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embarrassed to tell you where I called him—okay, I’ll tell you: I called him at his shrink’s. He goes to a Guatemalan shrink over in Alexandria who looks like Carmen Miranda and has a dog named Pepito. “Come home immediately,” I said. “I know about you and Thelma Rice.” Mark did not come home immediately. He came home two hours later because—are you ready for this?—THELMA RICE WAS ALSO AT THE SHRINK’S. They were having a double session! At the family rate!! I did not know this at the time. Not only did Thelma Rice and Mark see Dr. Valdez and her Chihuahua, Pepito, once a week, but so did Thelma’s husband, Jonathan Rice, the undersecretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs. Mark and Thelma saw Chiquita Banana together, and Jonathan Rice saw her alone—and that man has something to do with making peace in the Middle East!
    When Mark finally came home, I was completely prepared. I had rehearsed a speech about how I loved him and he loved me and we had to work at our marriage and we had a babyand we were about to have another—really the perfect speech for the situation except that I had misapprehended the situation. “I am in love with Thelma Rice,” he said when he arrived home. That was the situation. He then told me that although he was in love with Thelma Rice, they were not having an affair. (Apparently he thought I could handle the fact that he was in love with her but not the fact that he was having sex with her.) “That is a lie,” I said to him, “but if it’s true”—you see, there was a part of me that wanted to think it was true even though I knew it wasn’t: the man is capable of having sex with a venetian blind—“if it’s true, you might as well be having an affair with her, because it’s free.” Some time later, after going on saying all these lovey-dovey things about Thelma, and after saying he wouldn’t give her up, and after saying that I was a shrew and a bitch and a nag and a kvetch and a grouse and that I hated Washington (the last charge was undeniably true), he said that he nonetheless expected me to stay with him. At that moment, it crossed my mind that he might be crazy. I sat there on the couch with tears rolling down my face and my fat belly resting on my thighs, I screwed up my courage, and when Mark finished his sixteenth speech about how wonderful Thelma Rice was compared to me, I said to him, “You’re crazy.” It took every ounce of self-confidence I had.
    “You’re wrong,” he said.
    He’s right, I thought. I’m wrong.
    Well, we went around in circles. And then he asked me if I wanted to be alone for a while. I guess he wanted to drive over to Thelma’s to tell her he had held fast to their love. It didn’t matter. He drove off and I scooped up Sam and a suitcase full of Pampers, called a taxi, and left for the airport.

two
    O ne thing I have never understood is how to work it so that when you’re married, things keep happening to you. Things happen to you when you’re single. You meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married, and the hair grows in. I love the everydayness of marriage, I love figuring out what’s for dinner and where to hang the pictures and do we owe the Richardsons, but life does tend to slow to a crawl. The whole summer Mark was secretly seeing Thelma Rice while pretending to be at the dentist, I was cooking. That’s what I do for a living—I write cookbooks. And while I did discover a fairly revolutionary and absolutely foolproof way to make a four-minute egg, and had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don’t bump into vinaigrettes that good.) Before that, there had been a lot of time spent on swatches and couches and floorplans. It was almost as if Mark had