I Am Curious (Thirty)

January 14

Marcie Hillman thinks I should have an affair!

She came over this afternoon for the pause in the day’s occupation she calls the housewife’s hour, before her kids were due home from school. I made real coffee in honor of the occasion. The nice thing about instant coffee is that there is no way to screw it up. Not so with this afternoon’s pot. You would think that after seven years of marriage I would know how to make a simple thing like a pot of coffee. You would think that, wouldn’t you?

We sat in the kitchen and pretended the coffee was all right. And, like fighters warily circling one another in the opening round, we played Who’s Depressed? (That’s the first time I’ve named our game, but not the first time I’ve seen it as such. If there were a way to package it as a board game for two or more players, a way to introduce dice and spinners, I think it would outsell Scrabble.) We fence around, Marcie and I, alternately bubbly and sulking, until through some hard-to-follow process we mutually determine who will be patient and who will be therapist. The roles float back and forth from day to day and week to week. Her hangups are at least well defined, and I guess pretty standard. She keeps going on and off diets and forever weighs I guess twenty-five pounds more than she should. And she is periodically incapable of keeping her house as clean as she wants it, and never capable of keeping it as clean as Edgar wants it, Edgar being her husband. She is, for all of that, a tall and pretty blond with a pretty if ample body. She is also a year and a half older than I am, which is to say that she is thirty, has in fact been thirty for a half a year, and it hasn’t seemed to destroy her.

“You,” she said, “are in a bad way.”

“I suppose.”

“What’s the matter? The periodic distress of the female ilk?”

“Ilk? My periodic ilk isn’t due for a week.”

“And maybe you won’t have it.”

“Oh, I’ll have it.”

“You could be pregnant right now, kiddo. And then you’ll glow with motherhood, and all the doubts and fears—”

“Oh, sure. Anyway, I’m not pregnant.”

“I don’t like to keep harping at it, but this one particular doctor is supposed to be fantastic. Every woman who goes to his office comes home pregnant.”

“From his office?”

“I didn’t say that exactly right.”

“It sounded as if he screwed them himself.”

“Well, whatever works, doll. American pragmatism in action. Better things for better living.”

“Uh-huh. Who wants to be knocked up, anyway?”

“I thought you did.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe I’m getting a little old for that sort of thing.”

So we tossed the age pillow around for a little while, and other things, and then Marcie cocked her head — I think that’s the word for it, set her head at an angle and swung her eyes at me — and told me I ought to have an affair.

“You know what?” she said. “You ought to have an affair.”

“Just what I need.”

“You think I’m kidding, don’t you?”

“Well, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Oh, for Christ’s—”

“For your own sake, kiddo. Not J.C.’s. You’re letting yourself go stale. Your whole marriage — do you mind home truths?”

“Go ahead.”

“Right where the angels fear to tread. All right. I get the impression that you and what’s-his-name are running out of each other. That it’s all turning sour.”

“That could be an exaggeration.”

“Is it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. But the thing is that it’s more than your marriage. It’s you. Do you know that it shows in your face?”

“What does?”

“The fact that you’re bored all the time. That you’re all drawn out, strained.”

“I know. I can’t stand to look in mirrors.”

“Well, they ought to pass a law against mirrors. That’s something else again.”

“But I find myself looking into them all the time.”

“Because you’ve forgotten who you are.”

“Oh, come on—”

“A little trite, I grant you—”

“More than a little. Pure soap opera.”

“—but no less true for a’ that. Jan? Have you ever?”

“Ever what?”

“Had an affair?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You...?”

She smiled at a happy memory.

“You’re not having one now?”

“Be serious. The way I look?”

We sidestepped into the Oh, you don’t look so bad/Oh, I’m so damn fat and what I wouldn’t give for your figure routine. But I was so taken with all of this that I almost forgot my lines. And she wouldn’t say anything much about her affair, just that it had happened a couple of years ago, lasted a couple of months, and left her very happy about the whole thing.

“Was it with someone I know?”

“Now don’t ask, Jan.”

“That means it was. Did Edgar know the man?”

“Cut it out.”

“Well, did Edgar ever find out about it?”

“No.”

“What if he had?”

“Do you really think he would have minded all that much?” I must have stared incredulously, because she reacted to my expression. “Let’s face it, honey. Edgar plays around.”

“I didn’t know that.” This is not exactly true.

“Oh, of course. He’s like a little boy, for God’s sake. I think all men are. I’m positive he started fooling around before we were married two years.”

“Well, who does he—”

“Girls at the office, tramps he picks up. There was a time, in my younger days, when I made scenes and threatened to leave. I laugh to think of it. I mean, where would I go?”

“But—”

“But what it amounts to is that something inside him makes him want that variety, and I can understand it most of the time, except when I start thinking that he wouldn’t do it if I took off thirty pounds or got the ironing done or compensated for one or another of my many faults. But actually I don’t think that would make any difference at all. I think he’s simply the way he is. You know, he even makes passes at my friends. Has he ever made a play for you?”

“No.” This wasn’t exactly true, either. I can remember a couple of boozy kisses at a backyard barbecue, a tentative Grope for the Boobies while collecting the coats at another party. The bit at the barbecue had been merely annoying, but the other pass had come at a time when I felt myself slightly less attractive than Miss Hippopotamus, and while I might not welcome the grab, I welcomed the reassurance in the knowledge that Edgar Hillman thought I was still worth grabbing, an opinion that Howard Kurland had not at the moment appeared to share.

“You know,” she said, a little later, “if you think Howard takes his marital vows so seriously, you’re only kidding yourself.”

“Are you trying to tell me something?”

“Nothing specific, no.”

“Do you know something that I don’t know?”

“Just that he’s a man.”

“And all men run around? I’m not positive I believe that. I’ve heard it often enough, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

“Maybe not. But things haven’t been going too well lately, have they?”

“Things have been going badly on and off for probably six out of the last seven years. Our marriage is like the country’s foreign policy. We somehow muddle through.”

“The country’s foreign policy before Vietnam, you mean. Now we muddle, but not through.”

“Fair enough. I don’t see—”

“Okay.” She pointed a finger at me. “Not all men run around. Some men have perfect marriages. Other men are profoundly unattractive, and other men lack the opportunity for an affair. Farmers who never get off the farm, for instance. But if a man’s marriage is not the ranking love affair since Heloise and what’s-his-name, and if he’s got a certain amount of poise and looks and intelligence, and if he’s got room to operate—”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if, like most men, he tends to think with his penis—”

“You are describing Howard.”

There was more, but that will do. My hand hurts. He called around dinner to say he was catching a late train. I had trouble not laughing until I put the phone down, and then for no particular reason I started crying instead. Real tears. My goodness, I hadn’t cried in, oh, perhaps a day and a half.

The funny thing is that I have to admit I don’t care if he’s fucking Elizabeth Taylor, as far as that goes. I really don’t care, and I suppose that was part of Marcie’s point.

I don’t know.

What do I want with an affair?