Or, she's not sleeping with your husband -- maybe you're single, maybe you have different relationships in your life -- and so this is a friend of yours, a woman you've come to consider a good and dependable part of your life. She's an elementary school teacher, a physical therapist, a pharmacist, a social worker, a bank executive, a swim coach, an engineer, a computer programmer. She's been your friend since junior high, your college roommate, your best colleague, your neighbor, your confidante, without revealing this part of her life to you because she suspects that even at your most understanding you wouldn't understand. You couldn't unless you've been through this and she knows you haven't. Or she thinks she knows you haven't but one thing she has learned is that nobody is exempt from the possibility of this happening -- if a person could claim exemption, she'd be first on the list.

So she doesn't tell you, her best friend. You might judge her harshly or, even worse, stop speaking to her altogether and she can't bear the thought of losing you. She's already surrounded by the possibility of loss and will not add to it, even at the cost of not talking about the very thing that consumes her waking moments.

Educated, polite and brought up by a loving family, she's not a particularly hot tomato or the kind of woman usually transported across state lines for immoral purposes. Attractive, fun, attentive and considerate, she is deeply committed to those she loves and that's one of the reasons this tears her apart, One of the things she loves about this man, after all, is the way he treats the ones to whom he is closest.

Not her -- he can't treat her as if she were really in his life, after all -- but others. His real family, the inhabitants of his real life. If he were an emotional bully or an emotional slob, she wouldn't have been drawn to him in the first place. Those aspects of his life he betrays to be with her are the very parts of him she would never wish him to compromise. So she understands how divided he is, how he feels like a piece of meat being sliced up by a rusty knife, how he feels like he's drowning and suffocating and being eaten alive all at once. He, too, is a decent person, except for this business of loving someone he isn't supposed to love.

Holidays are hard, but so is spring and so are winter nights, summer mornings and long, early-autumn afternoons. The phone is her lifeline and she has about 17 different ways of being reached in case some shard of time can be broken off and given to her. She'll take what she can get -- not in a way anyone would think of her, but in this case it's true. There are codes they use to communicate what can't be spoken or written; these were funny at first but over time they have be come as serious as a car crash.

Maybe it ends when there is a car crash and they're in the front seat together, returning from a place where they never should have been, suddenly having to make up a series of lies to disguise what everybody around them now suspects is the truth. Even if they get away with it, the experience wrecks them, mangles what they had beyond recognition. Or, she goes to his kid's high school graduation ceremony and realizes that it's been 12 years already and that she could have had a kid herself by now, one in the sixth grade.

Or it continues. Impossible nights, intolerable weekends, endless violations of everything she knows about how life should be lived, but they have loved each other for so long now, how can it stop? She starts to worry that he'll die of a heart attack and no one will tell her for days because why would anyone think to call and tell her an incidental piece of bad news about some guy she never knew very well? Or she starts to think about her own final moments. This is the worst.

She can't believe this is her life. Nobody else would believe it either, even the man. It's a tough, rotten, exhausting routine. Nobody chooses it on purpose. This is not a defense of her: She knows better than you that what she's doing is indefensible. Don't ridicule her, and don't think you don't know her. You do.

© Copyright 1998, Regina Barreca. All rights reserved.

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Untamed & Unabashed

Dr. Regina Barreca, editor of The Penguin Book of Women's Humor, is also the author of several works including the highly acclaimed Perfect Husbands (and Other Fairy Tales): Demystifying Marriage, Men and Romance, and They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted: Women's Strategic Use of Humor as well as Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature. Her books have been translated into several languages.

A popular media expert, she has appeared--often as a repeat guest--on many television and radio programs, including 20/20, The Today Show, The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, Oprah, and several programs broadcast by NPR, the CBC, and the BBC. She received a BA from Dartmouth College in 1979, an MA in 1981 from Cambridge University, where she was a Reynolds Fellow, and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 1987.

Dr. Barreca is currently professor of English Literature and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut. Recently appointed an advisor to the Library of Congress for work on humor and the American character, she is a popular lecturer and has been the keynote speaker at many events.

Dr. Barreca writes for The Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, and has published articles in The New York Times , The Hartford Courant, Ms., Cosmopolitan, The Women's Review of Books and elsewhere. She lives with her husband, also a professor of English, in Connecticut.

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