By David Paul Kleinman

You despise your wife.  She knows.  You know she knows.  Your daughters know, and you know you are programming them to find men who despise them because daddy dislikes mommy.  You find another woman and become enthralled.  You feel lust at the mere thought of her. She is everything you have ever wanted.  Smart, pretty, funny, bawdy.  The few times you meet the energy is too much to handle.  You flee in a cyclone of guilt and lust.  Your wife senses something, but she sticks with you because you earn the bucks and raise the kids.  She smokes pot, cases QVC, and watches The Insider.

She spies on you, discovering your secret Facebook page and searching your text messages while you sleep.  She googles your name daily.  You fight constantly.  You know you should leave her, but your acrobatic mind spins and flips and twists then dips to a split, hops up, and nails a full twisting layout.  The judges are amused.  If she could read your thoughts, Mary Lou Retton would be jealous.

You stay.

Every writer must admit that what he or she is writing may not be logical, may have absolutely nothing to do with objective reality, and may be the mind’s attempt to justify some irrational and shameful aspects of the self.  Every writer must question—constantly—whether or not he or she is full of shit.  Some adults do this too within their inner monologues, but it is much easier to get away with sophistry, much easier to perform gymnastics in your mind.  Words on a page crucify bad ideas and shine the harsh light of truth on fallacy.    

I stare at my own words in disbelief: “I know, I know, but it is so much easier for me to fight with her when I’m not doing something shady.”  I write for a living, and yet somehow I am able to justify dumping my mistress this way.  I continue on: “How many times are we going to have this conversation?  You know and I know nothing is going to change with her and me. It is a sad truth that I have ‘accepted.’”

A speedy typist, she returns, “this is your conversation, not mine.”

“If I wanted to,” I respond, “I could never talk to you again, and I would be okay with it.”  I walk away from the computer and set my brain to work condoning my last statement.  This one is like all the others.  You sought her out for entertainment.  You are bored and miserable.  She was a temporary remedy.  You have no strong feelings for her.  I hear the Gmail chat bloop, and I stare at the HP symbol on the back of my grey laptop.  I force myself to close it without reading the message.  This isn’t difficult because you want to be in a relationship with her.  It is difficult because you think of her as a friend.  You don’t want to hurt her feelings because SHE IS YOUR FRIEND.

Right side aerial?  Perfect.  The crowd erupts and roses rain down onto the mat.

Accompanied by the vinegary sound of my wife’s snore, I lie awake and imagine divorce.  Seven versions of it slide by in quick succession.  I remove the movie reel and begin to legitimize the gossamer that is my life.  I do not sleep.

In less than a week I contact my mistress again, and after we interact for a while like nothing happened, I ask her, “Do you think it is a good idea for us to be talking again?  I know how strongly you feel for me and am not sure if you are able to talk without getting caught up. Because to be honest, I never had feelings as intense as you did, which is why I would constantly tell you, ‘nothing will ever come of this,’ ‘you are going to get hurt in the end.’”

“I have the emails that prove otherwise,” she returns, “Don’t make me copy and paste them. Besides, don’t you want to hear my latest fantasy?”

I cannot resist.  She tells me I use sex and lust as proxies for my emotions.  “Whenever you talk about sex or ask me to talk about sex, you are really talking about your feelings.”

I return with this: “Maybe I am just a lustful person, isn’t that possible?  I definitely know I am not an emotional person.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘not an emotional person,’ unless you are talking about a sociopath,” she writes.  “My father used to try and pretend he wasn’t emotional, so he would drink and his emotions would come out in hateful ways.  It took me a while, but I finally realized all the time he spent bitching about ‘the Hippies’ was really just a manifestation of his being scared to tell my mom he loved her, that he would be lost without her, that he was just as vulnerable as everyone else.  If you weren’t emotional, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

You love your mistress.  She knows.  You know she knows, but you lie to her and you lie to yourself.  You say, “It’s only sex.”  You say “she means nothing to me.”  You say a lot of things, and even though you cringe at your flimsy justifications, untruths, and amateur chicanery, you hold fast to your mental masquerade.  It is to you like a child’s blanket.  Each night as you lie awake, you wrap your thoughts in your fatuous gymnastics and feel the warmth spread down your neck to your shoulders and chest and stomach and toes.  You hear the TV cheerily hawking products from the other room.  Pulsing just below it is the unmistakable sound of Ryan Seacrest, and supplying the bass is your wife’s snore.  You despise your wife.  She knows.  You know she knows.  Your daughters know, and you know. . .