You climb on together, grab adjacent chrome posts, and when the bus hisses and rumbles forward, you take out a book. A minute goes by and he asks what you’re reading. It is Madame Bovary in a Doris Day biography jacket. Try to explain about binding warpage. He smiles, interested.

Return to your book. Emma is opening her window, thinking of Rouen.

“What weather,” you hear him sigh, faintly British or uppercrust Delaware.

Glance up. Say: “It is fit for neither beast nor vegetable.”

It sounds dumb. It makes no sense.

But it is how you meet.

At the movies he is tender, caressing your hand beneath the seat.

At concerts he is sweet and attentive, buying cocktails, locating the ladies’ lounge when you can’t find it.

At museums he is wise and loving, leading you slowly through the Etruscan cinerary urns with affectionate gestures and an art history minor from Columbia. He is kind; he laughs at your jokes.

After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the ste-reo you play your favorite harp and oboe music. He tells you his wife's name. It is Patricia. She is an intellectual property lawyer. He tells you he likes you a lot. You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm.

When he says, “How do you feel about that?” don’t say “Ridiculous” or

“Get the hell out of my apartment.” Prop your head up with one hand and say: “It depends. What is intellectual property law?”

He grins. “Oh, you know. Where leisure is a suit.” Give him a tight, wiry little smile.

“I just don’t want you to feel uncomfortable about this,” he says.

Say: “Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough.” Show him your bicep.

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

You walk differently. In store windows you don’t recognize yourself; you are another woman, some crazy interior display lady in glasses stumbling frantic and preoccupied through the mannequins. In public restrooms you sit dangerously flat against the toilet seat, a strange flesh sundae of despair and exhilaration, murmuring into your bluing thighs: “Hello, I’m Charlene. I’m a mistress.”

It is like having a book out from the library.

It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

He is a systems analyst—you have already exhausted this joke—but what he really wants to be, he reveals to you, is an actor.

“Well, how did you become a systems analyst?” you ask, funny you.

“The same way anyone becomes anything,” he muses. “I took courses and sent out resumes.” Pause. “Patricia helped me work up a great resume. Too great.”

“Oh.” Wonder about mistress courses, certification, resumes. Perhaps you are not really qualified.

“But I’m not good at systems work,” he says, staring through and beyond, way beyond, the cracked ceiling. “Figuring out the cost-effectiveness of two hundred people shuffling five hundred pages back and forth across a new four-and-a-half-by-three-foot desk. I’m not an organized person, like Patricia, for instance. She ’s just incredibly organized. She makes lists for everything. It ’s pretty impressive.” Say flatly, dully: “What?”

“That she makes lists.”

“That she makes lists? You like that?”

“Well, yes. You know, what she ’s going to do, what she has to buy, names of clients she has to see, et cetera.”

“Lists?” you murmur hopelessly, listlessly, your expensive beige raincoat still on. There is a long, tired silence. Lists? You stand up, brush off your coat, ask him what he would like to drink, then stump off to the kitchen without waiting for the answer.

Ask Hilda if she will go to lunch with you. Over Reuben sandwiches ask her if she ’s ever had an affair with a married man. As she attempts, mid-bite, to complete the choreography of her chomp, Russian dressing spurts out onto her hands.

“Once,” she says. “That was the last lover I had. That was over two years ago.”

Say: “Oh my god,” as if it were horrible and tragic, then try to miti-gate that rudeness by clearing your throat and saying, “Well, actually, I guess that ’s not so bad.”

“No,” she sighs good-naturedly. “His wife had Hodgkin’s disease, or so everyone thought. When they came up with the correct diagnosis, something that wasn’t nearly so awful, he went back to her. Does that make sense to you?”

“I suppose,” say doubtfully.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Hilda is still cleaning Reuben off the backs of her hands with a napkin. “At any rate, who are you involved with?”

“Someone who has a wife that makes lists. She has Listmaker’s disease.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” says Hilda. “That ’s typical.”

Whisper, “Don’t go yet,” as he glides out of your bed before sunrise and you lie there on your back cooling, naked between the sheets and smelling of musky, oniony sweat. Feel gray, like an abandoned locker room towel. Watch him as he again pulls on his pants, his sweater, his socks and shoes. Reach out and hold his thigh as he leans over and kisses you quickly, telling you not to get up, that he ’ll lock the door when he leaves. In the smoky darkness, you see him smile weakly, guiltily, and attempt a false, jaunty wave from the doorway. Turn on your side, toward the wall, so you don’t have to watch the door close. You hear it thud nonetheless, the jangle of keys and snap of the bolt lock, the footsteps loud, then fading down the staircase, the clunk of the street door, then nothing, all his sounds blending with the city, his face passing namelessly uptown in a bus or a badly heated cab, the room, the whole building you live in, shuddering at the windows as a truck roars by toward the Queensboro Bridge.

Wonder who you are.

Slip carefully out, like a shoe horn, from beneath his sleeping body—he grunts groggily—and go to the closet. Open it with a mini-mum of squeaking and stare at her clothes. A few suits. Looks like beige blouses and a lot of brown things. Turn on the closet light. Look at the shoes. They are all lined up in neat, married pairs on the closet floor. Black pumps, blue sneakers, brown moccasins, brown T-straps. They have been to an expensive college, say, in Massachusetts. Gaze into her shoes. Her feet are much larger than yours. They are like small cruise missiles.

1. Fallen in love(?) Out of control. Who is this? Who am I? And who is this wife with the skis and the nostrils and the Tylenol and does she have orgasms?

2. Reclaim yourself. Pieces have fluttered away.

3. Everything you do is a masochistic act. Why?

4. Don’t you like yourself ? Don’t you deserve better than all of this?

5. Need: something to lift you from your boots out into the sky, something to make you like little things again, to whirl around the curves of your ears and muss up your hair and call you every single day.

6. A drug.

7. A man.

8. A religion.

9. A good job. Revise and send out resumes.

10. Remember what Mrs. Kloosterman told the class in second grade: Just be glad you have legs.

“Who is he?” says your mom, later, in the kitchen after you’ve washed the dishes.

“He ’s a systems analyst.”

“What do they do?”

“Oh . . . they get married a lot. They’re usually always married.”

“Charlene, are you having an affair with a married man?”

“Ma, do you have to put it that way?”

“You are asking for big trouble,” she says, slowly, and resumes polishing silver with a vehement energy.

Wonder why she always polishes the silver after meals.

Lean against the refrigerator and play with the magnets.

Say, softly, carefully: “I know, Mother, it ’s not something you would do.”

She looks up at you, her mouth trembling, pieces of her brown-gray hair dangling in her salty eyes, pink silverware cream caking onto her hands, onto her wedding ring. She stops, puts a spoon down, looks away and then hopelessly back at you, like a very young girl, and, shaking her head, bursts into tears.

“I’m thinking of telling Patricia about us.” Be skeptical. Ask: “What will you say?”

He proceeds confidently: “I’ll go, ‘Dear, there ’s something I have to tell you.’ ”

“And she ’ll look over at you from her briefcase full of memoranda and say: ‘Hmmmmmm?’ ”

“And I’ll say, ‘Dear, I think I’m falling in love with another woman, and I know I’m having sex with her.’ ”

“And she ’ll say, ‘Oh my god, what did you say?’ ”

“And I’ll say: ‘Sex.’ ”

“And she ’ll start weeping inconsolably and then what will you do?” There is a silence, still as the moon. He shifts his legs, seems confused. “I’ll . . . tell her I was just kidding.” He squeezes your hand.

Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. Wives are like cockroaches. Also part of a great historical tradition. They will survive you after a nuclear attack—they are tough and hardy and travel in packs—but right now they’re not having any fun. And when you look in the bathroom mirror, you spot them scurrying, up out of reach behind you.

[...] At lunch regard your cream of cauliflower soup with a pinched mouth and ask what on earth he and his wife do together. Sound irritated. He shrugs and says, “Dust, eat, bicker about the shower curtain. Why do you ask?”

Say: “Gee, I don’t know. What an outrageous question, huh?”

He gives you a look of sympathy that could bring a dead cat back to life. “You’re upset because I didn’t call you.” He reaches across the table to touch your fingers. Pull your hand away. Say: “Don’t flatter yourself.” Look slightly off to one side. Put your hand over your eyes like you have a headache. Say: “God, I’m sorry.”

[...] With the glassed candle by your bed lit and burning away, doze off and on, arranged with excruciating care on top of the covers, the window lamp on in the living room, the door unlocked for him in case he arrives in a passionate flurry, forgetting his key. Six blocks from Fourteenth Street: you are risking your life for him, spread out like a ridiculous cake on the bed, waiting with the door unlocked, thinking you hear him on the stairs, but no. You should have a corsage, you think to yourself. You should have a goddamned orchid pinned to the chest of your long flowing hostess coat, then you would be appropriately absurd. Think: What has happened to me? Why am I lying like this on top of my covers with too much Jontue and mascara and jewelry, pretending casually that this is how I always go to bed, while a pervert with six new steak knives is about to sneak through my unlocked door. Remember: at Blakely Falls High, Willis Holmes would have done anything to be with you. You don’t have to put up with this: you were second runner-up at the Junior Prom.

Hilda is worried about you and wants to fix you up with a cousin of hers from Brooklyn.

Ask wearily: “What ’s his name?”

She looks at you, frowning. “Mark. He ’s a banker. And what the hell kind of attitude is that?”

Don’t lose your resolve. Fumble for your list. Sputter things out as convincingly as possible.

Say: “I suffer indignities at your hands. And agonies of duh feet. I don’t know why I joke. I hurt.”

“That is why.”

“What?”

“That is why.”

“But you don’t really care.” Wince. It sounds pitiful.

“But I do.”

For some reason this leaves you dumbfounded.

He continues: “You know my situation . . . or maybe you don’t.” Pause. “What can I do, Charlene? Stand on my goddamned head?”

Whisper: “Please. Stand on your goddamned head.”

Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

At Karma-Kola the days are peg-legged and aimless, collapsing into one another with the comic tedium of old clowns, nowhere fast.