There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

He was forty-seven, married for twenty-five unfaithful years. He had two children—a daughter my age and a son two years older. His once ascending career as a social realist painter had stalled, and he now sold commercial serigraphs his younger self would have found appalling.

There is another omission in the text. I promised Arnold that I would not tell anyone about our kiss, but in fact I did. I told my mother as soon as I got home that night. I was two hours late. She had just gotten off the phone with Arnold’s wife to ask if there had been an end-of-the-year party. His wife had told my mother that she didn’t know, her husband hadn’t come home yet. I was furious with my mother for involving his wife. I told her that I was in love with him, that there was nothing she could say to stop me from seeing him again. She reminded me that he had a wife. I reminded her that she was seeing a married man, ten years younger than she, and (coincidentally) also named Arnold.

That scene isn’t in the memoir. It would have been a compelling scene. My mother and I shared a bed because I had sold mine in order to turn my bedroom into an art studio. My father, whose side of the bed I occupied, had moved out—been thrown out—the year before. What writer wouldn’t employ the irony of sleeping in your absent father’s bed after trying to seduce your father substitute?

I was the only sugar baby I knew who lived with a sugar daddy without sugar.

A forty-seven-year-old art teacher mailing a love letter in the guise of an educational solicitation to his teenage student is creepy—more than creepy, sinister. Yet the memoir treats the episode comically, a missive between star-crossed lovers.

(Sinister or amusing? There are three Jills weighing in: the agonized teenager crying in frustration because she can’t decipher nuance in an adult’s letter; the forty-four-year-old memoirist, entertained by her younger self’s confusion and Arnold’s predicament; and me, the one who knows how the story ends.)

When I was not learning about fellatio from Arnold, I was sleeping on my father’s side of the bed. The memoir never mentions the unresolved Oedipus complex or any other daddy issues. To mention the Oedipus complex, I believed, would have been stating the obvious, an insult to the reader who might not have read Freud but who had certainly heard of the complex.

I no longer believe in withholding something just because it is obvious. Clichés become clichés because they are true.

He is old enough to be her father.

[...] This is how the memoir describes our first vacation:

We traveled from motel to boggy motel, each a damp block or two from the gray Pacific. Most of the rooms had yellow blinds or yellow curtains, a trick to make the weary traveler believe every morning is filled with sunny skies and bright hopes. I cried mostly at dawn, shut in the bathroom, a nubby towel monogrammed with carmel holiday or jolly roger’s inn crushed against my eyes, while Arnold stood outside the locked door, on the cold linoleum, asking what was wrong. We both knew. I couldn’t bear his being married any longer.

Arnold was in psychoanalysis at the time, as were most of his comrades—lapsed communists with successful fur businesses, screenwriters who yearned to write novels, and admen who wished they were artists. These were the days before pharmacological fixes, so no one had any choice but to talk and talk and talk until the demons got bored and left on their own. Therapy, like communism, was an evangelical passion, and Arnold was no exception. Since I couldn’t afford psychoanalysis, he became my de facto therapist.

Or maybe his analyst asked him about the other sources of his anxiety besides me. His wife, of course. And his other mistress, E.

I knew about E. He had promised me that he was going to break up with her soon, but it was complicated. She was married to a friend of his. The two couples dined regularly together. The affair had started seven years ago when E took private drawing lessons with him, though he assured me, she was not nearly as talented as I. I accepted his Gordian sex life as the birthright of the male artist.

But I was curious.

“Do you still have sex with your wife?”

“I have to, Jill, or she would be suspicious.”

“What about E?”

“I’ve only made love to her once since I started seeing you.”

“Isn’t she suspicious?”

E, by the way, never made it into the memoir.

rnold told me he wished he could be with me tonight. He was stuck at a party, hiding in the coatroom. The hosts of the party were old friends of his—fellow travelers from back in the Red Scare days. The husband now owned a fur shop in Beverly Hills; the wife was a big supporter of Israel. He didn’t mention if E and her husband were in attendance, or if his own wife, who must have been wondering where her husband had gone, was nearby.

He must have been wondering where my mother was. Phone cords in those days rarely reached past twelve feet.

I began to cry, but with restraint, so as not to alarm my mother, who was listening on the far side of the love beads. But a teenage girl who has been stood up on New Year’s Eve by her steady can rarely maintain restraint.

His response to my hysterical tears was to break up with me. For my sake. He didn’t want me to spend another New Year’s Eve crying.

I cried harder.

Between sobs, I put it to him this way: Why wouldn’t he just tell E and his wife that he had fallen in love with someone else? I did not say, with another woman. I did not yet think of myself as a woman.

I might not have thought of myself as the “other woman,” but I suspect that was a choice on my part. I wasn’t ready to give up the benefits of youth. I had only begun to appreciate the shifting power of a thirty-year age gap, how the king can abruptly become the queen’s pawn. I gave him two weeks to break up with his wife and E—or else. Then I hung up on him and repeated my ultimatum to my mother. She looked both stunned and terrified.

“Or else what?” my mother asked.