Blogs and Stories
A Writer’s Secret Life, Part II
Adultery fascinated and horrified me. Why couldn’t I stop? The addictive trance turned me stupid. Later, I felt a combination of remorse, disbelief, and rationalization. I tried to give myself excuses. My husband did this and that, I told myself. He didn’t take out the trash, he never did the dishes, he was often depressed—whatever it was—so of course I had to cheat on him. He was mean; I needed more love than he could give me; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How could I have done such a thing? It must have been someone else’s fault.
Ultimately, in order to stop sleeping with men I had decided not to sleep with, I actually had to stop talking with them. I had to draw the line so close to myself that I essentially gave up almost any contact with married men. I didn’t have lunch with married men; I didn’t chat with them on the phone, and I didn’t answer their letters. if I had business with a married man, I only saw him during the daylight hours. I also had to stop drinking.
“Forrest and I sip Manhattans in the bar in the Ritz-Carlton,” Sue William Silverman writes of the beginning of an affair she had with a married writer when she was a student. “He wears a tweed jacket with the maroon cashmere scarf draped over his shoulders. The flame of the white candle wavers as he speaks. It is hypnotic. Just like his voice. My mind fades. I seem to fade…”
But it didn’t always take a drink to make adultery irresistible. The last time I came close was about ten years ago. I was writing about a famous architect, and an editor asked me to interview him and go to see a house he had built in East Hampton. He and his wife were good friends of the editor. Warren and I had also been to dinner with the editor; on the day of his trip to East Hampton, Warren was in San Francisco where he often had to go for work or, as I came to suspect, just because he felt more comfortable there. After a few calls the architect said he would pick me up and drive me out to East Hampton from the city so that we could chat on the way.
There is something sexual about the enclosed space of a car. We laughed a lot on the way out, and the house was amazing, a showcase for his sexy, whimsical work. It was all very professional until the moment it wasn’t.
Over pizza before driving back into town, he said something and I responded and it was as if we stepped into another country. Driving back into town, our conversation had a new dimension. It felt like laughing gas or dopamine had been pumped into the car. I couldn’t keep myself from leaning over to touch him as we chatted. I imagined us in a motel room bed off the Long Island Expressway so vividly that it almost seemed to have happened. The car felt warm, my skin tingled.
Desperate for a way to stop this familiar slide, I began talking about my children, my love for Warren, our dog’s health issues, anything I could find that seemed to dissipate the glow that now surrounded us. And it worked. Slowly, the eroticism seemed to ebb. The dopamine subsided. The urgency passed. When he dropped me off at my apartment house, I managed to escape with a kiss. Then he wrote me beautiful, sexy letters. I didn’t answer them.
© Susan Cheever 2008. Reprinted by permission of Inkwell Management.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Why America Must Learn to Bow
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
Going Rogue: The Index
Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
Guess Who's 60 Now?
Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
Who's a Bad Mother?
Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
Cheever on Cheever
Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
I am struck by the author's selfishness...adultery is a choice made by adults. It is a choice that says, I am more important than you, satisfaction of my desires are more important than my honor or the promises I have made to others.
It is surprising that anyone would be able to live with much less marry such a person.
This excerpt is simply unreadable. It's boring, ponderous and so self-indulgent, leaving nothing for the reader to walk away with. Is this what "Sensibility, Darling," is all about.
The ego set-up is , of course, the rhyme : "Women give sex for love,
Men give love for sex".
Nature is very good at these things.
But after so many nights with the same person, the love or the sex dims. We get tired of each other. Sex and love enter other arenas of our lives. We want more sex or love.
So we look around. Affection, Conquest, Thrill.
Addicts are the same, but they need one, or , the other, all the time. And you'll drive drunk to get it.
It's easy to judge, methinks. Harder to make an effort to understand. It's an interesting struggle and this book excerpt is a reflection of reality. Adultery is widespread and one can trace the impulse in each of us to a place and time - a sense of loss - a desire for change - a weakness - a need. We can re-balance our lives after the trough of a betrayal. All is choice.
It may sound selfish, and I wonder if the author wouldn't agree. Addicts are selfish, especially when it comes to feeding their addiction.
Still, the honesty and truth are compelling. She may be selfish, but at least she's telling it to us straight.
There is something really cheesy about this, as if the author's only motive for writing it is to get even with someone or portray herself as a victim. But then again, isn't that what Susan Cheever always does? Susan, you want to write about adultery, read French literature, read Les Liaisons Dangereuses, you might learn something ... about life.
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.