The Ten Year Affair

Here was how it worked in the world of the affair: there was a big, anonymous hotel one town away. The hotel serviced business travelers. It was not pretty, but it was not lifeless, either. It was arranged around a man-made lake, and the lake and its scrubby landscaping drew great blue herons, American kestrels, house sparrows, Northern cardinals, five species of warblers. Inside, an appealing blankness: you could fill it with whatever you wanted.

The first time Cora and Sam went, they contrived to stay overnight. This was not hard. Cora told Eliot she had a work event in the city and Sam told Jules the same. It didn’t make sense to come home late only to turn around and take the train back again in the morning. The questions that followed were logistical only. What would happen with the kids and what needed to go in their backpacks? Was there enough food in the house and should they call the sitter to help with pickup? Neither Eliot nor Jules suspected anything, and the ease of the deception added to its pleasing sordidness. Because they had both been trustworthy up until now, they would get away with it without friction or elaborate falsehood.

On the prearranged day, Sam beat Cora there. She knocked and he threw open the door harder than he meant to. It slammed against the wall, and way down at the end of the hallway, a housekeeper looked up. Then she was in his arms. He pulled her into the room, down onto the bed. They undressed each other, tearing fabric, apologizing breathlessly. He got her bra off, moved her underwear aside, pushed into her. She had her hands in his hair, on his back. He bit her lower lip like he had that time in the real world.

When it was over, they lay in bed looking at their reflections in the large mounted flatscreen.

I hope that was all right, he said. She assured him it was.

He got up and ran her a bath, called downstairs for room service. She liked to see him like this, taking care of things in his underwear.

The sun set over a building in the distance. The clouds were pink and streaky. They ate French fries and traded a bottle of champagne back and forth. Before they went to bed, they had sex again. They moved slower this time and he got her off first, going down on her at length, pulling her toward him and grinding his mouth, his stubbly jaw, into her as she came. She slept in his shirt, which was too large and had his cinnamon smell. Outside, the waters of the man-made lake shimmered darkly.

*

They were all friends now, so why didn’t the tension dissipate? She ran into him at a birthday party for a child named Frances.

This occurred in mid-spring. Sheets of mist enveloped the mountain, sliding past each other. In Frances’s backyard, a six-foot inflatable cactus shot water out of its head and arms. Kids hurtled through the spray, screaming “Cold!”

On the deck, she and Eliot talked to Frances’s mother, Anita. They knew her slightly from Happy Tree, where they kept the same schedule. They saw her in the morning at drop-off and again at pickup. Cora would wave, and Anita would wave back, shrugging at how impossible Frances was being. Now she stood under blue and green streamers, fanning out water crackers on a board, redoing it when the results displeased her.

Frances was adopted, she explained, and the transition had been rocky. He’d had a tough early life, suffered extreme neglect. She mouthed the word drugs. He’d been born into poverty in rural Mississippi. When they’d gone down to pick him up, he’d been this skinny little thing. Getting him to trust them had not been easy. They were still working on it. It wasn’t like a biological child who loved you implicitly, who was hardwired to love you. It was much more complicated than that. It was day by day, she told them, but so rewarding.

“Good for you,” said Eliot. He wore Miles in the carrier, swaying side to side. “That’s really worthy.”

“And of course, the race thing is a hurdle.”

Frances was black and Anita was embarrassed to admit they didn’t know many black people. You were supposed to fill their lives with adults who looked like them, but where were she and Brandt supposed to meet such people? Were they supposed to put out a personal ad? It was a little weird, wasn’t it? A little calculated? Seeking out friendships with black people for the purpose of having them help you raise your child.

Cora said, “That sounds hard.”

“Did you ever think about adoption, when you were deciding to have kids?” said Anita.

“We didn’t think,” said Cora. “Like at all.”

They had been newly married. Cora had been twenty-seven and Eliot twenty-nine. Elsewhere these ages were average, but in New York they were shockingly young. You’re a baby yourself, her mother had said. Take care of it and try again in five years. But it hadn’t been an accident. They had done it on purpose to fast-forward to the next phase of life, to make some stakes appear. They knew it was reckless; that was part of the appeal. They’d gone through with it not in spite of this, but because of it. “We always wanted to adopt,” said Anita. “There are so many unparented kids out there. So many kids in crisis. We couldn’t justify having our own. Brandt had a vasectomy right after we got married. I recommend it. I haven’t had to mess with birth control in years.”

Cora and Eliot nodded. People would reveal anything about themselves. Anything. They would tell you the status of their husband’s vas deferens unprompted. Then you were forced to picture sperm, unable to enter a urethra, being reabsorbed into the body of someone named Brandt.

Brandt climbed the stairs to the deck and they all looked at him.

Anita said, “I was telling them about your vasectomy.”

“Best thing I ever did,” said Brandt. “AMA.”

Later, Eliot went upstairs to change Miles’s diaper, and Cora found herself alone in the kitchen. It had recently been remodeled. The lighting fixture was shaped like a lantern. The floors were made of pale gray wood. Someone had pinned a large bundle of herbs to the wall. It resembled a farmhouse, if you’d never seen a farmhouse before.

Cora was crouched next to the oven when Sam found her. “What are you doing?” he said.

“Oh, hey. I was just . . . looking in the oven.” “Why?”

“I guess I got curious about whether they keep their pans in there when they’ve got nothing in them.”

“How do you know Anita and Brandt?” he said. “Daycare. You?”

They had moved to town around the same time, Sam explained. They had been neighbors for a while, before Anita and Brandt had bought this place and renovated it. Back then, there weren’t as many city people around. Jules had started a book club with Anita and it was still going. There were eight or ten women in it now. They’d recently read Middlemarch.

“Cool,” said Cora, pointlessly. “Middlemarch.”

“Have they told you about Brandt’s vasectomy?”

“They just did.”

“That’s their thing. They’re very into Brandt having had a vasectomy.” He crouched down next to her. “What do you think about that?”

“I might not personally lead with it.”

“How have you been?”

“Fine,” she said. “Regular.”

He put a hand on her knee to steady himself. She noticed the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt, his wristwatch, the dark hair of his arms. Certain people’s hands only made you think of them touching you. In the world of the affair, this was the prelude to a breathless encounter in a child’s playroom, Sam kneeling on a nubbly multicolored rug to take off her underwear as a row of stuffed animals looked on. But in this world, if she accepted what he said about wanting to be friends only, then his physical attention meant nothing and would come to nothing, and she should remove his hand. She didn’t.

“Is Jules here?” she said.

“Home. Penelope has hand, foot and mouth disease. Have you had that one yet? It’s brutal.”

They hadn’t. So far this year they’d had RSV and four different stomach bugs, but not hand, foot, and mouth.

“What do feet have to do with it?” said Cora.

“That I don’t know. It’s a fever, but highly contagious, and you get these sores around your mouth. Inside your mouth too. It gets hard to swallow. Poor Penelope. We’ll all have it in about five minutes. I’m probably giving it to you right now.”

Cora said, “Thanks.”

“You should call her soon to hang out.”

“Can’t Jules call me?”

They were quiet, listening to the sounds outside. Kids screamed and adults talked and music played. Someone who wasn’t at the birthday party mowed a lawn.

“I want things to be normal,” he said. “I want you to be normal.”

“I’m being normal. Are you?”

His hand still rested on her knee. He looked at it then took it away. On the other side, he had turned a stuffed Pikachu to face the wall. When she started making noise, he covered her mouth with his hand.

“Jules could use a friend.”

“I thought she was friends with Anita. Aren’t they in a book club together?”

“All that means is they’ve both read Middlemarch. Or part of Middlemarch, as the case may be.”

Cora didn’t understand why it was her job to forge a relationship with Sam’s wife. Couldn’t they let it unfold naturally, if it was going to unfold? She and Jules had the rest of their lives to become friends. Assuming they both continued to live in the town and achieved the average life span for women, they had forty, fifty more years. Why was his intervention necessary?

“I don’t trust you two to make it happen,” he said.

They regarded the oven. Through the smudged window, they could see Anita and Brandt’s sheet pans and cupcake tins, stained red-brown and stacked untidily.

“They do keep them in there,” said Sam.

“Eliot thinks it’s a bad habit. He wouldn’t approve.”

“Wouldn’t approve of what?” said Eliot.

He’d entered the kitchen and stood at the island. He held Miles on his hip and the straps of the baby carrier hung off his front. There was something feminine, mammalian, about the way the empty pouch was sitting. Cora and Sam stood up quickly.

“Storing pans in the oven,” she said.

“Oh yeah,” said Eliot. “You have to take them out every time you want to cook and pile them on the counter. Unsightly. I’ve never understood why people don’t keep them in a cabinet.”

He opened the fridge and took out a beer. “Do you want one of these?” he asked Sam.

“What about me?” said Cora.

“Oh, sorry. You, too.”

He handed each of them a can. Brandt entered and informed them it was time to pin the tail on the dinosaur. Cora thought again about what happened when he ejaculated. His wife was so enamored with the process that she told everyone about it. She bragged about her husband coming in his own body. Cora thought: Good for him, maybe. They followed him outside.

*

Summer began and it got hot. In the big, anonymous hotel, the air-conditioning kicked on with a startling clank. It worked beautifully, making the room almost too cold. You could enter from the humid, oppressive world and stand in front of it while your lover showered. Outside, everything was too bright. The white lines of the parking lot, the windshields of the cars. But if you drew the curtains, the room became a dark, chilly cave, beyond time.

They went on Thursday afternoons. Cora invented a recurring meeting. In fact, she invented a whole new coworker. She invented a young woman named Morgan, whom she had to meet every week as a part of a new company-wide mentorship program. Morgan was a recent college graduate and needed a lot of help negotiating the workplace. She was stymied by everything from email etiquette to how to enter a sick day into the system. This new generation did not exactly want to work, and who could blame them?

Cora prepared a backstory for Morgan in case Eliot asked. Morgan had grown up outside of Philly and attended UPenn. Morgan was gluten intolerant. Morgan had a dog, a Newfoundland named Beau, who she had raised from a puppy. Morgan sometimes fought with her parents, whose politics differed from her own. But Eliot didn’t ask. Why would Eliot doubt Morgan’s existence? He accepted the recurring meeting without question. The details of another person’s recurring meetings were beneath consideration. Cora had, for instance, never asked about one of his.

On Thursdays Cora parked her car beside the man-made lake and took stock of the birds. They were usually hidden away, wherever birds went to keep cool. But once she saw a heron sitting in the shallows, bending and straightening its graceful neck, shaking its feathers, and felt herself close to tears. The affair had made her susceptible to things like being moved by a bird’s neck. Up in the room, she stood in front of the AC holding her shirt away from her body. The parking lot blazed below. She heard Sam get out of the shower, and then he was behind her, lifting the sweaty hair off her neck. She turned and kissed him. He told her to undress and she did. He said, Sit on the edge of the bed and spread your legs and watch yourself in the mirror, and she did. He said, Touch yourself and tell me how wet you are. She was very wet and she told him this and he said, Good girl.

In the hotel room, she let Sam tell her what to do. He watched her make herself come and then he had her brace herself against the headboard while he fucked her from behind. The things he whispered into her ear made her come a second time. Afterward, they had beers in their underwear. She found a laminated sheet of TV channels and put on an old movie. They touched each other lazily in the flickering light of Paul Newman’s face.

*

In reality, Cora’s friend Isabelle came up from Brooklyn. They mixed Negronis on the deck and drank them out of mason jars. Roses had begun to bloom along the fence in four different shades. They had not known what they were until now. Cora researched how to care for them, and what you had to do was mostly nothing, water them once a week if it was dry out, prune them back, and fertilize them. She did these things with relish, in gloves gifted to her by the children, and then they were hers to feel proud of.

“So you’re a gardener now?” said Isabelle.

“I’m just watering plants.”

“Very upstate of you.”

“We’re not upstate,” said Cora. “It’s the Hudson Valley.”

“No one cares about that distinction but you.”

Isabelle was from L.A., the daughter of Korean immigrants. They had met at Sarah Lawrence, where they’d both majored in media, marketing, and communications. Now Isabelle worked in television and practiced polyamory. She had a boyfriend, a boyfriend, and a girlfriend, and managing the three of them was like a second job, she said. They sometimes had group sex, but mostly they had conversations. She found Cora’s life quaint and old-timey. A marriage and a couple of kids outside the city, like the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.

Eliot was barbecuing, jamming fish and vegetables onto skewers, dressing a salad, mixing more cocktails, listening to music on a speaker he’d brought outdoors, pausing when Opal called to him from the swing set to watch her do a trick.

Isabelle accepted a cocktail. “Where do you guys go up here?”

“Go?” said Eliot.

“Like when you go out.”

“Out?” said Eliot.

“Like to enjoy yourselves.”

There was nowhere to go and no reason to go there. There was no enjoyment, not in the sense that an unfettered person understood the term. They had a baby and a three-year-old. The most they could hope for was gratification. Occasional reprieve. One day the baby and the three-year-old would be older, and maybe things would change. But currently every moment was spoken for.

“We don’t go anywhere,” said Eliot. “Where would we go?”

Over dinner, Isabelle and Cora talked about college. They had been roommates for three years. Afterward, they lived together in an apartment in South Williamsburg, at eye level with the BQE. You could see individual drivers; that’s how close they’d been. Sometimes they looked right at you. Their lives in those days had been precarious. They waitressed at the same bad Italian restaurant; they were often a week late on the rent; most of their furniture had been found on the street. They had been living like this when Cora met Eliot.

“Remember that night?” said Eliot. “That thing hit you in the head.”

It had been a dowel holding up a tie-dye tapestry. They had been at a party at the twelve-man loft. The dowel had not hurt her badly, but it had caused her to stagger back two steps in confusion. Why had something come swooping out of the air to hit her in the head? After it hit her, the tapestry had fallen to the ground in a coarse heap. Eliot witnessed this and made her sit down on a nearby futon, covered with yet another tapestry.

She was embarrassed, but he’d been funny about it. “Does that happen to you a lot?”

Cora said, “It’s everywhere I go.”

He looked at the tapestry they sat on. “What’s with these anyway?”

They were all over the apartment. They had tie-dye patterns or splotches or elaborate swirls. They looked like they had been purchased at Urban Outfitters. Some of them hung in the air as room dividers, but most were covering surfaces.

“You just know that whatever they’re covering is so much worse,” said Cora.

They talked awhile longer and people started moving instruments into the area of the apartment that was regarded as “the stage.” A band with two of everything began to play. Two drummers, two lead vocalists, two guitar players, two bassists.

Eliot said, “Oh Jesus. Not this.”

He asked if she wanted to go somewhere with less clanging. They’d gone to his apartment and pretended to look at his records for five minutes before having sex. When they’d married two years later, they knew it was fast and that they were young. But they had been sure. Cora had no doubts and Eliot had no doubts. They had moved into the first of many apartments, barely caring that it was ugly. That’s how happy they had been. Barely caring that the fake-tin ceiling was peeling off in one corner and had to be shoved back up once or twice a week with a broomstick.

“I remember,” said Cora now. “It was a tapestry.”

It had been the most important thing to ever hit her in the head.