She met him at Dooly's bar after one particularly hectic day at the office. Nothing on time, desultory promise from a young hire, nastiness from the front office, and a prickly exchange with her supervisor led her to her favorite watering hole, this time without the martinis and oyster crew who crowded into the bar on Fridays for happy hour.
A single woman alone always was a dubious proposition, but Dooly's was in the toniest neighborhood of Washington, a well-heeled and temperate place, progressive, and gender-aware, so she never hesitated to stop in, especially in the summer when Dooly kept his A/C on high and she would shiver in the first few minutes while her eyes grew accustomed to the light.
It was an old-fashioned Irish bar, unusual for Washington, better suited to the Lower East Side than to Woodley Park - Miller Light neon behind the bar, PBR on draft and a few regulars nursing a shot-and-a-beer.
Dooly's had been in Woodley Park long enough for Dooly to remember the day when the regulars had their pack of Camels and dollars and change on the counter and would chat him up about the 'Skins, always leaving a generous tip to take care of the cheap beer and long hours at the bar. Times change and he with them, and his retro look, very Fifties, down to the Formica table tops in the back and Bobby Darin on the music loop kept customers coming.
Although he was partial to the old crowd, the plasterers and pipe fitters from Maryland, the lawyers Luke - Lucretia - Fanning were just fine.
He wasn't used to seeing Luke on a Tuesday, earlyish, four-thirty or so, looking like she needed a drink, but she was a good customer, and the Friday martinis-and-oyster tab was well over five-hundred a night so he treated her as bar royalty.
Roland Pierce was a newcomer. Clearly one of Luke's set but an infrequent customer. Lawyer probably, maybe aide to someone on the Hill, nice enough, good tipper, polite.
'Roland', she thought when he introduced himself. Not many men named Roland these days nor Ronald or Donald, names as retro as the ambience at Dooly's, but he was courteous and respectful - the profile of the sensitive new age men working in her part of town.
Luke was married and had been for many years. She and her husband from a well-known Boston Brahmin family - the Chippendale, Revere, Townsend, Beacon Hill, and Nantucket Fannings - had met at a reception at Piping Rock, and after a short affair were wed in Southampton. 'Lancaster-Fanning Nuptials' announced the New York Times, and the wedding and the years of social whirl which followed.
Yet all was not well with the Fannings. Two children had taken a lot out of Luke and her husband who was spending more and more time at the office currying favor with prospective clients, and was largely out of the picture when it came to social or family engagement. She pursued her career with the same enthusiasm, but in her case it was Freudian displacement. What she wanted was at least a modicum of sexual satisfaction if not romance.
Her relationship with her husband had been all it was supposed to be - cruises of archeological discovery in the eastern Mediterranean, moonlit drives over the Bosporus etc. - but it lacked 'oomph' for lack of a better word. A prosaicism at best.
She, despite being distracted - lured - by some dime-store fantasies had never taken a lover. Infidelity would have been a rude disruption to a very settled and comfortable life; but as she approached forty, and sat at Dooly's bar with a yet unknown, very appealing stranger, she wondered why.
Affairs were as common as peach cobbler, especially in Washington where the currency of the town was sexual favor, power was an aphrodisiac, and entitlement included sexual dalliance. Yet...and still...
She and Roland drank another beer and then moved on to Dooly's famous blood orange Margaritas. Rollie talked about India and the Sri Ramakrishna ashram in Hardwar effortlessly, simply, naturally, until she felt completely comfortable with this man who was at ease sharing, not impressing, and most of all was interested in her.
She got home well before her husband even though she had stayed longer in Petworth than she had intended. In fact she had intended nothing of the sort. This sort of thing comes up without notice, without anticipation, and without fanfare, but there they were and there she was in bed with him as delighted as a schoolgirl and as satisfied as a mated sow.
Why was it that she felt no shame, no guilt, or no remorse as she opened the door home? Hadn't she broken a social, Biblical, and moral rule? Hadn't she crossed an uncrossable line?
She greeted her husband warmly and with only slightly less enthusiasm than usual. Affairs, she was learning quickly, were easy to have, and harder to hide; but she was a quick learner and negotiated the tricky currents of an extramarital encounter with ability.
The affair went on for months, but the trickery - there really was no better word for it - was getting tiring and offensive; and the afternoons in Petworth were becoming routine. A trip to Miami while her husband was in Chicago did less to stimulate dissipating passions than to exaggerate the fanciful sexual idolatry of the affair.
Now that it was over, she wondered, what was next? Would she return to the settled, predictably happy life of marriage-with-children? Or would she take another lover? If so, to what ends? For what purpose? Never one to ponder existential questions, she still had to ask them.
Age decided it all - no need to either ask or answer existential questions when wrinkles and sags solve the equation. There were fewer and fewer Rolands in her repertoire and her future, and without ever even thinking it possible, she was a suburban matron.
She never regretted her dalliances. There had been, despite her concerns about age and sexual interest, a number of affairs after Roland, all of which had diminishing returns - and never once did she wish that she had never married. Marriage after all was society's anchor and without it we all would be drifting without a port; and so she and her husband carried out their days, their duties, and their fidelity until the end.
Luke never asked her husband about his affairs - whether or not he had any, with whom, and for how long. That was his business just as Roland and his successors had been hers. Matters of little importance in the scheme of things.
Infidelity is as human as birth, death, and children. Never to be regretted or forgotten. A part of life and a part of marriage. Society does its part in keeping the lid on infidelity, tamping down our intemperance, and keeping us sexually quiet; but it never succeeds. Men and women like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich reflect on lives misspent but quickly turn to preparing for their end. Ivan was crestfallen, shocked, and disappointed at a past poorly led; but Luke never, ever would be.
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