not have sex with him for two days. What did his wife think he was doing that weekend?



Interestingly, this friend expressed a most concrete disapproval of my relationship with your husband. "I wish you would choose something better for yourself," she says to me without even trace irony and I tell her that I am troubled by my actions, know that it is not right, but equally I believe that to say no to True Love is certainly wrong, and in a universal and spiritual way more compelling to me than the presumed wrongness of betraying the social convention of marriage.



The conversation made me think of the different sorts of women and infidelities that are available to men like your husband. If it makes you feel any better, I don't think your husband would fall for the likes of her. He is a man of great integrity and takes his commitment to you and to the children he shares with you very seriously. As far as I can tell, more from his actions than his claims, this is his first transgression -- and from what I understand your marriage has been corroding for a long time. He's a good man and wants to be a good husband and father.

But then again, now that he has seen how easy it is to deceive you and how much fun, how deeply delightful it is to have a lover aside from you, he probably won't give up this behavior even if he gives me up or if I leave him. Which of course I might. Your husband is a pain in the ass, as you know, and he is married. I think I can do better. Unfortunately, one doesn't choose whom one loves, whom one is drawn to. I am not fucking your husband because I think I can steal him from you or because he might marry me. I fuck him because it is part of being in love with him, which I am. He me.

You can know that this does not sit well with me. I have many girfriends, sisters and cousins with marriages I would stand up and fight for and each moment I spend with your husband, each thought I have of him, every small thing is a betrayal of marriage itself, of those women and the dreams they hold precious and I do not fling myself into betrayal with abandon. My heart aches at my own vandalism of the cultural construct of marriage and all it stands for and it aches for your husband’s demolition of trust between the two of you and I know more than I know anything else that this forsaking of truth and of trust will be the downfall of all this. That is the thing that cannot be withstood.

But at the same time, my heartache is itself false, a sentiment forced upon me for reasons and by methods I cannot make sense of. That there are excellent marriages does not make marriage excellent in abstraction. I should tear down the construct and see if there is something substance in the rubble of glue and newsprint.

Do you see? I am trying to reveal myself to you that you might have the tools you need to second-guess my battle plans for being with your husband, that you might have the best chance for winning the war. Knowing the specifics of his alternatives, and being apprised of my own weaknesses, you might imagine and invent astonishingly clever ways to bring him back to you and to love within your home. Leave me out in the cold. Perhaps I am hoping you do because it is too awful to contemplate being in love forever with your husband when I cannot get rid of you. I am too weak to leave him on my own. Not yet, anyway. I want you to steal him back, to take him away from me that I might have a chance of love with someone who is available to me in the ways your husband never will be, however much he loves me. And I am afraid, for what it is worth, he does love me, believes that he does. You can discount it however you like, but it will not serve you to pretend he doesn't believe he loves me. And I am not the sort of person to discard love. Even a sincere image of it is magnificent to me.



There is another reason I might want you to get your husband back from me. Maybe I want to believe that marriage is stronger than illicit love; believe the fantasy that love, once embarked upon, has every reason to keep going. Maybe I want to believe the myth of marriage even more than you do. Want to believe that if a man were to marry me, to swear to love me forever that he then would. Maybe I am more romantic and silly than you are. Maybe I am a minor priestess of love and have been given this affair with your husband as a test of my integrity, of my devotion to love itself and willingness to sacrifice my own desires to the demands of real love. Maybe it is for me to recognize and to rescue love. Maybe I don't know how to do that, so I am making a stab in the dark, telling you of this in hopes that you will gather these stones and destroy me with them.

You snear at me and I can feel it. If I am trying to give you a chance to get your husband back, why don't I leave him? Why don't I address this letter to you with your name that you might know to take the details seriously, that you might more effectively undermine our trysts? Spoil our fun. You are right to snear. I am cowardly. I do not want you to sabotage our union. I am the naughtiest priestess if I am even one at all. I may as well be sneaking cigarettes behind the temple. I am not serious about doing the right thing, not serious about helping you retrieve your husband. No. I'm not.



Or I am. But not regarding you. Maybe I think you are hopeless, that your marriage has no chance of salvation. Maybe I write this letter without salutation because what I am learning at your husband's hands and feet might help another woman, not you, one whose marriage is only in danger, not already destroyed. Maybe another wife will read this and she will find something in it to help her tug her husband back to her body, reorient him to her, re-attach him to her very soul.

Maybe that is what I am hoping for. I do not address this personally to you because there is no point. Your marriage was done for, regardless of me, long before me. Your husband remains with you only because he is hobbled by his hopelessness. Maybe I would sooner steal your husband and discard him rather than leave him in your cold clutches. I do love him, and that love gives him hope and strengthens him, makes him happy. But I also hate your kind of wifeliness, the sycophant and nagging wife, dry as bone and fun-free. It is bad enough to be a wife at all without also being a bad wife. I am willing to expose my crimes, share my secrets, reveal this harsh nakedness that other wives might take note of what infidelity looks like in this swift and digital age of planes and small phones and fast cars and corporate hotels where no one tells and maybe they will take measures to protect themselves. You, I do not care for your fate. You will keep your husband or not but it will depend wholly on his sense of duty to this thing he embarked upon. Commitment.



There. That word again. Sooner than I expected. I quibble with it, and your husband quotes Abraham Lincoln to me and we come to the point of agreement that commitment fades in the face of responsibility. Commitment is the thing one agrees to do and then finishes and accounts are settled. Without an agreed upon endpoint, commitment is a promise extracted and then held up as collateral to manipulate another when the situation has changed and the commitment would not again be made. Employers do it. Politicians, diplomats and heads of state do it. Spouses do it. Responsibility is the non-promise that cannot be broken, only fulfilled or handed off or shirked or failed. It is a beautiful thing to recognize, to shoulder, to share, to relinquish, to pass gracefully, or clumsily humbled and with difficulty, on to the next person. It is a means to discover strength and also to learn humility. It is never finished. It exists. Like love. And then it might cease to exist. Not something one can be held to. Instead something one recognizes and cares for, holds dear, finds bearable or unbearable, and one way or another tries to make sure it is not dropped, even if it must for good reasons be laid aside. The great crime is not to fail at carrying a responsibility but to not have seen that there was one worth carrying to begin with.

Commitment is the thing that crushes your husband, which makes no sense and drives him into my arms in a sort of madness. Responsibility is the thing you can count on, the ground where your life is staked. The thing that tethers him not to you but to himself and, because you two have mingled in the form of children, to you.







I don't really mean it, the part about your marriage being over. I choose to believe, want to believe that you can have your husband back. I tell him that, too. Encourage him to be nicer about you, discourage his slandering of you. If nothing else, I find it distasteful, but also I think that if he would stop saying mean things about you he might forget some of those things and begin to view you in a more gentle fashion. I really do think you can get him back. I have offered you a few strategies for doing so, and I may come up with more before this letter and these long weeks finally draw to a close, but I suspect that you will, in the end, take things I have said, combine them with your own particular knowledge of your husband and come up with a strategy I cannot imagine myself. To that end, you will forgive me for going on and on about my experience of your husband and my thoughts on this whole matter. I figure it is better to give you a great deal that you can root through to find that which you believe to be useful, rather than my trying to distill out the parts that will be of value to you. That would be truly arrogant. How can I know? I do, in the end, defer to the fact that you have known your husband longer and more intensively than I ever will. You be the judge. And please accept my apologies for dumping all this on you. I am hoping there is contained in here somewhere the clue you need. The key. I really do.



Way back, I started to talk about other sorts of women who might prey upon your husband if I were out of the picture and if you did not succeed in putting yourself back in, but I don't know if it is that interesting a topic. Women like my girlfriend will fuck your husband carelessly, whimsically, and only a careless man would fall for that.

Your husband didn't do that, for what it is worth. You are not getting the terrible news that your husband is careless of your marriage, that he would trade his whole life for a fuck one drunken night. He might, but as far as I know he hasn't and won't. Since I am also not that kind of person, the health risk is also minimal. At least compared to women like my girlfriend. Honestly, the girl is a public health hazard, prone to having sex with any old thing that gets her motor running. Virtually no sense of right or wrong. She will have sex with a bisexual heroin junkie she knows to be fucking every last thing that moves. It makes my relationship with your husband look positively conventional and even healthy.

Of course it's not. As honest as we are with each other, we practice the art of omission with each other as well, and the deception he sustains toward you I worry will affect his health. It can't be good for a person to maintain such a fabric of lies.





Mind you, he doesn't lie to everyone. His best friend, my cousin and how I met your husband to begin with, knows and has known since before it began. Your husband's father knows. I will be meeting him soon, on a trip. Strange. There is another friend, a colleague or client who also knows. There are more people. I haven't asked recently who knows. There is always another person, some close friend it was too difficult to deceive. Your husband is aware that all my friends know about him and that he is married. I tell everyone except my family. When this affair turns out badly, as it will sooner or later, when my heart is broken and I have curled into a bruised ball, my friends will not chastize and taunt me for having been involved with a married man. No. They've already done that, and can just open the bottle and start with the sympathy drinking.





I am writing to you, but I am also waiting for your husband to call me. If he can get out of the confines of your house for a moment he will, if he can't he won't. As you can imagine, I am utterly powerless. I would never call him there. Perhaps it delights you to know that you can, without trying and without even knowing you do so, ruin my evening.

Of course, it is not actually ruined. It is inconvenient to talk to your husband every day. As much as I long to hear from him, to know that he called even, I know it is an indulgence and not what I contracted for when I agreed to be in love with a married man. In truth, in the first week of our conversation, a written correspondence through email, he asked if I would call him, if he could call me, and for a day or so I said No, please don't. I had good reasons and if our correspondence could be mined you would be able to read all my arguments for not talking on the phone. They were good and valid arguments, left over from scars hard won during another long distance relationship. It's possible that we might be happier had we not started this easy habit of talking to each other on the phone. But as long as it does not damage or dilute the intensity of the written exchange, I am alright with it. It is odd, though, to talk everyday to someone I do not have an everyday relationship with. When you thwart us, inadvertently, it is difficult but it is also maybe better. The silence fills with desire and finally bursts into letters that tease and push us toward the moment we meet. It is very good.



I want to return again to the varieties of sluts who could be preying upon your husband if I were not occupying him. I forgot one worth mentioning. In addition to infidelity that appears to be love, a love affair, and the loose-cannon chicks who will fuck anything that looks good to them without regard for other attachments, there is another sort of infidelity, the one where the woman playing my role, instead of being relieved that there is no promise to the relationship, instead of appreciating all the benefits of that freedom, believes there is promise and works to that purpose, to take your husband officially away from you.

Now, you can cite all the statistics you like about how men do not leave their wives for other women, or if they do they do not finally end up with the woman they were seeing during the marriage; or that if the woman should actually get the ring on her finger that those stolen marriages have even less chance of success than marriage in general.

Yes, yes. But at the end of the day the damage to the original marriage, your marriage, is great. In my opinion you should be delighted that your husband has chosen me, a woman for whom marriage itself holds no charms and for whom monogamy is the natural state. I couldn't possibly pose less risk to you unless I actually vanished from the surface of the earth. Which, for the record, is exactly what I would want me to do were I you.



Maybe. Can we consider you, your story, for a moment, at least the part of it I am aware of? Just so you know what I have come to understand, what the context is for what I am writing to you. You, from my point of view. I expect most of it will sound wrong to your ears. Still.

You and your husband are having sufficient troubles that divorce is, or has been, a repeated word in your conversations together. For whatever reason you have developed enough distaste for each other that the momentum of your relationship has been thrown in reverse. Each day makes things worse. You are unhappy, feel put upon, unappreciated and unloved. He is rarely home, drinks too much and snores so loudly you have taken to sleeping in another room. He stays out with his friends, and now with me, so late you have to call him and remind him to come home. You have even resorted to putting your children on the phone to tell him they want him to come home.

That was bad. What kind of relationships can your girls look forward to as adults when you teach them that you have to beg men to come home, teach them that their own father doesn't want to be with them? It's not true anyway. He loves to be with them.

Anyway. Back to you. You are not happy. Your husband is not happy. You find ways to punish each other, you discuss divorce and sleep in different beds. He occasionally fucks you or lets you suck him off. Mostly he is snappish and rude to you and behaves like a rotten child. You meet him of a Friday night for an evening out and you end up stomping out of the bar ten minutes into your time alone with him. Communication has disintegrated. You live in a certain hell in your comfortable home.



Add me to the mix. Everything is the same except your husband is slightly happier and he feels reasonably guilty to be deceiving you and to be taking anything of himself away from the children. He is resentful of you, pouty because he wants me to be naked and waiting for him in bed and I am not. But still, he is happier, well-fucked even if he wants more, and less demanding of you. Voila, the possibility of an incentive for him to be a more pleasant person in the home presents itself.

But only if you are nice to him. If you continue to be a shrew, he will drift more in the direction of resentment toward you, resentment that you keep him from me, resentment that drives him perhaps to me but certainly away from you. If you would just disappear, he muses, then everything would be fine. He jokes without levity about the possibilities of a hunting accident.

But you might instead be nice to him and his incipient guilt about being with me will be nurtured and perhaps come into full bloom, ripen and begin to cast seeds of hope. He may begin to go out of his way to make it up to you, this thing you do not know about. Or perhaps you learn of it.

Oh, I am not ready to discuss that. Hold on. I have a story for you.

One of my neighbors is one of those women who married an icky, useless man when she was very young because they already had a child together. They then had another and within a year he left her.

Within a couple years she took up with a man who had a parallel situation, also with a couple of children, though the loony and manipulative ex-wife was still in the picture unlike the woman's ex-husband who had disappeared like a slippery thing down the drain. They moved in together and raised this assembled family, along with the looney ex-wife and a number of presiding judges, and lived this way for many many years without getting married.

But somewhere in the ten to fifteen year time frame there was some discontentedness, some petulant withholdings and the like. The words "Go find it somewhere else then," were uttered multiple times by the man in the house.

So when my neighbor found herself spending a substantial amount of time in another city on a school-related project, she took a lover who gave her whatever it was she missing. She still does smile to remember that affair. The man at home did learn of all this. I imagine she told him because she is not secretive. And it was resolved and they did, after that, get married. And she reports that she has not again heard the words "Go find it somewhere else then."

The moral to the story? Without comparing my entanglement with your husband too closely to this thing that I do not know the details of, I want to use it as an illustration of how straying might lead to improvement within the original relationship. I don't mean to say that you could give your husband what I give him, but the thing that he was missing that led him to be available to fall for me... there must be something you could be doing to diminish that poverty. But what poverty was it?

All I know about you I know from your husband. I saw a few pictures of you but they were a couple of years old. Your husband's friends have said nothing about you, which I suppose is a little telling, but I am not going to speculate there. What I mostly hear is that you are deceitful and manipulative and cold. But surely that view is a biased one.



Here is what I understand generally: Your husband is horrified at the lack of affection you show your children. He being so hugely physical and affectionate cannot understand how a person can be around children and not hug them constantly. Perhaps if one's life were very trying and one had many worries and was beaten down from a 12 hour shift at the factory and was headed off to a part time job to try to keep food on the table and the roof over their little heads. But that is hardly your situation. I try not to ask about you, but the bare facts suggest that you have a well-paid part time career, all the daycare you please to partake of 7 days a week, a beautiful and warm house that others keep clean and a husband who makes enough money that you would only ever worry if you are investing it properly and not whether it will cover this month's expenses. So you have no reason not to be warm and sweet toward your children. Your level of stress should be as low as yoga as many times a week as you like can achieve.

Why then do I hear in the afternoon that you yelled at one of the children at breakfast for some minor infraction that "needed only a reprimand?" Your husband's heart breaks that you should be harsh and unaffectionate to your girls. To the degree that these stories are accurate, my heart breaks as well.

I grew up in a family where the father disliked and disrespected the mother and the girls were left with a vision of twisted bonds of rancid left-overs of something someone once mistook for love. Who knows what it was. The unfortunate momentary alignment of ultimately incompatible agendas leading two people to think they have found their soulmate, but instead discover a person who will dissolve their soul and vice versa until you have a giant house full of emptiness.

No wonder you all rush out to fill the void with the frenzy and noise of children. Now your lives have meaning. Everything is secondary to childrearing. Everyone not doing it—me for example—a second-class citizen. Fine. I am delighted to play this supporting role. Keep in mind that I am the one fucking your husband all afternoon, even though you have the halo of motherhood clipped onto your belt. See, that is not where halos go. If you would wear it correctly, perhaps your husband would have that other response men have to the mothers of their children: respect and amazement and even greater desire for the physical joys of love-making with that person. How do you think Catholics end up having so many children?



I am puzzled. There is nothing at all to keep you from being the most delightful person on earth, no burdens so great, no stress from any direction to speak of, and yet you are unhappy and occasionally over-harsh to your children. Why? What is wrong?

Granted your husband's point of view is skewed against you at this point. But he was complaining and upset about this long before he met me, before he considered having an affair with anyone. Remember, I am cousin to his best friend. I do not come out of nowhere. I don't know what the truth is, but I do know certain things. Like the night you met him in town, just after Christmas. You met him and people from his work at one bar and had a few drinks for a couple hours. I am sure he ignored you and was boorish. Then the two of you went to a bar you had been to before, disagreed over sitting at the bar or at a table—I can't remember the crux of that argument, though at the time I heard the story it did make sense from your point of view, sort of, but not if the goal of the evening was to be out with your husband and have a good time—and you left the bar less than fifteen minutes later. He said ten, but that seems overstated.

In any case, what was that all about? You come out of a Friday night, you know your marriage has been less than friendly, that he is distant and short-tempered to you. You get mad for whatever reason and leave him at the bar. You call him not long afterward from your cellphone—again, not necessarily a good thing to have—and tell him not to come home that night, you are so mad at him. You call again a few minutes later and tell him not to come home for a week, you are that angry with him. He calls me on my cell phone which is off. I am at a performance. It takes me an hour to get his eleven messages, one every six minutes for an hour. I run twelve blocks from the theater in the winter night—the same theater where you first met him at a fundraiser, it turns out—and I find him at the bar where you left him and he tells me he can spend the night with me.

We are joyful. I am breathless. I press against him as I always do and the beautiful young children at this very chic bar you picked out for us might regard us oddly, our age and our foolishness, but who cares. I have my lover in a dark place where groping is encouraged and our hotel room is across the street and I know it to be made up because I called housekeeping after we spent lunch in bed with a picnic I picked up while he was at work, and we got all kinds of crumbs and soy sauce and oils on the sheets as we ate, and now that I think of it, I had left my boots on while your husband had me for an appetizer. Anyway, I had called housekeeping in the afternoon and requested the room returned to order.

So we have one drink while I catch my breath, a plate of sushi while I hear the story of your tantrum and exit, and then, your husband tired and drunk after this long dramatic evening of fighting with you and waiting for me, we cross the street to the hotel. Now we entwine in the luxury of time, fuck and fall asleep, half wake and fuck more, again and again through the night.



Morning comes and he finds a dozen messages from you on his cellphone. Now you love him. Want him to come home. You dangle the children and how confused they will be if he is not home, as though he is always home in the morning and you are too stupid to concoct a reassuring story for them this one time, since it is the first time. But you go straight for the juglar and I watch your husband crumble against the barrage of guilt coming from the hateful device in his hand. His eyes, the eyes of a battered child looking at me as he listens.





What do I do? I hold his hand, sit next to him, reassure him that he is powerful and whole and that he will find a way to sort this out. Or did I laugh at the whole thing and continue getting dressed? I might have done that. I was sympathetic, and I was so sad to see his reaction to your calls, so sad to hear your calls at all. For heaven's sake, if you tell a man to get out, then go home and shut up. A single message will suffice to relay that you have changed your mind and wish to be forgiven for being a bitch.

In any event, I can't remember. I remember only feeling sad for all of you, and feeling that it was probably important for him, for him and you and your children, that he not just scurry home, jerked back on that stupid gold chain you've strung through his ears. I thought it set a bad precedent. I have a dog that is ill-behaved for exactly this kind of behavior on my part. I can't stand his barking and whining so I do whatever he wants so he'll stop. I think I said to your husband, "I'm hungry."

His sweetness was torn between wanting to stay with me and have breakfast and worrying that he was going to be further slandered in his children's eyes if he didn't get home instantly. We went together outside to walk him to his downtown garage, and he relents saying, "if we find somewhere to eat..." and at the corner there is a perfect, history-riddled diner luncheonette, the very sort of place we both love, and we do have a good breakfast and I feel much better knowing he will enter your house at least fortified by food and not weak with hunger, hungover and tired. We didn't sleep all that much, as I said. And I do walk him to his car and he drives me back to the hotel so I can hear he has a CD I gave him playing which makes us both laugh. It's a very funny cut.

Saturday morning. I can't remember if I saw him again that day. I think I did. I can't believe I would have had a whole day without him. But perhaps. Sunday I remember having him with me all day and all night till finally he had to go home and appear to be a family man. First at the sports bar watching games with his friends, and then dinner at the bar of a steakhouse where he decided that he would like to see me wearing the color of the dim and pale yellow-orange lights on the ceiling. He drops me off at the hotel, it's late and we have spent the day together but fantastically none of it in bed.

No, I'm wrong. I remember that he did come up for awhile after dinner. Not long, not long enough, but something. At first it didn't seem like there would ever be so much togetherness that I would forget one moment of it, forget one kiss, one fuck, so intensely do those first touches burn the memory, the surface of the skin, the depths of the heart. But I do remember that he put the leftover porkchop on ice for me, that I had it for a snack the next day and so did he.

So he did come up, we did make love to each other and he did go home to you.



Perhaps that is the night we sat together on the armchair in the room and talked about how he played hockey in college and why he stopped. My understanding of hockey players is that they shouldn't ever stop. It occurs to me again that he would be far less unhappy in his life and so with you if he were skating still. In flight, on ice, he would be healed.


Do you love him as much as I do? I hope you love him. I want to think that you love him much more than I do, that when he finally returns to you out of duty and entrappedness, that there will be a greater love there for him than I was ever going to be able to offer him. That is what I hope. That is why I write this long, terrible letter to you, that you might somehow find in these stories of our affair keys and clues to loving him so he feels loved. Somehow I am doing that. I don't know how. Our affair is uncontrived. Find for yourself in these stories, as a critical reader, as a detective of human behavior, find the instructions for how to love your husband so he is loved, feels loved, and then incorporate the substance, the seed of that in your own expressions of love toward him, that he feels love but feels it from you.





He doesn't feel it now. Not from you. But it is not the case that he cannot love, is not lovable. He is perhaps the man most open to being loved and to being in love for real, the way women imagine men should be in love, of all the men I have ever known. Which is plenty. He is sweetness. I would keep him for myself, but he is so branded, so spoken for, there is nothing left for me other than what I already have of him, and really not even that. The only thing he could give me further is to be honest with you, to succeed in constructing an alternative life that incorporates you as the mother of his children and therefore his enforced partner, and me as his acknowledged lover.

You would never need to meet me, see me. But it is too late for entire discretion. He already has bundled me into his life. If he hadn't I would suggest that you also demand that none of your friends know of me, that he not take me anywhere that the two of you also go. Too late for all that. Too much of the world already knows I am the woman he fucks. Better to try to keep it at that, maybe, then to risk the world knowing that I am the woman he loves. You could play this so that he looks foolish and you look patient. Everyone will assume that you know what you are doing and that the final score will be him back with you, no more harm done than normal under the circumstances.

But if it is made known that he is in love with me, that I am other than something to keep him out of your hair, then it becomes a matter of some pride or form to resolve the situation to reflect the vagaries of love. I am anachronistic enough to think that is a darn foolish a way to deal with love, that fickle, capricious thing. That our hearts should be swept up together in this thing we call love is no reason to threaten the home the two of you have constructed. Leave me to the side. Let this thing burn out. It must, since it can't transform into something else. Allow me, be gracious about it, and see what happens.





No. You won't. It is more vicious toward him and toward me to force us to be secretive. The pressure of the deception could work in your favor. It is true. I would bet that way myself. But I do love your husband, desire nothing but to be with him, bodily and otherwise, and my actions are not sensible. And the degree to which I am willing to participate in this forbidden thing, to be clandestine, to accommodate his need for deception, is the degree to which he continues to find me marvelous, forbidden, cloaked. It is as though I am forever, in his mind, swathed in transparent cloth, making me invisible to everyone but him, and to him, naked. Not a public thing, a thing in sweaters who had to park the car three blocks away and has to be back to work in an hour. No. A secretive, magical thing, a thing thrilling in its illicitness.

It is a hard call for you. Will the stress of deception prove greater than the thrill of it? Or would the banality of a non-secret affair kill the desire between us more quickly, more decisively? This is why I write to you. To give you all the knowledge you need to make an informed decision about how to approach destroying my relationship with your husband.





Yeah. Sorry. It has become a relationship. He cares what I think, whether I am upset about anything, calls to talk to me before he goes to sleep. It's like having a boyfriend, for heaven's sake. Your husband is my boyfriend. We hold hands and talk about art and play games and meet for coffee. What are you going to do about it?







Do you want to know how this began? I am not sure you do. Kind of like looking at a car wreck. Maybe if I leave out the specifics so the imagery isn't there. Maybe if you don't know which bar, which friend, which hotels in which cities, which restaurants, which garage, which parking spot. You don't know my name or what I look like and that is merciful. Remember, I was betrayed. I remember what that felt like. I still can't stand to hear words or be in places that in any way summon images of that man's infidelities. I am still sickened by the woman's name, even if it refers to someone else, revulsed by any image of her at all. There is a whole region of of the country I won't go into because I don't want to see highway signs telling me how far it is to the city she lived in. There is an entire genre of women, a certain, sluttish, faux-hippie version of skinny blond with long curly hair that just creeps me out. Ninety miles of freeway I just won't drive on. There is a big square pillow on my bed that was left for awhile in this man's studio after I was banished and which I am sure they fucked against and I don't know why I still have the damn thing since I swear it does still does remind me of all that. I would replace it but I suspect the replacement would remind me as much. The memory of buying it to replace the other. Endless associations.

I really do think such images make things worse. We are compelled to ask questions, as though to hear specifics will somehow contribute to a healing process. But they don't. Each detail is a new wound with its own, independent soreness. Each visual image a tender scar. My last man hung himself from the rafters of a porch he was building, we were building together, here on this property where I live. I did not find him. He was gone when I got home that day. I am certain that if I had found him that I would have left this property, this city, this region. There is no way I could live with that image. As it is, I never asked anyone exactly where he hung himself. There are several rafters that are equally plausible, but I don't know which it is. It is a deliberate deception I offer myself.

So if I do not give you specifics, do not give you the name of the hotel, the one where you park your car when you go to the bar across the street, that street, that hotel, that garage, that bar, none of that will remind you of your husband's betrayal. You won't be plagued by images of us when you drive downtown and see street signs, won't imagine us entwined together, in the bar, in the elevator, in our room every day and most evenings, for several or more hours each day and once all night for a week. What were you doing? I never asked. You called a few times, and maybe once he took the call and told you he was meeting friends at a bar other than the one we were in.

I have to say I do not relish that degree of deception. I prefer neglecting to mention things rather than making things up I might have to remember later.



On the other hand, if I do tell you where we were, you might find ways to destroy those associations for him. The bar where we met, though long a favorite haunt of his, has now become a place that reminds him of me. He calls me when he goes there to tell me he is there, to reminisce provocatively and try to coax me into moving to your city. There is a minor metropolis in the midwest, a town no one would ever go to by choice, but which is to us a romantic mecca, the site of our first tryst. A whole city you should never let him go to again. There is a chain of elegant steakhouses that will remind him of me, an evening we spent together, no matter what city he is in. The restaurant will also remind him of the hotel and the room and a million other details of that several days we spent together.

If you knew the specifics, which cities, which hotels, which streets we wandered on, you might rankle at their mention, but you could also make some effort to subtract them from his life. Memory is an amazing and maybe cruel thing. I tend to move to a completely new city every few years just for the purpose of removing myself from the dense weave of memories that begins to blanket a city one has lived in for any amount of time. It is a little extreme but it does clear my mind and allow me to think new thoughts. My stock in trade.



Maybe you will need to do something equally extreme to renovate your marriage. It is possible that the two of you have poisoned forever the city where you live and work, that you will have to go somewhere entirely new in order to re-establish you, the bond between you, as the primary thing on earth. I doubt you will do such a thing. You strike me as the kind of person who will swallow any indignity if it keeps things "easy" and "comfortable." Doesn't rock the boat. It would be too much work to re-locate, you would have to move away from your family, and on and on. So you stay in this soup of memory and simmer to death.



It is hard for me to care about you. I do not know you but I know that your husband, right at the time he met me, suggested to you that he might pursue a different tangent of his career. That he might give up his corporate tenure and try his luck at an entrepreneurial venture. His idea, his opportunity, was hardly the sort of dangerous, hard work and high risk thing common in the realm of entrepreneurs, but it was adventurous to him. It would have entailed some minimal risk, but not really. It wasn't like he was going to mortgage the house to finance an invention or manufacture a gizmo. No, nothing like that.

But your response was No. No. No, he was absolutely not to give up his sure thing. No. I forget what he reported as your ultimatum. It might have been so simple as you forbidding him to give up the job he has. Apparently you felt your lifestyle was threatened by this possibility.

You are not young. You should know by now that the time to nay-say a notion is not at its inception, but much later, when real drawbacks are beginning to show themselves and it is easy enough to weigh in on the "let's not" side after appearing to consider the whole thing. To be negative as an initial response is a terrible strategy and only reveals you to be a fearful and close-minded shrew. You have children. You know the "we'll see" strategy, how to leave yourself open for saying yes or no but probably no at a later moment. No harm done. Imaginations and goodwill and hope itself left intact. I am not very good at this myself, but it doesn't matter much as I have neither husband nor children to negotiate with.

But you do, and your negative response to his hopeful and childlike proposal happened to come at just the moment I began my correspondence with him. Is it possible that you inadvertently pushed him toward me that week, I of infinite freedoms and the child of an entrepreneur myself? Did your husband respond to me so quickly and with such immediate eroticism because I am a princess in the world he was longing for anyway? Is all this an accident of timing?





How did this begin anyway? I keep not telling you.



I met your husband late one night at one of his favorite bars, a place where he also buys pizza to bring home to you and the children. He was drinking with an old friend and colleague of his and a slew of my cousins. I arrived late and almost all my family was gone. I knew the other friend and of course I knew my cousins. Your husband was abrasive and vulgar and I would have been put off, but there was a certain force to his body that drew me to him and I was captivated. Made captive. The friend eventually left for home, and my cousins wandered off as well. Your husband and I, strangers still, somehow stayed. It was one of those slightly awkward moments when you are not sure if the other wishes for what you wish, moves are made in tiny gestures, another beer ordered to provide an excuse for staying, like that.

I had come to understand from my cousin before she left that your husband was married. She didn't tell me directly. I overheard her lecturing him on what beautiful children he had and how he should buck up and deal with the marriage. When we were alone, your husband and I, I told him that his behavior toward me was wrong, abrasive, vulgar and disrespectful of both me and of his marriage. He looked at me with those strange colored eyes and apologized. It was the most simple and sincere apology I had ever heard, completely free of posturing or fear or sarcasm or excuses. He looked me in the eye and apologized, just like that. I wondered who this was.

The next day my cousins were all a-buzz with my having met your husband. Apparently they expected terrible and entertaining fireworks, a clash of sharp and opposite wits, a feminist writer and a chauvinist boor. They teased and prodded for details.

But what I heard mostly were two quiet comments, uttered by my aunt and my uncle, comments referring to what a good friend your husband had been to my cousin several years back. My cousin is a very private person and his wife even more so. They withstood that cruel year, withstood the loss of a child, and I never knew how. I visited once or twice during that time, found them all at home between surgeries, and saw how hard it all was, the bleakness and sorrow filled the house like a fog, a fog pierced and burnt away by the gentle care my cousin offered to this baby girl with dark circles around her tired eyes. But a fog that would settle again with every passing minute of that scant and fragile life. God, it was a terrible time.

The low-voiced statements made by my aunt and uncle were off-hand and without intent, almost like feet scuffling in dust. But their words illuminated this time so many years ago as though an arclight were cast upon it. I had wondered how my cousin had made it through, knew nothing except that his marriage had been on the brink and they brought it back to life somehow. I live far away and am not my cousin's intimate. What I heard suddenly was that my cousin had not been alone during that time, that someone was able to be near him as he confronted the loneliness of sitting by as one's child slowly dies and there isn't a blessed thing anyone can do and god knows no one can enter that grief, no one can touch the core of that ache. No one should even try. Even husbands and wives find themselves separated as by a chasm, a great emptiness where hopes and dreams were supposed to be, and are left to grieve in impotent solitude. I am told marriages rarely survive such a trial.



There is no way of knowing which person will be able to provide companionship and comfort until a tragedy is in full swing. Impossible to know. It's not usually who you would expect. Then whoever it is has the choice of rising to the task or turning away from it. I don't know if you can imagine my relief to discover that there was someone for my cousin. Perhaps I had believed that his inclination to be tough and private might have overwhelmed any efforts to care for him. I should have known better. This fine man has friendships he has built and guarded over time and one of them is with your husband. I was overcome with gratitude toward your husband, to learn that these friendships had proved sustaining, were stronger than grief. My heart lept forth and when I was alone I cried to know that this was true.



Mind you, I had already been surprised by my thoughts of your husband, the bluntly erotic images that were filling my head, my occupation with whether I would see him again before I returned home. I was surprised and a little concerned to have such a response to someone who had been so impudent and obnoxious to me. To then discover that your husband is a man of certain strength and quality comforted me, made me believe that indeed I had seen something in him, that my impression of him as excellent and true had some substance behind it, that it wasn't merely an effort on my part to justify a bizarre and senseless attraction. Of course, it was also a bizarre and senseless attraction. There is no other way to explain the dense effrontery of our verbal and physical conversation that night. We did not embrace or kiss. But we may as well have fucked each other past consciousness, the meeting was so raw and brash, sensual and solicitous. The game was immediately over.

Sometimes you recognize another person.

Over the next week or so I made an effort to establish a friendship with your husband, one that respected the friendship he has with my family, but found it was already too late. He had already cast his desire toward me. I had already become consumed with my desire for him. We exchanged swift letters using the internet that went straight to erotic. A week later we met in a city unfamiliar to both of us, to be together briefly, to see if we were mistaken. I think we both hoped we were wrong, that there would be nothing between us, that we could go back to our convenient lives. Separate. Again, it was too late. Your husband was in love with me, falling as though into a well, as was I. This is still before we had sex. We fucked completely not many hours after that first confession of love, but still. The chronology remains and the affair deepens rather than burning out as I expected it to by now. And as long as it hasn't, you are at great risk, as I have mentioned, if only from my unknown degree of promiscuity. But more from his increasing sense that love might still exist for him in this world, whether with me or with another. You cannot withhold it from him any longer.





You will still win of course. At least, you will not lose your husband to me at this time. He will keep working, keep coming home in the evening, eventually in any case. He will keep doing the things that will make him feel he is being a sufficient husband and father and keep you from nagging him too much about his poor husbandly behavior.

You will win, and I do wonder what that victory will feel like to you. To him it will feel further numbing and I would wager everything that he will go to the doctor and his prescription for anti-depressants will be increased. It always is. He will crumble that little bit more, as though to prefigure the slow crumbling of our vertebrae as we get very very old, slowly and with both a constant ache and sudden bouts of unreasonable pain our spine disintegrates, one disc at a time breaking into pieces and wandering about our bodies until it finds a way out. Our integrity does the same thing, apparently, in the face of constant pressures from the cultural quo.





I do not know what your victory will mean to either of you. It will mean nothing to me. I will have escaped a lifetime of arguing with your husband over how much he accommodates you regarding the children. I will turn my gaze to the next man who falls in love with me, for there will be another. As I said, I am very beautiful and intelligent and I am extremely kind and have very few inhibitions in the sexual realm. I am also a very good cook. And, clearly, I fall in love very easily. Still, you will win. You will keep your husband. He is shackled to you with great heavy chains and it is easiest for him to stay, however much it may chop away at his insides. He is as lazy and as seduced by the comforts of your life as you are. He would not even be particularly welcome in the rougher world that I live in. His blindness toward art would be crippling in my world, just as my disinterest in the machinations of money-grubbing corporations would be crippling to me in his. You are perfect. You fit the vicious paradigm of his successful life as well as he fits yours.





What I still don't understand, though, is how you lost his sexual affection. He is a powerfully physical man with great appetites on all fronts. He is a beast and an angel to me in our bed, wherever it may occur. He tells me that he has not been, historically, particularly inclined to oral love-making, cunnilingus if you will, and that he has surprised himself with his desire for me in that way.



Why not you? Why doesn't he desire you? We are not so different physically, though I am prettier generally and a little younger. We are both of us northern European stock, pale and relatively tasteless. Easy enough to be delicious, is all I am saying. I have a long-standing lack of self-esteem regarding my genitalia, an early boyfriend having remarked quite innocently one time that I would be airbrushed were I photographed for Playboy. It was a comment that had a context and was not meant hatefully and in any case he was inclined to spend our nights with his head between my legs, but still. The remark stayed with me, and I have been self conscious only of that part of my body, though there is plenty wrong with the rest of me, according to the media standards of the day. I am tall and slender, but small-breasted and too lazy to get to the gym.

Still, I worry with each new man how they will feel about that part of me, the part it is most important for them to find attractive, compelling, gorgeous and delightful. There are so many callous to cruel jokes made at our expense, about the unattractiveness of the vulva. And it is well noted. I talk to many men about sex, including men I am not having sex with, and know that they do care about how yummy and maybe how pretty a pussy is. It does have something of an effect on their behavior, I think. One recent and very young lover remarked at his delight at finding me to his taste. "You never know until you get there," he said, or something on that order. We were relative strangers and he was very young. I could not help feeling sorry for whatever girl he might not find delicious. Very damaging to the frail ego of a young woman, I should think, a loss of interest at that moment.





I know your husband has had many women. He gave me a number around 300, and I have no idea in which direction he was cheating. He was a college athlete, so any number from 2 to a thousand would be reasonable. I feel as though I have been relatively circumspect in my lovers and still I would guess that I have had more than forty men. More than I can remember, in any case. I mention numbers to point out that your husband has seen a great variety of women and that broad experience must have a different effect on a man than the long experience of just one woman or a small sampling, a sexuality that becomes attached to certain physical aspects and has a hard time adjusting to something new.

A friend once reported wondering if a new lover was perhaps a transsexual, her genitalia was so different from that of the very long-term lover he had just broken up with, one of only perhaps two other women he had experienced.

This is the opposite of your husband. His history suggests he is willing to be sexually involved with almost anything, that he is not the pickiest of men. That he is willing to love, to make love to pretty much anything more girl than not. It suggests to me that there is no reason why he shouldn't be as compelled by your cunt as he is by mine, and I cannot help but wonder why he is not. He was at some moment attracted to you, in love with you, so there must be some basic thing about you that could, did attract him. What happened to it?







Your husband just called me. Livid and complaining, which I do not really appreciate. Not having the benefits of a husband, I am hardly interested in the drawbacks. But he did call, angry with you for some stupid infraction against his sense of proper behavior. Let's see. This time you brought the children home, they went up to his office and duly reported that you didn't know why their father didn't make dinner more often.

And people ask me why I am not married. Geez. I fully appreciate that he is probably worthless around the house, but his point is equally good. Why would you tell the children such a thing? If you want him to do more of the cooking, you should talk to him about it. Ask him to. Tell him it would make you happy. Try that. He views you as manipulative, and this sort of story makes it easy to see why. I am puzzled, very puzzled as to why you two aren't in counseling, if only to help you communicate with each other better. One hour a week with a mediator and you could get this sort of cooking issue on the table and resolved, one way or another, but at least you wouldn't have to complain to your children about their father's habits. That he has plethora of bad habits is not the point. Children are not communication tools.



"Shut up, you vile slut," is more or less what you are thinking. You are right. I am pretty slutty and I should shut up. Keep in mind, though, that while you may be righteous and all, your husband is counting the days till he sees me next. We talk everyday and discuss the things we will do to each other and send love letters and tell each other what the weather is so that we know what surrounds the other, what their body is feeling, and very occasionally we talk about you. I don't encourage it. I defend you, though, believe it or not, and he does not like it. He would prefer me to be sympathetic and to simply agree that you are horrible. You are both horrible, as far as I am concerned, horrible in your combination anyway, and I am concerned for your children and their hopes for happiness given the lessons the two of you are carelessly bestowing upon them: you teaching them small-minded manipulation techniques and he teaching them that men resent their wives.



Here is another thing that keeps coming up, and it certainly came up in this conversation. Your husband thinks you care only for money and material things, that you are spoiled and have no appreciation for all the things that you have, the luxury of your life. He believes you have come to think of extravagance as given and granted and are inclined to complain about whatever is not exactly as you would like. He not making dinner, I guess, would be an example. He tells me he wants to throw you in a snowdrift. I suggest that instead he should find a counselor and invite you to go to counseling with him for the purpose of breaking the tension of discontent in your house. If you don't, there is hardly any reason to say you are staying together for the children. The daily grind of your marriage is doing far more damage than a divorce would do.

I lobbied for that action—counseling, not divorce—as much as I could during our conversation, also coaching him on how to present it to you so you won't be defensive and will be most inclined to trust that he does want to make the home safer for the children and isn't just trying to move you toward divorce. He is a sarcastic man and he is embittered toward you, but he is also extremely intelligent and I am right and maybe he heard me and will consider my advice and maybe you will be surprised by his humility and desire to make things better and you will be nice and not demanding for a moment and maybe in that moment you will remember the dreams you once shared and will go to counseling with open minds and things will improve in your home so much that sex returns, and with a new kind of mutuality that it might not have had before, and he will have no further need for my affections and you will live happily ever after, a fat ugly couple at the overstuffed weddings of your bratty daughters to the rotten men they will no doubt pick for themselves because it is just too late and they have already learned how `resentment and trickery are the main ingredients in marriage.

Oh, dear. That is not where that sentence meant to go. That downward turn towards the end was a mistake. You will be a beautiful, radiant couple at the beautiful and radiant weddings of your brilliant daughters to the good men they will pick for themselves, having learned from the two of you what good love and deep respect there should be in a marriage. That was the goal of my advice to him.

This letter is the parallel of that for you from me. I tell you the very same thing I tell him. You must be kind when you think it is not your turn to be kind, you must give when you think it is not your place to give, and you must do everything in your power to bring an atmosphere of peace and goodwill into your home for the health and safety of your children. You two are being incredibly stupid and thick-headed and he is as spoiled to the comforts of your crusty marriage as you are. Wake up you stupid bitch and save your marriage and the lives of your children, or they will end up stupid dried-up bitches with embittered, cheating husbands just like you.



Well now, again, that wasn't very friendly of me. But for heaven's sake, I am sick to death of you but I cannot get rid of you because I am not at all done with your husband.



Which brings me back to my earlier discussion of why he is so driven to get his mouth on my lips but seems to have little interest in yours.

What are you doing wrong?

Clearly he is capable of feeling this way, and my impression of men is that they believe themselves to be in love with the woman they want to eat. Again, the only clue I have about you is a single but repeated comment he made about you having a "demanding sexuality" that "turns him off." Of course, at this point the resentment you each have toward the other on non-sexual issues would understandably destroy any impulse towards such a giving act on anyone's part. I know I am wholly disinterested in sucking on a man who has been even a little careless of me, and I, like you from what I understand, am generally very given to sucking cock. I just like it, and I resent men who are unpleasant or careless of me and destroy my desire to do so.

Oh, so yes, I do suck your husband's cock. And fairly well, I'm told. But I don't know how much it matters. He tells me that it was a particular specialty of yours, but somehow he has lost interest in you anyway, even to do that. So proficiency is not all. Somehow he wants my mouth on him, dreams of me not you. I have told him when he is impatient and piggish and I am five hundred miles away that he could just go buy this sort of thing, or get it from you for that matter and he is indignant, claiming that it is me he wants.





Me.



Why not you?



How far would sex, warm humorous deeply loving and slightly kinky sex go toward sweetening the atmosphere in your house? How can you get there when you have strayed so far from that place and now your husband has found someone else to share that with? Again, I am not blaming you for this failure of your marriage. You are both no doubt equally responsible. But this letter is to you. I tell him separately that he needs to be good to you. Really I do. So much so that I think it will be the reason he tires of me.





I can't seem to find a way into the answer. What can you do? The answer that keeps coming up is "be sweet." But I feel from here that you are unwilling to be sweet. Or that you would look at it as a giant concession on your part and thereby make a false act out of it, which isn't sweet at all. He loves me because I am sweet. Because I press up against him and cannot keep my hands off his darling belly that you probably just think is fat and reminds you that he drinks too much. Because I rub his feet, both while I am sucking on him and also just like that at the end of the day while he lies back and we talk and maybe listen to some music and have a glass of wine.

He tells me he has never had his feet rubbed before, not simply as such and certainly not as an addition to sex. How can that be? Do you not notice that he has feet and there is fifty extra pounds being carried by them all day long? How can you not use your strong, grown-girl hands to massage the day away from his footers? If he did leave you and come be with me, it would probably be because of that one act. It is very powerful. He speaks of it constantly since I first brought it to bed.



Anyway, your husband finds me sweet and arousing and finds you deceitful, demanding and unpleasant. And he has taken up with me to prove it. What can you do to displace me?



I have an idea. You could start by being sweet to the children. That might be easier than being sweet to him. I am sure he is a terrible butt-head at home, and then of course you can't feel very sweet toward a man who is fucking around and lying about it. But the children are innocent. Surely you can find ways to be extremely sweet and kind to them. Be affectionate, hug them and demonstrate that you love them physically. Focus on them with lovely lovingness. Focus on how delicious they are. Let them destroy the house playing games and then go out for pizza instead of cleaning it up. Laugh and laugh and laugh.

This could accomplish several things: First it might begin to chip away at your husband's impression of you as cold and unfeeling toward the children and he will have to stop resenting you for that perceived crime. It will take time. Secondly, it will remind him that you are able to be physically affectionate, just generally. That you are a physically expressive person. That you have the ability to give affection without expectation of return.



That particular bargain, you can know, is the bargain between us. Each gives freely and without expectation of return, like a parent, and each wanders freely in and out of the other's arms with no promise of return, like a child. I think I might have accidentally seduced your husband with that particular discussion. He is a baby boy and needs to be loved for no reason at all. Mother issues, anger, resentment, festering sores. I am sure you know about them better than I do. I also have the impression that my laughter—just general laughter though I do laugh a lot—gets him hard. Just in case that is useful information.



Furthermore, I will draw a big, thick connecting line from the vision of you being kind and selflessly loving and affectionate towards your children to him viewing you as the antidote to the horror that was his unloving and selfish mother. "Insane" is probably a fairer description, but the former is how he views her, and he is layering his view of her onto you. I have been cast in the role of rescuing ingenue, the one who is sweet, who would give him and his children the love and affection he wanted as a child. I give it to him, and he begins to think I would give it to them as well. He is right, but you should make sure that this line of thinking is stopped as soon as possible. It is not in your interest, and I assure you it is not what I am looking for either.

Anyway. Change your aspect toward the children to eliminate all anger you have toward him. Remember that they are children and want you to look at them with love and approval. You probably can't switch discreetly to out-and-out affection, but move in the direction of greater warmth, more patience. Do not in any case take out your frustrations with your husband on your children. Seek counseling on this matter if you must. Do that, do it without telling him maybe, for them and for your marriage. Normally I like to think that a marriage takes precedence over children, but for you, paying attention to the children in this new way might be a good approach to softening the air in your festering home. Put the girls first, dislodge his resentment toward you on this count, be nice to him as well, use a counselor to assist you, and slowly move back into his bedroom. Choose to sleep with him.



Yes. We have to discuss this, too. Is it true that you do not sleep in the same bed with him? I hope he is lying about this, yet the manner in which it has come up makes me think that at most maybe half the time you sleep with him. Maybe that is generous. I guess I am just hoping that sometimes you sleep with him, that he exaggerates. He is not exactly the cuddliest of sleepers.

I was recently taken up with a young man who did not compel me in any way and we barely had sex at all, but we would sleep together at every occasion and he would hold me all night. I would half-wake and find myself held tight, his hand caught in my hair, and we would wake up in the morning the same way.

Not your husband. Your husband eventually wants to be asleep as though he were the only creature in the world. Not snuggly. Me, I am burrowed in blankets while he pushes them all off and lies naked and dead to the world. Sometimes I snuggle myself against the side of him, he is so mountainous I think he will not notice. But he does and it wakes him and we make love to each other and that is wonderful, but certainly if one wants to sleep one might as well be down the hallway in another room.

And he does snore, I will give you that. And you do have to deal with children in the morning, whereas I can go back to sleep until your husband comes back to me. We spend our time together in cities where I have no business. When he is with me, I am only his.

Still. Why don't you sleep with him? Earplugs work.



If not that, then perhaps you could create a room for sex and not for sleeping somewhere else in the house.





I have often thought of that, when I think of the architecture of my dream house. A room for sex. In my imaginings it is often wholly disconnected from the main house, it almost becomes a guest house of sorts, except not for guests. I tend to like house guests to be in the house, for them to wander to breakfast in their slippers, for it to be possible to visit in their room, for their area to be as connected to my home as they are in my heart connected to my life. Inside of it.

No. For privacy I don't put the guests out of the house. I would instead put the place for uninhibited sex at a distance from the house, that there should be a place sacred for it and only it, as designated and decorated for the purpose as the dining room is for dining and the kitchen for cooking. It would be a beautiful room, with nothing in it but a big bed built considerately to accommodate various dramas, a couch and chairs and a table to set books and art that might migrate to that room. Windows that let in gobs of diffused light, and that might open out to trees and sky. Perhaps there is a porch, screened, for fucking in fresh air, an uncovered terrace or garden for sex in sunlight, under blue sky or moonlight. A small pool for cooling our feet. Cupboards filled with clean linens, towels, extra blankets, down comforters. Closets with silken and enveloping robes, drawers with lace panties and flimsy slips. Toys. Tools. This room alone might be carpeted. Thick, wool carpet so that one is unafraid of falling off the bed, that noise should be muffled, that the room itself should beckon visitors to become naked and to entwine. A perfect room.

There is much much more I might tell you about this room, but the idea is that there is a room for sex, and that sex is given a place separate from sleep, its own room, like a child finally grown old enough to not share anymore.

It is just a suggestion. I don't know what your room for sex would look like. Were I you, I would create it and then invite your husband into it, offer it to him as a gift, as a gesture of good faith and good will and good intentions for your sexual union. Offer it without expectation. A room completely arranged for sex. What would that entail?

Again, I do not know what that would mean for you. Do you want to know what I think that might mean for your husband? I am not sure I want to share that with you. Not sure that the things that would be in a room for the two of us are necessarily the same things that would be in such a room for the two of you.

But there are a few things I know are important to him. He is very conscious of windows, for example. He is sensitive to people being able to see in. He brings up a desire to be tied up, so there should be some soft ropes of some sort for that, a bed that allows for such gentle restraint. A cupboard with delicious wines and large, stemmed glasses, and there would be snacks. He loves to snack. I would have roasted cashews in the room all the time. And a bowl of fruit. Leftover steak whenever possible. Cookies. Bottles and bottles of sparkling and not sparkling water. There would be an extraordinary bathroom also designed for sex and bathing before and after and during sex and not for anything else.



Are you understanding that I am in love with your husband? I have been rambling on as though I want you to take him back and get him out of my hair, but it is not true. I don't really know what I want for me, but for him I want happiness, contentedness, and given that he shares children with you and is therefore burdened with you one way or another until the end of time, it is in my interest, caring as I do for him, that you two stop resenting each other and creating an infected atmosphere in the home where the slightest touch sets off a siren of pain. Fix it. I don't care how. He is unhappy. You must be too.

There is also my general, feminist and maternal concern for the developmental experience of your daughters, whose little selves you are thrashing with this rotten and selfish behavior. I assure you I tell him the same thing. I would go further and tell him to give you everything you want to get away from you. Whatever your demands, give you everything. Just get the fuck away from you. Do not be with me, but get away and give you everything. Run, man, for your life and for your daughters. "Give that wife of yours everything so the girls always understand that you are generous and care more for their well-being than for money or things." That is what I would tell him if I were not fucking him, if we were not in love and if it were not impossible for that to be interpreted as anything but a plea for him to be with me.

But since I am in love with him, I am not at all interested in trying to seduce him away from something he is not ready to leave on his own. He told me very clearly when we met and first began to fall in love that he would never leave you, because of the children. I choose to stay with that pronouncement until I get another one that is as concretely stated. I am not holding my breath. I do not even wish for it. What good would it do me to have him be my resentful husband, have him take his continued frustrations with you and at your treatment of the children out on me because I am in the house. No. Not that.

I can imagine something other than this cloaked affair we are having behind your back, though. For example the European model of marriage in which a husband and wife establish a clear agreement as to their formal arrangement as a social entity and regarding the rearing of children, but affairs of the heart and sex are separate and unquestioned and time is allowed for them.

That sort of thing could be perfect in a perfect world that did not involve jealousy. Your home and the children's world is left undisturbed, and you each are free to entertain yourselves with lovers who can never expect that you will marry them. After all, you are married. I would spend time with your husband, more or less as I do now, but he would not be concerned about you finding out. You wouldn't call him, looking for him in the middle of the night, but would know that he is safely asleep with me, leaving you to your peace in your house. You could do the same. Take a lover and enjoy yourself, knowing that on nights when you are out your husband is home with the children, who will be none the wiser, but who will be much better off because for obvious reasons you would both be in better moods. Lovers of married people assume that husbands and wives continue to have sex with each other, so you give nothing up on that count either, unless you want to.

Meanwhile, I don't have to deal with your children, as I would if your husband left you for me. You don't have to deal with me, as you would if your husband left you for me. And you don't have to fret over what he is up to, as you would if he did not leave you for me. The kids just know that their parents sometimes are out. Which it true now.



I wonder what your thoughts on such an arrangement would be. I wonder what my own thoughts and objections would be were I you. I wonder if you would prefer a separation, a divorce, to that sort of an arrangement. For that matter, it might be smart to demand a divorce because it would make my life hell and I would probably break this off with your husband. Then, once again starved for sex, he might return to you as he did before you got married. It would not be a bad strategy. But then you would have him on your hands again. I don't know what your feelings are for him, so I cannot speculate. If your feelings for him are dead, it wouldn't be a very good plan at all.





I was just reading over the notes and letters exchanged between your husband myself over the past 24 hours. I was wondering if I should share them with you, that you might know what I say to him, what his response is regarding my pleas that he find ways to make the atmosphere in your house more pleasant. You cannot believe me. You cannot believe that I do my best, as though I were a friend to your husband and not his greedy lover.

I do though. Not for you. I do not give a fuck about his marriage to you. I would be more interested in the fate of a fly than I am in the fate of your marital union. Still. His happiness and the health of your children make me care about the tranquility of your home, and I do argue for it, lobby for it. As I have said, I have begged him to invite you to go to counseling with him, and, if you won't agree to that, I have begged him to go on his own, to somehow make an effort to acquire tools to be more tolerant of the small things that currently set him off into mad waves of anger toward you.

Yes, there is a selfish element in this for me. I don't want to hear about how much he hates you. I don't want to hear any complaining at all. And I am willing to risk that he becomes more comfortable staying home with you and quits this thing with me in order to get tranquility in my own relationship with him. Your husband. We can't forget that for a moment. I am at all times speaking of the man you are married to, the one you run into in the bathroom in the morning, the man you reportedly love.

But these letters between him and me are not for your eyes. We agreed when we began writing to each other that we would never show these letters to anyone. No one. I don't even report things that have been written to friends. It is a wholly safe place for all communication. It is intellectual and emotional and erotic and dreamy and drab and full of reports of the weather and small annoyances. No, not full. Just sometimes, as we long to be aware of each other in greater tiny detail. And for the past 24 hours I have been arguing for him to be a better person regarding you, if only in order to show your daughters a vision of what husbands should be, what they should expect. This is the recurring theme. But it is as difficult for him as it would be for you to reach out and be the first one to make the unearned effort. You have both become so bitter, so sure that the other has wronged you.

And you are both completely right. You have both been wronged horribly by the other.

Still, you have to spend the rest of your lives in civil communion with each other because you have children. How are you going to achieve that minimum thing? And isn't it almost as easy to achieve the greater thing of renewed affection? How much further down the same road would you have to go?



Again, I don't really want you to. I want you to do as little as possible to keep the bones together and leave me your discards, which I will snap up not as scraps but as rare treasure, not wishing for more, happy to be this third thing as long as he is not being tortured by his relationship with you.



Wait. That presents an interesting strategic possibility. Do nothing to change, continue destroying the quality of your home with your bitterness and perhaps I will grow fatigued with your husband's frustration and anger at you and leave him. More likely, he will up and leave you, but it is possible that I would get tired of you, his hatred of you, and leave him before he he leaves you.

OK. It's not a very good one, but it is a strategy. One that is most tempting to you no doubt, and perhaps you are intrigued to think that it might get rid of me.

Yes, it might. But keep in mind that your husband feels terrible after he has taken out his frustrations on me, yammering about what a bitch you are, and it mainly makes him even sweeter to me, places me even higher in his estimation, especially when I make an effort to remind him that he should be good to you. Sometimes I think he is going to throw his back out the way he pulls that pedestal around for me. And you can imagine how easy it is for me to take a lofty place there, given that he never has to see me in even the least bit of bad mood or all ugly from an ill-fated trip to the grocery with children or some other such degradation of daily life. He sees me damp from the shower, warm from the bed and generally in the very flattering light of the restaurant bars where we take our meals. Always at the bar, as I hate the idea of a table coming between our bodies and prefer to be able to entwine ourselves and feed each other off shared plates of savory things. Bartenders get sick of us and other customers tell us to get a room, and I respond, "We already have one, thanks."



I am inexplicably driven to spoil your husband. Perhaps it is hypocritical of me, "an exercise in futility," as they say, to write this letter to you. A great waste of time as it is taking me days and days as it goes on and on in circles, repeating itself and finding really nothing of use to say to you. I am not playing fair and so how can you possibly compete with me? I am doing everything I can to make your husband believe that women are what he has dreamt them to be. I am not at all interested in you seducing him back into domestic bliss and leaving me without his adoration. I don't have any intention of backing down and so why would I write to you to tell you what I think might steal him away from me and back to you?



Maybe I want the challenge. Maybe I don't want to be loved by a man who hates his wife so much that he would probably fuck anything that looked at him twice. Maybe I want him to be in love with me even when he doesn't hate you. Maybe I want him to leave me for the noblest of reasons, because he thinks he can make things work at home, because you have made him believe that he can, that it is possible to have happiness there again, to create a happy family setting for your children. Maybe that is more appetizing a prospect than letting this affair drag on until I tire of him and he of me and it ends in a fizzle and spatter. Maybe I am in love with your husband and want him to remember this affair in its perfection, for it to be slaughtered like a movie star in its youthful gorgeousness and to be remembered forever as that, rather than as something that was left out too long and went bad. Perhaps you think this latter version of the future is fine, that you would even prefer him to remember me as another woman who betrayed him by becoming real, a fierce and demanding harpy, one who can be sick and need care, one capable of jealousy and anger of her own, another burden keeping him from being his fast sleek self. For him to return to you because he turned against me.

But you would be wrong to want that. You don't want him to come back further embittered against women, to choose you as the less awful thing or the one it would be harder to get rid of. You want him to make a choice between two excellent women, beautiful and delightful both of us, and you want him to choose you. I want him to choose you too, if only because I am one of those people who does not want to acknowledge that my lover has had other lovers, cannot bear for my lover to be in even the most casual contact with former lovers. I don't want to know you exist, let alone spend my life knowing what your plans are every Saturday afternoon. I certainly don't want my own weekend destroyed because you had a change of schedule and now he has to care for the children when we were supposed to be doing something else. Like paying attention to each other. I don't want the burden of daily life with your husband and still have to deal with you and the way you piss him off with your every breath and gesture. It would not be better for me than it is now. It would be better for him to fall back in love with you enough for him to leave me of his own free will. Better for me to lose him in this way than to keep him under those compromised conditions. Better for you to have him back because he wants to be back and feeling noble about his choice to return.



Do you disagree?





I have not heard from your husband today. No mail, no call. It is early evening so there is still time. I don't really know what our pattern is. I don't have a time when I know he will call. It is almost always from the car as he is driving to or from the office, or on errands, taking the children to their activities, picking up a pizza or drycleaning at your behest. He called the other day from the parking lot of a toystore and I went into the shop with him on a vile errand, requested by you, to buy a birthday gift for some friend of your daughter for a party she was to attend that afternoon. He was alone, talking to me. I asked where the child was, why she wasn't with him picking out a gift for her friend. There was no reason, other than that the two of you have completely given up trying to treat your daughters like humans, respectfully and responsibly. The daughter is at home doing nothing and the father is at the toystore buying some icky outfit for a boring and sentimental doll owned by a child he doesn't even know, all the time talking to his lover on his cell phone. Naturally I suggested he look around for some kinky lingerie for the stupid doll and we had plenty of fun at everyone's expense, but in the end I was mostly just revolted at the pattern of your life, that you two have become so careless of your children that you would call him and tell him to pick up a gift rather than suggesting he come get the child and take her shopping or going with her yourself and it doesn't occur to him either. Spoiled brats, you have made. Of course, it is good insurance that women like myself will not want to steal your husband away from you, will not want to have a life that will force them to participate in the rearing of children already damaged beyond repair.



Last night he called from the car and I ended up with him in the dry cleaners where he was no doubt picking up some of your clothes, though I did not ask. That conversation was the one where he mostly complained about you and I spent a half an hour counseling him to be a better husband, and then wrote him a note reminding him of that, along with a small amount of erotica of course, and got a note back from him before he went to bed telling me thanks and that I am right about the children and that he loves me.



Still. I have not heard from him yet today. It is difficult, I confess, though I remind myself that I have no business getting as much from him as I do. He is very attentive. I don't know how he can juggle work and family, let alone give me as much attention as he does. I ache to hear from him. Worry that something might be wrong, that our affair has met a gruesome fate at your hands and I do not yet know, or that some accident has befallen him and he is not well and how will I ever know. No. I am his best friend's cousin. If anything happens to your husband, my cousin will know and will tell me. He won't like having to do that, but he will. My cousin knows we are in love, however he may feel about it. I am lucky this way. Oh, and I suppose I could call your husband's office and see what excuse they give people who are looking for him. It is not impossible to find things out.



Still I have not heard from him today. I repeat this phrase because I think you might like to hear it. I have not heard from him. No note telling me he misses me. No call to hear my voice. Nothing. No discussion of when we will meet again. It should have been today, but the week became too crowded, ending too fast and weather made travel distasteful to me. He is going to visit his father on Thursday for the weekend. I was invited to go with him and declined because I will be meeting them later in the month. And it is my birthday this weekend. And maybe I didn't want to spend my fortieth birthday on a trip with my married lover. No. I will instead have a birthday party of my friends who will still be my friends when your husband leaves me and goes back to you. They will never meet him. He will always be someone else's husband that I was fucking that winter I turned forty, the year after my big strong man killed himself, the year that was cold and I was burglarized by my pasty white neighbor for crack money. The winter I fucked your husband, may be the way I think of it. Who knows. Perhaps it is already over. You have found us out, ultimatums have been made and contrition negotiated, he has sworn to forswear me and I am out and this love is done. I have not heard from your husband today.



Does this mean I can stop writing this letter? Is there nothing you need to hear from me if you have foiled this affair and have him back in your lair? Are you safe now? How will this work? Will you have him call you every hour? Will you refuse to let him go out in the evening without you? What rules can you instate, what promises extract that will keep him from straying again, whether towards me or towards another?



Nevermind. He was in meetings all day with, well, whatever. Sent me a note. All is very, very well.



You should be concerned. This heats up even as I write to you, even as I grow dismayed because I haven't heard from him for one day. How can you let this go on? Do you not notice? Do you not care? For two months now your husband and I have been behaving like Romeo and Juliet, in love and under siege and it only encourages us. Have I said anything to you that would help you imagine how to entice him back to you? Are you understanding the gravity of this affair? Are you happy to think he is finding sexual comfort and satisfaction elsewhere while you remain secure in your ability to hold on to your creature comforts? I will never challenge you there it is true. It is more likely that I will encourage him to rethink his devotion to making money and curtail his earning habits than I will try to usurp your luxuries. You are snug and safe and somehow in great danger. If not me, another woman will offer your husband the seemingly taxless joys of love and you will lose him to her less noble, less base desires.



I am a writer and I am very good and fuss endlessly over my work to make it right, graceful, unburdened. But in this case I do not care if I repeat myself. I do not care if I keep your attention. I do not care in the least for your critical opinion of this letter. I will say the same thing over and over again and risk your sarcastic yawn. But what is it? What is the thing I am so anxious to say that I would write to you, try as hard as I am trying to communicate to you. Am I trying to warn you that there is great danger, that your marriage is headed for destruction? I don't know. I don't even know if that is true. I don't know what marriages are made of. Commitment confuses me, it so often conflicts with what I understand as my responsibility to those around me. I make few promises. What if your marriage is headed for disaster? It was before your husband met me. He had already spoken to you of divorce. Perhaps you can find solace in my news that even though he told you a year ago that he was willing to consider divorce, he told me two months ago he was not. But did he have a change of heart, or was he just protecting himself from the possibility that I would be a demanding and plotting lover? Did he think that by stating his unavailability up front he would be immune from later litigation? I don't know and neither do you. He was drunk when I met him so he may not know either.





You are right, by the way. He drinks too much. I would care deeply about if I were his wife, but I am not so I don't. For him to die in an accident or of some alcohol-related ailment means nothing to me. He will be snatched suddenly from me one way or another, and it might as well be by death. That would be a better story for me anyway, a better way for this to end. More sympathy from my friends. I might even be able to tell my family that I was in love with a married man and he died and not have them scowl. Mind you, I do not encourage him to drink. On the contrary. I encourage him to come to bed instead. I make an effort to get him naked before he starts drinking. I am sure you are aware of the hardness issues. I am of the opinion that he does better when he has not been drinking. So I grab him and pull him to bed and get him to fuck me right away. Before alcohol has worked its other magic. In this way I have personally determined that booze does make a difference. Don't get me wrong, though. We do drink together, and way too much because we love caressing each other in the public realm of bars and we like to drink together. Then we return to bed and fuck ourselves to sleep, and I do negotiate hardness issues as they are exacerbated by alcohol. I do not mind so much. A man whose erection comes and goes is a man I can entertain myself with endlessly.



Oh! how can it be that I have such an overwhelming desire for your husband when you have nearly none? A point of curiosity. But is it even true? Are you as frantic for his attention as I am? I cannot know. This is the sort of thing that cannot be communicated from him to me. Certainly will not be communicated from you to me.



Since I brought up hardness, it seems I should address the effects of the anti-depressants your husband is on, and maybe even why he is on them. But I won't. My last love took prescription drugs, thought he had to, but he's the one who killed himself and I am not prepared to be objective. It doen't matter anyway. Your husband would have to restructure his entire life, accounting fully for his whole, wild self, for him to have no need for those drugs. It did strike me though, when I heard the story of how he ended up taking the medications, that his complaint was mild and certainly not something that warranted an infinitely continuing presecription of any drug, let alone one that compromises sexuality. Honestly. A man complains of sleeplessness, of waking too early in the morning and having too much energy, and the doctor gives him saltpeter. I am not a doctor, but in my experience, a man who wakes too early in the morning restless and with too much energy needs sex, and right away, not to be fucked slowly to death by the medical and phamaceutical industries. I am not sure how to take my own opinion on this matter. Because I live in a world of art and artists and also in a world of spoiled corporate brats, I know an astonishing number of people on medication for some interpretation of "depression." The statistics are bad enough, but it has come to the point that I am surprised to discover someone is not on medication.

What is painfully clear to me having lost a man to mental illness, is that men like your husband are spoon-fed medication largely because they have insurance that will pay for it. It is in everybody's interest for your husband to be taking those expensive little pills. On the flip side, people who really do have debilitating mental illness are unlikely to be holding jobs that give them cushy insurance packages, so they do not receive the treatment that would keep them alive. Not that I care very much who is and who is not kept alive. The only person I cared about fell through this net and I really wouldn't care if everyone else did too.

But your husband is not at risk. Except in the sense that he does a thousand things that threaten his life in other ways to pamper his aching soul, starved for happiness in the very home he made for the purpose. Happiness that is not brought on by pill-form medication. Martinis, steaks, fast cars, small planes, lovers without boundries. These are the things he uses to replace the feeling he once got on the ice or in bed. Heart disease, tragic crash or AIDS. These, before suicide, will take your husband's life.

Not that you necessarily care. He wishes you dead, so perhaps you wish the same thing. Living death is how I found him. I have no guilt over this. I alone would describe him as a man who smiles a lot. He is mine. His cock is mine. His heart is mine. He is mine, all mine.









There are days when I do not have a shred of insecurity regarding your husband. When his devotion to me is so present that I can almost forget you exist. I don't know why some days are like that, but today is one. We exchanged messages about a trip to Chicago, plans were made. We settled a date in Phoenix. He called me from his car as he went to pick up your youngest from the daycare. We laugh and talk and he is aroused by my voice as usual. I was with friends in a public place so I know I said nothing provocative. This is what it is, and it will run its course. Perhaps there is nothing for you to do, nothing to do but wait until he or I tires of this inconvenient affair. You still there, mother to the children. You are what he will be left with in any case. I do not know that I have anything at all to say to you.



Still, we are in this conversation.



If we were to come face to face, if we were to encounter each other sincerely and openly on a playing field, what would you think? Would you crush me with a careless stroke? Would you walk off, disgusted to have even seen me? Would you lunge at me and claw me to shreds? Would you feel anger? Hatred? Curiosity? Camaraderie? Would we be opponents or teammates? What do you imagine you would feel, confronted with the woman your husband loves, fucks, enjoys in every way?

I cannot imagine. You are so much less to me. You are the wife. A piece of paperwork made manifest as stale flesh in a house I will never visit. You could appear before me and I think I would feel confusion over what to do with you and then this same impulse to speak to you. I imagine I would also feel some chagrin to be faced with a woman I am betraying, mortified and embarrassed and probably unable to speak to you for that reason. Such a confrontation might be all that is needed for me to refind my ethical self and to leave your husband's "tongue and cock and love" behind.

Still though, I might find you arrogant and cold enough to not be sorry to have taken your husband in. I might find you pitiable but not feel sympathy. Or I might be overwhelmed by my desire to understand your husband and be compelled toward you by the fact that you alone know your husband well enough to be of interest to me. You might be in that sense a potential friend to me, a confidante, someone to laugh with and tell stories.

But no. You can only view me as a threat, even though I insist that I am not. The contrary, even.

It is impossible to imagine a meeting anyway. A pointless exercise. How could it be arranged? Our culture has so isolated women from each other that the only woman who is of any interest to you, who has any power over your life at all, is specifically barred from contact with you. How do you feel about that?



I was sexually betrayed once. Several times, I suppose, over time, and by the same man. In any case, the main person he fucked was an old girlfriend, someone who had a certain power over him, as well as over others it turned out, and she was not loathe to use it. Later, after our relationship had completely disintegrated, I told him I found it unfortunate that he had kept her and me apart. I came to think that had he brought her openly and warmly into our relationship, which was one of love, she might have been served by being treated as a friend, as a trusted part of our community rather than this thing that I had to be protected from and she from me. Keeping us apart gave her all the power and took mine away.





How do you feel about your husband? Would you want to know him if you were no longer espoused? Or would you want him to disappear off the face of the earth, except as regarded the well-being of your children? Is this thing I have admitted to you, this sexual betrayal and web of lies, enough to make you wish he were dead and gone? Vaporized? Or does it galvanize you to the task of repairing your marriage?



Does it even matter that he has taken up with me? Would you be willing to consider and address the quality of your marriage as such without this apocryphal news of his affair with me? What does this matter? The problems in your marriage were there before me and they remain the same. I am merely symptomatic. But would you recognize the distress of your marriage without such a crisis? Without him putting you so extremely at risk? Have you?



I don't believe you are taking the risks of letting your marriage go to hell as seriously as you should. Your husband is fucking me, no condoms are ever involved, his tongue is inside me as much as I will allow, he speaks of anal sex with great anticipation and I have no objections, and you don't have any idea who else I might be fucking or how. For that matter you don't know that I am not an intravenous drug user. You have no idea what risks you are taking, whatever sex life remains in your house. Are you listening to me? I am a very attractive woman, and cannot leave my house without being presented an opportunity for sex. For example, just a couple of months ago, just as I was beginning my correspondence with your husband, I met a couple of delightful doctors in town for a conference, and ended up the next night in a high-spirited threesome that happened to also involve anal sex.

I am not even a particularly slutty chick, either. The women who might snap up your husband after I am done with him or he with me might be still less considerate than myself. More promiscuous and less considerate. Women who fuck other women's husbands are not bastions of virtue. How faithful do you think I am to your husband when I know he might fuck you any day of the week? One would almost expect me to be particularly reckless and abandoned in fits of resentment or frustration at this terrible corner I've painted myself into. Do you blame me for leaping through a window, if only for a night? Are you concerned how my careless behavior might affect your health, your life?



From the moment your husband reached between my legs and pulled the barstool and me toward him, you should have been apprised. He should have gone home and confessed that he had been forward with a woman, that he had felt enamored, that he'd felt himself powerless, that there was reason for concern, that your bond was threatened. I don't know what you would have done, but it would have given you a chance to be responsive and inventive, to conjure up a way to connect with him sufficiently that when I wrote to him later in the week—and I did write first—that he would have already reattached himself to you, already reinforced his barriers against such attack. You might have taken his report of his response to me as a clue that he desperately needed to be held, loved, fucked. He needed someone to patiently suck and fuck him until he came, strenuously through the fog of his medications, offer him the blind attraction of a new lover, the curiosity and delight of new love.

What were you doing? Were you wandering forth, thinking how convenient that he should have lost the ability to bother you with his erections now that he is medicated? You are wrong. It is not convenient and such disinterest should bother you much more than insistent love-making. For your relentlessly physical husband to have lost interest in sex should have troubled you tremendously. He is massively sexual and romantic. He needs to be fucked, but by the woman he is in love with. Why isn't that you? Where are you? Why have you left the field so fantastically open for me to walk on and carry the ball to the end zone without breaking into a run or even looking over my shoulder? What are you doing that is so important you have chosen to ignore your husband as a human, as a man? I realize he is a pain in the ass, but he is still human. Still a man. If you do not recognize and honor that, someone else will. I have. Others will follow me. Where are you in all this?



I have a vague memory of some Victorian erotica, slightly sado-masochistic, perhaps. A reprint of one of the many magazines of erotica that circulated towards the latter part of the 19th century. I remember a particular story that spoke to the phenomenon of the cheating husband and a passing comment that making love to one's husband more frequently, even as he is leaving the house, is no guarantee that he won't go out and get another serving of a similar dish elsewhere. Perhaps the wife just whets his appetite for something more savory or sweet. Likewise, that a man comes home and fucks his wife is no evidence that he has not been straying. Again, his sexuality may have simply been piqued, his appetite stroked and encouraged by a dalliance earlier in the day.

I mention this only to qualify and moderate any sense you may have that I am advising you to have sex with your husband. I am advising you to do that, but it is not enough and it is secondary to my admonition that you redouble efforts to make him associate sex with you rather than with me. Remember, he associates my very voice with sex. I have to do nothing to arouse him other than show up. Not even show up.

My suggestion for you is to somehow re-attach his sexuality to you. To make him associate sex with you. How? By being interested in his sexuality. Talking to him about sex in a curious, detached but interested way. Not complaining, as is tempting, that there has not been enough or it has not been good enough or what have you. Not discussing the sex that does or has existed between the two of you. Let alone the specifics, the places where the other might take an observation personally. Take up sex instead as an area of conversation and curiosity, a topic of discussion as such. It's easy enough to get a man to associate you with sex in this way. But difficult to do it with sufficient detachment and sincerity and humor that discussion is not misinterpreted as criticism. Humor is very important, but more important is a sincere and curious and delighted interest in sex. I told another girfriend recently to pick up some books about sex that she could browse through and read aloud from on a road trip she and her husband were about to take, as a means of bringing up general, random topics of sex out of interest rather than the normal sort of sex discussion between couples which too often springs from concern or dismay.



"Another girlfriend." I have come to count you as a girlfriend?



You are with your husband more than I am. You can get under his skin. But you should do it with love and with a completely truthful interest in sex and in sex with him. He will turn to you like a dog looking for treats, I am almost certain. I am also almost certain that he won't be fooled by a charade. Remember that you let him get far enough away that he fell into my arms and into my bed, and now he knows what that is like. He was an honest man to begin with, but now he knows what an honest woman who loves him feels like, and won't be as easily fooled by manipulative and false performances of love as he once was. If you can be real, sincere, sweet, you will have him back. He wants to have his home be the place where he is happy. I really do think he does.



For now though, it is in hotels, in other cities and in your own, where he is happy. Where he is unable to stop smiling, where we sleep like children, heaped on top of each other. For today, I am not concerned about my place in his heart. For what it is worth and for however long it can last, he does love me, whatever love may mean. Perhaps when you get him back he will have been marked by this love and he will be a sweeter lover and partner to you. I do hope for that, though I cannot imagine that you believe me.



Perhaps I do begin to consider you a friend. God knows I have spent plenty of time with you writing this unwieldy letter. Perhaps this is why, walking down my darkened hallway a few moments ago, it occurred to me that you might care to know who I am. Perhaps it was the lilt of the floor. The chill outside my office. The darkness. It is winter. You are my only human contact tonight. You and your husband are out of the country on a boondoggle. I will not hear from him until I see him on Thursday. I am alone in this relationship and have nothing to say to him until we have been again in each other's arms. So I turn to you, apparently. You may stop reading but I will continue to write.



Who am I? What would I look like to you? I wonder if you imagine me as some version of perfection, possessed of all the qualities you chastise yourself for not possessing. Or do you envision instead a trashy thing, something slutty and not nearly as educated or elegant as yourself. Do you suppose that your husband has succumbed to pornographic charms, a tight shirt and short skirt, heels and more red lipstick than you are comfortable wearing?

All these things are true enough. I do possess qualities you would envy, if only that I am younger than you are. I am trashy, willing to wear things that have no purpose other than to delight a man's eyes and hands, and I am certainly less educated than you are. I stopped at my bachelor's degree and never pursued graduate school, let alone any professional graduate programs. From any angle, you are more educated and certainly more successful than I am. For all I know you are in better shape than I am as well. I am sure that I dress more provocatively than you do, occasionally anyway, or at least that my slutty manner of dress is more integral to who I am than your version of slutty dress would be to you. I think it makes a difference. If we were both at the same party, I would appear more fuckable than you. Of course, I am more fuckable, so that's part of it.

Still, it is true that I am beautiful, or that I am considered so by a percentage of people who meet me. Tall, more slender than not, a body that is fine even when without exercise for years on end, small-breasted and not inclined to wear anything that shows my legs. They are perfectly nice legs, but still, I don't like revealing them. I cannot shop at regular stores because manufactured clothing is too cruel to accommodate my many flaws, let alone my height. I design and make most of my clothing and it is some combination of sensible and frivolous, always very comfortable, forgiving, sensual and easy to remove. I don't like to wear things that mark my body, and won't wear anything I would be concerned about spilling some red wine or olive oil on.

I have seen a photograph of you and I wonder what a photograph of me would look like to you. I can't imagine. There are photographs where I am rough and ugly, masculine even. There are portraits in which I am so lovely I do not recognize myself. Our lives leave too many images of us in our wake. Too many snapshots too carelessly taken. I have no idea what you would see in one photograph or another.

Do you wonder what I saw of you? It was a formal but generic portrait of you and your oldest daughter, the one in your husband's office. You were posed in what I suppose is your home but it might as well have been a backdrop labeled "suburban affluence, winter." I registered only blandness, of setting, of clothing, of expression, that might for all I know disguise a great mind, creativity, diplomacy. There is no reason why a photograph should reveal a person. But still it seemed smug and contrived. A photograph meant to project something that may or may not be.

I don't have any photographs like that. I have a very old Polaroid camera and I use it to take pictures once in awhile. I have to experiment with timing and light to get a picture to work at all, and half the time I forget to focus the thing and the pictures are a blur or black. But occasionally I get a meaningful portrait of someone or a group, and that is the prize. There is only one photograph out in my house. It is a high-key Poloroid of me against the white sheets of our bed, me holding one of our giant cats. It is a bright and blurred composition of a figure in repose but at the same time embracing a dark being. The cat stands in for my love, my bare arms represent our vulnerabilities and our strength, a small triangle of silvery blue, the corner of a slipdress, draws attention to my breast even as it covers me. The surrounding diffusion of white is muslin at the window transforming through a chemical magic into an endless and cloistered impression of light. It is the opposite of a seated portrait. It is a gesture, an abstraction, an image meant to capture not the exact pixels of that moment but the sense of something. It is not a great photograph, but it succeeds on this count. It is a reasonable image of our life in bed, sleepy, nearly naked, embraced and bathed in the light of something bigger than ourselves.

I leave this photo out because it is barely a picture of me; to me it is a picture of my last man, the one who is dead. I only see him, that morning, standing by the bed, taking the photograph. I guess we did that sometimes. Take pictures of each other in the morning. The best portraits, the ones that look like us, we took up close at the breakfast table one morning when the camera happened to be there. We didn't move from our places where we were having coffee. The pictures for better or worse are what we looked like to each other every morning. Our unshowered faces and nothing else. The thing about Polaroids is you can see right away if you captured what you wanted to capture, and if you didn't you can take another. If you wanted to know what I look like, those are probably the best pictures. Better than the photographs from parties where I look glamorous and carefree.

What I look like is hardly who I am, though. Nor you.

I am your sister. I am a woman raised as you were, privileged but not extravagantly. Educated without restraint. You have higher degrees than I, but I have probably pursued my education more deeply than you have yours. Book reviews litter my house, art magazines addressed to other people, Bills, letters, catalogues. The catalogues are thrown away, the literary publications kept and read, the letters saved, the bills paid, though not promptly. I own my house, in fact I own more property than just my house, but it is at the scary and ramshackle end of the spectrum. I bought abandoned houses. I thought I could make them better. Thought that by caring for them, bringing them back to life, I would help heal a neighborhood. I could be terribly mistaken.

Meanwhile, I live carelessly and casually. My house is cold and drafty. Walls are missing. Tile needs repair. The yard is not landscaped. The kitchen almost doesn't exist. I am aware that you and your husband and children live in great comfort and even luxury, but I do not envy it. You pay too high a price.



You know who you are. Me. Who am I? I cannot think of how to describe myself to you. The vocabulary of my day is not the same as yours. I am in the service of others, compelled to it by something within me and not a salary. I live on coffee and wine and leftovers from last weekend's party or small sandwiches made in passing. Young men and women do not believe I am as old as I am, though my face is lined and my body begins to rebel. I wear no make-up to speak of. "I am a wastrel," I say, and half the people don't know that "wastrel" is a word.

Whoever I may be, I have the time and inclination to write this to you. I would prefer to be in the company of your husband, would prefer above that to have never met your husband at all. You cannot imagine the beauty of the young men who surround me. They are astonishing. Sweet and beautiful and smart. And you cannot imagine the loveliness of the older men. The men in my city are handsome, artistic, intelligent, interested. At least the ones I meet. It is a little puzzling to me, to be honest. You might ask why I angled for love in your city, why I should accept the attentions of a married man when there are so many available and attractive men in my own town. In my own house, for that matter.

There is only the one reason. I fell in love with your husband. And I am disinclined to imagine other men as lovers when I am occupied with the one. Yours. I know he is yours. I do not forget that. And it is not a drawback, it turns out. Why would I shift my attention to a man who is available to me and local and likely to disarrange and intrude upon my life or demand that I participate in his, when I have the conveniently restricted devotion of your husband? Would you not trade what you have for a man who cannot come to your house, who cannot invite you to his, who adores you and plots to have you, meets you for passionate trysts in delightful hotels in strange cities, but who cannot invade your life, does not leave towels on the floor of your bedroom or bath, does not look disapprovingly at the disarray of your office or closet? What man other than a married one in another city would put up with my life, my inclination to hang out with friends, to party with lesbians, to go for Mexican food or dance wildly all night with one or another of the beautiful young artists around here. My last man could almost not stand for me to go to the grocery store or to work, worried where I was, became mad with jealousy.

I am not with your husband because he is married or because he lives in another city, but at the end of the day it works out rather nicely for me. More so than for him. More than you I was trained to be a wife and I am too good at those tasks, fill the demands of that role too easily. For me it is good to have a lover who will not turn me into a wife. For your husband it is good as well, as he would have been inclined to turn me into a wife, which is then so easy to turn against, and he would be just where he is now.







For heaven's sake. Enough of this jabbering. I have been in your husband's life, and so in yours, for nearly three months. There is no end in sight, and for the next month I will be seeing him in a different city every week. How can you not know of this? Why haven't you put your foot down? How can you not be aware he is fucking another woman? Has he been so good at deceiving you? Have you noticed nothing to make you suspicious? Or again, are you glad to be rid of his attentions, his demands? Is he being nicer at home out of guilt for betraying you and lying to you? Are you glad for this change? Is there any change? Would you even notice? Honestly. I have left hickeys on his neck. I try not to, but I do unwittingly. Did you not notice them? The bruises on his arms from my adult hands. Do you tell yourself that your small children are responsible?



I am not tormented as I would have thought I would be by not knowing what goes on in your home. My curiosity is mild, and in truth I don't want to know anything. The less I know the better. I am learning a great deal about myself, being in a situation where I love a man but the details of life are not allowed to invade the sanctum of sexuality between us. It has empowered me to do things, say things, try things that would be difficult for me in a regular, modern dating context. That your husband is unavailable to me, that he has no right to be with me to begin with, has allowed me an opportunity to not care whether he likes me, whether he wants to be with me. Has freed me from making any effort to keep him, to nurture or maintain the relationship between us.

I feel extremely lucky to have this opportunity to be careless. It reminds me of my time in Paris where I learned French by speaking almost exclusively with my lover, a filmmaker who'd started his career working in pornography. He taught me all kinds of vocabulary and expressions that I would never have been able to utter in English, some of which don't really even have translations in English, and I came to rattle off vulgarities as if they were nursery rhymes. In French I could curse out a bad taxidriver like a merchant sailor, or cooly discuss sex like a 10,000F prostitute. My boyfriend was very proud.

I am still a bit of a verbal prude in English, but the French episode did open up my ability to express myself in sexual terms, allowed me to be expressive in a context freed from the taboo and naughtiness we carry around from from childhood, from being slapped for saying the wrong words. In English we tend to go from silent or euphemistic prudery straight to vulgarities, trash talk and smut that always sounds disrespectful and derogatory to me in the context of sex between lovers. As though the language of sex went straight from being locked up as some kind of dangerous treasure to being the butt of all jokes. Sex tossed in with potty humor. Our exquisite and adored queen thrown in the stocks and mocked mercilessly by the unwashed crowd. It always surprises me and I think my own writing retreats back to discretion and even priggishness in response to the increase of vulgarity in the culture. I want sex to remain precious and believe it deserves careful articulation of desire and observation. Perhaps I don't trust myself to offer that as a writer, so I cowardly decline the challenge.





What about this letter? Yes, well, all this is another reason why neither you nor I can be named. I hope you understand and forgive me for not being more brave, for not being a better writer and worthy of the challenge of being named, identified. I cannot be revealed as the writer, nor you revealed as the subject, for then this letter wouldn't be about the ideas of infidelity but would instead become a dull text about my specific body and the things it has done. To identify our three characters by name would transform any reading of this into a voyeuristic exercise. Is it true? Is it fabricated? Who are these people, what do they look like? Who is this man, this cheating husband, this lothario, this object of desire? We become characters in a domestic narrative not even interesting to us. Acquaintances would peer at us and imagine our failings, our misbehaviors, discuss us and we would have a hard time even going to the grocery store in peace.

All this would be short-circuited if I could give this letter directly to you, but that, as I discussed at the start, is even worse. The dialogue I seek with you requires the abstraction of anonymity, both to allow you the possibility of hearing me and to leave us all our privacy.



Sometimes people write of scandalous and difficult things about real people, and then insist that it is not to be read until everyone involved is dead. To do that would be an act of hopelessness. I want this message to get to you soon that you might use it for good, to do what you will to make your life happier, softer, warmer, if only because it gives you permission to take a lover of your own.







Your husband asks me, apropos nothing at all, why I never married. Or to be more precise, why I am not married. The answer is that I never thought it was more important to be married than to be married to the right person. And a right person has never been available to me.



Then your husband poses the question of children, do I want them, do I want or plan to have them with him. I don't. I don't plan to have children. I am not averse to children occurring in my life, but I am not aiming for them, do not desire them, and look forward to the day when it is no longer a topic for discussion.

But that is not quite yet.

But why should your husband quiz me on this point? He speaks again and again of it, and says bluntly it would not be such a terrible thing for me to become pregnant during our trysts. I have mentioned this already. It is an important point. I am not sure what to make of it, and certainly don't know what you should make of it.

Your husband is in love. With me. And there is not enough time and leisure for him to tire of me. I do not know what to do to protect you. You have given us the perfect soil and climate to grow sweetest, deepest love. Ultra-romantic. Forbidden and clandestine, occurring in the hidden rooms our culture provides for such stuff. I can't stop this now. I am smitten and do not try to be otherwise. Every week there is another friend he informs of this affair. Your husband is not a good liar, though apparently it is easier to lie to you than to his friends. But still. He is not happy lying. One of us will be sacrificed eventually. You will be made aware of all this or I will be excluded. Suddenly. That is what I expect. Everyday. I have told you this. I tell my friends the same. They say, "That must be hard." I don't know if it is or not. It is the deal I struck. It is less hard than not being with your husband at all right now. He occupies me and controls my desires. He would say the same of me, would steal my words if he heard them. Claim them for his own as he claims me.



Do you laugh and dismiss all this? Are you certain of his love for you? You are right now for six days with him in a warm and luxurious place. Will you make love to each other? Will you re-find your marriage? Should I be remorseful that at the end of five days your husband will meet me in another city for several days of whatever it is we do? Will his attention for you during your time together be compromised by his desire for the seventh day to arrive and bring me with it? I did not plan this, did not plot this. It just worked out this way. We share him. I can now count the hours until I see him. I can list what I must do in each of them, the pace of time quickens and I will be in his arms, alone in the world with him only before me.





I think it was this unusual stretch of time, the distance, the not knowing, not seeing, the brutally physical absence of presence that drove me to want to communicate with you. A perverse desire borne out of my desperation for contact with your husband. Any contact with him, even if it is through you. Writing and talking with him weren't enough. I needed to dig in more deeply and so turned to you as an opportunity to explore this affair, to examine this part of my relationship with your husband that is too much ignored and discounted in our hurry to undress and swallow each other. I don't forget you and I don't think he does either. I don't know if that is good news or bad. Do not know if it is good or bad that I should construct and then mine a conversation with you in order to sustain myself for a few weeks without him.

On the other hand, maybe I've been apart from him long enough to come to my senses. In this moment's sanity and in utter sincerity I turn to you and beg you to steal him back from me.



In either case, I don't think this will happen again. It would be better to end our affair than to spend another such length of time apart. To find one's sexuality attached to another and then to be separated from that other is too difficult, distracting, maddening.



I won't have it.





So I say my closing to you. Best regards. Sincerely. Respectfully. Not shamefully, not yours, not with affection. You are very kind to accept this missive. Perhaps one day you will find yourself writing to me and then I will understand what I have done.





Please forgive me for not signing.