Crush

Chapter Eighteen Whatever We Do

Eighteen

Whatever We Do

“Bleak House of Boning , The War and Peace of Dick , My Polysecure Struggle… ” Paul started joking that I should write an eight-hundred-page book about being in an open marriage. I admired his ability to overcome jealousy through levity even as I flinched at crass words like “boning” to describe something that felt so pure.

If there was a story in any of this, I felt like it was how David and I had unlocked something in each other, something that felt unstoppable. I wanted to merge with him in every way possible.

I had voices in my head asking me if I was deluding myself. I knew that the story of every affair is always about how “This is different! This love is like no other!” People explode their lives and then so often a few years later they say, “Never mind! It wasn’t different after all,” and leave that person too.

Every time I saw anything online about how someone was with one person and fell in love with another, I noticed they were crucified. “I wish the worst for you both,” a colleague had posted under a podcast about a couple who left their spouses for each other. “You’re going to fail and I’m going to laugh,” wrote another. A third: “Love and sex aren’t sacred and beautiful and you’re not a special snowflake who gets to have that. What you have is a brief infatuation. Just you wait. Any day now you’ll be back here trudging through life and loneliness like the rest of us.”

Seeing those reactions was chilling, but I didn’t think they applied to me. For one thing, as long as I wasn’t lying, I wasn’t cheating. Paul and I were figuring it out together. And I had full faith that even though it was difficult I would find a way to preserve my marriage, to keep my family from the violence of a divorce. With enough thoughtfulness and work, I could incorporate David into my life in a safe way that would benefit everyone.

Usually, Paul agreed. He said that the challenge was just to embrace the notion of “liminal relationships.” He began to describe us to his friends, with pride, as practicing “consensual nonmonogamy.” He didn’t want them to think I was having a secret affair, which would be emasculating.

“Affairs love vagueness,” he said. “They love the dark, like mold and potatoes.” He preferred the antiseptic light of Polysecure . I struggled with the labels and began to joke that what we were practicing was “grudging nonmonogamy.” And I didn’t want people to know, so I hoped it would also be “top-secret nonmonogamy.”

To show my commitment to the marriage, I took Paul out for a date night. As we settled into an outdoor table under a wooden framework decorated with fake flowers he said, “Do you feel open to hearing some things about me and other people? We’ve talked a lot about your desires but not as much about mine.”

“Sure,” I said. I was feeling strong, and I had a very full glass of red wine in front of me. The weather was crisp. A heater hummed above us.

“I have something to confess,” he said.

“Is this about the night when you were out late?” I said.

“No, nothing actually happened that night. We were just drinking a lot. It’s about something a long time ago.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“You know how I’ve always said that Sarah and I had an emotional affair?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was more than that.”

I felt my body sink as if its mass had doubled. Gravity changed the way it did at the Planetarium when you went from one scale to another and learned that on Venus you might weigh 149 pounds whereas on the moon you’d be just 27. Where was I now? Whatever part of the universe had the most gravity. A neutron star?

Now that I was being pulled to the center of the earth by the force of twenty-three trillion pounds, I had to work to blink as if opening and closing an iron gate. But I forced myself not to cry. I began to ask questions in a detached and curious way, as one might ask new friends about how they decorated their house.

“I’d sort of thought that might be true, but I didn’t really want to know,” I said. “Did you sleep with her?”

“Yes.”

While I’d always suspected it, this news mattered, the way when someone dies everything is different even if the patient had been sick for years. I took a long drink of my wine. “How many times?”

“A few.”

I wasn’t sure what I expected to hear—once, maybe.

“Over how long a period?”

“A couple of months.”

Images floated into my mind. They were devouring each other on beds, on couches, against walls. His muscular back with her thin, shapely legs wrapped around him…

“Where?”

“At her apartment.”

“What else?”

“I made out with Jacqueline one night at a bar and on the street another time.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” he said. He described a few other moments of infidelity, mostly with people I knew vaguely and who it had never occurred to me he could like.

I was quiet for a minute. For many years, in spite of my suspicions, I’d believed what he’d told me. I’d used the term “emotional affair” in speaking to others about his relationship with Sarah. I’d said it with something like smugness. When you say “affair,” you mean husbands who have sex with other women. But my husband loves me, loves our family, too much to do that, so he just wants to, but doesn’t.

Even without an acknowledged sexual component that relationship with Sarah had been rough on us. But he’d relinquished her, suffered, and our relationship had grown stronger as we raised our son together all those years.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t believe in you or myself enough to tell you before now.”

I looked around and was surprised to find that the restaurant was the same as it had been an hour earlier. Then I realized that I felt something like relief. This news was terrible in so many ways, but in at least one it was fantastic . I was in love with someone else and yet Paul was apologizing to me .

“Thank you for lying to me,” I said. “If I’d known at the time, I would have divorced you and then we wouldn’t have raised our kid together, and I’m glad we did. I forgive you.”

Then it was my turn to come clean—only I had no secrets of my own to reveal because I’d never kept any. I was glad to know the truth about his past. For one thing, I felt that his having had sex with someone else without my saying it was okay gave me cover for possibly having sex with someone else when he’d said it was fine.

He’d betrayed me and then lied about it. Whatever was happening with David, I wasn’t being reckless. David and I had not even kissed. We wanted each other, but we hadn’t decided yet if we’d do anything about it. We were trying to be extremely deliberate, not break anything. And now I knew that even if I did sleep with him, I wasn’t drawing first blood in my marriage. My sense of righteousness was a bit pathetic, but there it was.

Veronica had said what David and I had was “platonic love with erotic edges,” that Paul and I were doing the hard work of trying to make “a thoughtful exception to monogamy.” But she did warn me that if I slept with David all bets were off. She said that the volatility of the situation had brought out an aggressive energy in Paul and that staying out late at bars with women without telling me when he’d be home might be the tip of a chaos iceberg.

On the way home after our dinner, Paul asked me what was new with David. He remained eager to make the connection be about sex, not love. The contrast between how he spoke about it and how it felt was jarring.

“Is he sending you dick pix?” Paul asked.

“No!” I said, horrified that he thought that was something he or I would do.

“How do you flirt?”

“We send each other books?” I said. “Maybe sort of: ‘Check out this poem from the thirteenth century. Here’s a song from when I was a little kid.’?” I told him about Zoo .

He seemed disappointed.

In the days that followed, the revelation about his affair hit me harder than I’d realized at the time. It was like discovering injuries after an accident’s been cleared and you’ve walked away patting yourself, crowing, “No broken bones!”

Something about the long deception had me rethinking things I thought I’d known. I’d trusted my husband. He had deceived me. How much did I care about having been duped? Was I grateful about being lied to or was I furious? And why, again, was I hesitating for a second to spend time with David given this new data point?

I didn’t quite know how to explain how much chemistry David and I had, how good—deeply good—it felt to share things with each other. I thought of the Lucinda Williams song “Something About What Happens When We Talk.” It felt like we had created our own language.

I recalled someone who worked at the Museum of Modern Art talking about how the poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery discussed their work with each other. Ashbery said, “Do you think there’s too much gold in my poem?” and O’Hara said, “No, darling, I think it’s very summery .” The curator thought, “ My God, what kind of literary criticism is this anyway? ”

I imagined someone overhearing David and me and them feeling the same way: What kind of conversation is this anyway? They’re just staring at each other and occasionally quoting Emerson. I mean, Pillow Books and Choose Your Own Adventures? Can’t they just screw around like normal people?

We kept saying we weren’t sure if our relationship would be physical, but it felt as though we were playing out a game of Clue even though we’d already seen the solution in the center of the board—and it was more art-house film than family-friendly board game.

For my final Advent calendar submission, I pretended to be Abelard arguing against our kissing, though I admittedly picked all the weakest dodgeball players for that team. He replied with a long letter as Heloise arguing for our making out. His dialogue incorporated three languages and a dozen footnotes. In the end, he quoted Saint Augustine: “Give me chastity and continence—but not yet.”