A Case of You
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.
