Down the Affair Rabbit Hole

A. was an advertising executive, married and with two children.  Our physical connection was both instant and explosive on that autumn afternoon she invited me over for a drink of wine.  It was the beginning of an affair that would last for quite a few years, even if intermittently so.  Our encounters consisted mostly of a few hours here and there, often in hotel rooms around the city, although the back of a restaurant or the roomy restroom of a fancy bar were not out of the question for our often heated and passionate encounters. 

At home, C. continually rejected me sexually.  And the rejection began to come with derision.  One night, as I was trying to rouse her from her sleep with seductive caresses, she turned to me abruptly and told me to get off her because my body disgusted her.  She claimed later when she was awake that she had been dreaming of her very overweight ex-boyfriend, whose body did disgust her...Nonetheless, it marked the beginning of the end of my attempts to get any sleepy, middle-of-the-night sex, which I still think can be some of the best. 

I remember another time, while trying to create a spark with passionate kisses, C. rolled her eyes, as she often does, and said that my kisses were boring.  I remember very well because that same day A. had spoken so highly of my kissing abilities, her voice melting as she spoke of how delicious and sensual my kisses were.  I remember another time C. speaking to me about a female coworker of hers who she thought was beautiful.  I joked about seducing her with my charms and C. exploded in laughter in my face: "You? Seduce someone with your charms? Hahahahaha..." A flash of A. and I rolling naked in bed, making love in dark alleys, in public restrooms...flashed before my eyes.  If only C. knew of what I really was capable of doing with my seductive ways...

A. and I grew comfortable in our affair.  At some point she declared that she loved me.  For some reason it didn't scare me when she said that and I said I loved her, too, although I didn't feel like our affair had risen to that deep a level, emotionally, limited as it was to our brief encounters.  I know she loved being with me and in my company.  At home, her husband would not make love to her despite her pleading and begging that he take her.  I always thought this was crazy: A. was a smoking hot, former dancer with an bottomless desire for sex.  She was not the type of woman that needs to beg to get the attention of men...In any case, our affair helped fill the hole in her marriage and, of course, it helped filll the hole in my relationship at home.  It was our crutch and it helped us both to satisfactorily carry on with our lives as they were.

One day C. used my laptop to check her email.  She discovered an alias yahoo account I had used to communicate with women on Ashley Madison as well as with A.  She snooped around a bit and found sexually explicit messages from me to other women.  She was shocked, to say the least.  Angry, for sure.  She cried and sobbed.  She made sounds I had never heard her make.  I felt ashamed to be the source of her hurt...I wanted the Earth to open up and swallow me whole..."What did you DO?? What did you DO??", I can still hear her exclaiming with exasparation and deep agony.

I confessed to having chatted with other women online and to exchanging messages.  But, luckily for me, at the time she did not uncover evidence of me having met any women in person, much less of having slept with them.  She did find a message I had sent A. where I told her that I had recently walked by Bryant Park and that I had remembered fondly that time we sat and kissed by the fountain for what seemed like an eternity.  I am not proud of this, but I invented a lie and told C. that A. was a former girlfriend of mine from my New York University days, from before I had met her, and that I was simply reminiscing with her about days gone by.  Somehow, she believed me.

When the dust settled and calm began to take hold again between us, C. recognized that what I had done was also partly her fault, that I was not the only one to blame here.  She acknowledged that the way she rejected me had led me to seek other outlets to release my sexual energy.  She said that she understood and that what hurt her was not so much that I had done what I had done as much as the fact that I had lied to her. 

C. forgave me.  But she made me promise that, in the future, should I consider doing something like this again, that I would tell her and that maybe it would be something she'd like to be a part of, too, seeing how I chatted with other women, that it would be ok to tell her as long as I was honest with her. It was a promise I made but that, as much as I would repeat her words in my mind, I was not able to keep...But more on that later.

I continued to see A. even despite the blow up at home, but I saw her less and less.  For her part, she started seeing other men in between the times we would meet.  I never learned the truth of how many men she had affairs during our time together.  At times, listening to her talk about her other encounters was a source of excitement and would make us really hot.  But over time I mostly felt pity for her: as a former alcoholic that she was, I could see how sex had replaced the bottle in her life.  She begun to act more and more erratically.  She eventually lost her high paying job and had an affair with a colleague who got her pregnant with her third child.  When I'd see her, she'd ask me to help her with money, even though she knew full well that I didn't even make half of what she had made when she was employed.  She confessed to me that she had advertised her body for money on craigslist and was prostituting herself.  I began to fear that she might do something crazy that might ruin my home life, so I decided it was time to lose contact with her.

A. is divorced now.  I don't know how she got there, but I do see snapshots of her life on Facebook.  I hope she has found happiness and every time I see a picture of her smiling I hope it's because it is so. 

Interestingly, a few weeks ago I went to see the Bob Dylan concert in Forest Hills.  On the train platform I saw someone that looked familiar: it was A.'s ex-husband.  I had never met him in person but had seen many pictures of him during the time that A. and I had had our affair.  He was the front man of a Beatles' cover band at the time, too, and I suppose a Bob Dylan concert would something he'd be into.  To think all these years later after A. and I had our torrid affair, when she would go home to him, and here he was standing right in front of me on a train platform.

A. was not my one and only affair.  There were many others.  But this one marked the first time I got caught and was forgiven. 

Some times I wish C. had not forgiven me, for perhaps I might have learned the error of my cheating ways much sooner...

But this was not to be: I continued to go down that affair rabbitt hole, instead.

TO BE CONTINUED