They haven\u2019t met face to face, my husband and his pen pall.<\/p>\n
An image came into my head as I wrote that: Charlie\u2019s face and her face, the face of this other woman. I saw his thick silvering hair, the broad forehead wrinkling and brows rising as he smiled. And within inches, hers, constructed by my imagination: pert, oval, hair pulled back, lips pursed…<\/p>\n
But stop.<\/p>\n
I meant they haven\u2019t made a rendez-vous, no phone calls or even live chats. I know because I read everything they write to each other, and their dialogue is entirely self-contained, no \u201cas I was saying last night\u201d or \u201cdidn\u2019t that waiter drive you crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead they go on and on about nothing.<\/p>\n
BigBear47: \u201cIn a good cup of Columbian Supremo,\u201d he writes, \u201cyou can smell the mist rising up from the forest.\u201d<\/p>\n
2Dance: \u201cI taste it much better now,\u201d she says, \u201csince I give up smoking. But I miss. Without stopping to think, tell me something else you love.\u201d<\/p>\n
BigBear47: \u201cWhat I love most is trajectory: the arc a thing makes — a golf ball for instance, but it could be an arrow, a champagne cork, a man\u2019s life, the plot of a mystery — rising and falling to the trigonometry of destination.\u201d<\/p>\n
2Dance: \u201cYour are poet! How do I always find artists? When I\u2019m in Russia, they are all the time at my apartment, and I am at their apartment. Painters, writers, philosophers. I am the only ballerina. Now I am in New York only one years. Pushkin said in a foreign place he lets a bird fly, then he is free. Do you know? The e-mail is maybe my bird.\u201d<\/p>\n
It’s all so innocuous. I keep reading it just to make sure. If anything changes, I will know as soon as they do. Yes, it goes down like cyanide. But what can I say? I believe in a marriage you have to overlook such annoyances.<\/p>\n
I wonder if my parents would have stayed together if they had focused on what really matters.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They haven\u2019t met face to face, my husband and his pen pall. An image came into my head as I wrote that: Charlie\u2019s face and her face, the face of this other woman. I saw his thick silvering hair, the broad forehead wrinkling and brows rising as he smiled. And within inches, hers, constructed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[24,23,25,10,22],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adrienne","tag-fidelity","tag-infidelity","tag-internet-affair","tag-polyamory","tag-polyamory-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":609,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}