Adultery Read Free

productive question like “What’s happening to me?” I let my thoughts spiral out of control. For days now—although not that many, thank God—I’ve been wondering if I should go to a psychiatrist and seek help. What stops me isn’t my work or my husband, but my children. They couldn’t understand what I’m feeling at all.
    Everything grows more intense. I think about a marriage, my marriage, in which jealousy plays no part. But we women have a sixth sense. Perhaps my husband has already met someone else and I’m unconsciously responding to that. And yet I have absolutely no reason to suspect him.
    Isn’t this absurd? Can it be that of all the men in the world, I have married the only one who is absolutely perfect? He doesn’t drink or go out at night, and he never spends a day alone with his friends. The family is his entire life.
    It would be a dream if it weren’t a nightmare. Because I have to reciprocate.
    Then I realize that words like “optimism” and “hope,” which appear in all those self-help books that claim they’ll make us more confident and better able to cope with life, are just that: words. The wise people who pronounce them are perhaps looking for some meaning in their own life and using us as guinea pigs to see how we’ll react to the stimulus.
    The fact is, I’m tired of having such a happy, perfect life. And that can only be a sign of mental illness.
    That’s what I fall asleep thinking. Perhaps I really do have a serious problem.

I HAVE lunch with a friend.
    She suggests meeting at a Japanese restaurant I’ve never heard of, which is odd, because I adore Japanese food. She assures me that it’s an excellent place, although quite some way from where I work.
    It takes ages to get there. I have to take two buses and ask someone the way to the gallery, home to this supposedly “excellent” restaurant. I think the place is hideous—the décor, the paper tablecloths, the lack of any view. She’s right, though. It’s one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten in Geneva.
    “I always used to eat in the same restaurant, which was okay, but nothing special,” she says. “Then a friend of mine who works at the Japanese consulate suggested this one. I thought it was pretty ghastly at first, as you probably did, too. But it’s the owners themselves who run the restaurant, and that makes all the difference.”
    It occurs to me that I always go to the same restaurants and order the same dishes. I don’t even take any risks in this.
    My friend is on antidepressants. That’s the last thing I want to talk about, though, because I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just a step away from sliding into depression and I don’t want to accept that.
    And precisely because it’s the last thing I want to talk about, it’s the very first subject I bring up.
    I ask how she’s feeling.
    “Much better,” she says, “although the medication can take a while to work. Once it kicks in, though, you regain your interest in life; things get back their color and flavor.”
    In other words, suffering has become yet another sourceof income for the pharmaceutical industry. Feeling sad? Take a pill and problem solved.
    I ask, very gingerly, if she would be interested in collaborating on a major article on depression for the newspaper.
    “There’s no point. Nowadays people share their feelings on the Internet.”
    What do they discuss?
    “The side effects of the different medications. No one’s interested in other people’s symptoms, because symptoms are infectious, and you’d suddenly start feeling things you didn’t feel before.”
    Is that all?
    “No, there are meditation exercises, too, but I don’t think they’re much use. I only started to get better once I accepted that I had a problem.”
    But doesn’t it help to know you’re not alone? Isn’t talking about depression’s effects good for other people, too?
    “No, not at all. If you’ve just emerged from hell, you don’t want to