Tales, confessions of 'the other woman'

In "The Other Woman: Twenty-one Wives, Lovers, and Others Talk Openly About Sex, Deception, Love, and Betrayal," Victoria Zackheim shares 21 essays of love, betrayal, shock and jealousy by women who either broke up relationships or those who suffered at the hands of "home-wrecker" or "Jezebel." Here's an excerpt:

Here's the thing about the other woman. She lives inside your head. She may live on the next street or in the next town or halfway across the world; she may be five-two or five-nine; she may be rail thin (never skinny) or voluptuous (never fat). But however big or small she is, however much space she takes up in the world, will never compare to the amount of space she'll take up in your brain. It is there that she will spread herself from wall to wall, eating gift-wrapped chocolates-so many gift-wrapped chocolates that she will ooze into every nook and cranny of your cerebrum, until you won't be able to think of anything else. And if you let her take up residence there, no matter when you cut her off, no matter how hard you try to starve her, you may never, ever, get her out.

Let's say, for the purposes of this conversation, that the other woman lives in a foreign city. Let's say it is Istanbul (though it is not Istanbul). Let's say she is married to the minister of economics (although she is not married to the minister of economics). Let's say she practices a religion that does not recognize divorce. Let's say she and her husband have four children between the ages of two and ten. Let's say that when the man in your life went over to the city that is not Istanbul to visit her, the man who is not the minister of economics hired other men in trench coats to follow them around. Let's say one or another of these trench-coated men approached the man in your life in a coffee shop and told him that the price of a life in the city that is not Istanbul is one hundred dollars U.S. Let's say the man in your life told you this story with an impish grin on his face and his palms raised to the ceiling, like, What is a poor American boy in love with an unhappily married Turkish Muslim mother of four to do?

Which brings us to the man in your life. Let's say he is a painter (though he is not a painter), and let's say the Other Woman is a painter, too. Let's say they met at one of those places in Italy or New Hampshire where painters go for a month to compliment each other's paintings and gossip about other painters and after a long day of gossiping about other painters, fall together into bed. Why the painter wants to risk getting himself killed in a city that is not Istanbul for a woman who enjoys lying to her husband and her children and all of her friends and her religious co-practitioners is only one of the mysteries of this whole escapade. But then, why you have fallen in love with a man who wants to risk his life for such a woman is at least an equally compelling question.

Let's say you have known your painter for twenty years. Let's say you met at a student art show when you were both in graduate school and you had an amazing conversation about some artist who has fallen so far out of fashion in the two decades since that night that you can't be sure anymore who it was. Let's say you were attracted to each other immediately but you did not fall into bed together, and now you wonder why. Maybe it was because you were both too young and you knew you would have screwed up your relationship, and maybe fate or God or providence wanted you to wait twenty years so you would be mature enough to see that you really belonged together for the long haul. Or maybe you did not fall into bed together twenty years ago because in those days you only fell into bed with assholes and the painter was not (at least not yet) enough of an asshole to really catch your eye. Or maybe it was because the painter only liked tragic, super-thin (never skinny) women, and you have never been enough of either. Maybe you were too busy noticing the assholes at the art show, and he was too busy noticing the onelegged bulimics who had to sell themselves on the streets of Paris to put themselves through school.

In any case, let's say you were at a party ten years later (and also ten years before now) where the painter showed up unexpectedly and told you a story about the night his father died and that story made you fall in love with him for certain. Why you didn't fall into bed together that night is also a mystery because you were more or less out of your asshole phase by then, and he had already lost quite a bit of hair on the top of his head, and probably couldn't get the tragically thin women to look his way anymore. But let's say that ten years after the night of the party, your father dies and he is the very first person you want to e-mail and next thing you know, you are back in regular touch.

Let's say you and the painter plan a weekend together in San Francisco, SF MOMA and the galleries-you'll drive-and when the e-mail says I'm just a dog waiting for you to lower the tailgate, you know that after twenty long years, you and the painter are going to fall into bed together at last. But first let's say you spend two days of a three-day weekend acting like (what you are) old friends. Let's say that when you tell him that being in love with a married Muslim woman who lives five thousand miles away sounds a little self-punishing, he smiles brightly and says that he is waiting for the Other Woman's husband to die, so he can bring her and her four children to the States. When you ask how old her husband is, he says thirty-eight. When you point out to the painter that he is fifty-one, he says, Turkey is hard on people; I know I'll live longer than he will.

Let's say that you decide that what is between the painter and the married Muslim mother of four can only be about the illicit sex, and when you ask (still clinging to the safe distance of long-term flirtatious friendship) Is it about the illicit sex? the painter says not only No, but also volunteers that sex with the Other Woman is not particularly good. He goes on to say (by way of too much information) that the Other Woman doesn't let him do anything her husband doesn't do, and given the constraints of their strict religion (not to mention the fact that they dislike each other intensely), her husband doesn't do very much.

Let's say that when you finally do have sex with your painter, on the last night before you drive back to your neighboring cities, you let him do every single thing the Other Woman won't let him do, and you do several things to him that she has never even thought of. You do it for hours and hours and hours, until the front desk calls to ask if you intend to stay another night. Driving across the Bay Bridge, you stare out at the boat lifts that stand over Oakland's harbor and wonder why, instead of replaying all of the weekend's good food and great sex and long walks down city streets in the misty dark, you are rehashing every single word he said about the Other Woman. Whatever kind of sex they have, she has lodged herself firmly in the four-bedroom house of your parietal, temporal, frontal, and occipital lobes. The wrapper is off the first box of chocolates and she is making herself comfortable, changing around the furniture to suit her taste and draping her favorite scarves over your medulla oblongata. For not one moment do you consider the possibility that, in this scenario, the Other Woman is actually you.

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