It’s not inaccurate to say that the adultery has always been a part of my life. Not the actuality of it but the idea of it, the possibility, the fact that it exists. Although it had not yet happened, I had flirted with it several times, considered it, and rejected it, but I had always thought it would happen. Perhaps thinking about it with an absence of the pejorative and a presence of the inevitable was what had kept me on the straight and narrow for so many years.
I thought I was being honest in admitting that people strayed and that it could be no big deal. Although sometimes it was a very big deal and marriages ended by infidelity all the time, I never quite believed sex with someone other than one’s spouse was the real reason a person left a marriage. I guess I bought into all that women’s magazine garbage that when a marriage ended, adultery was only the symptom, not the cause. I had married my husband after all, I was fond of telling anyone who would listen, because I enjoyed having coffee with him as much as I enjoyed having sex with him. The truth was that I enjoyed having coffee with him more than I enjoyed having sex with him.
The women’s magazines were right, in that sense: it wouldn’t be good or bad sex that ended the marriage of my husband and I; it would be the fact that talking with him was no longer interesting. Or interesting enough.
So I thought.
I was well versed in all those theories about men and women, too. About how women biologically need to nest with one man to protect their young and assure a father for their children, while men just need to go out and let off sperm now and then, here and there, populate the world with as many children as they can. How it takes so many many sperm to find one who is strong enough to penetrate that hardy egg. Blah blah blah. But it was really women who were the ones who strayed, or wished to, or thought about it. Their good fortune in finding a mate who would stick around for a while was little good fortune at all. Men were like buses, right? Even the oldest and ugliest and fattest of women were sure we could, if we only wanted to, find another man to sleep in our beds and eat our food and squire us to the supermarket. How else to explain that notion that there was somebody for everybody if not by the equal notion that there were lots of somebodies for every body.
But then again thinking about adultery and actually doing it are two different things. Fantasy is one of those things that keeps you from going crazy while reality is the cause of craziness. T.S. Eliot was right: humankind cannot bear too much reality. The messiness of climbing out of bed with someone who is not your husband and, some hours later, getting back into bed with someone who is your husband, is nearly unbearable. Keeping secrets is hard. Why else would people be so bad at it? The first time you say to someone else “Don’t tell another soul what I am about to tell you,” you’re doomed. And you always have to tell someone when your fucking someone who’s not your husband; otherwise what, exactly, would be the point? Secrets like that are meaningless unless shared with someone who can both be shocked and sympathetic, who can remonstrate and commiserate and put into words all those little things you’ve been thinking but dared not give voice to. The kind of pillow talk lovers have between themselves, while skirting around the issues of the spouse or spouses left behind is never either honest enough nor descriptive enough. Too much is left unsaid. One is there, after all, to pretend one has a complete other life with that fellow adulterer in the bed. To talk to him as you would to a girlfriend would make the whole exercise even more ridiculous than it is. You must present your better different self, the one that no one else could ever understand.
But none of what I’ve just said, none of my years of contemplation of the act prepared me for the fact of it. When I leaned in to hug Ben that day outside the library, when I allowed my tiny body to be enclosed in the much larger, softer, embrace that was Ben in all his bulk and formidableness, the sudden shock that I could actually sleep with him, would actually not only want to but do so, was as life-altering as the moment you find out you’re going to have a child. Things, I suddenly knew, would never be the same. If that sounds utterly, pathetically, ridiculously romantic, then so be it. It was still as if Ben, in that single hug, which started out and even ended innocently enough, had transferred some part of his self to me and I, now the keeper of it, had the awesome and lifelong responsibility for it. Forever.
Of course, the truth was that Ben hadn’t long to live, which was why I had hugged him in the first place.
“How are you?” I said, my voice muffled in the wide expanse of his chest. When he let go of me, he said, “Well, you know.”
And I did, I had heard all the gossip. They, the ubiquitous They who said everything, who discovered everything, who knew everything, said that cancerous cells had been found in his liver. While They said that the prognosis was good, They also said that the doctors insisted on chemotherapy, rounds and rounds of it, and They said that the doctors also hadn’t ruled out radiation. That was the good news. The bad news, of course, was that he was dying.
He was just an acquaintance really, the husband of a friend. The husband who was dying of friend who was not. But all around me, suddenly, people had begun to fall ill with cancer and other dreaded diseases and I had had enough of it. It was time I did something positive. The people of my town were falling like flies, so much so that some of them began to talk about the elements in ways that were very elemental, to spin various paranoid fantasies about poisoned reservoirs and contaminated ground water, the co-generation plant up the road. And what was it, exactly, that that new chemical plant in the county made, anyway?
All those theories made as much sense to me as did Martians taking over our souls, or the current film fad that we were nothing but beings controlled by computers or television producers. Anything and everything was possible, especially if I was very soon going to engage in an adulterous affair with a dying man whom I barely knew.
There are scenes in women’s novels, romance and literary, where a man and woman meet eyes and instantly know that they will be lovers. Some writers can even make that moment believable, if they don’t dwell on it too long and get on to the good part. But people write novels, even bad ones, to make sense of what happens in the real world, and in the real world, when Ben and I hugged we both knew we were done for.
We both had ostensibly happy marriages, decent spouses, good children doing well in school, mortgages, car payments, work, aging parents, all the detritus of bourgeois existence. None of that mattered. It never does. If it did people wouldn’t fuck other people to whom they aren’t married, now would they? And though the fact that Ben was dying might have lent poignancy to the whole affair, it would have happened anyway. I might not have hugged him at that moment outside the library, but across some room, at some time, our eyes would have met. They would have had to. The whole script was, after all, already written, and we were just actors learning our lines. Weren’t we?
Ben and I stood talking on the sidewalk for a few minutes. He seemed cheerful enough, if self-conscious about dying. I could understand that. Dying is such a public thing.
My children tumbled about the back seat of the car (I had, after all, just planned to drive through and drop off books, but then I had seen Ben and said: “Kids, hang on a minute. I gotta say hello to someone.”) His child was nowhere in sight, nor was his wife. Apparently he had been at the library researching his disease. I told him he could stay at home and do that on the Internet but he admitted to having a fondness, still, for books, and for looking things up in them. I agreed to that and asked him how Marcia was taking the news of his illness and he said, again, “Well, you know,” and I thought I knew all about that too. She was a nice woman, sturdy and capable, she would make his last moments bearable, I thought.
But then, and this actually happened, I swear to God, I knew somehow that that wasn’t right at all. I felt that he would be with me, not Marcia. At the end, I thought, it won’t matter a bit what she thinks of his last moans and groans, because I’ll be the one there changing his diapers and holding his hand and guiding him on to the next place. And as if he had heard me think all of that, as if I had said all of it out loud, Ben said to me, as I stood on the sidewalk looking at him lovingly, expectantly, “D’ya wanna have lunch sometime?”
And I said, “Yeah.” I said, “How about tomorrow?”
It is true that life changes in one tiny moment: the moment when a child is conceived, when one says, “I do,” instead of “No, No, No!” When one misses a plane that crashes or steps off the curb into an oncoming bus, when one picks a certain path over another. There is always a moment, too, to stop whatever is going to happen, but sometimes we don’t know to do it. Sometimes we do know to do it but we can’t. Or think we can’t. When fate catches up with us and we just go with it. Lunch with Ben could have been just lunch with Ben. Instead, it was like running to catch the plane that crashes rather than waiting for the next one that won’t.
How does one live a life with the idea of something and then actually do it? I couldn’t say now. I couldn’t have said then. I couldn’t have articulated what it was that made the difference, not even if someone had put a gun to my head–which was, in effect, what happened. Ben was the gun. He fired the shot that destroyed me and I hadn’t the sense to get out of the way. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t know the gun was loaded. I did. I did. And still I put myself straight in the path of its trajectory.
It’s not easy having an affair in a town the size of mine. Perhaps if it had been easy I might have done it sooner or not at all. For years my husband and I would joke about adultery. He would say that he was much too busy to screw around and anyway he was at work all day and what did I think he was doing anyway (I really had no idea, actually). But, he would add, You, you, are home all day and I have no idea what goes on, you could be doing anything, which of course only made me angry, as if he thought I was one of those housewives who sat around and ate chocolates and watched Jerry Springer or went back to bed until it was time to pick the children up from school. I could have, of course: I could have done just those things, or others. But then the bills would not have been paid and the house would have been a mess and nothing would have gotten done. But then I knew people who lived just like that, with no good excuse. So having an affair was then something I did in my copious spare time. Of which, I discovered, I had more than I thought. Work does, after all, expand to fit the time we have to do it. I just became much more efficient once I was meeting Ben on a regular basis. In fact, I became a whirlwind of activity. Even my energy level increased.
We began with the first lunch, which neither of us would have admitted meant anything, really. And then we had another, and a morning coffee, and then we managed to run into each other here and there. In a small town like ours it’s easy. But it wasn’t until I offered to drive him to chemotherapy that anything important happened. And even that offer to drive him to chemo was made out of what I convinced myself was true altruism. His wife Marcia worked, it was hard for her to get off. She was grateful. I even told my husband I was doing it, it was all so aboveboard.
Sitting there opposite Ben, in a matching lounge chair, my book open on my lap but unread, I watched the chemicals snake their way out of the plastic bag and through the thin tubing and into his hand and ultimately, I hoped, into his liver. He looked exhausted, he had already begun to lose weight, his appetite was off, things tasted funny he said, and the dark bags under his eyes were larger and sadder but, I thought, beautiful. He was beautiful. Still round and soft and puffy like a teddy bear, and his hands, as I watched them lying on the arms of the chair, were gorgeous. I could not take my eyes off them. I brought him a soda, and I crouched beside his chair, and I handed it up to him, guiding the straw to his mouth and I knew that I had to lie with him in a bed somewhere and put my head on his chest and just warm myself with him and give him something, I didn’t know just what, it wasn’t only sex, I wasn’t even sure if he could have sex, and that was when I knew I was in big trouble. One does not look for rescue from a dying man unless one is dying oneself, or thinks she is. I felt fine, but that couldn’t be, could it? I had to be sicker than he or I could not have imagined what I was imagining in the first place.
Ben reached over and placed the hand that wasn’t connected to the IV on my head. Later, as I helped him walk to the car I realized he was somehow holding me up instead of the other way around. When I reached over to help him buckle his seat belt I kept my face close to his until he had no choice but to kiss me. At least that is what I told myself, allowing him no culpability, he was after all dying, and I was driving, I was in charge.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I could lie down,” Ben said.
And I said, “How about the hotel near the university?”
And he said, “That would be lovely.”
And it was. It was lovely. It was as lovely as anything ever gets. Even with his hand sore from the puncture and the nausea (in spite of the anti-nausea medications) rising in his throat, and his exhaustion and his pain and his despair, being with him in that room for those two hours was bliss. As he sat on the edge of the bed I undressed him, foot to head, all but his boxers, his pristine white cotton boxers. He lay back on the bed and watched me take off my clothes and his breath caught like he was a fourteen-year-old boy seeing his first woman. I was matter-of-fact rather than sultry, a little self-conscious about the C-section scars and the way my breasts no longer stood up. But then I reminded myself he was dying and I realized that the fact that I wasn’t was good enough for both of us.
I called my husband from my cell phone, told him that Ben wasn’t feeling too well and that we were stopping for coffee for awhile, the car made Ben sick at his stomach. I asked him if he would he pick the kids up from school and call Marcia and tell her not to worry, and then I lay down on the bed and I kissed Ben as though I could breath life back into him, as though he were drowning and I was performing CPR, little realizing at the time that he was rescuing me.
He couldn’t get hard but there was no need to apologize and he didn’t, didn’t even think of it, nor did I expect him to either apologize or to get hard. I just lay there naked beside him and kissed him and lay my head on his chest, which I had wanted to do, after all, which was all I had ever wanted to do from the moment I had pressed into him outside the library. I rubbed his soft flesh and I kissed every part of his body and so we spent two hours, until I helped him dress and we headed back to the car and for home.
Nothing was discussed about what we had done or what we would do next or what it all meant.
I put Joni Mitchell on the CD player and sang to him: “You’re in my blood like holy wine. You taste so bitter and so sweet. I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet,” and when we pulled into his driveway, he put his hand, his huge pinpricked hand, between my legs and I came, wet and hot, as though he had just been inside me forever.
I suppose that one could legitimately ask why, if the idea of adultery had always been so much a part of my life, at the actuality of it I was not better prepared and not better able. Why did I allow myself to get caught, what was I hoping to achieve by revealing myself so, both to Ben, and to my husband upon his discovery of my betrayal? I could not say. It was just that the notion of straying had always seemed more romantic than the reality of it. But that was later. At first, neither of us was caught out at all, at first we existed, as do all illicit lovers, in a world of our own making, a universe to which no one else was allowed entry. We managed, as lovers do, to fool ourselves and others into believing that nothing was going on, in the way people have been doing for centuries: by enacting our love affair mostly in public, as though we had nothing to hide. And so we convinced ourselves, my husband, my children, Marcia, Ben’s son Max, our friends, that I was merely a do-gooder and Ben the recipient of my ministrations.
Marcia found it easier for me to drive Ben to therapy than to think about the implications of my driving him, my husband was grateful that I was a much nicer person than he had thought me to be (or so I imagined). My friends, and Ben’s, thought me a saint. And I felt saintly, for awhile, as though I were not only doing something worthy but was actually saving Ben’s life, prolonging it, making it possible for him to stay around as husband and father far longer than he would have been able to without me.
This is all nonsense, of course. I knew exactly what I was doing and so did Ben. We were being supremely selfish, solipsistic, dangerous, mean and hurtful. He had convinced himself that he deserved this small measure of happiness before he died, and I had convinced myself that I was the only person who could give it to him, and that somehow the fact of his being a dying man made it all all right, and that everyone, eventually, would understand and forgive me.
When the doctors decided to add radiation therapy to the chemo, we rejoiced. Although that meant that Ben’s chances had grown dimmer and although he was completely enervated by the new therapy, we saw it as a way to see each other more often. Although we could never make love in any conventional way, our affair was as passionate and tempestuous, as dirty and noisy and messy, as though we had been screwing for hours like bunnies.
Mostly I would lie with him and kiss his scorched flesh, help him to the bathroom, hold his head while he vomited. I managed to buy some marijuana, not very strong, homegrown and green, but we would smoke it together and sit in its haze and pretend we were horny teenagers who couldn’t get enough of each other.
Somehow I could almost always come at the sight of him or just some gentle touch and he would look delighted and satyr-like at the flush on my cheeks and breast, at the way my breathing quickened and my limbs shook. His pleasure was mine, mine his, it was as an erotic experience as I had ever had or would ever hope to. Once in awhile he would grow hard in spite of his weakness and I would sit atop of him and kiss his face until he came. But mostly, it seemed, I would just bury my face into the warm flesh of his chest and we would lie for hours, Ben stroking my hair, and both of us drifting in and out of desultory conversation.
What did we talk about? Nothing. Everything. Books, the children, his illness, the news, how we could not go on. Lovers’ conversations, the same as lovers have had and will have forever, the kind of conversations that seem meaningful and important while one is having them, but really are as dull and transitory as any married couple’s talk at the end of the day. The only thing we did not discuss was the ordinary running of households, which takes up so much time in a married life, or the litany of errand running and to-do lists, we did not ask each other the questions that begin with Did you get? Or Did you remember to? Or Have you done the? In that way, again like lovers through the ages, we managed to convince ourselves that ours was a special relationship, above the fray, not weighted down my life’s mundane details.
Of course there was a certain amount of talk about scheduling. There had to be, we had to co-ordinate the trips, the time, and how we could explain what was taking us so long. And we had to discuss the progress of Ben’s illness, if only occasionally. I presented myself to the doctors and nurses as a dear friend and no questions were asked and in time the doctors spoke not just to Ben but to me when discussing the various therapies, prognoses, and timetables.
Clearly Marcia could not cope. Or did not wish to. She welcomed Ben back from his trips to the doctor with good meals, which he could not eat but professed to be grateful for. She kept their son Max quiet and entertained, but then, after Ben was settled on the couch of an evening, in front of the television or with a good book, she would disappear into her room for hours. He told me this, with some anxiousness, not sure if her abandonment was for his sake or hers. He felt guilty about being ill, guilty about not wanting her around anyway, guilty about loving me. So he said. He said he loved me. I had no idea if that were true or if I loved him. I just knew I needed him and if it made him feel less burdened to love me, then I was happy to have him say it.
I did ask him, once, about a month into our affair, if he thought he was with me just because he was dying.
He said, dryly, “I could ask the same of you.”
That made me cry a little because it was so true. Would I have fallen into this affair were it not circumscribed by finiteness? Was the fact of its finality its strongest appeal? Was I hoping, sometimes, that he would just die already, and I could commit our relationship to memory before we got caught?
Perhaps.
There were days I wished him dead, although those would come later. Days I wished to be released from him. But I had felt that way about my husband, too. In the early days of our marriage, when my love for him had been like a monstrous headache, when I got so angry at him I hated him, I would often imagine him dead and me free–without, of course, my having had to do anything to free myself. My passivity had frightened me then and it frightened me again with Ben.
What does one think about when one thinks about adultery? How does one justify it? The notion that everyone does it doesn’t cut it, because everyone doesn’t do it. Perhaps half of everyone does, the half that ultimately splits up. But even then the reasons for splitting may at once be more complicated and more banal than infidelity. And marriages survive infidelity, too. They survive everything: abuse, desertion, indifference, despair. I once knew a woman whose husband had left her sixty years before. She died, at ninety-nine, still expecting him to walk back in the door. He might have been long dead, a great-grandfather, or anything else, and she still thought he might come back to her some day. When I sat in the church pew at her funeral, even I half-expected that old husband to show up and pay his last respects, late to be sure, but still there. At the end.
And perhaps it was just that idea of The End that kept me with Ben. I could see our relationship through, after all. With my husband I had no concept of an end, it was just a long long drive down a long long road: when would it stop? Who knew? But with Ben, I knew that eventually, sooner than later, the end would come and I would have seen that end. Would have followed it through, would have stopped the car at the destination, gotten out. Journey over. It seemed easier and more desirable to do that than to just wander aimlessly through the years with a husband who might be around forever.
After those first few times at the hotel, we began to worry about the costs and hiding the bills, explaining away the money spent. So I would drive Ben to his house or mine, and we would climb into the bed in his guest room or onto the sofa in my study (which I pulled out and made up with fresh sheets each time. After all, I was the one doing the laundry, my husband would never notice). It was riskier and thus more exciting, scarier and more satisfying. At his house, I would brew tea so we would have some reason to explain my presence if someone were to drive by and notice my car. At my house, I was less circumspect. If the appointments were in the morning, I was just sure to drop him off before I picked up the children from school. He had taken a leave of absence from his university job so he had nowhere particular to be, and as I have said, Marcia worked. When she called he would talk to her. If he wasn’t home, he would tell her he was tired and just hadn’t answered the phone. I think we got away with it because no one could have imagined a dying man having an affair, or a woman selfish enough to take the last dregs of sexuality away from a wife who would be, soon, and ultimately, left alone and sexless. Or perhaps no one could think about–without a queasy stomach and some measure of distaste–a love affair between a man who was so desperately ill and a woman who was clearly taking advantage of him, so obviously diverting the energy he should have been using to try and get well. Ben should have been listening to tapes, visualizing waterfalls and wellness, reading books on laughter and forgetting, eating healthy food and drinking green tea. Instead, I laced his tea with bourbon and fed him with sandwiches of fatty cheese and mustard. Instead I read erotic literature to him and tried to rouse him to my pleasure. Instead I took his strength like Delilah. The fact that he was willing did not make me look any better, to myself, or, later, to the others who would judge me.
I mark the beginning of my adulterousness to the moment I first leaned into Ben’s chest, outside the library, in full view of my children sitting in the car, watching me, impatient to be off. My son called to me to hurry up and come on, and I could have I realize now, said, well, bye, Ben, see you. I hope things go all right, and left hurriedly, gotten back into the car, and gone on home. And nothing that had happened would have happened. My children should have been able to save me but they hadn’t. Somehow they hadn’t been enough. Twelve years of marriage, two children, a home, a life, all that should have compelled me out of Ben’s arms and back into the car and home. To safety. But none of it had been enough. I had somehow been spiraling toward him for years and hadn’t even known it until I fell. It was as if I had tripped on the stairs, had broken an arm or a leg in a moment of supreme carelessness, one of those moments when you wish, more than anything, that you could be back at the top of the stairs, and prevent yourself, somehow from taking the fatal tumble. If I could have kicked myself, kicked myself back up those stairs I would have, but it was too late.
If I had gotten back into the car a moment sooner, I could have gone home and felt a frisson of what could have been, what might have been, but would never be. I could have lain with my husband that evening and, closing my eyes, imagined myself on Ben’s chest instead of my husband’s, but it would have been in imagination only. I could have used that fantasy to infuse our marital lovemaking with an element of deception, delicious deceit, as thought I were making love with a rock star or a famous writer or . . . a lover. But now that I had a real lover none of that was open to me any longer. I went to bed with my husband and he was just my husband, and not the man with whom I was really sleeping. But if the fantasy was no longer possible, neither was the reality.
