I might have gone on indefinitely like that but for an unforeseen shift: The hidden life I’d been forced to cultivate seemed to open up a new, secretive channel inside me. I began to look forward to meeting Damon on Chicago’s moldering underside; its rusted railways and exhausted yellow brick struck me as a more authentic substrate of the glass-and-steel towers where my lawyering took place. With Damon, there was neither pretense nor judgment. I needed drugs; he sold them. The thing itself—how often do we see it? Damon had clear skin, blue eyes, good teeth. He drove a brand-new silver Nissan Rogue. There was something familiar about him, and I wondered if we might have met before, in some other context. I wondered about the rest of Damon’s life, even imagined trying to start a conversation with him in those few seconds when we both had our car windows down. I hadn’t had a close friend since I fell out with Jack Stevens, and found myself craving male companionship.
Groping for a less transactional relationship with Damon, I texted him one Friday afternoon: “Plans this wknd?”
He responded immediately: “Anything u want bro.”
“I meant u.”
“Grls? Prties? U tell me & Ill make it happen.”
“Tks,” I wrote. “Good to know.”
Apparently, it was hard to avoid a transactional relationship with one’s drug dealer.
Our neighbors were having a cocktail party that night. At one point, looking for the bathroom, I opened the door to one of the kids’ rooms by mistake. Janna, the hostess—Trudy’s friend—was snuggled in a chair with three of her four kids, reading Puff, the Magic Dragon. She grinned at me, embarrassed, and said softly, “They sleep better when I do this.” I closed the door and then stood in the hall with my forehead pressed against it, my eyes shut, listening to her husky voice.
… Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail…
I’m aware that, in the telling, my love affair with Janna is hopelessly clichéd—its components so familiar from life, or Lifetime TV, that it could be written out mathematically. How to explain the enthrallment of living it? My family and work—so long the crux of everything I did—became thin topsoil over a deep, bitter root system where my real life took place. Once I’d entered that system, it was all I cared about. As with Damon （whom I patronized on an accelerating schedule）， there was no pretense with Janna, no restraint. The thing itself. Seven kids and two spouses between us were nothing against our mutual longing, and we fucked in bathrooms, on cold sand by the lake after dark, and in Janna’s basement rec room during the small hours when neither of us could sleep. I adored her with a heedlessness poor Trudy had never glimpsed in me; I’d never seen it in myself. I told Janna I would die for her, and I think I assumed I would have to; for all the fervor of our passion, it was death-infused from the start.
Four months into the affair, Trudy confronted me on our deck after the kids were asleep. Dry-eyed, she explained that she had tolerated my distraction and absence for years, believing it was all to the purpose of our shared domestic vision, but she’d mistaken my character. There was no room to negotiate; she had already filed for divorce and wanted me out of our house by the end of the week. As I listened, the pilot light of my terror roared into flame, and I was engulfed by a sensation of apocalypse. My hands shook too hard to hold a glass, so I shoved my head under the bathroom faucet and swallowed several Xanaxes to try to calm down. I texted Janna and waited outside her house in my car. It was October 16, 2014. With Janna beside me, I hurtled toward Chicago while trying to explain that the time had come for the two of us to run away together, but my speech was garbled and I was driving erratically and way too fast, which led to Janna pleading, then screaming, to be let out of the car and my refusing, all of which culminated in a single-car accident at ninety miles per hour on Lake Shore Drive. My car flipped, flew, and plunged into the shallow lagoon just south of Diversey Harbor. Mercifully, the water rose only to our chests and likely squelched the explosion of my nearly empty gas tank. But Janna’s left leg was partially severed and crushed beyond repair, and had to be amputated at the thigh.