An Affair

She Felt it was her literary prominence that appealed to him.

He claimed it was her smoky voice, and her air of having attended good schools.

He was ten years younger than she was.

She was close to hysteria when he arrived late for their first rendezvous and admitted openly that he had been with a college friend--and slept with her--and then said goodbye to her forever.

She had no reason to doubt this.

She was overcome, and wept, at the first sight of his naked body.

Their affair, which was intensely sexual, began officially (as she saw it) when she whispered two words to him: "Be rougher."

His first attempts were mannered, but he quickly became skilled at it.

They would meet at her apartment, which he found cold and which he--of all people--made livable with a number of purchases. Rugs and paintings.

He was a venture capitalist, though he rarely spoke of it, and lived with his parents.

In the year they spent together, she could not recall a single day during which they had failed to make love.

In July and August, they remained in the city and enjoyed having it to themselves.

A song (with patently absurd lyrics) was in the air and became the backdrop of their affair.

She considered her lovemaking spontaneous, without thought or calculation. In truth, she had certain skills, the use of her teeth, for example, on his penis and scrotum.

Though she had other, he preferred that she wear plain white underwear.

He definitely enjoyed watching her masturbate.

She enjoyed watching him watch her--but only now and then.

He locked her out of the apartment and she stood shivering and naked in the corridor. Tacitly, she had agreed to this. A neighbor, disappointingly, ignored the spectacle. When he finally opened the door for her, predictably, they made love with a fury.

They kept raising the ante, not out of boredom but for the adventure.

She gave him a leather crop. For his rides in the park, but not entirely.

As a gift, she offered him a girlfriend, but on condition that she be present. He accepted--once--and they survived the experience.

He often slept with his face buried in her vagina.

When the sex was most intense, he complained of feeling pain and she realized she'd been clamping down on his penis as he came. Perhaps to ward off pregnancy. She stopped doing that.

Never once did he say he loved her.

Nor did she say she loved him.

Although she did.

For a time.

And she was confident he loved her.

He took her to have cocktails with his parents. She could see the hatred in his mother's eyes--and the understanding in his father's.

They took only one vacation together. As they looked out on Charlotte Amalie Harbor, she felt a need to suck his penis.

She always felt that need.

She wrote a novella in five days, as part of the vacation. But it wasn't any good.

At a party, her editor made a snide comment about his prominent nose. She changed editors. But it continued to bother her.

Though he could do the Times crossword puzzle in a flash, he was not terribly verbal. That troubled her as well.

What he did for the most part was to look at her in silence and try to anticipate her every need. As if he were a nurse and she had been ill.

Which she had been, having walked out on a troubled marriage.

But she had recovered. And begun to notice other men. Some were closely allied to her professionally. Others were not.

She broke off the affair suddenly, perhaps with some cruelty, as if she had lost confidence in a book she was writing and had decided to set it aside. She said she wanted to try again with her husband. Which wasn't true.

He took her decision poorly, sending back the first editions of her novels that she had given him. Mutilated.

He begged her, literally on hands and knees, to stay with him. Behavior that sealed his fate.

She saw him only once again, months later, by chance--at a diner. They each had a cup of coffee. She asked if she could call him for dinner.

He agreed to this but said that he was seeing someone, therefore it could be only for dinner.

She was offended by the assumption that she wanted more (she had) and did not call him.

Years passed.

She had always felt that she would have other affairs, of equal or greater sexual intensity. She felt it was her due.

But this did not come about.

At a certain point, she came to realize that it never would.