The woman, my lover, was my friend, and so was her husband.
They had some kind of open arrangement whereby they could do whatever they wanted as
long as they told each other everything. Still, our assignations seemed pretty illicit. We'd
sneak off, take precautions, meet in places nobody ever went. It was more exciting for us that way.
It was also more exciting for them, because, to my increasing alarm, she really did tell her husband
everything. It was their ritual, a far more sacred thing than anything we had.
What fascinated and bothered me about the whole thing, aside from what fascinated and bothered me about the woman herself,
was the transparency of her double
Play Marimba Improvisation by Hai-Ting Liao
life, the pose of secrecy. We'd meet in a dark bar, drive through side streets to my house,
or to a riverbank. We skulked around like doomed lovers, when we were really just confused, angry
people with permission to fuck.
I guess it was more fun to feign doom.
What didn't fascinate me so much but really started to bother me was the idea of the debriefings. I imagined, or tried not to imagine, their conversations, the pressing for details about what we'd done or, worse, how I'd done. I'd see them both at some party, a sudden couple again, drink with them and laugh with them and feel as though my skin had been peeled back. Finally I broke it off with the woman. I loved her in my way, loved her mind, her moods, her body, her face, but I couldn't take it.
The acerbic American writer H. L. Mencken said,
“Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
” Maybe that's the allure of the transgression, the sense that demotic vistas have opened up. Monogamy is totalitarian.
The marriage, the relationship, is the Dear Leader. Are adulterers dissidents?
Or are they just desensitized to what's good for them?
Long-time lovers pretend they are strangers to reignite their passion. When we have that lust in our hearts,
foolishly, courageously, what are we lusting after? New life? More life? More feeling? What is it to create a fantasy
of secrecy and danger when neither really exists? Maybe it's just a game, or an evasion from facing certain truths about
oneself, but it's also, one assumes, a source of genuine pleasure, anticipatory, sensory. And putting one's faith in
such pleasure — is that running from one's truth, or running straight at it?
The acerbic American writer H. L. Mencken said, “Adultery is the application of democracy to love.”
What this couple had constructed was a delicate thing. A little sick, maybe, but beautiful and delicate.
It couldn't last, but I should have been more respectful of it. A few weeks after I broke it off the husband came knocking on my
door. It was raining hard and he was drenched
and wild-eyed and for a moment I thought jealousy had finally seized him; that he was
going to do something — strike me, smash my place up. He sat me down and gripped my forearms, cursed me for ending the affair.
“She was happy, you bastard,” he said. “Who are you to ruin that?”
I'm still not sure.
