Tales, confessions of 'the other woman'

Let's say you ask whether or not, at age fifty-one, the painter has any twinge of remorse about breaking up a family, and he will tell you in a bored voice (as though he has told you again and again, though he has not told you again and again) that the marriage has been dead for years. But if the marriage has been dead for years, you wonder, what is with the men in the trench coats? If the marriage has been dead for years, why don't she and the kids move to the States right now? Let's say he has no answer, but does say, in a fit of frustration, I can't just abandon her; she risked her life for me. And let's say you narrow your eyes and say, She didn't risk her life for you, you fucking idiot; if she risked her life for you for four straight years, she'd be dead. You are glad that you and the painter are finally, after all these years, really getting to know each other. You feel momentarily happy to live in America, a country where, for all its other shortcomings, women can say such things to the men in their lives and not be beheaded, or boiled in oil, or given thirty lashes and locked in a dingy room upstairs; where women have such an outrageous sense of entitlement that we never really see ourselves as the Other Woman. In America, the Other Woman is always somebody else.

Let's say you drive the painter to Sea-Tac Airport, even though you are only one day into a three-day weekend. Let's say you tell him to give you a call when he decides which one of you it is he loves more. Let's say a month goes by and he calls and invites you for Labor Day in San Diego. You don't ask about the Other Woman and he doesn't tell you. Let's say the weather is perfect in San Diego, but the weather has shifted inside of you. In the space between your ears, the Other Woman has gotten too big to have children. She has painted over all the windows and hung depressing art.

Let's say a few weekends later the painter says, offhandedly, that he went ahead and sent that e-mail to the Other Woman. He seems particularly pleased with himself. The two of you begin calling her Istanbul in conversation because (let's face it) neither one of you has ever been very good at pronouncing her name. You and the painter start spending more and more time together, but you are never sure if he is really excited to see you. You start to believe that if you could pick up a limp, or an undiagnosable illness, or a childhood where you walked a hundred miles with your ten brothers and sisters (all of you under the age of thirteen) to the Thai border to escape Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, then the painter might really love you. The Other Woman visits you nightly in your dreams.

Let's say one day, helping the painter look for his missing driver's license, you stumble onto a photo of him and the Other Woman in some dreary-looking Turkish suburb in front of a cement block wall. She looks nothing like the woman who has pulled up all the carpets from your cerebral platform and laid down fine, snow-white Egyptian marble. She looks nothing like the dark-eyed (if expanding) gypsy, dressed in silken cloth with mirrors that wink and baubles that rattle when she twirls over to her stash to open a new box of chocolates.

In the photo, the Other Woman is wearing Levi's knock-offs and a flannel shirt. The painter is pale and his comb-over is sticking up as if he is about to be struck by lightning. Together, they look as absolutely unhappy as two people can be.

For the entire four years they were (not) together, the Other Woman said repeatedly to the painter in her thickly accented e-mails, "We 'aff to end ziss story," and as soon as something better came along (being practical in the way men often are), end the story he did.

Let's say you look around the room and realize that, at this point, you are the only one keeping the Other Woman company. Some days you think you are beginning to prefer her company to the painter's. It is this thought that allows you to invite her out of your head (whoever she was), to clean up all the chocolate wrappers and bring in a wrecking ball to get rid of all that damn white stone.

Let's say you buy some steaks for the painter to put on the grill, you open a bottle of Sonoma red and flip through the channels looking for baseball. Let's say you slip into something silky and tell the painter if the Dodgers win tonight, he might get lucky. When he says Birthday job? you shrug your shoulders: Maybe. This is America, after all, where women have the right.

Excerpted from "The Other Woman: Twenty-one Wives, Lovers, and Others Talk Openly About Sex, Deception, Love, and Betrayal" by Victoria Zackheim. Copyright 2007 by Victoria Zackheim.  Published by Hachette Group Books USA.  No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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