WHOSOEVER COVETS THY neighbor’s wife, he shall never stray. Whosoever has woken up next to his wife but thought of his neighbor’s instead; whosoever has cherished the fact that his wife’s back often faces him when he wakes up in the morning, so that he can pretend, even for just that predawn moment, that she is someone else, that the long slope of her alabaster back dips unknowingly into regions he can only imagine; whosoever has never been to his neighbor’s wife; whosoever has never been in his neighbor’s wife; whosoever has volunteered to wheel the trash can and the recycling bin down to the end of the driveway just so he can look through the window above the sink of his neighbor’s house down the hill at the base of their cul-de-sac where she always washes dishes after dinner while her husband walks around in the background just oblivious; whosoever has, on a whim once, driven into her carport and pretended that he lived there and even got out of his car to meet her at the front door and when she, of course, opened her own door to see who was standing there, came up with the excuse that he was missing some mail and wondered whether it might have been mixed up with hers and did he think she could check, and then while watching her pillage through her handbag thinks in just that moment that he’d make himself as small as possible to fit into a place she visited often: He’d live in the back of her mailbox anxious for her fingers to graze him as she reached for bills and catalogues; he’d crouch into a ball at the bottom of her purse, sitting on the plank of a nail file balanced precariously on the edge of her key ring and a pack of tissues; he’d shrink into something so small that he could live on one of her eyelashes, then move up and down with each closing of her eyes, each impossible wink; whosoever has imagined cradling her short-pixie-shorn head in the palm of his hand, gently guiding her down to his cock from which she’d enthusiastically receive whatever avalanche of gifts she’d be able to coax out of him, grateful and ecstatic to receive his bodily fluids as if they had curative, magical powers; whosoever has made love to his own wife yet actively imagined she was someone else, even going so far as to cover her face with his wide palms as she tossed and whipped her large mane of brown hair against his chest as she rode him with her knees pulled into a clench, like on a ride in an amusement park too tightly secured; whosoever has licked his lips at the sight of his neighbor’s wife at a cocktail party, in that bombastic, eager way he has with that face he has that reads “devoted,” “stable,” “safe” (his mother would say “a catch,” but then whose mother doesn’t say that?), who has fixed her a drink at the makeshift bar set up in the living room, taking just shy of too much time to clink one ice cube after another with silver clawed tongs into one of the gold-leafed crystal goblets someone thought were impressive enough for this crowd, who then poured mostly gin with her tonic and squeezed her lime in such a way that both of them were momentarily blinded by two escaped pistons of lime juice and who then laughed at the sitcom hilarity of it all while watching each other through now-squinty eyes (for, of course, whosoever covets thy neighbor’s wife must also imagine that she covets him, if only for that moment when they both share a laugh and a lime-clouded look); whosoever has treated every problem he has with his wife as a non-issue in the alternate universe where he’s fucking his neighbor’s wife, who looks at a sagging roof in a thirty-year-old house or the dramatic slope of a broken gutter as things his wife has cooked up simply to annoy him, to occupy his time, whose two children are preternaturally astute and fluent in exotic languages that he cannot speak such as Mandarin Chinese or Latin, languages to which his exceptionally intelligent wife is already well attuned and can therefore carry on conversations with them so he can sometimes walk into his own kitchen in his own house in the United States of America and feel like he’s stepped into a Chinese noodle shop off a noxious alleyway in Hong Kong, underage whores dispersing like rats from the screened-in backdoor, whose wife’s propensity to forget to shave her legs, occasionally rubbing up against him in the middle of the night makes him want to vomit, reminding him of cheap vacations where he had to sleep in a bed with his father while his mother and sister slept in another bed across the motel room; whosoever has imagined choking his wife just so all the languages she knows might spill out of her mouth, word after unrecognizable word, like dead black eels found in waterlogged corpses at the bottoms of drained creeks and lakes; whosoever has followed his neighbor’s wife down an aisle of the Safeway, his own cart temporarily parked out of sight, past the fresh produce section with the fine mists of the sprinklers dowsing the leafy cabbage and long, tan turnips like a vineyard at a winery he once visited in Sonoma with his wife after they were first married, who picks up a bottle of mangoes swimming in viscous syrup with which he can imagine himself poised above her, dripping juices off the edge of the flaccid mango slice, pooling in the crater of her belly button before he sucks it right out, who dreams of taking her into the chilly trough of cellophane-wrapped packages of ground beef and tenderloins and coiled turkey-sausage links and fucking her in it, fucking her right in the meat bin so their thrashing limbs puncture the packages as the meat escapes, wrapping itself around her legs, stringy bits of ground turkey curling themselves around her ankles like sea creatures, a goddess lying breathless in carnage; whosoever cheats on his wife every day in his mind, as if she is a burden, a disappointment to him sexually, a serial boner-killer, who could very well be carrying on her own mental affair, with one of her students even—that boy she employs as a teaching assistant or that one girl in her class she refers to as “the Nadine Gordimer girl” (his wife described herself to him once as “sexually fluid” and has admitted to having had affairs with several women during graduate school before they met); whosoever secretly hopes that she feels these things for other people so he may justify his own silent, daily longings; whosever feeds on these silent, daily longings, who subsists on the fantasies like a prisoner subsists on his sweet, rationed bread, who is actually held at bay by his desires, propped up by them, able to be a good husband, to be a good father by the very existence of his secret interior life, whose wife is physically saved from domestic violence or marital rape by virtue of the fact that he imagines his neighbor’s wife is inside his own wife and therefore cannot be beaten or violated; whosoever finds himself coming home from work and, seeing his neighbor’s wife once again in the window of her den straightening a pile of magazines on a low glass coffee table, just as she might’ve done if the two of them had been preparing the house for a party, or getting it ready to bring home their baby or selling it and moving away together, leaving behind his professorial wife and his children; whosoever sees her and thinks, What if she were mine? He shall never stray.