topic/infidelity

Hansen stayed three weeks, and after he left, I experienced a modified version of my prior despair. I missed him bitterly, but with each day the bitterness abated and another set of possibilities began to assert itself, like shifting my weight from one foot to the other. A week after he left, I had dinner with a young playboy, dark-haired and light-skinned like the Carravagian boys Hansen and I had observed so recently. Again, as with Henri, the desire that I felt for this man was like a blanket tossed over my head. We went back to his house, a house in the middle of Paris with tall shuttered windows, and I spent the night without making love all the way, but the next morning I relented, and we began an affair. I felt exactly two opposite ways: gripped by the feverish eroticism of my new circumstances, and devoted to Hansen in a way that made the other feeling outrageous, inconceivable. In moments, I clutched at the notion of some larger “me” that could contain and justify my contradictory behavior, but more often I simply felt like the scene of two irreconcilable visions, two different people, one unerringly loyal and faithful, the other treacherous and greedy. My affair with Henri had pushed something open in me, and now I felt ravenous, in constant danger of going hungry. Hansen alone would never be enough.

[...] Almost every Sunday she took the cheap slow proletarian combo of SEPTA and New Jersey Transit to New York. She put up with Ed Sterling's paranoid one-way telephone communications and his last-minute postponements and his chronic distraction and his jaw- taxing performance anxieties and her own shame at being taken to cheap ethnic restaurants in Woodside and Elmhurst and Jackson Heights so as not to be seen by anyone Sterling knew (because, as he told her often— running both hands through his mink-thick hair—he knew everybody in Manhattan). While her lover teetered closer to utter freakout and inability to see her anymore, Denise ate Uruguayan T-bones, Sino-Colombian tamales, thumbnail crayfish in red Thai curry, and alder-smoked Russian eels. Beauty or excellence, as typified for her by memorable food, could redeem almost any humiliation. But she never stopped feeling guilty about the bike. Her insistence that she'd chained it to the usual post.

“Do you want to be with him instead of Harris?”

“No.” That was still easy and true. “He’s not a rock like that. I love him as my lover. I just want to dance with him, I don’t want to raise a child together.”

“So maybe it’s okay.”

“And fuck him. And kiss him. And lie in bed in his arms all day.”

“If you were a French man this would all be perfectly acceptable,” Jordi said.

She was a really good friend.

I am telling myself that I did what I was told. Claire told me to stay. Jane wanted me —she pulled me towards her. Why am I being so weak? Why am I blaming the victim? I ask myself, did you ever think you should stop yourself or someone else but in the moment you couldn’t or didn’t? Now I understand the meaning of — it just happened. Or — it was an accident.

Isobel, softening, said she couldn’t imagine how bad Lydia must be feeling. Christine could imagine it. She knew Lydia better than Alex ever would or could, she thought; Lydia would always be performing for him. — She tells herself it was fated, it was bound to happen. And also that passion is always selfish and amoral, but can’t be resisted, only submitted to. She thinks what a selfish person she is, but thinks it luxuriantly.

“That guy has been writing you. It sort of hurts my feelings.” He paused, figuring out what to say. “People like you, you know, Claire,” he said. “They love you.”

“I know,” I said. Even though I didn’t really believe him.

“It’s okay to have secrets,” he said. “Just be careful.”

I cried a little, in a pro forma sort of way, wondering as the tears leaked out: Did he have secrets? We had been gone from each other so much, traveling alone. I knew it was dangerous, but I also intuited it was the only way for us to be married right now. We were each giving the other a long lead. I was so mired in my own despair it was hard for me to see that Bruce was undergoing something or other as well. We were sort of trundling along, in our separate orbs, next to each other. I didn’t know what to do about it, except hope we were headed in the same general direction. I often had an obscure feeling that I wanted to figure out a different way to be married; it had never before occurred to me that Bruce and I were in the midst of inventing it.

Barbara is the name of the waitress at the Arkade. She’s tall, and taller when she puts her hair up. Two coffees and two glasses of Rotkäppchen, please, Barbara. A celebration. It’s their third 11th day, their trimensual anniversary, and if Katharina had a wish, then she would wish that fate never ran out of elevens. Nine years, three years. How long will she and Hans be good for? Is what they have nothing but a so-called affair? Will he be sitting with someone else in ten years’ time, showing off a snapshot of her, Katharina, and saying: that was Katharina, she was my lover? How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past? So why did he show her the photos? Of course he’s been with other women, he’s been around that much longer. Even she’s had three or four others, plus Gernot. What makes her so jealous is the secrecy around the other women, the trouble Hans must have gone to to keep each relationship going: rubbing the lipstick off a wineglass after a meeting in his apartment, or telling Ingrid, we were working late in the office, using her hairdresser’s appointment for a phone call or taking advantage of a moment at night when the wife’s gone to bed to whisper into the telephone: O darling, O beautiful, O sweetheart. The way he does now, with me. Little Ludwig was revolted by it, she recalls. And isn’t he right to be? And now she’s a part of this tissue of deceit. And even thinks of these little treacheries of Hans’ as a distinction. Not long ago, when Hans went to the cinema with Ludwig, she sat three rows behind them, just to have some proximity to the man she loves. In the general crush when everyone filed out, Hans brushed against her hand.