For my husband, I had only sympathy.
It was as if by the mere act of betraying him,
I had adequately bested him.
It was supererogatory for me to gloat,
and if I gloated at all,
it was over my fine restraint in not gloating.
My overt feelings of superiority
I reserved for my friends.
(She returns to her vanity and powders her face. Gentle music underscores.)
Lunches and teas,
which had been time killers,
matters of routine,
now became perilous and dramatic adventures.
The Young Man's name
was a bright, highly explosive ball
which I bounced casually back and forth
in these feminine tete a tetes.
I would discuss him in his status of friend of the family,
speculate on what girls he might have,
attack him
or defend him,
keeping my eyes clear and impersonal,
my voice empty of special emphasis,
my manner humorously detached.
While all the time ... !
(She applies cream to her hands and legs.)
The Public Appearances were even more satisfactory.
To meet at a friend's house by design
and to register surprise,
to strike just the right note of young matronly affection at cocktail parties,
to treat him formally as "my escort" at the theater during intermission.
These were triumphs of stage management,
more difficult than the lunches and teas,
because two actors were involved.
His over-ardent glance must be hastily deflected;
his too self-conscious reading of his lines
must be entered in the debit side
of my ledger of love.
The imperfections of his performance were, indeed,
pleasing to me,
because the high finish of my own acting
showed off well in comparison.
In these theatricals,
it was my own many-faceted nature that I put on exhibit,
and the audience
(unfortunately limited to myself and my lover),
could applaud both my skill of projection
and my intrinsic variety.
I should have gone on the stage,
or been a diplomat's wife.
Or an international spy.
Actually, I could never be an actress;
I find it more amusing to play myself
than to interpret any character conceived by a dramatist.
The Public Appearances were not exclusively duets.
They sometimes took the form of a trio.
Exactly.
The husband.
(She crosses to a full-body mirror to straighten the seams on her stockings.)
On these occasions,
the benevolent carefulness
which I always showed for my husband's feelings
served a double purpose.
I would affect a conspicuous domesticity,
would sprinkle my conversation with "Darlings,"
and punctuate it with pats and squeezes
till my husband would visibly expand
and my lover plainly and painfully shrink.
Though I was aware of the sadistic intention of these displays,
I was not ashamed of them,
as I was sometimes twistingly ashamed
of the hurt I was preparing to inflict on my husband.
Eventually, however,
my reluctance to wound my husband
was overcome by an inner conviction:
my love affair must move on to its next preordained stage.
The possibilities of the subterranean courtship had been exhausted.
It was time for the Announcement.
(She grabs her robe off the back of a chair and puts it on.)
The Young Man and I began to tell each other,
in a rather breathless and literary style, that
The Situation Was Impossible,
and Things Couldn't Go On This Way Any Longer.
The ostensible meaning of these flurried laments
was that our hours together were too short
and our periods of separation too dismal,
and that the whole business of deception had become
morally distasteful to us.
Perhaps the Young Man really believed these things;
I did not.
(She crosses to a lingerie drawer, pulls out her “falsies” and puts them into her brassiere.)
One of the virtues of marriage as an institution
lays in its public character.
The engagement parties,
the showers,
the big church weddings,
the presents,
the receptions—
these are simply socially approved devices
by which the lovers get themselves talked about.
The gossip value of a divorce and remarriage
was obviously far greater than the gossip value
of a mere engagement,
and I was now ready,
indeed hungry,
to hear What People Would Say.
I tried it first, a little nervously,
on two or three of my closest friends,
swearing them to secrecy.
"My husband must hear it first from me," I declared.
"So you mustn't tell, even later on,
that I told you about this today.
I felt I had to talk to someone."
After these lunches,
I would hurry to a phone booth
to give the Young Man the gist of the conversation.
"They certainly were surprised, but they think it's fine."
But did they?
