This Time Will Be Different

4

Jack had been waiting at the police station for half an hour when Paul came out of an adjacent hallway. Paul, dressed in jeans and a Penn Lacrosse hoodie, looked taller and broader than Jack remembered. His face resembled Sarah's so much that, if not for the near ten-year age gap, one might think the two were twins.

The two men shook hands. Jack noted the firmness of Paul's grip. He was no longer the scrawny teenager who'd been one of Jack's groomsmen. "How's she doing?" Jack said.

"She's just got a couple cuts and bruises. But I'd guess she's pretty shaken."

"Where is she?"

"They told me they're just finishing up some questions and that she'll be out in a bit." Now Paul came close to Jack as if to confide something in him. "I should have gone down sooner."

"What are you talking about?"

"It doesn't take five minutes to walk up three flights of stairs. I should have known something was wrong."

"It's not your fault. You need to get that out of your mind. Feeling guilty isn't going to help anyone."

I deserve this, but she doesn't.

They waited for another hour. They tried to talk—going over the details Paul knew of what had happened and then trying to make chitchat—but this lasted all of three minutes. After that, the two sat, mostly silent.

Jack knew he had betrayed his wife, and now she had been "attacked." If he hadn't been with a . . . a prostitute . . . maybe, somehow, he would have been there to protect her. He imagined the scene: a faceless assailant attacking Sarah and Jack coming to the rescue at precisely the right instant and tearing him to shreds. Sarah would see what a good, loving husband she had: one who would do anything for her—even tear some faceless motherfucker to shreds.

But he had been with a prostitute. She had been attacked. Even as he intellectually knew these two facts had little to do with one another, he viscerally felt that they had everything to do with each other.

Seeing escorts had been a gradual process. At first it had just been the occasional "body rub" or "sensual massage" where some young, cute woman would take off her clothes, rub up on him, and jerk him off at the end. It wasn't behavior he would advertise, but after a little moral and mental gymnastics, he could come up with an explanation as to why it was permissible. He was just fulfilling a biological urge, de-stressing, managing the rough patch in his marriage. He couldn't really afford the two hundred bucks a session given the pay cut he'd taken when he quit his job, but that was beside the point.

The first time he had sex with one of these girls had been a kind of accident. She was a young Russian girl...twenty-one, twenty-two max. It was the third time Jack had seen her. She was blond like Sarah, but that wasn't what he liked about her. He liked how she blushed when he paid her a compliment and how she responded to his every caress with an erotic bite of her lower lip. She had smiled, genuinely, he thought, when he walked into the back room that time and had called him by name.

During the first two visits, she stood to the side of the massage table as she finished him off with her hand. But this time, once she really got him going, she climbed up on top of the table, straddling his upper thighs. Jack rubbed her with his fingers. She closed her eyes—pleasure showing across her face and in the curvature of her mouth—and moved in rhythm with his hand. "I wish I was inside you," he said. It was true, but he'd said it only because he thought it wasn't a possibility. But then the young woman grabbed a condom from the nearby side table and put it on him.

Afterwards, wrapped up in the young woman's arms, the thought crossed Jack's mind that in another world, another life, he might ask her to dinner. No, that wasn't quite right. He didn't yearn for another life—only to live this one a second time. Like, if only he could fall in love with Sarah all over again, he wouldn't feel the need for all this.

Later, when the guilt set in, he swore to himself that he would never sleep with anyone other than his wife again. He wouldn't even get body rubs anymore. For a while he held true to his promise. Then a day would come when he was bored or lonely in front of his computer, and Sarah wouldn't be home, and he would end up on some website where girls posted their ads. He was just looking, he told himself. And most of the time, this was true. But every so often, the compulsion would grow and he would find himself on the phone calling one of the numbers, his heart pounding with excitement.

The whole process had given him an increased understanding of the nature of evil. Evil, or doing bad things, was an acquired taste. And we were all much closer than we wanted to admit. No one set out to do wrong. Evil was just a series of increasingly bad compromises, no single one that much worse than the last. If a man could betray his wife and if a man could say "I promise" before all his friends and family and then disregard that promise, why couldn't a man do other things? Why couldn't a man stab his girlfriend with a kitchen knife or shoot a liquor store clerk in the face or attack some woman as she entered an apartment building because he liked the way she looked?