Tales, confessions of 'the other woman'

Let's say the first post-coital e-mail is full of words like wow and wonderful, but in the third one the painter admits that he has not been able to emerge from the throes of angst regarding the Istanbul situation. Let's say that this surprises you a little because in the four years since they started sleeping together, the painter and the Other Woman have seen each other three times for a total of eleven days.

Let's say you decide that the throes of angst are possibly the most unsexy place a man can claim to be, so you ignore the throes entirely and send a suggestive e-mail inviting the painter to your favorite fireplace hotel on the Mendocino Coast. When he turns you down politely, even a little condescendingly, you go to Mendocino anyway and pick up a twenty-nine-year-old professional salmon fisherman with lots of hair, great freckles, and callused hands, and the two of you spend the whole weekend in the fireplace hotel's king-sized bed. When the painter pops back up on your e-mail a month later, apparently post-throes and wanting to see you, you wait three days, and then agree.

You have known the painter for twenty years, after all, and you convince yourself that in all that time he has to have had some therapy. Surely it will be obvious to him that you-a living, breathing, financially secure, ESPNwatching, blow job-giving (the painter calls them birthday jobs), gourmet-cooking, age-appropriate woman with blue eyes and sexy calves who is right there in his own country with her arms open wide-is far preferable to a woman who runs around dingy Turkish hotel rooms screaming I'm a motel whore, I'm a motel whore whenever the painter tries to give her a foot rub. And let's say that when the two of you finally make it to Mendocino and the painter tells you he loves you (with no prompting whatsoever from you and no reciprocation afterwards), you decide for sure that you are right.

Let's say that two weekends later, in Seattle, the painter makes a big point of telling you that he sent an e-mail to his other girlfriend in yet another exotic locale. Let's say it is Nicaragua (though it is not Nicaragua). Let's say she is the daughter of a Spanish diplomat (although she is not). This is the Other Other Woman, the other one he told you about the weekend you finally (after twenty years) fell into bed together, and frankly, you have been spending so much time thinking about Istanbul that you haven't given Managua very much thought.

Grand Central Publishing

Let's say that in San Francisco the painter had called the relationship with the Other Other Woman a lightbulb relationship, as if you would know what he meant. Let's say that when you looked at him blankly, he said, You know, on again, off again. Let's say he also told you that the Other Other Woman's doctor said she was too fat to get pregnant. You tried (at the time) to imagine how fat one would have to be before a Nicaraguan doctor would declare you too fat to get pregnant, and you decided that whatever it might mean, it meant that she was at least fatter than you. Also, he had reported (incredulity creeping into his voice) that the Other Other Woman told him he could do whatever he wanted with whomever he wanted when he was away from Nicaragua, as long as when he was in Nicaragua, he belonged only to her. Let's say you asked him why he didn't believe her. Let's say you asked him why men don't ever believe a goddamn thing women say.

But let's say that back in the present, in Seattle, on the fifth "date" since you fell into bed together, the painter tells you he has written a Dear Juan letter to the Nicaraguan, telling her not to wait for him. Let's say you say, I thought it was a lightbulb! Then let's say you say, Are we ready to have this conversation? Because I'm not sure we are ready to have this conversation.

Let's say when you say this you are thinking a little bit about the salmon fisherman, who you have very tentative plans to hook up with in Tobago in the spring, but mostly you are thinking about the way a conversation about the Other Other Woman is sure to lead to a conversation about the Other Woman, and since she is already half naked, watching old Doris Day films and throwing candy wrappers all over your corpus callosum and filling up all your subarachnoid space with half-read People magazines, you are pretty sure that you don't want to hear what he has to say.

Let's say he says he thinks it is time to have that conversation, and let's say he smiles kindly because he can see that you are tensed like a cat, ready to spring away. Let's say he tells you there is no comparison between you and the Other Other woman; that she, in fact, has started dating a Bolivian (let's say) and she wishes the painter, and even the painter's new girlfriend (by which you can only assume he means you), the best. Let's say you smile back, thinking about how in a perfect parallel universe the con- versation would be over at this point, but you can feel the other half of it ticking in the air like a time bomb until, finally, the painter opens his mouth and begins to speak.

Let's say the painter says it was his intention to send a similar e-mail to the Other Woman in her pathetic circumstances, in her corrupt country, in her loveless life, but when he tried, he just couldn't do it. Let's say you take a big deep breath and ask Why, and what he actually says in response to your inquiry will be the subject of every argument you and the painter have until the end of time. You are absolutely, positively certain that he said Because I love you more than the Other Other Woman, but when it comes to you and the Other woman, I feel the same way about you both. You know that this is exactly what he said, because you remember exactly what you said next: Don't ever say that to another woman as long as you live, even if you think it is what you mean.

Let's say this is not how he remembers it at all. Let's say what he says he said in answer to your Why was Out of respect for the history I have with the Other Woman, the years together we shared. And you agree that he did say that, but later, after he had called her the elephant in the room and, well, after you had started crying and screaming. You are absolutely sure that this was the order of things because you remember that you had screamed, You mean the years you didn't share, right?

Let's say that because you have spent the last twenty years in therapy, you don't say, "How dare you tell me you love me, when you love her the same exact way?" Because you have spent the last twenty years in therapy you say, Well, I hear what you are saying, but I have made myself way too vulnerable here, and I have lived too long to settle for being second to anyone, no matter how distant, how tragic, or how thin. When he says, But you aren't second and because twenty years in therapy only counts for so much, you scream in his face, I don't want to be first, either! There is still no point in the conversation when it comes anywhere near your consciousness that, technically speaking, the Other Woman is you.

What does start to become clear to you in Seattle is that all the things that make the Other Woman seem to you like such a poor, even self-destructive, choice for the painter are the very things that make her so hard for him to give up: the politically powerful husband who will only have sex in the missionary position; the kids weighing her down like Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice. Between her impoverished country and her overbearing husband and her misogynistic religion, there is no chance her paintings will ever make their way into the larger world. The painter will never have to be jealous of the other woman's successes. The onus will never be on him to be there when she needs him. She will never bleed or fart or hurl a Vlasic dill pickle jar across a sparkling American kitchen. Her thirty-eightyear- old husband will never die. She can exist almost entirely in cyberspace and in the painter's imagination. She will remain his constant, excretionless muse.

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