Free Casebook by Mona Simpson Page B

asked why you had the affair.”
    “I, I didn’t tell you this, but, at the time, Jean and I weren’t having sex.”
    “Not much or not at all?”
    “Not at all. She’d always said she wanted to be a virgin for her husband. But then, by the time, by the time we got married, I knew there was a problem.”
    “Did you work on it?”
    “She was seeing a therapist. We always made that a priority. I assumed they were working on it. But then, I found out later that she’d never even mentioned sex. She said it was too icky to talk about. I tried to get to know her other ways. I didn’t want to hurt her.”
    “It sounds like a case of serious abuse.”
    “I thought that, too, but it wasn’t, apparently.”
    “What was it?”
    “I guess I wasn’t her type. Later on, when we were in therapy, that came out.”
    “So you were married, but you never had sex?”
    He didn’t answer that. I guess it didn’t need an answer. Now the Mims asked if he’d been in love with Lorelei.
    “It wasn’t like that. I told you. It was an affair.”
    “You never said you loved her?”
    “No, honey, it wasn’t like that.” She didn’t read, he said. After a year, he ended it. “She’d started to say unpleasant things about Jean,” he said in a prim tone, as if that had offended him.
    I mean, duh, I thought.
    Eventually he told Jean what had happened, and he moved out; he’d thought he should. But Jean didn’t want anyone to know. Then they started sex therapy.
    Sex therapy! I hadn’t known it really existed outside of British comedy. But he and my mom talked about all this as if there’d been an illness.
    “What do you do in sex therapy?” she asked, in a serious voice.
    He stood up and started pacing. “It’s just such a betrayal.” He sounded angry. “I’ll tell you, but it’s a serious betrayal.” He breathed a few times before continuing. “We did exercises. At first we had to undress and lie with a book covering my penis. She put her hand on top of the book.”
    Like swearing on a Bible, I thought. Gross.
    The next week, they took away the book. My mom asked him how long until they had actual sex. Five years, he said right back. I almost laughed out loud. I calculated: He married at twenty-three, and I remembered the affair happened when he was thirty and that it lasted a year. That would make him thirty-one. Then five years. So they had sex when he was thirty-six, after thirteen years of marriage.
    “What made you stick it out?” she asked. Maybe she’d done the calculations, too.
    “I thought, I thought who else was she going to be with? Jean always wanted children. I thought she should be able to have a baby the normal way. And she said if we broke up and she dated other people, they’d know she’d been married and think it was strange that she’d never had sex.”
    They’d think it was strange all right. A married virgin. That was a type I’d never known existed. Even in British comedy. Now I wondered how many of them there were.
    I sure didn’t want one.
    “And then once you’d finished the therapy, what was it like?” my mom asked.
    “Once a fortnight,” he said. “I always initiated. She never said no.”
    “And did it feel like real sex?”
    “No,” he said. “Not really.” I wondered what real sex felt like and what the alternative to that was.
    It was an odd story. Like the brother. A lot of Eli’s life seemed weird. Sad, too. I felt that even then. But sad in a way that had no poignancy. More like a disease I hoped wasn’t contagious. The opposite of my dad’s family. Just then, I wanted to be a Hart, not a hyphen-Hart.
    A little while after that, they came in, and my mom gave him a piece of her pie made from a real pumpkin, which tasted too vegetal. Like squash.

28 • A Double Agent
    Upper School was sweet until my mom walked into my room without knocking one December night in her UCLA clothes. Somebody had told her that I’d been selling soup. She said she’d noticed me