So that was our deal. And I was thinking about our deal that very day-the day it all began. I was sitting on the patio, watching my children play and thinking about our deal and also thinking about a girl named Tanya. Now, Tanya was a college girl who worked in my office over the summer, an energetic, cheerful blonde with a bright, pretty face and a tight, electrifying figure. And I was thinking about her because I had spent a certain amount of late July and part of August fighting the urge to fuck her senseless.

She had given me a number of indications that fucked senseless was exactly what she wanted to be. She was an expert flirt. Her gaze was admiring whenever I spoke. Her smile was warm, her perfume intoxicating. She encouraged me to play the mentor with her. I often found myself lecturing her on local zoning policy or whatever, just to get a taste of that gaze, that smile. At first, she flattered me a little. After a while, she flattered me a lot, calibrating her praise to my increasing credulity. And then there was her touch… As the weeks wore on, she would sometimes lay a hand on my forearm when we spoke, or straighten my collar or brush an imaginary piece of lint from my chest. Once she even came up behind me and massaged my shoulders briefly as I was working at my keyboard. And yet… yet she never took that last step. She never propositioned me. She never tried to kiss me, never so much as stood on tiptoe. That last step, with all its risk of rejection and with all its moral responsibility-that she left up to me.

So it gave me a lot to think about. On the one hand, I thought about breaking the heart and losing the trust of the woman I loved; about shattering the idol of my two sons who looked to me for their image of manly strength and integrity; and about disintegrating the emotional universe of my daughter which rested primly, like a ruby on a turtle's shell, atop her parents' affection for each other.