z

Her theory was that we could go to a mosque and be married; I was leaving that part of the country, Michigan, soon, and after I’d gone, the marriage would be naturally dissolved. Her therapist had told her she needed to have an affair, or so she said. So here she was, working a loophole in her religion, and though I understood her desire to cheat on her husband, a monster as she described him, less so as I begin to intuit, I did not really want to accept why she thought I would.

My wife was in our apartment, several months pregnant, asleep. I’d met z with a friend, M, at a club. M, the tall, not very attractive Australian with lots of money; after my wife and I divorced, he would forsake our friendship to try to seduce her. Of course, she would reject him. That intimacy of friendship one mistakes for a different kind of affection. I’ve never been brave enough to be so blind.

In any case, I meant for him to have z, and I tried to arrange it. This was probably an impulse to have the vicarious experience. This time in my life when I was most settled on being settled. They went out once or twice. She had twins, little boys; her husband, Lebanese, as she was, worked all the time, she said. He hated her. She hated him. She wanted to be out in the world, out of the marriage, but it was complicated.

Sometimes, she would come to our apartment and spend a night or two. There was a mattress I’d put on the living room floor. My wife, the anti-insomniac, asleep by nine, z and I watching television. They were friends, in the way that women sometimes relate like friends without seeming to be really connected.

Will you hold me? she asked.

And afterwards, I told myself and my wife I didn’t know where it would go. I didn’t imagine what could happen. The little kisses on my neck that I could allow to go on for so long because they were so light they felt almost not like kisses at all.

But then it became impossible to pretend I didn’t know.

Come outside, I told her. We stood in the woods, on the path on which I walked our dogs, z and I, and she held me again. She kissed my mouth and told me we had to fuck. I put my hand down the front of her pants, into her panties, I felt the hair, the wet, little else. A thin girl with a neck so tiny it disturbed me to touch, tall and with slightly bulged eyes, fine cheek bones, a pretty mouth.

I drew my hand away. Later, I’d tell myself it went there without conscious effort. That I didn’t know what I was doing. What she was doing.

She knelt on the woodchips and unzipped my pants. It was spring, not overly warm, a mosquito landed on my neck, I could feel it dipping into me, and I wanted not to slap it.

She took out my x, just the tip of it. She looked up at me and she said, This is all we can do for now.

I said nothing and she took me, just a little of me, in her mouth. After a moment, I tried to lift her. I said, You’re degrading yourself, though that is not what I meant.

It was me degrading me.

She didn’t understand my half refusal. Even as I carried her things to her car, loaded her up, told her she must go, she talked about the marriage at the mosque, the way that God would acknowledge us as holy so we could fuck, the way it would fade away and leave us to the rest of our lives.

I told my wife. I confessed it not the way I do here, but like a person who had been overwhelmed, who had gotten in over his head.

z called the next day and my wife told her that she felt betrayed. z said it as my fault, that I’d been looking at her since I met her, that I’d related to her sexually, that even if I hadn’t asked her explicitly, she could see it in my all the time, that throbbing question. My wife hung up.

I wanted to think as my wife did, that z was wrong, that she had projected her desire on to me, but the fact is, I knew then as I know now that I do it, without meaning to, or at least barely meaning to, that many of my interactions with women, are consciously and unconsciously, craftily and instinctually, guided by the desire to seduce.