in the kitchen; if anything, I wondered why he had waited so long to make another move. I tried to make it clear, from my expression, that I was ready and willing, but he seemed reluctant to touch me, and finally, out of impatience, I put my hand on the back of his head and pulled his mouth toward mine. Everything happened very quickly then; his lovemaking, on this occasion as it would be on others, seemed to be a kind of payback for the help I had just given him—payback in the sense of vengeance as well as reward, for mixed into his passion were distinct tones of both gratitude and punishment. I didn’t mind. I’d never had much of an appetite for namby-pamby sex. Then we sat together, half undressed, and he talked a little: about how irritating he found Ben’ food phobias, and about Daphne’ lack of respect for her parents, and about what he called, using the parlance of the day, Nancy’ “frigidity.” This last accusation, I would later learn, is one to which husbands often resort when they feel the need to justify, after the fact, an extramarital dalliance. At the time, though, it was totally new to me. I took it at face value, and felt as sorry for Ernest, whose needs Nancy obviously refused to satisfy, as I did for Nancy, condemned by her own coldness to miss out forever on the wild pleasures of sex.
I was always rather fond of Ernest’ office above the garage. I liked the way the nubbly red fabric felt against my back, just as I liked the portrait of Freud, gazing down on us like some benevolent saint, and the smell of typewriter ribbons and wood and paper. Indeed, we might have gone on for years like that, our affair confined to those Saturdays and that daybed, had not Nancy decided rather capriciously one Saturday to forego her weekly trip to the supermarket and make lunch instead. Perhaps she suspected something, or perhaps she was starting to feel left out, or perhaps (this seems most likely) her decision had nothing to do with us, and was made in response to some shift in her own cosmos of which we knew nothing. In any case, after that Ernest stopped asking me up to his office, and we took to meeting at my apartment, usually on Sundays. In this way Nancy contributed, albeit unknowingly, to the intensification of our affair.
I suppose at this point I am obliged to offer some detailed explanation of what I felt about my situation at that time, as for most readers the ease with which I alternated between such seemingly incompatible functions—efficient secretary, available mistress, best friend to wife—must seem peculiar. For me, though, it was not peculiar at all. It was natural. Call me immoral, but as I typed out Ernest’ correspondence outside his office each weekday, I felt no need to block from my memory the afternoons we spent making love. Nor when we made love did I feel stabs of guilt in recalling the mornings I played piano with Nancy. I moved easily among these roles. Of course I recognized the risks—among them the certainty that if Nancy ever found out about Ernest and me, I would be banished forever from Florizona Avenue, and have to quit my job—and yet I attributed those risks entirely to the narrowness of other people, and figured that so long as Ernest and I played our cards right, and no one found us out, there would be nothing to worry about. After all, he had as little wish for Nancy to discover our affair as I did. He was not one of those men who uses his mistresses to get back at his wife. He didn’t want to leave her for me, and I didn’t want to marry him. I adored them both. And so we proceeded fairly harmoniously, although I would be dishonest if I did not admit to sometimes experiencing a sense of emptiness in the aftermath of his departures, something akin to what one feels when one arrives home alone after a Thanksgiving dinner. For there was one thing that I would have liked (not that I ever could have had it), and that was to have a bed of my own at that house, if not Daphne’ then some other bed, specifically designated for me. Not a bed I would sleep in every night, and certainly not Nancy’ half of the