Riverside Park. Laura Wormer Van

      Sheila looked at first stunned and then deeply pained. She brought the tissues up to press against her mouth.

      “I might be able to help,” Cassy said gently.

      Sheila slammed her fist on her knee. “I can’t stand it! I can’t stand by and watch how he’s deceiving you!”

      It had hit her like a physical blow to the diaphragm. Cassy couldn’t breathe and then an icy fear started down her spine. She gripped the arms of the chair and forced herself to resume breathing, to sit there and breathe, and to listen.

      Sheila told her. That she and Jackson had been having an affair. For a while. Since before he had married Cassy, in fact, while Sheila had still been married. She told Cassy about traveling with Jack on business trips, about meeting him once for a quick tryst in the side yard outside Cordelia’s mansion in Hilleanderville between dinner and dessert.

      “For a long time I thought it was just me, and then you, too,” she told Cassy. “I finally wised up when my secretary warned me that she would probably be leaving soon because, even though she had only slept with Jackson a few times, she was sure he was the man for her. Then she asked for my opinion of how long I thought it would take for him to divorce you.”

      Cassy excused herself, went in her private bathroom, quietly threw up, rinsed out her mouth and came back into her office.

      “It’s almost every day,” Sheila said, starting to cry again. “He takes whatever attractive woman he can find. I don’t know, maybe he buys them off, I don’t know.”

      Jackson didn’t deny a single thing Sheila had said. His eyes only took on deep, weary sadness. When Cassy had finished and was waiting for an answer, he took her hand, squeezed it and held on to it. “But it’s you I love,” he said simply. “That’s why I married you.”

      She did not let herself cry. “Then why, Jack?” Oh, she had thought she knew why and it burned. He obviously found her sexually inadequate. (“How many times do you think a guy wants to screw Snow White?” Michael used to say.)

      He had no explanation for his sexual exploits except to say that it had nothing to do with his love for her.

      What alcohol is to the alcoholic, Cassy’s therapist told her, sex is to the sexaholic. Then she went on about endorphins and about the brain chemistry of the drinker, the drug abuser, the gambler, the bulimic—and the sexaholic.

      Cassy had held her face in her lap. “You’re telling me I’ve done it again? I’ve married another addict?”

      Like alcohol, the therapist told her, there was treatment for the disorder. Even rehabs specifically to treat it.

      “No, I don’t think so,” Jackson said when Cassy asked him to see someone, a specialist that had been recommended. “I mean, not right now, Cass. I need to focus on this encyclopedia deal. I promise I won’t—you know—until I go.”

      They continued to share the same bedroom in New York and Connecticut, and even started having sex again on the proviso he wore a condom until he was cleared of any possible sexual diseases. The encyclopedia deal had dragged on and he kept putting off going to the counselor but Cassy remained hopeful, particularly when after six months the tests came back negative. Lydia went off her rocker again in Mexico and they went there as a team this time, a united front. They resumed a more active sex life, no longer using a condom.

      During this period she remembered why she had fallen in love with him. Jackson was infinitely kind and funny and endlessly interested in anything he sensed might interest her. He was also very affectionate, an element that had been sorely lacking in her first marriage, and they often held hands and almost always lay down together while reading or watching TV. He could also be extremely thoughtful about little things. He always tried to keep the newspaper fresh for her because he knew how much she liked a crisp paper. And if he had a cold and was coughing, he would quietly take himself off to a guest room in the night so as not to keep her awake.

      He said he thought there was no need for them to go to counseling anymore. Didn’t she agree? That things were good? They were happy? She had hesitated but then agreed, mostly because he had said this on a Friday and she didn’t wish to ruin their weekend sailing.

      When Jackson came back from a meeting in Atlanta the following week she knew. She knew because he had seemed distant and depressed and could scarcely look her in the eye. She said as much out loud while they were lying in bed, waiting to fall asleep. He said she was crazy, he hadn’t done anything and snuggled closer. Instinct prevailed and she sat bolt upright in bed and told him she did not believe him. He protested he was too tired for this tonight. Then she got out of bed, wearing one of the red (ugh) nighties he liked her to wear, and said they might as well have it out, because if he was not going to counseling then he was moving into the guest room.

      “Fine,” he said in the darkness.

      “Fine what?”

      “Fine, believe what you want to believe, Cassy, but I don’t need a therapist so I’m not going. If you want to sue me for divorce over it, then go ahead. I’m tired and need some sleep.”

      She hesitated, standing there in the dark, crossing her arms against the cold and feeling warm tears rolling down her face. (In the first years of their marriage she had only cried tears of gratitude. She had felt so good about the world, about herself, about their future. How had she not seen this side of him?)

      “I mean it, Jack, if you won’t go to counseling…” She wasn’t sure how to finish the threat. She wasn’t sure how she wanted to finish it. They had already built so many things together, their families, their homes, the network. And what would she say? How would she explain? To Henry, to everybody? Oh, and would Michael ever get a good laugh out of this!

      “I’m sleeping in the guest room,” Jackson announced, sighing heavily as he hauled himself out of bed.

      She let him go and took a sleeping pill to knock herself out. The next morning when he came in to get dressed, she told him that if he valued their marriage at all he would at least go with her for counseling.

      “I love you,” he said, frowning at her. “But I’m not going.”

      “So you’re saying that our marriage is over?”

      “I think that’s up to you,” he told her, walking into his dressing room.

      That was where they had left it six years ago. If she hadn’t been so adverse to yet another public humiliation she would have left him then. The women, she had come to realize, had never stopped for more than three months in their entire marriage. A year later she sought the advice of a divorce attorney but then Henry announced he wanted to get married and the thought of that, of having to participate in the celebrations by herself in front of Michael and his young wife, had been too much. To his credit, Jackson had acted the role of the perfect husband to a T.

      Cassy was moving toward leaving him again when Maria had announced she was pregnant. Henry was so happy and scared and elated that Cassy didn’t have the heart to do anything that would further worry him. And Henry would have worried about her. (If Henry had said one more time, “I’m so glad you have somebody, too, Mom,” she thought she’d lose her mind.) So with Jackson acting the part of devoted and attentive husband (which reassured Henry and incensed Michael, whose second marriage had since broken up), and with Cassy acting the part of devoted and attentive wife (which elated her in-laws, who also happened to make up the Board of Directors of Darenbrook Communications), Cassy didn’t know how she could ever get out of it. Or if she even really wanted to. So much, it seemed, relied on their pretense.

      Perhaps the worst aspect of the situation was that their marriage was not always such a pretense. They still had their moments. Cassy wasn’t particularly proud of the fact that, on occasion, usually around some family event, they would look at each other with great fondness and sometimes, sometimes, they would make love.

      With a condom, of course.

      This last part, that once in a while they