How to Fall in Love with a Married Woman by M. Laurel Walsh
How to Fall in Love with a Married Woman: Steps One through Five
M. Laurel Walsh
Step 1: Vilify her husband.
This process requires that you twist any stories that she tells you about the husband. “Walter…” she begins, and his name signals to your brain to begin the ogreification that triggers your profound dislike of the man. It is important that you can imagine him with hairy, unbrushed teeth, each cheek ablaze in an acne that requires antibiotics to clear. (Walter is not his legal name. Walter is the name I call him so that I can shorten it to “Wally” and therefore shorten his (in my mind) already miniscule cock.)
Why would you need a how-to manual that outlines the way to fall in love with a married woman? Why gain expertise in an endeavor that even armchair psychiatrists recognize as unhealthy? Aren’t we supposed to avoid lusting after and desiring the wife of another man? The Ten Commandments mentioned something about this exact thing, and there is a billion dollar industry built around the how-to’s of healing potentially-satisfying-yet-not-actually-very-fun marriages like the one that my beloved Sarah has with Walter.
Sarah is not a pseudonym. I’m using her real name for several reasons. Reason one is that I like having an excuse to type her name. It is the adult male equivalent of what my high school girlfriend (now ex-wife) used to do in notebooks when we were in eleventh grade. She’d write my first name over and over in a variety of fonts: balloon print, calligraphyesque cursive, in the shape of animals, entirely in realistically-colored purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red spectrum rainbows with puffy clouds attached to the bottom of each letter. A reader may think that the writing was already on the wall there with the lover’s name doodling, but I do think I could have stayed married to Glynis if I had not met Sarah.
She’s not even the conventional beauty that my former-cheerleader, trim and athletic wife was and legally, I suppose, is. When I first met her, I thought Sarah looked manly. I remember watching her lug in boxes trudging across the main office floor. Her boss assigned Sarah into the cubicle that was most directly in my line of vision. Hair in a ponytail, ratty blue jeans, she was humming tunelessly. I’m sure Sarah thought she’d found the office abandoned on a Saturday morning. It wasn’t until her third trip that she’d even noticed me in my sprawling corner office.
In Sarah’s defense, her vision was blocked by my secretary’s cheerful and rigorously tended plants. The unhappy truth of my life at the time was that Saturday mornings in the office had become a necessity. A month earlier, I’d obtained my Vice Presidency. Since I was not the fastest reader, coming in when the office was empty gave me an opportunity to catch up on email and fully go over shit that I’d glanced at frantically before a meeting. Plus, Saturday morning my then-wife, queen of the rainbow font, Glynis, golfed, so she could care less where I was.
Sarah had scored a cubicle with a window provided by her supervisor, who was not in my department. Sarah’s appointment had been part of an HR effort toward cross-departmental relations. She was not my direct responsibility, but we would both be reporting back to people concerning one another’s work. At that point, I was hoping to be able to ignore her as much as possible. That first morning, she proved that this would be impossible.
Let me assure the reader; this is a step-by-step guide to falling in love with a married woman, and by no means an exhaustive examination of how to win her love. That part has proven impossible, although my desire to sway her has cost me my marriage. Professionally, a relationship with Sarah would be suicide. But regardless of anything, I will always have that first morning when she discovered me in my office. Sarah did this fabulously exaggerated neck craning, dropped what she was lugging, and then marched over. Her good cheer radiated. It was as though I had always known her, had always looked into her face. I told my therapist later that it was like coming home.
“Hi,” she said moving toward me, extending her hand.
Classic features, almost a line drawing, high cheekbones and a feline tilt to the outer edges of her gray-green eyes. On that day only and not one time since, Sarah wore no make-up. Her nose was decorated with a dusting of pale freckles, evidence of recent sun on chin and cheeks. Her voice was husky: a midnight whisper, heavy smoker, morning DJ, phone sex. I stood up and moved from behind my cartoonishly large desk, and shook her warm dry hand. My mouth felt numb, but I smiled.
It seemed awkward in that we were both dressed so casually. Country Federated Insurance has not discovered business casual. We are utterly 1950s in dress codes. High contact with client areas, like mine, are especially formal. Maybe it was Sarah’s jeans and old torn sweatshirt that made her so human and available, so present. I swear I felt this actual warmth on my chest when she stood in front of me. Some people talk about having their breath taken away, but I just felt compressed by some warm vice around my middle. It became steadily uncomfortable. By the time Sarah left, I almost felt physically ill, faint. Finally, she spoke.
“So, Saturday morning you’re here. I’m impressed, or is this an office-wide expectation?” She was curious, as a colleague maneuvering the new office culture, but she was also teasing me.
“Well, I’m actually catching up on some reading. In my two years in this office…” I felt very peacocky gesturing toward to the large office I’d just exited while basically pointing at the spectacular view it afforded. “I’ve never caught anyone from my department in on a Saturday morning. I normally try not to let it happen to me, but this was a tough week.” These two sentences were as close to the actual truth as anything I’d ever said in my office. My usual response would have been to blather on about early birds and worms or some such bullshit. Vice Presidents of Marketing are supposed to be innovative, but the first thing they do is get you too busy to think about being creative.
Sarah’s smile went to her eyes. I couldn’t help but smile back.
“Well, good, don’t let it happen again,” she said. She gave me a little backhanded wave and I returned to the pile of Re: Fwd: Re:s in my inbox. Something about Sarah and me in that space alone snagged my imagination; my thoughts got stuck on her like a hook trapped in the muck at the bottom of the lake that is my brain. (Going fishing and watching baseball together are the only two things I ever do with my dad. One of the worst/best moments in my long childhood spent in boats with the old man involved getting your line snagged on something. The first thought was always that the tug was a fish; the reality was that the tug is more often a weed, a submerged log, a mysterious object that if you were lucky, released when you tightened the line.) For hours after, I replayed the scene where Sarah walked away from me over and over. At one point, I remember that I looked down at my left hand and there was my wedding ring. Here was this metal ring that had been there since I was eighteen, and all I wanted to do was take that thing off and fling it across the room. That specific, heartfelt reaction made me recognize that what Sarah snagged inside me was not going to unsnag easily.
It didn’t help that my eyes were often drawn to the light that I could see streaming from her desk area every time I glanced out my office door. Through the mini-forest that my secretary Elizabeth has in the entrance to our shared space, I could perfectly see Sarah’s left arm. It brought me comfort, but I also had to see the glint of her diamond-encrusted wedding ring.
Step one was tough for me. Vilifying Walter was not easy work. After they had kids, he became a stay-at-home dad for their two children, Madison and Tyler. Pictures of the kids adorned her work space, and I got to overhear so many touching conversations that she had with Walter regarding bowel movements and art projects. If Walter and Sarah ever had a substantive argument during work hours, I did not hear about it, much less overhear it. They disagreed about punishment (Sarah is pro-spanking; Walter is anti) and music (he likes rockabilly and plays the guitar; Sarah hates country music but loves disco/the eighties). They mainly had kid-based disagreements, which fed in Sarah a sense of dissatisfaction or as she best explained it after her second glass of Pinot Noir, “Sometimes Walter bores me.”
Making Walter (or any nice man who happens to be married to the woman you wish you were married to) into the bad guy in this, or your own personal story, requires that you always imagine him as an unattractive ape with pustules and plumes of green funk/odor clouds puffing from each orifice and then all of his words seem monstrous. “Can you pick up milk on your way home…” is just evidence that the guy is an asshole who can’t plan ahead. Sarah’s deep sighs about his splurges on new technology and the latest gadgets allowed me to wonder what kind of a man could make his wife pay all the bills while he rolled around on the floor with children. Not much of man, was and is to this day my assessment of Walter, plus with the acne and hairy back, I would clearly be the better bet for Sarah.
Step 2: Reduce the married woman to an abstract level and pretend that she does not have a family or children so that in the fantasy future that you envision, you and she are basically on a marooned island. Maintain this fantasy by leaving your wife so that you have your own apartment ready in case of an apocalypse where everyone (except you and she) perishes.
In fairness, Glynis was not totally surprised when I asked her for a divorce. She had never shared a vacation with me since the third year of our marriage. My first wife got her tubes tied without consulting me and when I confronted her, she looked surprised.
“Did you want kids, Kevin? You never acted like it.”
“Well, it would have been nice to be part of the conversation. You said you had an appointment with the gyno, and I’m thinking a pap smear and you come home limping. Did you think that I wasn’t going to notice that you’d had outpatient surgery?” Glynis is a Communications Consultant and makes six figures. In disagreements, she often used what I called her “client” voice with me. When I accused her of this detached tone the first time, she said my observation about her volume and cadence was a way for me to be petulant, and about which she was correct.
“This is not about you, Kevin. If you recall, you’ve always known that I don’t want to be a mother. I’m not cut out for it. If I got pregnant on accident, I would probably abort. This is common sense here. Think of how much I travel, Plus, we’re over thirty five, do you want to have the three-headed baby?” Glynis used humor to bully other people, and often, it worked. When I didn’t look at her, Glynis’s voice raised and she did the hand-to-hip shift.
“Listen, I did not ask you to have your precious cock sliced. All I asked from you was for you to pick me up at four and then bring me home and feed me codeine.” My lack of immediate response launched her I-am-woman-hear-me-roar feminist tactics, “If you made an informed decision about your needs and your body, I would never judge you for your decision.”
I fought her logic with complete silence. If you don’t speak, they can’t get in or adjust your channel. “Jesus, Kevin, what are you ten years old? Talk to me, please.”
As often happened when I didn’t respond to her mad voice, Glynis’s tone got softer. “I’m sorry you’re hurt. I’m actually surprised that you have such strong feelings about being a dad after the way you grew up.” Glynis meant the fact that I wasn’t particularly close to either my mom or my dad, or for those twenty years that we were married, to any of my sisters. It was a foolproof way to get me to talk. I can tell you how boring, repressed and dreadful my family is, but don’t let me hear you agree. Glynis knew that I couldn’t ignore that jab.
“Hey, don’t twist this back to my fucked-up family. Not everyone gets born into a sitcom like you did, and I don’t have strong feelings about being a dad,” as I said the words, I realized that I wasn’t being authentic. “Your childhood was different than mine, not better. Just because I don’t get along with my father, does not mean that I would not have gotten along with my son.”
Despite her clenched body language, Glynis actually laughed at that comment.
“Kevin, listen to yourself, now you’re getting completely ridiculous,” and she was right. It probably was out of line to give the imaginary product of my soon-to-be ex-wife’s egg and my sperm, now rendered physically impossible, a gender. Glynis moved toward me and kissed my neck. “Relax, it is reversible. If we change our minds, they just untie the knot and we’re in the baby business.”
That is one of the drawbacks to being married for twenty years at the age of 38. We often just made decisions assuming that both of us felt the same way about things, only to discover that we didn’t share opinions about some major issues.
For example, the word “vacation” meant completely different things to us. Because she traveled so much for work, Glynis hated to fly. After a daily forty-five minute each way commute, I never wanted to drive again if that was humanly possible. Vacations became separate events in the beginning of our marriage when Glynis and I each decided to celebrate 21st birthdays with friends and not each other. In the five years before our marriage ended, both of us really looked forward to the other person leaving so that we could “get some stuff done”. Or so we said, I basically watched a lot of sports in my underwear and ate out of containers. The day before Glynis came home involved me frantically scrubbing the entire house down so she didn’t see the week’s worth of enthusiastic neglect.
Glynis didn’t drink alcohol or enjoy my company if I did. That attitude can be unpleasant on those aforementioned vacations or on Friday, for that matter. My parents were practically prohibitionists, and one of the earmarks of my adulthood is that I can now drink beer. I like beer. Glynis does not. So, it wasn’t shocking to either of us that living separate lives in separate houses was actually easier than living separate lives in the same house. Would I have come to this realization if that internal snag hadn’t happened? I don’t think I would have.
Step three: become pathetically available to your married true love’s every whim. Never be the first to have to leave the room if she’s in it and maintain steady eye contact even when it makes you want to vomit.
So, six weeks after I met Sarah, without a lot of fanfare, I left my wife, and so I became even more productive and involved at work. I started encouraging folks to go for a drink on Fridays, and these gatherings gain popularity, and sometimes Sarah came. There is no way even now that I can avoid having my face light up when she walks through the door.
Sarah is tall, 5’9” with this crazy shampoo-commercial hair that is as close to the color of honey as hair can be. It is as healthy and glossy as a seal’s pelt, and as inviting to touch. I have learned that I need to never be alone with her. So, I basically lived for Friday nights. With both of us surrounded by people, I could pretend that her wallet was not full of darling little photos of the kids clutching pumpkins or Walter in a midnight-blue sweater holding a rake.
“How’s that project going?” I always ask about work, and let Sarah switch to unsafe topics.
“Oh, fine, stupid Teresa put in the wrong invoice, so Adam jumped up both our asses. Next time, I’m not going to share the pain, at some point it becomes obvious that cross-departmental delegation is not working.” Her favorite topic in the first few months of my separation from Glynis was her agitation to get placed physically back in Finance. She felt that being out of sight was hampering her ability to get a promotion. I never encouraged this perception because if that were to happen, I could not see her drumming fingers or that bent wrist with the thin gold bracelet that draped down and actually touched the desk top slightly. Doesn’t Wally know the woman’s wrist circumference? I wanted take it in dental floss without her ever knowing what for in case Sarah ever gave me the chance to take care of her.
Her boss sometimes attended the Friday night “marketing meetings” and I made sure to buy him a Beam and Coke. He knew that I thought having Sarah (or someone from Finance) keeping an eye on us was an inspired idea. What he did not know is that if he switched to a different member of his team, I would have that person out of there in less than a month. I argued in meetings that Sarah’s presence increased both output and our ability as a group to meet strategic departmental goals. One Saturday morning, I took the time to prove it with the only thing that matters in Finance: numbers. I actually graphed the impact of her presence and shot it to him in an email.
Regularly, Sarah had to come in on Saturday because Marketing and Finance were working together to institute some monitoring software that she had recommended. It is a CRM (customer relationship monitor) which allowed us (through data mining) to focus our budget on the most profitable segments of our clientele. The implementation process went company wide. It was controversial and the sales department was up in arms. Sarah had to call for emergency meetings; due to conflicting schedules, many of them fell on the weekend. Sarah still always seemed delighted to find me in my office and without fail, made some excuse to come in at some point and flop down in my espresso-colored brown leather chair for a chat.
“Good God, Kevin. You’d think that we didn’t work for the same company as those guys. What is wrong with Sales?” Her hair always got disheveled over the course of meetings because it is fine, delicate, silken and it frequently slipped from the tight French knots she made in the back; tendrils would get caught in her lip gloss. Her fingers pushed back loose strands and I tried not to visibly tremble.
Instead, I did what I often tried to do, I sat back in my obscenely expensive and worth-every-penny chair and relaxed my whole body. She’s like a female valium, I told Katie once. I would sleep perfectly next to her. Yet when we talk, I tend to sound like her uncle, even though she’s only six months younger than me. “Hey, you knew that there would be resistance going into this thing. These guys are set up to bring in new clients, the idea that you nurture and build relationships seems girly and like it might even cost them money. You have to think about commissions.”
Sarah rolled her eyes, but she knew I was right. “Have you eaten?” she often asked and I made it a habit to starve myself all day in order to feel perfectly validated when we headed out to lunch.
Step 4: Allow her to make you into a better person, bring out the very best in you.
My love for Sarah, not to be confused with Sarah herself, has been the impetus for me to make some positive changes. For one, Glynis and I were doomed long before Sarah came along, but I was emotionally stunted enough, dead enough, to ignore how very alone I was even though I was married.
At the end of our marriage, if Glynis and I had been suddenly introduced, Glynis would have never gone for me. For one, I had let myself go (in magazine nomenclature). Glynis was/is very athletic; she’s firm to the point of bouncy. I knew that she had physical reservations about me. Suits are forgiving; boxer shorts not so much. Glynis and I still had sex regularly, but it was a form of function more than fun.
Gone were the long showers before, during and after sex, and somewhere along the line, Glynis started to prefer that we do it doggie style. I see that now as an opportunity for her to think that it was someone else banging her. I don’t blame her for disloyal thoughts. I certainly used shadows and the curve of her back to pretend that Glynis’s face was actually someone else’s. In the end, we mostly came together under the fuzzy blanket of darkness; furtive midnight no-foreplay sex is like the Big Mac of intercourse. You do not ever feel glad you finished it. You end up satiated, not satisfied.
So, I let my love for Sarah guide me back to taking care of my body. Instead of eating processed garbage, I started making soup and baking bread. And because eating stew and dealing with leftovers gets pathetic and lonely (you don’t make soup for one, you just don’t). I got in contact with my eldest sister, Katie, who lives in the Twin Cities too.
Before my divorce, she and I were about as close as I am to my folks. We have two younger sisters who live up north, near my parents, in Brainerd. Neither Katie nor I talk to any of them except at the holidays. In many ways, we’re a typical Midwestern family. In Minnesota, we pride ourselves on being nice but actually, we’ve chosen to say nothing at all and it becomes nice. Sarah is originally from a small town north of Seattle. She liked to say that Minnesota nice is actually being passive aggressive and that there is medication for it. Sarah consistently, to this day, identifies my weaknesses, teases me, and then I go off and dutifully deal with my personal flaws in an attempt to win favor in a battle I am not likely to actually ever get an opportunity to physically engage in, much less win.
Katie had one son with her ex-husband. Mark stayed with her on Monday and Wednesday and Sunday. Katie wasn’t terribly warm to me initially, but she ate the Curry Carrot soup I lugged over, and smiled at a few things I said. After eating, Mark and I tossed a football out back. He was eleven, and liked those things. I was happy to because it was exactly what my father would not have done. My dad would have glared at you as if you were insane and then would have started watching his t.v. again. A few weeks after my first soup sharing, Katie asked me to help her haul some compost and after that, we started hanging out on Sunday as a fairly regular thing. I’d be nervous to ask her whether or not, at least at first she thought that I was overstepping our stoic family detachment that Glynis had always found so peculiar.
Glynis’s name and her entire family comes from Ireland. She is the only one of her sibs to be born in the U.S., and her mom and dad have brilliant accents from their youth in Scariff, County Claire. Glynis doesn’t like beer in direct proportion to how much her family likes beer, especially her mom. Every member of my immediate family exited our wedding reception early after a parking lot scuffle between some of Glynis’s visiting relatives from Boston. Glynis was appalled at my folks leaving. The Irish are all about staying until the last song is sang. My family seemed bloodless and dreary to her.
Part of falling in love with Sarah was that it was intrinsically taboo for me. There is something about growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota that makes you apologetic for wanting things. I was an ambitious kid in a family that didn’t honor drive. My sisters wanted to not be noticed, to blend in to the scenery. Katie is so painfully shy that people have a hard time remembering if she attended an event or not. I wanted to be noticed. Football, strategic dating (I’d never go for girls who I thought were cute; I always polled the guys and found out who was universally desired. Glynis was selected by committee), careful grooming, running for class offices, seeking scholarships to any school with status that might give me a scholarship in the Cities.
I’m rooted in this place, but I knew I was not going to end up at the Ford plant like Dad. His life was a map of job uncertainty. My dad is terrified to want things; in my opinion, that’s made his life a small place. My heartfelt desire was to have Sarah in my life and my bed, and that made me want to repair the strained relationships in my immediate family that I had happily ignored while basking in the hilarity and joviality of my first in-laws.
Step 4: Make yourself constantly physically available.
Remembering that this is a guide to falling deeply and profoundly in love with someone who already has someone, and this guide will not help you get laid by that individual. Not that I have not gotten laid at all. The other part of wanting to be a person’s partner (when that person already has a partner) is that you are free to have sex with other women. In my case it was a woman whom I knew from high school, and vaguely and irregularly ran into when mutual friends came through town. Her name is Melissa, and we (in the early months of my separation) attended things together frequently as our schedules (mine severely falsely inflated to allow me to be available if I could force a potential interaction with Sarah) allowed. I really enjoyed Melissa’s company, and she mine.
We made decent tennis doubles, which we discovered at a club lunch where we were invited to play. No surprise for Melissa because she played for our high school team, but I impressed myself. A newfound love of tofu and a ban on anything that had passed through oil on its way to my lips (including Tempura Tofu) had changed the way my body processed food. I came to crave exercise.
Melissa and I often started a date with a run. Sarah raised an eyebrow when I stopped by with Melissa one Saturday to “grab something” but really it was to show Sarah that women did want me, and give her a sort of jab regarding her security about access to me. Normally, we both would have worked away the morning in quiet companionship, but there had been a breast cancer 12-k run that morning. If seeing Melissa draped possessively across her favorite seat in my office caused her any alarm, Sarah’s face did not betray it. Her warm calico-hazel, speckled with gold, eyes were just as focused and aware as on any normal day. Melissa popped up and shook hands. She was surprised that anyone was in what had seemed truly to be an empty office.
I saved and to this day frequently play the message Sarah left on my cell that afternoon while I was in the shower at the gym. “Hey, Kevin, just wanted to call and see if we could catch up on some things. It was surprising to see you… (her voice trails off) not working. Yeah, so, give me a call, okay?” It is all in the tone, looking at the words, they don’t seem odd or really all that exceptional.
Everything changed after Sarah met Melissa. Mel and I changed too; it was like she suddenly understood why I went to the office so early on Saturday morning and was not willing to lounge for even an hour over coffee. She didn’t call me on it, but I saw her glance at Sarah’s prominent diamond ring. We were all waiting for a cloud to pass. No one had to get hurt, not Wally, not Melissa, not Sarah, or Madison and Tyler, nor me. But I felt as thought safety and goodness were the last things that mattered. I frequently pictured myself standing in the office with Sarah and Melissa, and we’re all talking as we did that morning, heads nodding, an occasional laugh, gesturing and adjusting our stances, but if you drew the scene with pen and ink, I would want to be sketched as a lunatic fiddling with the gun in a trench coat pocket. Why was the weapon fully loaded? Would it go off on accident? Would it go off on purpose? Who was I shooting and was it a form of suicide? All this wanting, all this desire, was so bleak and constant and true. It hurt and made me dangerous.
I said to Katie that next Sunday, “I’m trying now to really not involve myself with Sarah. I feel attracted toward her, still, but I think it can all be avoided. I’m not going to start anything.”
Katie didn’t say anything, she just looked down at her soapy hands and then pulled the drain plug and we listened to the sucking sound of the sink for a minute. Mark was at a friend’s house, and it was unusual for us to be alone together except the few times that we had played cribbage on a Sunday night after Mark was sleeping. Katie just looked out the window, and I felt vulnerable, like I was being judged by her, so I fought my familiar reaction which is to just quietly shut down all my emotions, except anger. I concentrated all my energy instead on not getting mad.
Finally she turned to me, and gave the smile that hides her crooked front teeth. “I don’t know, Kevin. It sounds to me like it has already begun.”
Step 5: Get her alone.
A week after the breast cancer awareness run, Sarah closed the office door behind her and sat in what I had come to think of as her chair. She looked tired, weary; her braid wasn’t the tight vision of efficiency that it normally was in the morning.
Sarah was briskly chipper in the a.m. When passing her desk, I tried to not be visibly annoyed with everyone on the planet. I could smell the citrusy clean scent of her hand lotion. She leaned her elbows on my dining-room-table sized desk and put her chin in the palms of her hands. The door closing and the posture was entirely out of character.
“They are transferring me back.”
I concentrated all my power on creating an engaging false smile. “Wow, congrats, you’ve been wanting this. That’s great news. Is it tied to a promotion?”
Sarah didn’t look at me; she put her finger out and flicked at the edge of the desk. I had a perverse image of the classic principal/naughty student porn scenario and fought it back by adjusting the already perfect Windsor knot that Melissa had tied for me that morning. For no good reason at all, I thought of what my dad would be thinking if he was sitting in my place. This shit does not happen when you work assembly down off River Road.
“Yes, I’m getting more money. Basically I’m going to be all over the place. They’re sending me out to Milwaukee, Chicago and Kansas City to facilitate implementation at our branch divisions.”
“Seriously?” If the board room succession plan was any indication, Sarah was being fast-tracked to a much more senior position.
She finally glanced up.
“It will be good for me to be back in Finance,” she said, straightening her spine and squaring her jaw.
“Oh, I agree. You were probably right that out of sight was becoming out of mind,” my tone was congenial and open. I was trying not to totally pull out of my body. I have the ability to leave the bones and muscles and vital organs and just direct all of my body’s action from a corner of the room. I’m sure it’s a form of disassociation, but it is terrifically handy when life becomes unseemly, blood soaked or when you experience emotional vulnerability. Escaping or, at least going a couple of floors down in your internal elevator can save you from hitting, yelling, or inopportune displays of affection/devotion.
“I am dreading being back in an almost all-female office. It’s been a good learning opportunity working here with all these men, and especially watching your management techniques. You’re really fair with people, did you know that?” Sarah’s words fell on my desk like accusations. It was to win her that I was able to compliment Elizabeth’s foliage, and practice a Ghandi-like countenance when projects ran late and client emails were ignored or worse, mishandled.
I nodded, and sort of waved my hand in an “aw, get out of here” gesture. I didn’t want to thank Sarah for her comments because they were not really true.
“Anyway, it’s been great working with you. It was probably talking to Bill at those happy hours that got me even considered for the position, that and all the long Saturdays…”
Both of us, okay, maybe just I, began rerunning the film of that first morning, of her lugging boxes, and then the eight months of fiddling with her papers, being able to see her reaching down to scratch her ankle, the morning when she spilled coffee on her pale cream-colored shirt and dabbed at it with a wet paper towel until it was vaguely see-through (the echoing vision of which ruined a client pitch for me because I was physically overwhelmed by an animal instinct to throw her to the ground and forcibly enter her through her hastily and lustily ripped pantyhose and then eventually, with a lot of time and nurture, becoming the stepfather of her children). Why can’t we command the eyes to tell people how we really feel? As Sarah sat in front of me telling me that what ever it was, or wasn’t, that we were doing, or avoiding doing, was over and that the temptation that I’d enjoyed/endured for the past few months was about to be removed.
Step 5 continued: The Last Saturday is the day where your fantasy reaches a fevered pitch. You re-enact the vision of watching her lug boxes but the ending changes. In this new version, both of you experience carpet burns all over your bodies. This new unfolding scene culminates in you lovingly joking (under the canopy of Elizabeth’s fake ficus tree) that office carpets were certainly not designed for high contact intercourse. A night of Neosporin and midnight pizza delivery launches you into blissful post-divorce harmony.
Instead, Sarah brought in Wally and the kids. None of them noticed that I was there, but there was a lot of laughter and both kids took a spin in her chair. When it was time to head down the corridor toward Finance, even Madison (who was going to be in Kindergarten in the fall) was carrying a bag of stuff. It was a truly family affair. Wally said something over his shoulder, and Sarah patted his ass, and they all disappeared down the corridor, headed toward an entirely different destiny.
The trick to the five steps of falling in love with a married woman is the awkward dismount that often follows your failure to get what you want and the knowledge that your loss was really meant to be, was destined. Avoid the five steps altogether, you suggest? I think this planet affords us few opportunities to throw our hearts into the collection plate. We are fools if we decide not to feel everything, every single thing.
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