That night, the affair begins. When I arrive at the Married Man’s apartment in central Manhattan, his eyes are already ablaze from several bong hits. He leads me into his study, overflowing with Emmys. One of the globes has come off, and he rolls it around in his hands.
“That’s the problem with these things—they break,” he says.
Then he tosses it to me to catch.
“Nice move,” I say.
Then he hands me his bong.
I haven’t been drinking or drugging for a few months now, but I know I’m about to do something wrong—really wrong. I need some plausible deniability as to why I did it, right? Alcohol and drugs are so great for that. Without a moment’s hesitation, I lift the bong to my lips—and inhale deeply, feeling the wash of simpleton fluidity. Such a relief not to think.
Just like that, my weak-ass attempt at sobriety is blown. I cough, and he hands me a beer to wash it down.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” he says.
I nod through my coughing fit. Yes. It’s good.
He keeps checking. “Are you high yet?” he asks. “Want some more?”
“Yes,” I finally say. “I’m high.”
He comes over to the couch where I am sitting, looks at me with sickness and excitement in his eyes, and kisses me.
“I was afraid that might happen,” he says. He starts taking off my clothes and says, “Let’s go to the bedroom.”
He is so hungry, so out of control. He presses his face into mine, asking, “Did you think about me all day? Did you feel it the instant we met? I want to fuck you all the time. Say it. Say you’ll fuck me all the time.”
That’s when it hits me: Oh my God. This is an ego fuck. I am fucking his ego.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”
Afterward, we smoke cigarettes on his balcony.
“Holy shit,” he says. “Now I’m thinking about what I’ve done. I just did a horrible thing. You are a temptress.”
Not really. Just a fellow self-sabotaging depressive, but whatever.
The next time I see the Married Man I meet him at a Thai place near the Post for dinner, and he dryly brings up the newest cheating scandal dominating the headlines.
“Can you believe this Tiger Woods thing?” he says with an angry straight face. “What kind of a scumbag cheats on his wife?”
I laugh, hate myself, feel aroused, and hate myself some more.
Any moral high ground I ever held over the Other Women who fooled around with my ex-husband is wiped out. Everything I’ve done—everything I’m doing right in this moment—is unjustifiable, unredeemable. It provides such a surprising sense of relief, too. It feels like freedom. No burdens. No moral questions. Say yes to every bad idea and accept that you are a bad person. You can’t get lower than that, right?
But eventually my conscience does catch up. I ask the Married Man if we can just be friends. No, he tells me. He’s not interested in that.
This makes me angry in a very specific way. Why do I have to lose out on this guy’s friendship when I try to do the right thing? Fuck it. I’ll just make things even worse then.
So instead of shutting it down, I bring my three-way companion Bianca into the mix.
“Want to get a hotel with me and my friend?” I text him one evening after one of our most recent trysts at the St. Marks Hotel. His reply is instantaneous. When and where?
I’m riding high now on just shrugging off any kind of consequences or responsibility. Because, I mean, society is so fucked-up and a guy who I thought was the perfect husband is cheating and the gun control problem and 9/11, so why bother, right? Everyone is terrible and we’re all going to die. When you make everything into this big awful incredibly gallows humor joke, you can pretty much justify anything.
“Let’s go shopping,” I suggest to Bianca. We stroll into American Apparel, and the young gay clerk keeps bringing us boring outfits until we finally tell him what’s up.
The clerk smiles. “Three-way with a married guy? I know just what you’re looking for.”
I buy a sheer body stocking and Bianca gets a barely-covering-her-ass blue mesh dress. Now fully costumed, we meet the Married Man at the Standard in the East Village.
“I told my wife I was at Avatar,” he says.
As I kiss and undress Bianca, I ask in a nauseating infantilized voice, “How do you like the movie?”
We all get stoned, and it is fun for about a minute. But when he begins fucking Bianca, it’s like I have disappeared completely. Of course that happens. What the hell did I think would happen? She’s fresh meat. So after a few minutes, I just bolt completely.
A few weeks later, Bianca comes to see me perform at Jon Friedman’s Rejection Show at the Bell House in Brooklyn, and she comes up to me at the bar, glowing and flush with the scent of sex.
“Dude,” I say. “Did you just come from seeing him?”
Bianca beams and says, “We have a new place. The Liberty Inn!”
I snatch my phone and send the Married Man a text with just the name of the hotel and a question mark. He doesn’t write back, which is unusual.
It is Valentine’s Day. His wife found the phone. His wife read the text.
I have just completely devastated this man’s marriage.
Neither Bianca nor I ever see him again.
Of all the shitty things I’ve done, I think hurting his family is perhaps the worst of all. But I also very much believe that it is the hiding of our secrets that create our sickness. There’s no excuse for what I did. There’s no excuse for what he did either.
It wasn’t all for naught, though. Because I am positive that after that disaster, the Married Man never cheated on his wife again. Most men never do—when they realize just how close they have come to losing everything that really matters.
FORTUNATELY FOR MY career at
