The Affair (9 page)

“I think I’ve got something on Diana that will shut her up once and for all. But I don’t think we should discuss it on the
phone. Meet me at Jim Dandy’s tomorrow at five.”

’Til next time,

“STAY AWAY FROM MY SON-IN-LAW!” Mrs. DeLuca’s furious warning is clanging in my head as I make my way uptown to Jim Dandy’s.
I will never forget the look of pure contempt on her face, the disgust. Nor can I forget the sight of Diana, self-satisfied
and laughing as I trembled. As comptroller, Diana has records on every employee, even the contracted service workers like
Eddie. She knew his last name—Bennedetto—and could easily have found his number in the phone book.

I feel such despair. How is it that other people manage to have these torrid and clandestine affairs while I can’t even manage
a kiss, let alone a relationship, without everyone knowing about it? Who will be next to drop in unannounced—my minister?
My sister Teresa? The gods must be conspiring against me.

Eddie was waiting outside Jim Dandy’s. He started to kiss me but I pulled away. (With my luck, my mother was shopping next
door. Can anyone blame me for being paranoid?) He led me to a booth in the back room, a place normally reserved for the restaurant’s
owners and friends. The maitre d’ greeted him warmly and bowed elegantly toward me. A young waiter made a tentative approach
but Eddie waved him away. “Give us a few minutes alone.” The waiter retreated. Eddie leaned toward me and whispered: “Diana’s
a thief.”

“Huh?”

“Listen. A buddy of mine happened to be at a party where Diana had gotten herself stewed. I mean, flat-out drunk. She decided
she wanted to take him home and was blabbering about all kinds of nonsense. The next thing he knows, Diana pulls out her wallet
and flashes
these bills. He never saw so many hundreds. So he says, ‘How’d you get so rich?’ And she says, ‘Creative accounting,’ and
starts laughing.”

“What happened next?” I asked, stunned.

“She threw up on his jacket.” Eddie howled. “Anyway, I nosed around her desk after hours on Wednesday and came across this.”
He pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and waved it at me. A deposit slip. I stared at it blankly. “So?”

“It’s a dummy account. She’s scamming the center.” A triumphant smile spread across Eddie’s face and he thumped a fist on
the deposit slip. “She’s as good as gone.” He pulled out an envelope with photocopies of records he “borrowed” from Diana’s
office.

For the next twenty minutes, Eddie reconstructed Diana’s scheme. Apparently she had applied for state and corporate grants
to cover a program in which AIDS patients get free and confidential treatment for depression. Because patients remain anonymous,
she can construct as many fictitious clients as she pleases, bill the granting agency, then pocket the cash in a dummy account.
Eddie called his brother, a tax lawyer, to test his theory. It checks out. Diana may have embezzled hundreds of thousands
of dollars or more from the Center.

“So what do we do now?” I felt thrilled and terrified.

“What do you think we do? We bust her.” Eddie slid around to my side of the booth and put his face close to mine. He clinked
his beer bottle against my water glass. “To us,” he said, his eyes locked on mine.

I whispered, “To us.”

’Til next time,

This is how my day begins. The phone rings. I pick up. Roger, in another room, picks up simultaneously. I let him answer first
while I listen.

“Hullo?” he says.

“It’s me.” It’s Alyssa.

“Yeah?”

“Uh. I think I left my diaphragm in your van.”

“You what?” Long silence. “Jesus God. What were you thinking?”

No answer. Then, a childish: “I’m sorry … Roger?”

“Yeah.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Okay. I’ll take care of it.”

“Roger? I love you.”

“Yeah.” Click.

I didn’t know whether to scream or cry. My husband was screwing this girl. I heard his racing steps down the stairs but I
beat him to the door leading from the mud room to the garage. I told him: “I think I’ll take the van today. My Jeep’s out
of gas.”

Roger looked as if he had swallowed a grenade. For once, he couldn’t seem to muster his usual smug retort. “No!” he practically
shouted, stepping into my path toward the door. “You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The brakes,” he blurted out. “I think they’re malfunctioning.”

“I know how concerned you are about my well-being, Roger, but I’ll be fine,” I told him, pulling the door open. “I’ll just
drive to the mechanic’s and get it fixed. See ya.”

He stood there helplessly while I backed out of the garage. I drove with my hands clamped to the wheel, my skull literally
buzzing. I pulled into a shopping center at an intersection and allowed myself finally to look. There it was on the passenger
seat, the ultimate emblem of my marriage’s demise: a plastic case, violet and smooth, bearing an embossed daisy on the cover.
I picked it up. It smelled of perfume and spermicide. I traced a finger along the daisy. I didn’t open it. I slipped it into
my bag.

I finally have my proof but I’m hardly victorious. I feel sick. I always suspected that Roger and Alyssa had some sort of
relationship but never believed he would actually make love to her. Yet… as I drive to the office, even in my dazed grief,
I know I am not ready to abandon my marriage. It’s odd: when I was a teenager, I believed (with the kind of unwavering righteousness
and certainty that comes with youth) that if my husband ever cheated, I’d boot him out the door.

But things aren’t so simple now. I know that I’ve been as instrumental as Roger in fouling things up. By the time I reach
the office, in an uncharacteristic moment of maturity and grace, I have resolved to salvage my marriage.

But this is how my day ends: Eddie slipped into the elevator as I was leaving for the day. I thought he wanted to talk about
Diana but I was wrong. His eyes gave my body a hot, raking gaze. “Be with me now,” he said, pressing me against the wall.
Then he did something I’d only seen in movies. He pushed the red button and the elevator abruptly ground to a stop between
floors. He put his lips on my neck. I could feel his breath, warm and moist, and I pulled his head toward mine. I was propelled
by an energy that had no conscience.
My lips met his as he slipped his hands under my blouse, then my bra. I could feel his arousal as he pushed slowly, rhythmically
against me. “Let’s get a room,” he whispers, “at the Roundtree.”

Like someone who must have one last hot fudge sundae before starting a diet in earnest, I decide that before Roger and I begin
counselling, I must have Eddie.

’Til next time,

The Roundtree Hotel was four and a half blocks from the office. We practically sprinted there, yet I felt as if I was moving
through Jell-O. The anticipation was unbearable, painful.

Could this really be happening, after all these months of fantasy and flirtation and contemplation? The animal instinct I’d
felt in the elevator had subsided, replaced by a stream of self-rationalizations: After over six sexless months, I deserve
this. I need this. Just this once. I can handle it. Roger’s doing it, why can’t I? My marriage had collapsed like the Berlin
Wall, how much worse could it get?

I remembered couples I’d seen on TV who had “open” marriages, and thought, that’s not such a bad idea. I recalled scientists
who said humans weren’t built for monogamy. I thought of a client of mine who had unselfconsciously nurtured a twelve-year
affair after her husband was stricken with multiple sclerosis.

Then I remembered my prim neighbor, a forty-year-old named Ann who admitted (after a few too many
tequilas at a Labor Day block party) that a brief fling with her dentist literally saved her life; her marriage wasn’t just
dead, it was in rigor mortis. She found herself weeping in supermarket checkout aisles. She despaired at the notion that she
might spend another forty years in this airless chamber of a marriage. It took a scant three months with the dentist to revive
her—a faster turnaround than any therapy could offer. She saw herself through her lover’s lens as a sexy, vivacious woman,
and now, from this position of strength and security, was able to resuscitate her marriage. I held fast to Ann’s story as
Eddie slid his credit card across the counter and signed for our room. When he put his hand in the small of my back to gently
guide me toward the elevator, I suddenly remembered, with astonishing lucidity, the summer of my sixth year when, after much
hestitation, I finally plunged off the diving board into a swimming pool. There is this moment when fear and reason are simply
overwhelmed by irrational desire, when one must stop thinking and
move.

And now I sit here, alone in my office, staring at the hand that holds this pen, and know I must write about the two hours
I spent with Eddie in Room 1040 at the Roundtree Hotel. How can I possibly give language to what happened between us? If it
had been a disappointment, if he didn’t know how to move me from arousal to climax, if he’d been selfish or hasty or lazy
or clumsy … I’d be relieved now. I could say, I tried it, and it is over, and I can turn my attention once more to the man
who shares my bed night after night.

But I would be lying.

The Roundtree is the only really nice hotel in town, the kind of place you send out-of-town guests if your goal is to impress.
The closets are filled with good
wooden hangers, the kind that could actually function in your closet if you chose to swipe them, and there are always two
large wicker baskets in the bathroom, one to hold a pair of soft terry cloth robes, and another for toiletries, and not just
the usual shampoo and shower cap, but peppermint foot cream, a wooden rolling back massager, and a small plastic case filled
with sixteen sewing needles already threaded in sixteen different colors.

Our suite was done up in shades of peach and creamy yellow, and there was a large arrangement of silk flowers on the narrow
table in the foyer, and I remember thinking that someone had taken great care to arrange this room but the only thing of any
value right now was the expansive bed against the wall. It really didn’t matter whether it had a sheet, let alone this lovely
bedspread with its brocade trim and its swirls of peach and creamy yellow.

And then, after Eddie had pulled me urgently toward him, and pushed me up against the wall, I knew that even the bed wouldn’t
be necessary. As Eddie ripped down my zippers and yanked up my bra, he was more beast than man, lapping me up greedily, kissing
my mouth with savage insistence. He still had his clothes on, which intensified my arousal, but when I tried to reach for
his belt buckle he pulled my hand away. “Not yet,” he whispered hotly into the nape of my neck.

I slid his pants off and we fell upon the bed, and with fingers and tongue he explored and savored each part of me. He seemed
to know intuitively how to please me, softly here, a bit harder there, quickly then slowly. His rhythms matched mine, his
mouth tasted like honey. He stared at me as he brought us both to the peak, and he sighed into my neck as he collapsed beside
me, exhausted and elated. We both dozed off—it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes—but when I opened my eyes and saw
him snuggled beside me, slaked, comfortable as a cat, I felt a terrible surge of adrenaline streak through me. What had I
done? What, really, do I know about the man whose body fit mine so perfectly only moments ago? What does he know about me?
And where do I go from here?