"Fidelity is a personality trait"

I felt a gut-wrenching stab of guilt. I felt like I had pursued Jack, tracked him, shot him, and heaved him over my shoulder, with no thought at all for his wife and child. But that's not true. I thought about them. I thought about them all the time. I felt guilty and miserable, and I hated myself for wanting so wildly and urgently to take him away from them, not just because I knew it was a bad thing to pursue a married man but because I knew precisely how Carolyn and William felt. I knew what it meant to have the man around whom you have built your life betray you, discard you, and find a younger, more appetizing object of his desire.

When my sister Lucy informed me of my father's many infidelities, she was revealing nothing I did not already know. In fact, there are secrets about my father that would bring my sister to her knees with horror if she knew them. I was the one who held my mother's hair back from her face while she vomited her despair into the pale blue toilet of the master bathroom in the house where I grew up. I sat in the waiting room of my mother's gynecologist -- the same doctor who had, ten years earlier, given me a prescription for Zovirax, along with a lecture about sexual responsibility -- while my mother lay on his examining table and tried to explain, without crying, why a fifty-three-year-old woman who had only slept with one man in her entire life needed an HIV test. Only I -- not my sisters, not my parents' friends, not my grandmother, not, I presume, my father's law partners -- know that my father did not leave my mother. She threw him out after discovering that he had been spending as much as $50,000 a year supporting a Russian stripper. No one knows but me, and my father has no idea that I know. I have kept my knowledge a secret from him, and revealed his secret to no one, not even Jack, to whom I have told everything else. My father's secret has been safe with me despite what it has cost me. Every time I see my husband and my father together, I feel soiled, as if my father's filth has been rubbed off on me by my complicit silence. I don't know why I haven't told Jack. I don't know if it's because I am afraid he will be disgusted with me and with my father, or if I am more afraid that he will not be, that the behavior that I find so horrifying will strike my beloved as normal.

I worry that this is something men do. Maybe there is a vast secret underworld about which the wives and daughters know nothing. Maybe the men are all there, in the clip joints of New Jersey, watching as some girl barely out of her teens, a faint blush of acne staining her buttocks pale pink, spreads wide her spindly thighs clad in nothing but a poorly laundered polyester G-string. Maybe all men sit in dark rooms, fingers itching to explore the plump bodies of girls younger than their daughters. Maybe it's perfectly normal to slip hundred-dollar bills into the fists of fat pimps with gold chains digging into the flesh of their necks and then check into third-rate hotel rooms for an hour or two, paying extra to leave the condom in its wrapper, paying even more to do things the wives and daughters could never even imagine.

Or maybe my father is just a fucking psycho. I vote for that. It helps me to keep from hating him, thinking he's crazy. It helps me to have some kind of relationship with him, after he left my mother wretched and alone in a five-bedroom, mock-Tudor house, crying into a wine spritzer, asking me if I thought he would have been faithful if she had not gained so much weight over the years. It helps me to love my husband to think that only men suffering from my father's mental illness -- sexual compulsion, sexual obsession, surely there is some heading in the DSM-IV under which to file my father -- would engage in this kind of behavior.

So, yes, I've seen betrayal and its cost. When I stood, bent over Jack's credenza, his erection pushing against my ass, even before I saw my self-loathing reflected in Marilyn's eyes, some part of me felt miserable and sorry for what I was doing to Carolyn and William. Mostly, though, I was just so happy, so filled with joy at the palpable evidence of Jack's fervor, that I pushed away the idea of the devastation I wrought on his wife and child. I was the atom bomb of desire, and they were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could not spare time for mercy. I had a war to win.

Copyright © 2006 by Ayelet Waldman. From the book "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits," by Ayelet Waldman to be published by Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc. Used with permission.

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