The Affair

by Debra Kent

  It took all my willpower to stop him. It was all happening so quickly. Knowing that Diana was sitting in the bathroom, stark naked, possibly watching us—I should have been freaked out, but I felt intoxicated. For a fleeting moment I wondered what it would be like to have Diana in bed with us. I thought, I could do this. What guy wouldn’t want to have two women in bed? And I could give Diana what she wanted: a piece of me.

  I was still having that weird out-of-body feeling. Even while I tasted Eddie’s tongue in my mouth, part of me seemed to float around the room observing—the dead horsefly squashed against the mirror, the stray puzzle piece under the bed. And then I thought of Petey. He loved puzzles. I thought about the bad dream he’d had the night before, something about this boy in his class cutting up all his Pokémon cards with scissors. I’d chuckled as I smoothed his forehead. “That’s the worst that should ever happen to you,” I whispered as he drifted back to sleep. I kissed his face.

  Now Eddie was kissing mine. I couldn’t go through with it. “Eddie. Stop.” I mumbled the words into his neck. I finally pushed him off me.

  “Please.” I whispered. “We’re not alone.” I cocked my eyes toward the bathroom.

  “Huh?” Eddie looked bewildered.

  “Remember Diana?” I mouthed.

  Eddie nodded, wide-eyed. He pulled himself onto his elbows. His face was flushed. You’re kidding, right?”

  “Diana!” I yelled “Get out here! Now!“

  No response at first. I knew there was no window from which to escape. Either she’d slit her wrists (unlikely, given her Montana-sized ego) or she’d fallen asleep (also unlikely, given her avid interest in my sex life). After what felt like ten minutes but was probably more like four seconds, Diana appeared, fully clothed.

  “Hey, don’t let me stop you. I was just leaving.” She reached for the faux fur coat hanging on the bar near the door. “You kids just go about your business. I’ll be out of your way in a minute.”

  “What the hell is this all about?” Eddie looked angry. I realized that the prospect of a three-way probably would have been more repellent than appealing to him. He detested Diana. “What is this, some kind of sick joke?” Eddie shot me a dark glare. He thought I’d set him up!

  “Don’t look at me that way,” I told him. “I had nothing to do with this.” I implored Diana to explain herself. She hoisted herself up onto the dresser.

  “Okay. It’s like this.” She took a deep breath. “You know I’m in AA, right?” Oh no, I thought, here we go with this again. What could her twelve-step program possibly have to do with this?

  “I’m still sober, believe it or not.” She gestured toward the Merlot. “That was for you two. Not me.”

  Eddie reached for the bottle and took a swig. “Not bad,” he said, grinning. Good old Eddie. He wasn’t angry. He was amused.

  “Anyway, part of my recovery involves making amends. And I thought one way to make amends would be to get you together, you know, give you the opportunity to have a little fun, rekindle the old flame, whatever.”

  “You made amends to me already, Diana.” This twelve-step stuff was getting tiresome. “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “Oh, baby, I do.” Her smile faded. She was truly earnest. “See, I still feel terribly guilty for trying to break you and Eddie up. Your little dalliance drove me crazy. I made you think I was looking out for Roger, but that wasn’t it at all. It was more complicated than that. And …” Her voice softened. “… more pathetic. I had a crush on you. And I thought maybe you might like me too.”

  I glanced at Eddie. His eyes crinkled. “Oh, this is sweet!”

  Diana tossed a small stack of wrapped plastic drinking cups at him. “Oh, shut up! It’s not funny! I’m pouring my heart out here!”

  My head was spinning. Nothing made sense. “If all you wanted to do was make amends, why were you naked when I got here?”

  Eddie perked up. “She was naked?”

  Okay. Maybe I was wrong about his interest in a three-way.

  “Well? Why were you naked?” I demanded.

  Diana shrugged sheepishly. “A girl can dream, can’t she?” I thought I could get you warmed up for Eddie.

  I pulled on my coat. This was too bizarre. I was standing in a motel room with two people who wanted to get me in bed. At the very least, it was an ego boost. But it was still friggin’ weird. “Okay. Fine. But I’m married.”

  Diana sighed. “Barely.”

  “What do you mean, ‘barely’?” I asked.

  “I mean, your husband is a dog.” Another big sigh. “Roger’s a dirty dog.”

  “Look, I know all about Alyssa, okay?”

  “Alyssa?” Diana snorted. “Old news!” Her face filled with pity. “Baby”—she shook her head slowly—“you don’t know the half of it.”

  Eddie reached out for my hand and squeezed. I knew he meant to offer support, but he must have felt at least a little jubilation. Here was the opening he was waiting for.

  “Okay,” I told Diana. “You’ve got my attention. Start talking.”

  Diana pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her bag, shook one out, and lit up. She waved toward the bed. “Maybe you’d better sit down for this,” she suggested. “And take off your coat. We’re going to be here a while.” I chose one of the chairs near the window. Eddie stretched out on the bed, hands behind his head. I took a deep breath and tried to look neutral. Even though Diana thought she was doing me a favor now, I had yet to eliminate the possibility that she might take some pleasure in my anguish. She took a deep drag and began.

  “Remember Lola Jacobson?” Of course I remembered her. When Roger and I were engaged, I rented the upstairs of Lola’s house on a quiet street in West Liberty. Lola was a sculptor, fortyish, married, no kids. She had jet black hair and straight bangs, long legs, and strong arms. Her husband was a swami, of all things, the charismatic leader of an ashram on the fringes of the state park, about six miles outside of town. His name was Swami Muktananda but we always called him Mike. She told me they had tantric sex. I had to look it up in the library.

  I knew Lola enjoyed talking to Roger. Lots of women seemed to. Unlike most guys, Roger was at ease on the emotional plane. Women found it refreshing. He had a way of drawing them out, getting them to talk about the kinds of intimate topics they’d normally reserve for female friends. Just last month, for instance, when I was about to run next door to ask my neighbor for olive oil, Roger advised against it. “She’s just had a D & C, you know.” Actually, I didn’t know that. But how did he? Apparently this woman had confided to Roger that she’d been having irregular periods. I couldn’t believe she had told him that.

  Now I can believe it.

  After we’d been engaged for about six months, Roger moved his things into my apartment. He’d write while I was in class. He spent a lot of time alone there. At least I used to think he was alone.

  “Did you know he used to pose for her?” Diana asked. No, I said, I hadn’t known. I was beginning to feel sick. Then I remembered the Sunday morning that Roger and I joined her and Mike on the sun porch for herbal tea and scones. Lola had put one of her nude figures—an extremely well endowed figure—right in the middle of the rattan table.

  I joked that the man looked a little like Roger, the same high brow and clefted chin. “But there’s a big difference between you and this guy, isn’t there?” I said, giggling. No one else laughed. Still, I suspected nothing. I knew I’d embarrassed him. I assumed that Lola, a fellow sensitive artist type, was feeling his pain.

  It turns out Lola was feeling a lot more than Roger’s pain. “He told me all about that time on the porch, how you embarrassed him with some comment about his dick.” Eddie put his hand up to his mouth, suppressing a laugh. “He also told me Lola was playing with him under the table. And I don’t mean footsy.”

  “What else?” I asked Diana masochistically. I had to know. Diana took another drag on the cigarette and stared at me. “Everything else. With and without the swa
mi.”

  “What, you’re telling me Roger went both ways?”

  “No, God no. I mean, sometimes the swami watched, and sometimes Roger watched.”

  I felt a hard lump rise in my throat. I used to like Lola and Mike. I thought they were nice people. A little weird, maybe, but nice. “So, how long did it last?” I asked Diana.

  “It started a couple of weeks after he moved in with you. As far as I know, it lasted until you guys moved into your place on Heath Street.”

  “In other words,” I said, “it lasted until we got married.”

  “Not exactly.” Diana walked to the bathroom and tossed the cigarette butt into the toilet. I heard a quiet sizzle as it hit the water. Eddie looked at me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I’m fine,” I lied. I wanted to grab the bottle of Merlot and bash myself in the head. I’d been such an imbecile. I thought bitterly of our little apartment on Heath, how I’d decorated it with frilly curtains and cheap prints from the Art Institute. Roger helped me stain a hope chest. It held our grandmothers’ table linens and silver. We kept it at the foot of the bed. Everything was so new and full of promise. And I was the world’s biggest sucker.

  “Lola and Roger kept it up for a while,” Diana continued. “Three, four months after you guys were married.” Diana watched me for a reaction. I refused to cry in front of her. “They only stopped when Lola and the swami moved to Sedona, except for that time, uh …”

  “Except for the time he went out to Sedona, right?” Roger insisted he had to go out there to “get the feel of the place” for a new play. He never wrote anything even remotely related to Sedona. I’d heard enough. I was anxious to leave. I knew I’d have to change the locks. I knew I’d have to call a lawyer. I’d have to find a job. And I’d have to tell Petey. I stood up. “Thank you, Diana. My husband was a dog. You’ve made your point.”

  “No, sweet love, not was a dog. Roger still is a dog. We’re not talking past tense, baby.” Diana hopped off the dresser and put her hands on my shoulders. “You’re not getting it, are you? I haven’t even scraped the surface here.”

  “Really, Diana. I don’t need to hear this.”

  Now it was Eddie’s turn to talk. “Yeah, honey, you do. It’ll help you later, you know, when you start duking it out with the lawyers. You’ll need all the ammunition you can get.” He was right, of course.

  “Fine.” I reached into my bag and hunted for scrap paper. I pulled out a long cash register receipt and flipped it over. It would have to do. “Okay. Keep talking.”

  I grabbed the wine and filled my glass halfway. I battled a visceral impulse to soothe (or maybe destroy?) myself with alcohol. I’d wanted to remain clearheaded, but I also wanted to numb out. I didn’t want to feel the excruciating feelings, not just the anger but also the embarrassment. I remembered, bitterly, the time I’d driven Lola to the hospital when she had diverticulitis and thought her intestines were going to rupture. I baked her cookies. I walked Berkeley, her Pekingese. She was my landlady, but I’d also come to care about her. I’d been such a fool!

  After Lola Jackson, Diana (now the archivist of my husband’s infidelities) explained that Roger took a hiatus from infidelity—two years, give or take a few months. I remember those times as the best years of our marriage. Roger was fully present, physically and emotionally. That was before we had a TV in our bed-room. When I talked, he actually listened. There was a sense of our building a life together, not just in the material sense of buying and furnishing a home, but also in the way we’d shared the same values and goals. We talked about starting a family. We grew a small but productive vegetable garden. We took a cooking class together. And we joined the governor’s reelection campaign, stuffing envelopes, knocking on doors … and then Roger grew remote, distracted.

  “Then there was Jacqueline Leland. Or was it Lehman?” Diana asked rhetorically.

  “Leland,” I said, staring at my hands. “Jacqueline Leland.” Jacqueline had been a local strategist on the governor’s campaign. She was smart, wiry, blond, single. I once found them in the hallway giggling quietly, Jackie with her back against the wall and Roger leaning inches from her face. I’d accused Roger of flirting with her, and he’d protested vehemently.

  “She’s not even my type,” he’d insisted. “She’s too bony. And she has no chin!”

  I looked up at Diana. “So—what about Jacqueline Leland?”

  Diana reached for another cigarette, but Eddie stopped her. The smoke aggravates his allergies. She sighed, put the pack away, and continued.

  “He took Jacqueline to his parents’ cabin on the lake. The fire was her fault. Her curling iron, something like that.”

  Oh God. That was the year his parents’ cabin, a sweet little place on a magnificent lake in Door County, burned to the ground. Roger had said the furnace had exploded. His parents decided not to rebuild and wound up selling the lot. I was so disappointed. I’d hoped it would stay in the family. I used to imagine bringing our kids, and eventually our grandkids, there. One weekend during the campaign he drove up to get the cabin ready for winter. At least that’s what he told me. He encouraged me to stay behind and help with a telephone fund-raiser. Now that I think of it, Jacqueline had called me to ask if I’d direct the effort, and I’d been too flattered to turn her down. She said I was a “gifted communicator.”

  “They’d been together maybe a half dozen times,” Diana continued. “Mostly at night, mostly on the conference table.” I winced. “Roger finally took her to his parents’ cabin after she started complaining about back problems. It ended after the cabin burned down. Jacqueline knew it would scandalize the governor if it came out, so she dropped ol’ Rog like a hot potato. But he recovered just fine, with the help of a cute little thing named Dara.”

  Dara Rosario was Roger’s first intern. He’d advertised at the university for a writing major. He offered an unpaid internship—essentially a gofer’s job—in exchange for writing advice. He said he picked her because he pitied her. She came from poverty, the only one of nine children with any scholarly ambition. Dara was studious and quiet. But I remember noticing how her wardrobe seemed to change as the months wore on. The dumpy flannel shirts and baggy jeans gave way to short skirts and skimpy tops. And suddenly there was lipstick. She’d come to the house once a week, presumably to help him with filing and to clean his office. I once found her perched on his desk while he typed. Her legs were open wide enough for him to glimpse her underwear, if he’d been so inclined.

  “Roger bragged about changing Dara’s mind about virginity,” Diana said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “What I mean is, little Dara had strong views about preserving her virginity for marriage. Your husband convinced her that sex was a good thing, a healthy thing. He gave her a good dose of feminist consciousness-raising. Told her the idea of virginity was just another way of oppressing women.” Diana grabbed her cigarettes and lit up, shooting a defiant glare at Eddie.

  “Baby, you have no idea how he relished the idea of popping that girl’s cherry. I never heard the end of it!”

  My resolve to stay stoic had vanished. I lurched toward the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. I rinsed my mouth with water and staggered back to the chair. Eddie was standing now. He held me for a long time while Diana smoked and watched us.

  “I’m almost done,” she said, softly. “Sit down and keep writing.” I’d already filled up the back of the grocery receipt. Eddie found an old invoice in his jacket pocket. Wearily, I uncapped the pen and poised it above the paper. “Go ahead,” I said.

  For the next hour Diana recounted tales of stolen kisses and fondling, cyber sex, phone sex, and oral sex. And intercourse. There were two actresses in Basic Black, the computer repairwoman, a camp counselor, a three-night fling at a writers’ retreat, and, of course, Alyssa. “I think that covers everybody,” Diana said. “Wait. One more. There was this really crazy chick, a total sex freak. Met her at a gas station. She was pumping gas and flashing her b
ooty. I think they did it in the men’s room.” Diana stubbed out her cigarette and chuckled. “She actually gave him her business card. Claire Something. CPA.”

  I felt the blood crash behind my eyeballs, my stomach clench like a fist. I started to laugh, and then I was sobbing. “I’m sorry, love,” Diana murmured. “I’m really sorry.”

  It was a miracle I hadn’t contracted herpes or chlamydia. Or HIV. I closed my eyes and tried to feel gratitude. I desperately needed to find one thing to be happy about. I couldn’t be happy about the imminent dissolution of my marriage. I was terrified. But the prospect of living with Roger was even scarier. He had led a double life for years. He was a stranger to me.

  It was 5 P.M. when Diana finished recounting the list of Roger’s sexual conquests, and it was starting to snow. I looked through the stiff curtains, out at the dreary sky and parking lot, and wondered whether I had the stamina to drive home. I thought about my father. If he knew what I’d just discovered today, he’d probably dust off his old hunting rifle and blow Roger’s brains out. Then I remembered that my father barely has the energy now to dress himself. My father was dying. My marriage was over. Where would I possibly find the strength to pull myself out of bed tomorrow morning?

  I stood up and put my jacket on. “Wait,” Diana said. “There’s something else I’ve got to tell you.”

  I groaned. “No, Diana. I can’t. No more. Please.”

  “But you’ve got to know this. It’s about Roger’s money. Walk out now and you’ll wind up penniless.” What more could Diana possibly know? I would soon find out, but I’ve got no energy left to write.

  ’Til next time,

  December 11

  “I know you want to go. But we’ve got to talk about money.” Diana held me by the sleeve. “Listen. Roger’s a rich boy, baby. He’s got money. And you’re entitled to it.”