ever, and whose devotion did not preclude assignations such as the present one, although the fearless email cowboy was, so far, posture only, for he had been faithful.
     Fourteen years. The phrase rise to the occasion of your expectations kept bronco-bulling into his brain in an ironic gospel rhythm, orated by Jesse Jackson or Johnny Cochran, to the point that he was annoyed, as if he were channel-surfing and hit over and over the same footage of the Simpson trial or Diana's funeral.
     Only the day before, at lunch, two female colleagues had proclaimed that men were better at separating their work from their personal lives because they knew how to compartmentalize. "They just lock up all those pesky emotions," this (sour, stubby-fingered) woman said, "and get on with things." True. Still, things shifted, like the clothes in a garment bag that has been badly shoved into the overhead bin. In the middle of trying to solve some demanding problem at work he would also "think":
    

• garment bag [shit all smooshed]
• wife's grilled salmon in marscapone cream sauce

         with pancetta over arugula

               [should have office dinner party]

                    [[hate everybody]]

• projected fourth quarter earnings

          [fuck her in kitchen � kids summer camp?]

• meeting at gate

          [perfect grill marks]

     � whereupon the whole jagged free association would dissolve into a runaway train of fear and fantasy (wrong gate, plane late, great kiss, fired, Quick! Broom closet!, wife sees fingernail trails on back, divorce, remarry, awful stepkids, everybody hates me, she only loves me because she doesn't know me, if people knew me they would love me) that seemed as if it could only be resolved by the act alone.
     Until his sanity itself seemed to depend on him entering this woman he didn't know right this minute.
     Or not.


Not smart he told the mirror in the office bathroom, where he splashed off his face and tried to view himself as she would. Sallow, less hair, but the phallic vein pulsing in his forehead gave him the frank, bemused gaze of a man with enough intelligence and good will to articulate this paradox: the best sex with wives is often had pretending they are strangers, whereas with strangers you have to be willing to consider you want them enough to make them wives, so you can have sex always, pretending they are strangers. She knows me, she knows me not. I know her, I know her not: sex like that Escher print in which the hand draws a hand drawing a hand drawing a hand.
     Where does it end? In the act. The only way out of the hall of mirrors was to follow his cock. A phrase came to him that so pithily summarized the line of thought he had been entertaining, he couldn't resist violating their agreement, and sharing it:

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