“Caitlin,” she said, almost choking on the name, “the way I see it, if one is going to devote one’s life to social justice—to challenging the status quo and trying to make the world a better place—one needs to start by living an ethical life. By being honest with oneself and trying not to hurt others.” Sadie had not quite known that she thought this until she said it, and with a pang she wondered how honest she was with herself—and how many others she’d hurt, if only in small ways.
Caitlin compressed her full lips and nodded. “You think I’m hurting other people?” she said in a small voice that, too, sounded practiced.
Sadie suppressed a laugh. “Well, you’re cheating on your husband. I’m assuming he doesn’t know. Right?” Caitlin nodded. Suddenly Sadie had a terrible thought: she needed to tell Lil. It was her responsibility, wasn’t it? She pushed this thought away.
“And Tuck isn’t the first”—as she said this, she knew it to be true—“right?”
Caitlin nodded again.
“So you’re cheating on your husband, first of all, with the husband of a person you allegedly love.”
Caitlin pursed her lips again. “Your logic only works,” she said, “if you buy into the bourgeois approach to marriage, which is positively medieval.” A childish rage overtook Sadie. She feared she might burst into tears from frustration.
“What other approach to marriage is there?” she said, her voice cracking. “Marriage is marriage. It means pledging yourself to one person. If you don’t believe in marriage, then you shouldn’t have gotten married.” She stood up, brushed the cat hair off her skirt—or tried to—and walked to the window. The sky, blue when she arrived, had clouded over. “You know, you’re right. Tuck isn’t going to leave Lil for you,” she said, her voice low and threatening. “He’s not.”
“I know,” said Caitlin coolly.
“Good,” replied Sadie. She snatched a cigarette from Caitlin’s pack and stuck it in her mouth. “Then stop seeing him. Just drop Lil and Tuck as friends. Move on.”
“I can’t. Our lives are intertwined. Rob and Tuck are really close. It would be unfair to Rob.”
Sadie lit her cigarette. “He’ll get over it. You’re missing the point. You need to end this.” Caitlin started to speak but Sadie raised her voice. “You, you need to listen to me. You need to stop justifying your actions with this political rhetoric. When you get down to brass tacks”—ah, there was Rose, creeping in again—“you’re just an ordinary woman who’s cheating on her husband and deceiving her friend. You’re not some renegade subverting ‘conventional ideas about marriage.’ You’re not glamorous. You’re not Erica Jong—who’s an idiot, anyway—or Germaine Greer or Simone de Beauvoir. You’re not empowering yourself, you’re degrading yourself. It’s pathetic. You’re selfish. You’re just selfish.” Caitlin’s olive complexion paled and Sadie felt her skin grow even hotter. Her outburst sprung less out of fealty to Lil, she suspected, than general anger with Caitlin. This embarrassed her, this urge to reform Caitlin, who faintly repulsed her, with her unwashed feet and searching eyes. But there was something attractive about her, something that made Sadie want to help her, however slightly, even as she knew she was being played by her. The girl was clearly unhappy—miserable—caught in some pathetic mythology she’d devised for herself. A bit like Lil, Sadie supposed. “If you don’t believe in marriage—or if Rob isn’t right for you, if you don’t love him enough, or whatever”—she hated this word, where had it come from?—“then get a divorce and be alone. Learn to take your own medication.”
To Sadie’s surprise, Caitlin nodded soberly. Her face had returned to its normal color. “You’re right,” she said. She took a third cigarette. Smoking, Sadie realized, that’s how she lost all that weight. “I guess I read so much theory. I write so much about symbolic actions that I think about my life as a novel, kind of. Like in Passing, that Nella Larsen novel? Have you read that?” Sadie nodded. She had. She’d liked it, too.
“That’s my period,” said Caitlin. “The twenties and thirties. Harlem Renaissance. There are all these novels where the heroine liberates herself by smoking and drinking and having wild sex.”
“What happens at the end?” she asked, though she knew the answer. The heroine of Passing throws herself out a window.
“Well.” Caitlin laughed. “Usually she dies, actually. Society has no place for her.”
“Does she get caught?” asked Sadie.
“Hmmm. I’m not sure. I’ve never thought about it.”
I bet, thought Sadie. “The reason I ask is,” she said mildly, “I guess I sometimes wonder if people have affairs in order to get caught.” Caitlin stared up at her, rapt, her mouth open in a sort of O. “I mean, like last night. Why did you need to go off into the bedroom? Lil could have walked in.”
“We had to talk,” admitted Caitlin. “And Lil almost did walk in. It was a close call.” She smiled. “We keep having them lately. Tuck says it’s a sign that we need to stop.” Sadie’s cigarette had burned down and she had no place to put it. Spent, she sank back into the couch, breathing deeply of cat urine. The cigarette had made her head throb and she needed to use the bathroom. “Last week, we were on the couch, right there—” Caitlin pointed to the ginger cat, who had now gone to sleep, thrumming like a cricket. “Where Shiva’s sitting. And we’d just had an argument, actually, about how we needed to stop… doing this… But then. Well, we can’t be in the same room with each other without—”
“Yes, yes,” said Sadie, waving her hand to fend off elaboration.
“All of a sudden, we hear these loud footsteps stomping up the stairs. At first, I was confused, because, you know, we’re on the top floor. No one comes up here except us. But then it occurred to me that, you know, Rob’s not the most popular guy. He has an FBI file like this thick.” She held her fingers a few inches apart. “He’s doing some stuff, like, really advance stuff for this huge thing in November. And his other big project right now, I can’t really talk about it, but it’s this big protest against one of the biggies.”
“The biggies?”
“Top of the Fortune 500. More powerful than the government. Truly evil. Rob is organizing this whole thing with the Rainforest Action Network and the anarchist collective. Protests all over the country, with street theater and all sorts of stuff. They’re going to, like, burn an effigy of the CEO.”
“Wow,” said Sadie, though this didn’t sound particularly effective to her.
“So I’m thinking, this is the FBI or something, coming looking for Rob. I’d been half expecting it for a while. And then I start thinking, what if Rob is doing stuff that I don’t know about. He’s really into guerrilla tactics and he reads obsessively about the Weathermen and Abbie Hoffman and SLA and all that. Some of the people he works with are really hard-core ecowarrior types. They’re like chaining themselves to trees and dismantling logging equipment and blowing up generators and all that. Anyway, we’re, like, naked and there’s this pounding at the door. And two seconds later these guys are shouting, ‘Open up. This is the United States government.’ You wouldn’t believe it. I mean, it was unbelievable. And Tuck completely freaked out. He just pulled his… pulled himself together and ran into the bathroom. It was unbelievable.”