"Fidelity is a personality trait"

In an excerpt from Ayelet Waldman's new novel, sparks fly between heroine Emilia Greenleaf and her older, married lover.

By Ayelet Waldman

Read more: Fiction, Books, Romance, Sex, Books Features, Excerpts, Ayelet Waldman

Jan. 24, 2006 | Jack was the first married man I ever dated. I believe that women who date married men are cruel and irresponsible, and that they betray their sisters. Worse, I believe that they are fools. If they think that the married men whom they are seducing will be faithful to them, then they are deluding themselves. A man who cheats on one wife will surely cheat on another. Fidelity is a personality trait; it is not case specific. It is a matter of character, not of circumstance.

The commencement of my relationship with Jack was the most typical of stories. I was a young associate at the law firm where he is a partner. He was my boss. We first kissed on a business trip, outside the door of my hotel room, on the third floor of the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, California. The first time we made love was, as I've said before, in his office. I was thirty years old when we first began seeing each other; he was struggling to come to terms with his impending fortieth birthday. I am Jack's red Porsche.

It's all very trite and seedy, sordid and humiliating, except that I love him. I love him so much that while I know other people feel this kind of love, I cannot imagine that it is possible that they continue with their daily lives without stopping strangers on the street and declaring the magnificence of their lovers. I love him so much that I am in a state of constant terror that something will happen to him -- I want to wrap him in cotton batting and put him in my pocket where I know he will be safe. I only feel totally secure with him before my eyes, in no danger of dying in a plane crash, or getting hit by a taxicab, or having a bowling ball fall from the roof of a building to crush his skull. I love him so much that I want to swallow him, to start with his curled pinkie toes and work my way up to the whorls of his small and high-set ears.

I never knew that it was possible to feel this way. I thought I was in love before. There was an Israeli who worked for Moshe's Moving whom I was convinced I ought to marry. There was a guy in my orientation group in law school whom I probably would have married but for his conviction that marrying a white woman would ruin his chances of being elected to public office (he and his mocha-colored wife just moved to Washington, D.C., representatives of the Nineteenth Congressional District of New York). There were others, so many that nowadays, when sluttiness has come back into fashion, I am a veritable trendsetter. But I never before felt anything remotely akin to what I have felt for Jack from the moment I first saw him. I loved him for two years before he noticed me, and for another year before he allowed himself to touch me.

I saw Jack on my very first day at Friedman, Taft, Mayberry and Stein. I was being led down the hall by the recruitment coordinator, on my way to the office I was to share with another first-year associate, a languid, heavy-lidded young graduate of Yale who gave the impression of not caring very much about his work at the firm, who took long lunches and left early, but who would become the youngest person ever to make partner, after structuring a series of telecommunications acquisition deals that left opposing counsel reeling at his unexpected avarice and mendacity. I followed the recruitment coordinator, staring at her heels, which bulged over the back of her mules. Her shoes were too small, and she snapped them against her feet when she walked. I was doing my best to seem bright-eyed and eager, not to appear ungrateful for my job with its six-figure income. I did not want to let on just how depressed this place made me, the gracious wood-paneled lobby, the grim-faced cheer of the receptionists, the long hallways, a crossword puzzle of square offices just barely larger than a cubicle, all with the doors propped open to better permit the sleek-suited attorneys to exhibit their industry to their falsely benevolent taskmasters.

I had formulated no clear plan about my future when I started law school, and even as the three years drew to a close my ambitions grew no less muddled. To this day I am not sure why I became an attorney, other than because my father is one, although that might as soon have given me reason to avoid the law as drawn me to it. It is not that my father has ever expressed dissatisfaction with his career. On the contrary, he is absolutely content with his professional life. He practices real estate law in New Jersey, near the town where I grew up, in a firm with offices right off Route 17. My father was once the president of the New Jersey Bar Association. It is not any discontentment on his part that might have repelled me, but rather the fact that when I was a child the only thing guaranteed to lay my insomniac brain to rest was a discussion with my father about one of his deals. Further motivation for choosing another career is the fact that my sister, Allison, is an attorney in the appellate division of Legal Aid in Manhattan. They say she will soon be appointed to the judiciary. They, meaning Allison and my father.

I did not go to law school immediately after graduating from college, as did both Allison and my father. After a few years of travel and the sort of vaguely artistic jobs that college graduates with little ambition and less talent find when they first move to New York City, I took the LSAT. I took it on a lark, I suppose, or perhaps because I was sick of living in an apartment where I could turn on the coffeemaker in the kitchen without rising from the pullout sofa in the living room where I slept. To be honest, I don't really remember why I took the LSAT. But I did very well -- better than Allison -- and after that law school seemed inevitable. I started out with the vague purpose of doing public interest law, but criminal law was the only thing that interested me in the slightest and I was afraid of following in the aggressively competent footsteps of my older sister. In the fall of my third year at law school, when I was interviewing for jobs, I decided that if my work was doomed to be monotonous, it might as well be lucrative. Thus I found myself at Friedman Taft, following the swishing behind of the recruiting coordinator in the ill-fitting shoes.

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