This story doesn't shock me

As a nation we are obsessed with the moment it happens. When alcohol is involved, the moment is a glance of breath. It's the smell of cologne and lacrosse sweat. Meg is on the bed. Her brother-in-law walks halfway across the room and Meg has this look on her face like pre-sin. A white bra strap is showing.

He kneeled on the bed and she kneeled up to meet him and they kissed and skipped foreplay, pants off, dress hiked up, and they had drilling sex, fast and half-smiling, half look of holy fuck, my sister your wife. The depraved lunacy of gotta have it anyway.

This story doesn't shock me. I see the logic. More than I believe in the sanctity of union and promise, I believe that everybody cheats. If you have not cheated yet, it's because you are still too grateful to be secure, or you have not yet had the opportunity, or the right color of red hair has not come along and sat down at the bar on a Tuesday when the jukebox was steam market cs go playing Leonard Cohen and your manhattan tasted like the future.

Or maybe I'm simply rationalizing and making excuses. Because I relate more to the Lorax's husband than to the Lorax. Because I'd rather be getting fucked in bed than passed out on the bathroom floor.

It's this past summer at a country club in New Jersey where the pool twinkles like 1985. I am reading aloud to a friend from a David Foster Wallace essay in which he talks about how a man who puts his hand at a woman's abdomen while his mouth is between her legs is selfish. Because he wants to know if she comes. He's in it for his ego. Then we talk about cheaters, because I'm telling my friend about a man who was great at that, while he was married. And we talk about the fact that I've been with married men, which I feel taught me to be careful not to get hurt, to know that one day it could happen to me. And she feels it is because I'm worried about losing people, like I lost my parents, so I don't ever put myself in a position to lose. She says I'm just a catalyst for more loss.