Making love to a married woman? July 12, 1985

  

Am I fucking crazy?

Contemplating sex with a married woman.

It’s not the marriage that disturbs me so much as the whole routine of desperation, on both sides of the proverbial aisle.

Safire is going to Baltimore with a husband that she doesn’t love, puts up with, goes to bed with as a matter of survival.

She’s about my age and has a history of go go dancing and prostitution, a profession she took up perhaps to make up for the blotched face (due to a childhood disease) that kept her from a career of becoming a model she is otherwise pretty enough to have pursued. The scarring doesn’t mar her beauty. She has poise and grace that more than make up for it. Her deepest wounds are inside her, some inflicted by her husband, who beat her once so badly she lost all sense of taste or smell. She feels helpless because of it, thinking she can never be independent with such an affliction.

When I first met her, I thought she was a bitch, a tough hombre at the Fotomat, who seemed to hate me and certainly hated fellow fotomate, Mary Jane, who she accused of sleeping with her husband (and is without doubt right).

But lately, Safire seems more vulnerable, unsure of herself, when in the past she was stubborn and assertive, and certainly argumentative. We often had spats over the telephone when I previously worked for Fotomat.

I didn’t know her past then, how she struggled to get out of dancing, how even when she went straight and became a bartender in Paterson, she was expected to put out for special customers – even though the owner was her husband’s best friend, and her husband knew what she was expected to do, just as she had been expected to do when still a dancer.

She says she no longer does cocaine, but her mood swings suggest differently. She can turn on a dime, being friendly even warm at one moment, then lethal in the next.

I only discovered the more vulnerable part of her a few weeks ago, when I accused her of being manipulative, arranging to get me transferred to another Fotomat store without bothering to tell me. I wrote her a nasty letter. But instead of tearing my eyes out with her fingernails, she went home crying.

Bob, the manager, scolded me for being mean. Worse still, Mary Jane came over to my apartment, pounded on the door until she woke me from a sound sleep, and yelled at me for getting in the middle of her friendship with Safire.

“But I thought you hated Safire?” I said, not completely understanding what she meant about my getting in between them.

“It only seems that way, but I don’t,” she said.

I didn’t remind her of the change of locks, or how Safire badmouthed Mary Jane at every chance, or how many times Safire accused Mary Jane of stealing.

Mary Jane said Safire has run off somewhere, and that she’s fearful of what Safire might due to herself, and so we began a search, eventually finding her seated on a bar stool at a local dive, drunk as a skunk.  The bartender had taken her car keys. She cried and growled and blamed everybody for her misfortunes, especially me.

We took her to a diner and fed her cups of coffee until she stopped crying.

She said she didn’t want to move to Baltimore with her husband and said a lot of other things in nonstop rant I could barely understand. When Mary Jane went to use to toilet, Safire leaned against me and said she wanted me to make love to her. We might have done it that night, only I had to go to work baking, more than little startled by the offer, especially when I could not reveal the fact that Mary Jane had been my bed mate more than once over the previous few months.

I began to wonder if maybe Mary Jane’s waking me had been part of some prearranged scheme between the two of them to get me into bed with Safire, or maybe just a plot to embarrass me, or perhaps some deal between the two of them, Mary Jane arranging for Safire to get me, while Mary Jane made off with Safire’s husband.

Most likely none of that was true, and Mary Jane knew as little as I had, and was sincerely trying to help Safire, while Safire saw me as a life preserver to help get her away from a husband she hated, yet needed, until she could find someone else like me to replace him.

Anyway, I’m not sure what will happen the next time we meet, which Safire I will encounter, the bitch or the vulnerable, and wonder if I can resist when she asks me to make love to her.

 

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