When I fantasize about my husband’s mistress

She is desperate for him. I can sense it. The tattoo on the inside of his bicep is a tribute to where we met, but when he flexes to move the pasta water to the sink, I know she doesn’t know this. The forearm tattoo, a design representing the children we have made together, but it’s his tendons she sees. They bulge easily. With little exertion. And the short texts he sends: “hi” and “whatchu doing?” are filled with flirtation. She writes too much in reply, always. She should play it cooler. 

I know because I’ve read them. All of them. Squirreled away in the dark family bathroom, while he’s asleep. Playing make believe on the midnight toilet: it’s one of my great betrayals.

Last week I was at a play with my mother, a musical that he saw last month with her. And I can’t help but think, as I listen to Orpheus’s falsetto and scan the theater, where did they sit? Was she in his peripheral vision as he watched Hades lure Eurydice to hell? Or he in hers? When he shifted in his seat, did she sense it, distracted from the myth’s ending we all know is coming? Half the delight of watching this play is imagining the two of them watching this play.

My husband has a friend whom I fantasize he’s having an affair with. I trust him with my life and the lives of the four people I want to protect most in this world, but the fantasy is titillating. And devastating.

I’m more than certain that in our twenty years together, people have had crushes on one or the other of us. We have each, I’m certain, had our own crushes. Mine don’t make him irrelevant, in fact most have enhanced him in my eyes. But in this past season, this one I imagine she has on him has become, for me, a specific secret obsession. There’s an essay I’m reminded of in which Hanif Abdurraqib captures the allure of a crush when describing Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know”: 

“But, for all of the agony, what you get in return is the imagined person and not the actual person. Or, if you’re lucky, you get to hold off on the actual person for a little bit longer, until you get to be with the actual person. Whitney’s agony seems more urgent, it ticks my heart rate up a notch when I listen to the song.”

And I think this is how my muddy spring-winter fantasy began: an imagined crush on a person I already have crushed on. Dishes and budget talks, parenting debates and laundry have supplanted the crush, as Abdurraqib describes it. I’m with the actual person. So I imagine my husband as I imagine she does, which is to say how I saw him when we first met, but even better. Because now he’s an attentive dad, an attentive husband, has twenty five years of cooking under his belt, and I can pretend I don’t know what else under his belt, and how much of excitement is in the anticipation of the thing not yet realized? Not yet more than fantasy, and so, so much more than reality. 

My husband is more desirable in middle age than he’s ever been.

Walking home from work one afternoon, winter still heavy in the air even as the sky has lightened, Beyoncé's remix of “Jolene” plays in my ear. She reminds me “I raised this man.” And he raised me. If we separate, any future partner has us to thank for his manhood, my womanhood. And the particulars of our dysfunctions, too. But as I’m walking, I’m fantasizing. And what role do I play in this fantasy? Besides being its creator? That’s the double-edge of my reckless wandering: I am not the fantasy, nor am I of the fantasy. It’s a sweaty business, this fantasizing. I have positioned myself on the outside, looking in. 

In the 1400s, “to fantasy with oneself” meant to imagine or to picture something in your head. But the phrase’s construction suggests seeing a part of the self as other. It’s almost masturbatory: the hand is your hand, yes, but also an imagined other’s hand. Fantasy in my life has been a stick, a means to step out of and poke at my life, understand its viscosity, what feels solid in parts, to come at reality from a different direction, imagine it from a new perspective. 

So now I’m poking at it, the fantasy. The why of it. The purpose of it. Why does it feel so solid this season?

As I pursue the fantasy, I imagine coming home earlier than usual to find my fantasy a reality. What if I extend my fantasy beyond that electric point, to fantasize the end of us? If not the end, the disruption of us?

I’ve always fantasied with myself. Well into adolescence, I’d climb into bed and imagine my house burning to the ground. Sometimes others survived, but usually it was just me, brotherless-orphan, watching on the sidewalk as my home and family became smoke. I’d work myself into a lather, reach catharsis, and fall asleep exhausted, satisfied I’d wrung out the rainbow of emotions that built over the day.

Like playing at time travel, those adolescent fantasies gave my present a comforting nostalgia.  In imagining a terrifically tragic event in the future, I reminded myself of the security of the present, a present that otherwise felt rocky and tenuous. (Who of us knows we won’t fall dead of a pulmonary embolism at nursery school dropoff? Who of us is certain we’ll finish breakfast?) 

These fanged fantasies masquerade as perverse talismans. Neither is new to me. In my second pregnancy, I devoured stories of loss in hopes I’d secure a healthy baby. My bedside table was stacked with North Korean memoirs, books of families lost in tsunamis. By some low-level witnessing, I might use others’ tragedies to ward off my own.

So this intensity of feeling around an imagined affair feels both strange and like an old friend.

When I tell friends this spring about my obsession, we talk about how often affairs begin over exercise: there’s something about shared physical exertion. One of those friends reminds me that years ago my husband tried to get her into Pilates because he’d gotten into it with that friend. I flinch. This fantasy has lost all its mirth.

But I go on. Because the pièce de résistance is that she drove my husband to and from his vasectomy. There was a train strike the day of his appointment, and most of our friends with cars had cleared out of the city for the summer. If my husband were here with us, he’d remind me I suggested he ask her to drive him. 

What was funny then feels less so this season. And part of the direction this reckless fantasizing has taken is, I confess, a desire to hear his reassurances. Even the word reassures is a couplet of comforting sibilant shushes. It’s something I haven’t asked for ever in our relationship. We’re in new territory, and I can see the flicker of annoyance on his face twinned with compassion. And appreciation because all of this is, of course, quite flattering to him. 

In our semi-suburban mundanity, this workup is like theater. And I’m the director, offstage, the glow of his phone in my hand reflecting back my sadness. A gutted sadness I’ve imagined into being, my urgent agony a less melodic Whitney.

A crush my husband and I share (and another velvety voice), Pádraig Ó Tuama, commented on his podcast Poetry Unbound, “Maybe everybody feels a little bit alone when they’re writing a love poem.” It’s absurd how alone I’ve felt in this season of fantasy and newborn love for him.

Most stories begin with the betrayal and not with the contentedly-ever-after. And now I realize it’s what I’ve done with this year: begun it with the imagined betrayal. I’ve built an adulthood in which I’m needed, at the center of things and people: a teacher, a mother of four. Arms are always reaching in my direction. But here I am, in self-imposed, imagined exile, outside the innermost circle of my life. The fantasy is not about the end of our marriage (well, the fantasy is), but the act of it, the fantasizing with myself, has reified our marriage. Because right now, it’s my arms reaching—reaching for him. Outing myself in a desire to see him anew. Sailing out to circle back, but to another of his shores. A means of finding the newness in our oldness.