The Affair (24 page)

I woke up the next day—almost noon—head throbbing, eyes aching, tongue furry. I rolled off the sofa and found my underwear
on the floor, then remembered. I stuffed the panties into my skirt pocket and slurped water out of the faucet, convinced that
pulling a clean glass from the dishwasher would create an unbearable clatter. I staggered to Pete’s room and pulled the covers
off his bed, thinking, stupidly, that he had also overslept. He was not in bed. I looked in his closet, under his bed, in
the bathroom, my anxiety intensifying as it became clear that he was nowhere upstairs.

“Come on out, you rascal,” I called, and the words sounded strangled. I checked the basement, the garage, even the kitchen
cabinets. Pete wasn’t exactly skilled at hide-and-seek; he always revealed himself giddily before I finished counting. Now
the fear rose to my throat like an express elevator, and I felt ready to throw up. I ran out the front door and found a handful
of broken colored chalk on the driveway, and the words, “Love you, Mommy,” scrawled on the blacktop, every letter a different
hue. I ran back into the kitchen and grabbed the phone. Whom would I call? What would I say?

Then my eye caught the hot pink Post-it note on the cabinet above the phone. “Took Petey out for breakfast
to celebrate Daddy’s homecoming. Don’t eat. Will bring back fresh bagels. Love you.”

“P.S. You were great last night.” Relief washed over me as I felt my terror ebb and my pulse slow. I put the phone back in
its cradle and reread the note. “You were great last night.”

Was I? Great as in, a masterful lover? Or great as in, too drunk to stop him? I remembered his tongue pressing into my mouth
as I tried to speak. The sound of a belt unbuckling. The fingers unhooking my bra. I remembered how he felt slipping inside
me. He did not have to push. My body was not dry and unwelcoming but ready and supple, even as my mind and mouth tried to
stop him. I remembered, too, how quickly the wine had taken effect, hastened by the antihistamines I’d swallowed only moments
earlier to quell a sudden eruption of hives.

The house shook gently as the garage door rumbled open. I splashed some water on my face, gulped down a couple of aspirin,
and waited. Petey burst through the side door first, his whole body joyful as a puppy’s.

“Happy days are here again, Mom!” he yelled.

“Where did you get that, you little nut?” I let him climb on my lap even as my skull pounded.

“Got it from Daddy. He was singing it the whole way in the van.” Pete slid off my lap and ran to the door to wait for Roger.
“Dad, Dad, Daddy, Dad, Dad. Hurry up. Tell Mom what you told me before.” I could hear Roger call back from the garage. “She
already knows, punkin. She’s in on the whole thing.”

I watched Roger pop off his sneakers and slip into the moccasins he’d apparently repositioned by the side door. He was holding
a big bag of steaming bagels. I could smell them from the kitchen, and I felt nauseated.
I waited for Pete to switch on the TV in the family room, then said, “I think we need to talk.”

Roger busied himself with the bagels. He sliced a salt bagel, smeared it with cream cheese, put it on the porcelain dish I’d
saved since childhood, and set it before me. “Madame? Your bagel.” The fake French accent. The hidden rose, pulled from his
sleeve and now placed beside the plate. I didn’t say anything. “What? You no like?”

“No. I mean, yes. It’s very nice. But, Roger …” Part of me wondered, should I say anything about last night?

“Oui?”

“Enough with the French waiter routine. Please. It’s just that… well… what we did last night…”

Roger put a finger to my lips. “Shhhhh. Don’t ruin it with words. Just let it be.”

I pushed his finger away. “No. I can’t ‘just let it be.’ You see, I don’t actually recall giving you permission to have sex
with me.”

“Excuse me?
Per-mission?”

“It’s just that I remember asking you to stop,” I went on, ignoring his tone, trying to keep things conversational. “I mean,
that’s just how I remember it. But I know I’d had a lot to drink.”

Roger pulled back and stared at me. “As I recall, dearest, you were extremely receptive. In every way.”

I was now more confused. Yes, I received him. I could have clamped shut my legs, rolled aside, pulled myself out from under
him. Instead, at some point my hips met his, my rhythm matched his. I felt myself retrenching, felt my indignation fuzz and
blur.

“Furthermore, dearest,” Roger continued, “I seem to recall this coy game of cat and mouse being a standard act in our repertoire.
That’s what made it so much”—he
lifted a finger to trace my nipple through the blouse—“fun.”

I felt myself harden against his touch. I didn’t know what to believe. I had cotton-head and a parched throat and the
Rug Rats
theme song from the TV in the other room was somehow resonating in my sinuses. Roger pulled a chair up to mine, and I winced
as it scraped across the tile. “Love. Don’t ruin things. I’m back, and we’re together. Pete’s happy, I’m happy and … can’t
you try to be happy too?”

I wanted to pull away, clear the dishes, ignore his question. But that was too much like the way it used to be, the sullen
dysfunctional kitchen scene. Talk about a standard act in our repertoire. I looked out the kitchen window to the backyard
and could see the crocuses pushing through the hard earth, the pale green buds on the linden trees. Now is the time for new
beginnings. Couldn’t I, now, make a new beginning here in my own kitchen?

“What do you say?” Roger was asking me, drawing an imaginary smile across my face with his finger.

I stared ahead. I asked him to be patient with me. I said I would try to be happy with our new arrangement, but he had to
be patient. He puts his hands up, palms toward me, an expression of his willingness to back off. “I can wait.”

Having my work is a real blessing now, if only because some of my clients are dealing with a lot worse problems than I am.
Claire, for instance. Someone had written on her daughter’s locker in middle school, “Your mother’s a slut.” The girl has
been shut out by friends, haunted by gossip and graffiti. This happened the same week that Claire’s current plaything—a thug
from the health club—had started calling on her at
home in the evening, when her husband was in the house!!! Now she’s piling lie upon lie to keep her husband in the dark, but
how long can her ruse possibly last?

I’ve got to run. More later.

’Til next time,

Roger finally moved the last of his things into the house, and I’m aware of how cramped and put-upon I suddenly feel. I had
gotten used to having things a certain way
(my
way) and now I have to share, compromise, discuss, negotiate almost everything again. I have to contort my body to get out
of the Jeep now that his van is back in the garage. Meals are now planned by committee, as are Pete’s playdates and new shoe
purchases. Roger has reorganized the pantry, and once again the peanut butter is in the fridge, even though I’ve told him
that it belongs in the cabinet. He has also tried to sneak into bed with me—I woke up to find his hand stroking my butt—but
I told him I wasn’t ready (for sex or a permanent bed partner), and he reluctantly retreated to the guest room. The only consolation
is seeing the joy in Petey’s face when he wakes up in the morning to find Roger at his bedside.

Today’s session with Claire was riveting, devastating, draining.

Her story starts three months ago at the health club (where everything seems to start these days). She was there in the middle
of the day, a time when the club draws the oddest assortment of people. There are sub-urban
housewives, college professors, real estate agents, therapists, and everyone else with pliable schedules. And there are the
Hulks, brawny men with questionable work histories and enormous, tattooed arms, men who never run the track or use the Cybex
machines, swim in the pool, or take classes, but restrict themselves to the weight room, a dimly lit place that is silent
except for the grunting and occasional cry as great barbells are lifted. The one essential truth about this room is its maleness.
And it is here that Claire wanted most to be.

She had fixed her crosshairs on one Hulk in particular, Kevin, the strongest, gruffest, most heavily tattooed of them all.
“I don’t know,” she told me. It was like my endocrine system was activated in his presence. It’s a primitive thing, I think.
Like my body somehow knew that he was built for sex.” She paused. “There was something else. He was so serious, almost mean.
I can’t explain it. It turned me on.”

Claire pretended to know nothing about weight lifting, and the Hulk was polite enough to show her how to use some of the lighter
free weights, assuming the role of unofficial personal trainer. She loved feeling the heat radiating off his thick arms, loved
the sight of his black T-shirt stretched tight across his rock-hard chest. She took every opportunity to inch closer to him,
wanted to fold herself into his arms. (Having felt precisely those impulses around Eddie, I knew just what she meant.)

It took her three weeks to rouse Kevin’s interest, longer than any other man she’s pulled into bed (or onto a conference table).
She wasn’t his type, she found out later, and hadn’t even registered on his radar screen. He preferred leggy blonds, not plain
accountant/mother
types. “But he was still a man, and when I made my intentions clear, he wasn’t about to turn down the opportunity.”

“How, exactly, did you make your intentions clear?” I asked her.

Her lips curled slyly. “Some of the guys were talking about Monica Lewinsky. At some point I mentioned that I thought pleasuring
a man was an art form.”

“You didn’t.”

“I sure did. I mean, it’s true, isn’t it?” I said nothing, but secretly agreed. “Anyway, then I told him I felt I’d mastered
that particular art form. And that’s when I hooked him. He just stared at me. I mean, really stared. Up and down. Wouldn’t
take his eyes off me. And I could see he was breathing a little faster. And I knew I had him.”

Kevin hung drywall, and as luck would have it, he was working on a new and as yet unoccupied house across the cul-de-sac from
Claire’s in her plush subdivision, The Pines. She gave him her number, and he would call from the new house and command her
to present herself. “It was the hottest experience I’d ever had. I still get hot just thinking about it, even now. Even after
everything that’s happened.”

Sometimes he’d tell her what to wear (short black skirt). And what not to wear (underwear). It was a thrilling game, and Claire
became more daring with every episode. At first she visited only when she knew he was alone, or when her kids were in school.
Then she showed up when other workers were in the house, or on weekends when the kids were home or playing in the street.

One day he called her and told her to stand by her
bedroom window. She took the cordless phone to the window.

“Now raise the blinds.”

She did, and gazed out. He was standing in an upstairs room in the new house, facing her squarely, only a few yards away.
She could see him clearly.

“Now lift up your top.”

Claire could hear her family downstairs, the TV, the clattering in the kitchen, her husband’s voice. She slowly pulled her
blouse over her breasts, and watched him.

“Good. Now pull up the bra.”

Claire looked at me. “I thought I was going to die. It was so naughty, so risky. And I was so unbelievably horny.” I have
to admit, as screwed-up as Claire was, her story was starting to turn
me
on. I tried to stay impassive. “So I pulled up my bra,” she continued. “Then he asked me to press myself against the window.
I did. And that’s when I heard the doorknob turn.”

Just as alcohol slows the reflexes, so did the crazed, flaming lust that consumed Claire as she pushed her breasts against
the huge picture window in her bedroom (recently Windexed, crystal clear). Otherwise she could have reacted, would have escaped.

“Do you like what you see?” she said into the phone, breathlessly.

“Mmm. Yes. Yes.” She was frozen against the glass, head lolling, one hand raised high, the other between her legs. It’s a
kind of lunacy, really, that kind of heat, wild and mindless. And in the grip of this lunacy, Claire heard her husband open
the door, heard the soft squeak of the knob as if it were a million miles away. She heard him say, “What the—” but even his
voice was not enough to jar her into real time.

She turned toward the door and saw him there, wearing—of all things—a striped apron that the kids had bought him for Father’s
Day last year and a real chef’s toque he’d found in Quebec but never had the guts to wear. Then she heard her ten-year-old
behind him, heard him say, “Get the camera, Mom! Dad’s wearing the hat. Take a picture!” All this in a half second, no time
to pull away from the window, no time to yank down the blouse.

Her husband had enough sense to close the door between him and their son, and, through the thick oak, instruct the child to
go back downstairs. It’s not clear whether Casey had seen his mother splayed across the window like one of those decals meant
to deter birds from smashing into glass.