Everyone looked at me, waiting for my half of the confession. I admitted that I enjoyed talking to him. I didn’t mention how I shut my door and touched myself in my office after our first conversation. What words matched the sensations in my body? The constant thrumming, the woozy feeling like I’d pounded shots or snorted laughing gas. The only words I could imagine were ridiculous. I couldn’t tell them I was falling in love.
At the same time, I wasn’t a woman who stole another woman’s husband. I’d taken women’s studies classes. I’d read MacKinnon, Chodorow, and Cixous. Plus, I knew better than to believe that married Reed would leave his colonial in the suburbs. I hadn’t sat through hundreds of therapy sessions to dive into the cliché of the lonely girl who falls for the unhappily married man from her therapy group. I’d already tried dating a man who saw Dr. Rosen, and it hadn’t worked. I remembered Monica Lewinsky—the public scorn and the rescinding of her Revlon job offer when the blow-job scandal broke. Given the loose boundaries of Rosen-world, I too could end up publicly shamed, not to mention I was jeopardizing my therapeutic home base.
“What do you want?” Dr. Rosen asked me.
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know what I’m allowed to have.” I stared back at Dr. Rosen and believed he knew the answer: I wanted Reed.
Each morning my cell rattled on my bedside table. Reed on his way to work before dawn. Stock market hours. He always called my office midmorning to say hello, and then again when the market closed. At night he called on his walk from his office to the train. I could hear his shoes clicking on the sidewalk. Sometimes we talked from the moment he left his office, all through his train ride and walk to his front door when he’d put his key in the lock and whispered that he had to go. He showed me how to send PIN messages on my BlackBerry—messages that bypassed our firms’ servers and allegedly left no record. When my BlackBerry light glowed with a blinking red light, I knew it was a PIN from Reed and my body responded with a jolt.
He told me I could ask him anything, so I asked about Miranda. Maybe then she would be real to me, and I would back off. What did she smell like? (Clean) How thin was she? (Size four) What was his favorite thing about her? (Her devotion to the children) When was the last time they slept together? (Couldn’t recall) Why did he marry her? (It felt like I was supposed to) Why hadn’t he left her? (The girls) I drew a picture of her in my head: a woman my height in a plum-colored dress with silver sandals with perfect sun-kissed highlights in her mostly blond hair and a coldness that I associated with super-thin wealthy women who didn’t have to work. I imagined she had a signature lipstick shade and nibbled at her food. I dreamed her as flawless but cold; self-possessed but starving; perfectly manicured but brittle. My body had more flesh, more warmth, more vitality, more youth, more power.
I felt guilty. I was a fake feminist after all. A husband stealer. A cliché.
And yet: I’d never felt so alive.
“I have to go to my noon AA meeting. Meet me there,” Reed said one morning.
Jack was expecting me for a meeting in ten minutes. After he’d supported my German travel ban, I was loath to cause any trouble. How much would I risk for Reed?
I e-mailed Jack: Something has come up. Can we meet at 1:30?
The AA meeting was four blocks from my office, and I raced over in my heels with no coat, even though it was thirty degrees. I had no wallet, no money, no fucking sense in my head. All I had was the force of Reed’s voice inviting me to be with him and my reckless yes. Across the Chicago Loop, I bobbed and weaved between pedestrians and stepped into traffic so I could get to Reed sooner, so I could flee my gray, loveless life that turned vivid in his presence. Yes, I sprinted to an AA meeting:
Even though I wasn’t technically an alcoholic.
Even though I had to push back a meeting with the largest rainmaker in my department.
Even though Reed was a married man with well-documented fidelity issues.
I sat next to him in the back at the end of a row. He pressed his shiny black lace-up shoe against my black wedge heel. My breath hitched. I leaned back in my chair and snuck my hand into the space between his elbow and his rib cage. The throbbing in my fingertips was my own pulse, but it felt like his. The chairperson of the meeting passed around a flyer for a 12-step retreat, and when I passed it to Reed, I let my fingers rest on his palm. Skin to skin. Everything disappeared. The white-walled room packed with sober lawyers, secretaries, traders, and a massage therapist. The serenity coins. The stackable chairs. The woman in a security officer uniform eating her Chipotle burrito in the far corner. It was all gone and with it, the Loop, the El train, the traffic on Wacker.
There was only my fingertips and Reed’s palm.
And that throbbing through my body.
He walked me back to my office. I matched his long stride so that every few steps our hands would brush. Each time, we pulled our hands away quickly as if shocked. Or busted. We wore goofy smiles.
Oldest fucking story in the book. Older successful guy and his younger mistress. The end of this story would find me huddled somewhere bawling, leaving messages for Dr. Rosen, shaking my fist at my stupid-ass decisions. But this moment on corner of Wacker and Randolph with
