“So what do you get out of torturing this guy?” Artie asked.

“I like him,” I said. “Plus, you never know.”

“Right,” Artie said. “A hayseed from Podunk is right up your alley.”

I waved my hand like a game-show hostess toward my new wide-screen TV and Bang & Olufsen sound system. “He also paid for my transmission.”

“Any good in bed?” Artie asked, stoned now, yanking at my sweatshirt.

“He’s sweet. And a good learner,” I said, mimicking Curtis’s Arkansas lilt. “And extremely grateful.” I had to stop talking then, Artie had his fat tongue in my mouth and was digging into my pants with his fingers. Artie kissed a lot of puckered, old-lady ass to live like he liked, and when we got together, he took control and I submitted. I found humiliation cleansing somehow, absolution for something blistered in me.

I got the box out from under the bed and he trussed me up with leather straps. He put alligator clamps on my nipples and gagged and blindfolded me. Artie was fun that way.

Curtis didn’t look too good. He’d lost fifteen pounds in the three months since our affair started, and bags hung under his eyes. He said that he couldn’t stop thinking about me, and that his wife kept asking him what was wrong. She wanted to go to couples’ counseling. He told me that if it wasn’t for his son he might consider getting a divorce. They were so young when they got married, he said, and he’d become a different man. His wife was still the same Arkansas piano teacher who went to church every Sunday and Wednesday nights. Her throat had never experienced a warming swallow of alcohol or the blunt thrust of a penis.

Alex was six. Curtis showed me pictures of him, a towhead with Curtis’s water-blue eyes and pouty red mouth. He showed me pictures of his wife Susan, too, your basic midwest Baptist, dressed in crisp, buttoned-up pastel shirts and tailored slacks and loafers. I scanned through the photos, a tic jerking my upper eyelid like a pulse.

He wanted me to meet Alex, so one Saturday he took him to the mall and we staged a coincidental meeting. Alex was bored and fidgety while Curtis and I drank coffee. At one point he looked at me with his crusty little eyes and said, “My mom is prettier than you.”

Curtis said, “Mommy’s very pretty but that’s not a nice thing to say. Ms. Nolan is very pretty too.”

I smiled at the little prick. “All good little boys think their mommy is the prettiest in the whole world.” Curtis beamed at me, and when Alex wasn’t looking, he blew me a kiss. My eye was twitching again. I craved a Vicodin.

Afterward, he phoned me. “See why I couldn’t break up my family, even though I love you so much I can’t function?”