The First Time Read Free

numbers on scraps of paper left lying carelessly around, nameless voices lingering on the answering machine, the not-so-quiet whispers of friends, and now this, the latest, a receipt for a room at the Ritz-Carlton, dated several months ago, around the time she was suggesting the possibility of a second child, the receipt left in the pocket of a jacket he’d asked her to take to the cleaners.
    Did he have to be so blatant? Was her discovery of his indiscretions necessary to validate his experience? Were his conquests somehow less real without her, even if she had thus far refused to acknowledge them? And was acknowledging his affairs precisely what he was trying to force her to do? Because he knew that if he forced her to acknowledge his infidelities, if he forced her to actually confront him, then that would mean the end of their marriage. Was that what he wanted?
    Was that what she wanted?
    Maybe she was as tired of this charade of a marriage as her reluctant husband. “Maybe,” she said out loud, staring at her reflection in the smoky glass door of the microwave oven. She wasn’t unattractive—tall, blond, blue-eyed, the stereotype of the all-American girl—and she was only thirty-six years old, hardly old enough to be put out to pasture. Men still found her desirable. “I could have an affair,” she whispered toward her gray, tear-streaked reflection.
    Her image looked surprised, aghast, dismayed.
You tried that once. Remember?
    Mattie turned away, stared resolutely at the floor. “That was only that one time, and it was just to get even.”
    So
,
get even again
.
    Mattie shook her head, drops of water from her wet hair forming little puddles at her feet. The affair, if you could properly call a one-night stand an affair, had taken place four years ago, just before they’d moved to Evanston. It had been fast, furious, and eminently forgettable, except that she hadn’t been able to forget it, not really, although she’d be hard pressed to recall the details of the man’s face, having done her best to avoid actually looking at him, even as he was pounding his way inside her. He was a lawyer, like her husband, although with a different firm and a different area of expertise. An entertainment lawyer, she recalled his volunteering, along with the information that he was married and the father of three. She’d been hired by his firm to buy art for their walls, and he was trying to explain what the firm had in mind before he leaned in closer, told her what
he
had in mind. Instead of beingshocked, instead of being angry, as she’d been earlier in the day when she’d overheard her husband on the phone making dinner plans with his latest paramour, she’d arranged to meet him later in the week, so that on the same evening her husband was in bed with another woman, she was in bed with another man, wondering, with joyless irony, if their orgasms were simultaneous.
    She never saw the man again, although he’d called several times, ostensibly to discuss the paintings she was selecting for the firm. Ultimately he stopped calling, and the firm hired another dealer whose taste in art was “more in keeping with the sort of thing we had in mind.” She never said anything about the affair to Jake, although surely that had been the point—where was the sweetness of revenge if the injured party remained unaware of the injury? But somehow she couldn’t bring herself to tell him, not because she didn’t want to hurt him, as she’d tried to convince herself at the time, but because she was afraid that if she told him, she would be handing him the excuse he needed to leave her.
    And so she’d said nothing, and life continued as it always had. They carried on the pretense of a life together—talking pleasantly over the table at breakfast, going out for dinner with friends, making love several times a week,
more
when he was having an affair, fighting over anything and everything, except what they were really fighting