With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island
Subscribe and Save up to 45%
Derek was unfaithful Thursday. He told me today. It hurts. OK, they didn’t do it — just kissed. But he asked her to go to bed and she refused (because he was married). But still, it could have happened. In a sense, it did happen. Is it just a cultural constraint that makes me so bothered by it? Am I just the defective offspring of a defective culture?
I look at my kids and my husband and think of all the things we are together, and I think, isn’t it odd to be willing to risk all this so I can fuck some guy who washes dishes and whispers nasty things in my ear?
When we’d been married for a while, I expected my husband to say “I love you,” which he’d never said except on the inside of my wedding ring. Instead he told me he thought I really liked women and encouraged me to listen to my instinctive self.
We were not brought together through signs and wonders; we did not even particularly love each other. We married on impulse the night of our third date without “hearing a Voice,” and things went rapidly downhill from there.
Jane lingers in bed beneath the veil of the mosquito net and listens to schoolchildren slosh their clothing in buckets of water near her window.
Being tied up till eternity through the children, writing to each other in a centrally located spiral notebook, consulting the I Ching
Solitude seems possible; the sea and sky are wedged into the cove by two walls of volcanic rock. The horizon is broken only by an occasional sail.
The two of us are on a fact-finding expedition to Philo, California. At first, Luchita hadn’t wanted to come; she knew I was researching a magazine article, and she’s still a little peeved at certain references I made to her in a profile of Lola Falana I wrote some months back. But she knows I like her company, and that this article is important.
My God, he was a beautiful man. The way he sat on a horse. Or the way he rolled a cigarette. Charlie Freeman. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.