It always begins this way, doesn’t it? Or so that is what the prevailing adultery narratives would have us think. I tucked myself into bed and dreamily recollected the evening until I fell asleep. It was crucial-positively crucial-to get a goddamn grip. It was ridiculous, not to mention hazardous, to dwell on this attraction. I left him at the train and returned home disappointed, though I muttered to myself punishing admonishments. But in the moment, he betrayed not a trace of partiality or affection beyond the bounds of friendship. After we were married, Paul would tell me that, over the course of the evening, he had thought to himself, wryly, what a perfect date we were having. Always keen to imbue any moment with cinematic gravitas, I cast the two of us in my mind’s off-brand Nicholas Sparks flick. As we crossed a pedestrian bridge, we paused at the midpoint to look at the night. Later that evening, Paul walked me to the metro station. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play I hadn’t had a crush in years, and my affection for Nick had long lapsed into an antiseptic lull. But I was as curious about my desire as my head was muddled by it. Some obscure voice at the back of my head admonished me to wave aside these thoughts, to excuse myself to the bathroom and douse my face.
I had reassured myself that this outing was innocent-why not make friends with my new classmates? But as the night drew on and the beer eased my edges, Paul’s own form, though shadowed by the dim light, seemed to solidify before me, peripheries defined, precious matter within a nothing of space. Such was the case when, one fall evening, Paul and I grabbed a beer at a restaurant near campus. I had never found it difficult to maintain platonic male friendships while romantically committed, so I assumed the band on my finger wouldn’t bar friendship now.īut once I acknowledge my attraction to a person, I am almost irrevocably distracted, my awareness totally reoriented by piqued desire and curiosity. After collaborating on a class presentation, I was enthralled, but in a way that seemed chaste, even sisterly.
We met in a graduate seminar on nineteenth-century literature: I admired his artful, quick-witted mind and his velvety warm blue eyes. I fell in love with Paul slowly, but easily. I had only been married to my husband, Nick, since August. When I kissed Paul, it was the end of my first, frenzied semester as a doctoral student. In the rearview mirror, my affair, a one-week cataclysm that cracked open the winter of 2010, seems ludicrous and resistant to comprehension: It’s banal in its particulars, yet it was for me both shatteringly ecstatic and distressing.
0 kommentar(er)
