Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,33

to divorce from day one. She knows there must be unorthodox marriages that work, arrangements, tacit or no, where one or both parties are permitted to take lovers. The trick, she suspects, is discretion, no flaunting, no sloppily covered tracks. Don’t ask and I won’t tell—this has to be how it’s done.

Nonetheless, the fact that she is considering any of this, she who has only slept with four men in her life, and never a man who had another girlfriend, let alone a wife, is both humbling and a little shocking. When Jill and Celestine call to tell her about their affairs or one-night stands, she advises them to have fun but not to get too serious. What she used to say was not to get involved at all, not to sleep with anyone who had some other woman at home or on speed-dial, because her friends weren’t at all likely to get what they wanted. How many times had they seen it before? The pathetic single girl in tears when the man she witlessly has fallen in love with won’t leave his wife for her? It’s a scenario from countless movies and every single soap opera. Infidelity, along with alcoholism and drug abuse, is ubiquitous, the most prevalent open secret of most Western societies, and it seems almost always to end with something broken.

But Anna’s father, Jill and Celestine have reminded her, is the sort of man who really could have almost any woman he wants, and he left his wife for the other woman, didn’t he? “True,” Anna has conceded, “But look what happened. A second divorce and an ex-wife, who, up until a couple of years ago, still called and yelled at him when she was drunk.”

“Is one o’clock good for you?” Dr. Glass asks her now. “Or is noon better?”

“Either would work. I think I’m off all day.”

Before she leaves, he says, “If you don’t want to have lunch with me, please don’t think that you have to. I only thought that it might be nice. I could invite your classmates too if you’d like me to.”

She tries to keep her face from falling. “Whatever you’d like,” she says. “It’s really up to you.”

“Okay,” he says, his smile as boyish as any she has seen before. “Then it’ll just be you and me. We’ll have fun, I promise.”

She wishes that the memory of her mother’s unhappiness during her prolonged and bitter divorce were enough to keep her from seeing Dr. Glass again, but it isn’t. After a mostly restless night when she resorts to taking two of the Ambien in her medicine cabinet and still can’t sleep for stretches of more than an hour and a half, she calls Jill and tells her what she thinks she is about to do. “Why can’t I stop myself, knowing what my mother went through?” she asks.

“You’re a human being, Anna, not a saint,” says Jill. “It was only a matter of time anyway. How could you not be boning one of the doctors you work with? You’re gorgeous, and they’re all old goats who must be drooling every time you walk by.”

“Dr. Glass isn’t an old goat,” says Anna, wishing she had called Celestine instead.

“No, but he has a dick, doesn’t he?”

“You’re so crass. He’s not like that.”

“How do you know? If you gave them even the slightest encouragement, you’d have so many guys chasing after you that you’d need a bodyguard. I’m sure Dr. Glass is thinking about you when he yanks it in the shower every morning.”

“Stop it,” cries Anna, but the image of Dr. Glass masturbating is now in her head and she can’t send it back. “Tell me that I shouldn’t go out with him because he’s married and has two kids.”

“He has to answer to them. You don’t. Do whatever you want. Let him worry about his family.”

“That’s a convenient way to look at it.”

“You knew I’d tell you to go out with him. Why else did you call me? Did you already call Celestine and ask her what she thinks?”

“No.”

“She’d say the same thing. We’re both whores.” Her sudden burst of laughter is loud and self-mocking.

“No, you’re not,” says Anna.

“Yes, we are. You know it too. You don’t have to lie. I’m over it.”

“Do you think I’m a whore?”

“No,” Jill says quietly. “I think you’re just being honest with yourself. You’re attracted to him. He’s attracted to you. You’re single, and clearly he’s not getting everything he needs at home. You can’t