Three out of Four
I had concluded that I could easily get away with my affair with Sondra. She would never make any disclosure to Erica. I was sure of it. Sondra was broken and tough and, through her enduring tragedy, had fashioned a personal code of ethics that I suspected was not subject to amendment. She made herself available for me because she wanted to, because it did not constitute a violation of her obligations to Josh, and because she needed the release, which was good for her and therefore good for her continuing care of Josh. Maybe I felt an obligation to be honest to the woman I loved, but the true reason I decided to disclose the affair to Erica was because I had become weary of being a coward.
I found Jessica bracing in this regard. In our sessions, I saw that she was fearless in her confrontation of her own fears, willing to reveal her timidity to a total stranger with an almost complete lack of hesitation. I admired her, envied her perhaps, her willingness to preclude thoughts of consequences from impeding her progress.
So I called Erica and told her I was riding north to see her. Like ripping the scab off a wound, I raced to Garrison, where I found her seated on a rusted, wrought-iron chair, gazing out over the small patch of greenery that separated my parents’ home from their neighbors’. I sat down next to her.
“I feel better, and I’m ready to leave,” she said. “I want to return home, to my apartment, to my life.” She turned to me. “You’ve put up with a lot,” she said. “And I’ve never told you how much I appreciate that. I’m not clueless, you know. I’ve seen what you’ve been through.”
“I’m not a good person, Erica,” I said. I plucked a blade of grass from the ground and stared at it. I needed to force the words out. “I love you, Erica, and I don’t love Sondra, but I slept with her, and I’m sorry I did that, and I’m sorry I withheld this from you.”
I waited for the agonizing seconds of silence, of digestion. But Erica responded quickly.
“I’m not clueless,” she said. She reached over and grabbed my hands. I found tears flooding my face.
“Please don’t make this easy for me.”
“I left you, Will, in that way . . . there’s something else I have to tell you. This won’t be easy.”
“Josh,” I said automatically.
“This morning,” Erica replied. “He went peacefully. Sondra called me.”
Before guilt, before pathos, I calculated. My first failure. Of course, a terrible sense of loss and pain set in, but in those microseconds before conditioned emotions were activated, in that sliver of time pushing apart stimuli and reaction, I calculated. Not bad. Three out of four.
I then collapsed on the bench, immobilized. I had failed Josh through hubris and broken faith with Erica through weakness.
I glanced at Erica and saw that she was controlling her shock at my betrayal.
“Just leave me,” I said.
“No one is leaving anyone,” she responded. Then, she turned to me wearily but fearfully. “Right?”
“I won’t leave you, but I’m weak. You have to be the strong one.”
She laughed while tears traced down her face. “Maybe,” she said faintly, “just maybe forces higher than we can understand are at play.”
“Don’t do this,” I said. “You have no business forgiving me.” I pulled my hands away from her. “Walk away now. I don’t have a strong history of improving myself.”
It occurred to me that a philanderer could do no worse than to marry an energy healer, for any act of disloyalty would be viewed not as the act of a miserable bastard but as the result of energetic forces that he was powerless to resist.
“Will you . . . be with her again?” she asked. I turned to Erica.
“No,” I whispered. “Never.”
I longed for a hysterical rebuke, a righteous lecture—anything but her brittle smile, suffused with trauma.