My lover’s wife is sick with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and the reason he doesn’t want to come clean is that he does not want to “cause her more pain,” which is obviously not consistent with the fact that he is fucking another woman, but there it is. That is who we are—my lover and I, and of course much of the human race—capable of both compassion and cruelty. We did not invent infidelity, even though when you are in the midst of it, it feels like you did. We did not invent shadow selves or double lives or Neruda’s “dark things” loved in secret, “between the shadow and the soul.” Much of the literary canon to which we have both devoted our lives revolves around forbidden love and its consequences. “Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional,” as Nabokov said.