“I want you to know everything about me,” he said as we stood before the great glass revolving door that would churn me back into my office.
“Like what?” Thanks to group, I already knew his dad was a prescription pill addict who pressured Reed into an MBA program even though he wanted to be an architect. I’d heard the story about the track coach who got him drunk and molested him at an out-of-town meet during middle school. I’d been privy to the sessions where he described who he was when he drank every day, and of course that blow job that brought him to group. And the other extramarital shenanigans that fissured his marriage. I knew things. Knowledge was power that felt like love.
“Everything. How I open a bottle of water. How I hold the steering wheel or swim laps in the pool. Stuff I can’t show you in group or on the street.” He leaned over and whispered in my ear: “I want you to know what I look like when I tell you that I love you.”
“I did something yesterday,” I announced in Monday-morning group, where it was easier to disclose because Reed wasn’t in that group. For weeks, I’d come right up to the line of committing a sin with Reed. I rationalized each near transgression as harmless because nothing overtly sexual happened. Grazing his palm at an AA meeting wasn’t an affair. Neither was meeting him for lunch in a dark bar hidden under the El tracks or talking to him late at night after his family had gone to bed. We hadn’t even kissed. I lied to myself that I was blameless, though deep down I suspected what I was doing with Reed was like secretly eating a dozen apples but professing to have recovered from an eating disorder.
“What happened?” Lorne said. He’d predicted for weeks that my “friendship” with Reed might get too friendly. His wife, Renee, had been in group with Reed years earlier, and they’d come close to having an affair, which should have given me pause. It didn’t.
“We were talking on the phone yesterday—and things got—out of hand.”
“What does that mean?” Patrice’s brow furrowed with motherly concern. Grandma Maggie clucked as if she knew what was coming.
“He called from the grocery store.” On the weekends, Reed and I patched together a series of guerrilla phone calls whenever he was able to sneak away from his family. I was glued to my phone at all times. “He said things—he was in the frozen foods aisle—”
“Jesus, we don’t care about frozen peas!” Lorne sniped.
“Fine. We had phone sex.”
“While he was buying food for his wife and kids,” Patrice mentioned helpfully.
“He did this with Renee, you know,” Lorne said. “Did he tell you how special you are? That he loved you?”
I told myself the same things every woman in my position tells herself: I was different. But a braided knot in my stomach—one strand for Reed’s wife and each of the girls—tightened. I pressed my lips together and looked at Dr. Rosen, who prompted me to say more, so I described how I’d touched myself on the floor of my closet while Reed told me to imagine him inside me. He’d told me that he loved me, that he’d do anything for me. When I’d heard the cashier ask if he wanted paper or plastic, I tried to hang up, but he wanted me to stay on the line until he got into his car.
“Why the closet?” Max always with the relevant questions.
When the conversation with Reed had turned racy, I’d been standing in my closet looking for a sweater. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor, fingers between my legs, phone cradled to my ear, staring up at the hems of my pants and skirts.
Dr. Rosen spoke up. “Where better to hide sexuality than the closet? It’s an obvious choice.” Unable to meet his eyes, I stared at the outline of Dr. Rosen’s chin. He asked what I was feeling. There was only one answer: Shame. Shame. Shame. All the throbbing excitement turned to liquid shame, sloshing through my body.
“I’m a fucking cliché. I should be better than this. I’m moving backward.” A married recovering alcoholic with teenage children was a trapdoor in the space I’d previously labeled “the bottom.” There was no way Dr. Rosen could convince me that moving from single-but-not-in-love-with-me Alex to married Reed was progress in the right direction. Dr. Rosen insisted I was moving forward. “I want my own husband and my own children, not someone else’s! I want more than phone sex on my ballet flats.”
“What if this is exactly what you need to do to get where you want to go?”
“You can’t mean that.”
“When was the last time you let yourself be adored by a man who wanted to fuck you?”
“The Intern—”
Dr. Rosen shook his head.
“You should be warning me, raising a red fucking flag right under my nose.” It would never happen. Dr. Rosen was die-hard about letting us find our way without judging us. If I, as a so-called sexual anorexic, needed to have an affair with a married man to finally hit bottom with unavailable men, then so be it. To me, Reed was a category-six hurricane about to make landfall, and I wanted Dr. Rosen to pick me up and carry me to higher ground. But that wasn’t what Dr. Rosen did. He was a witness, not the National Guard.
Patrice balked at Dr. Rosen’s laissez-faire approach. “Maybe you shouldn’t talk to him outside of group, Christie.”
I nodded, knowing I should heed her advice, but positive I would stay the course, following the immortal words of Martin Luther: Be a sinner and sin boldly—though Luther wasn’t referring to getting off in the closet to the murmurs of a married group mate.
“How is this going to get me where I want to
