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Anatomy of an Affair (excerpt)

Posted on March 5, 2008
Filed Under fiction, writings | 13 Comments

She likes to start the day by shaking each teacher’s hand before relinquishing control of her only children. She feels the morning meet and greet is less an attempt to curry favor than an opportunity to give each instructor a look in the eye, to remind them of their precious charge, that they and they alone have been trusted to guide and advise her grade-schoolers in all things that happen between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. She thinks it advantageous that they have a healthy respect for her piercing gaze and her vise-like grip.

But in the last few days she’s come to realize that the hand she offers each morning has grown less commanding and assertive more limp and girlish, smelling of lilac hand lotion and seduction. She had thought she could compartmentalize it, this mounting affection for Ted O’Malley, but instead she wears it like a blush. She radiates the secret of it.

It used to be that she couldn’t imagine what a younger woman might see in a man fifteen, maybe twenty years older than herself. She has never understand the basis for that kind of attraction until now. With her own children and a decade married, she is growing familiar with the anatomy of an affair. Now, abandoned by the advantages of youth, she can see that appearance and age had little to do with it. The flush and flutter of new beginnings, the singular thrill of developing affections caused by something as simple and necessary as the right kind of attention given at the appropriate time.

She has spent the past few weeks caught in the mounting swell of attraction, suffering all the symptoms of a new and burgeoning love. The bottomless pit of desire, slowly sucking away at all vestiges of her rational self, affecting her appetite, her sleeping patterns, making her foolish and whimsical, distracted and plotting . She can almost hear it, the rushing sound of her own libido luring her down the rabbit hole.

It has been only three weeks since she’s begun working for him and just that quickly it had come to seem so natural, so separate and apart from every other thing that defines a day. She looks forward to Ted, his impatience and curt professionalism. The need to see him has taken on the urgent and ominous tone of obsession.

When she had first been hired to revive his garden, she had not considered him conventionally handsome. There were some obvious flaws (slightly narrow in the shoulders, a shortfall in the chin). But she has grown to admire the effort he expends staying fit. His muscular distinction distracting from the minor etchings around the eyes and mouth.

And despite the initial lack of physical attraction, gradually she finds herself arriving at the property early, shepherding her migrant workers through the motions of plant placement and installation in order to greet him in his perfectly tailored shirt and dress pants, impeccably pressed, off to an office where he makes the kind of money that allows for tardiness and a cavalier attitude toward making people wait.

Together they walk the perimeter of the property. He asks leading questions about plant varieties and watering schedules allowing her to shine with the knowledge she possesses. Smiling and nodding, he enjoys the way she grows red cheeked and flustered with attention.

“I’m enjoying this so much,” he says. “I can’ wait to get home each evening to see the changes, the steady progress towards completion. It’s like the Garden of Paradise is beginning to grow just outside my front window.”

She thinks, standing there with him in the planted bed of Australian tree ferns and peace lilies, He’s the matured version of my college love, my first significant sex, a total and consuming affair now lost to youth and folly. She strains for clever conversation.

“So what does Ted O’Malley do on St. Patrick’s Day,” she has remembered the luck of the Irish this morning and has decided on a green belt and jacket to mark the occasion. He is someone to dress for, someone who might notice the shade of her lipstick or the way she wears her hair.

He laughs, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder, “St. Patrick’s Day is for amateurs,” a flirtatious retort, at once dismissive and suggestive and enough to reduce her to adolescent awkwardness as she struggles against a mad tickle to call him on his way to work and continue the repartee.

She begins to play at being coquettish, pretending to be unavailable, allowing his calls to go to voice mail, saving his messages to replay over and over again, looking for intended meanings, possible suggestions in the voice mails he leaves about sod selection and installation schedules. She allows his recorded voice to remind her of dorm room sex and the smell of freshly mowed playing fields and a younger more vivacious self. She smiles with the knowledge that he too looks forward to her, stretching out his leaving in the morning; inventing reasons to call her with questions about the irrigation pump or just to say how much he likes the begonias she has planted in drifts by the front gate.

Grown reckless and feverish, it is all she can do each morning to let him go. She wants to hold on to his arm, to beg him to take her with him, where ever he is going; her day destined to go down hill after their early morning encounter, stuck with only the memory of his saying nice things to her in the garden she is busy creating at the house he shares with another woman.

Some mornings his wife walks out with him onto the driveway and he is careful to let her do all the talking. He excuses himself promptly after the day’s schedule is discussed: palm trees arriving at ten a.m., the ficus hedge along the east property line to be installed by day’s end. “Excellent, excellent. All sounds good,” he says with businesslike efficiency. And she will sting and hollow with the oddly protracted professionalism of the encounter, smarting with the way his wife has kissed him full on the lips before he departed. Sick with the way she has called him ‘Teddy’, indulgently, as if he were her little boy.

And it can’t sustain her, a few secretive glances, a simple wave of his hand in her direction as he pulled out of the drive. It isn’t enough to get her through the day and she finds a reason to check her cell phone at twenty minute intervals, anticipating his call, needing his apology for the forced distance. It comes four or five hours after she has first begun to check for it. And it is like the return of something as elemental and sustaining as air, her lungs and diaphragm expanding into the knowledge that he has needed it too; has struggled against it, but has needed it just as much as she has.

It isn’t more than this until it is…

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