Jane Smiley
Diana Abu-Jaber
Dani Shapiro
Susan Cheever
Sherry Glaser
Connie May Fowler
Lynn Freed
Caroline Leavitt
Pam Houston
Katharine Weber
Ellen Sussman
Laurie Stone
Nancy Weber
Kathleen Archambeau
Gayle Brandeis
Mary Jo Eustace
Binnie Kirshenbaum
Aviva Layton
Maxinne Rhea Leighton
Susan Montez
Victoria Zackheim

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LYNN FREED http://www.lynnfreed.com
Over the next few years, we met on every sort of pretext, his and mine. “Permit me to arrange it,” he would say. And so I did, charmed to have the details of deception lifted so easily from my shoulders. (Some years later, sitting around a table with a group of women friends, I asked if anyone could suggest what a man could say to make himself irresistible. Everyone had something to offer, mostly predictable things—protestations of love, promises of money. And then one woman sat forward and said, “`Leave it to me’. All he needs to say is that and I’d follow him anywhere.”) For almost two years, I permitted him to arrange my life. We would meet here or there, and, when we couldn’t, we wrote letters. Oh, those years of letters! Not only his, but all of theirs. Only after my divorce did I fish them out of their hiding place – a file I'd marked "Rabelais" – and put them into a box, and the box on a shelf in my garage. And then, one day, when I went to take them out, wanting to read through all those years again, I found that the box was soaked in rat urine. So I put on a pair of rubber gloves and threw it into the garbage can.

DANI SHAPIRO http://www.danishapiro.com
Here, in no particular order, are some things Lenny told me: that he and his wife didn't sleep in the same bed; that they hadn't had a `real marriage' in years; that she was undergoing electro-shock treatment in a clinic outside Philadelphia; that he had cancer, and had to fly to Houston three days a week for chemotherapy; that his youngest daughter, aged three, had a rare form of childhood leukemia. That he could not get a divorce for all of the above reasons. That he was heartbroken that he could not leave his wife and marry me. For a long time, I believed him. With every bone in my body, I trusted that Lenny Klein was telling me the truth. When we talked about it, his jaw would tighten and his big brown eyes would fill with tears. His voice would quaver with pent-up, complex feelings that I couldn't possibly begin to understand. Poor Lenny! I marveled that so many bad things could happen to one person, and I vowed to take care of him. Writing late at night in my extensive journals, I exhorted myself to be a real woman—one who could step up to the plate and be good to her man in his moment of crisis.

CONNIE MAY FOWLER http://www.conniemayfowler.com
He was the kind of cheat who'd get a blow job in a public bathroom from someone he'd just met: the lonely waitress, the sodden barfly. He couldn't help himself. It was as if his entire skewed sense of self-worth was tied to his indiscriminate dick.

MAXINNE RHEA LEIGHTON
Beginning life away from home did not change that I remained the other woman. I dated men where I was the other woman to their mother, ex-girlfriend, job, pet. I wanted a monogamous, non-secretive, committed relationship, yet I remained a minor league player rather than a major league pitcher. If not for a relationship I had years later with a man I called the Professor, I never would have confronted Big Hands. For the first six months...I ignored the fact that the Professor and I never spent an entire night together. Weekends were off-limits. When I finally questioned him and he admitted he was married, I sobbed the way I had done so often at night, after Big Hands left me to go back downstairs. Finally, I broke it off. I had to confront the source. Big Hands had just had a heart attack. When I walked into the hospital room, I found him sitting in a chair, hooked up to monitors. I brought a chair up to him, so close that our knees almost touched. I spoke in a whisper. “Why did you hurt me?” I asked. “Why did you do what you did to me?” This was the man with whom all secrets began. It was with him that I became the other woman at the age of six.

BINNIE KIRSHENBAUM http://www.binniekirshenbaum.com
It was a fairy tale of a wedding when in 1981 Prince Charles of the House of Windsor married Lady Diana Spencer. The train on the bride's pearl-encrusted gown was twenty-five feet long. Her shoes were also decorated with pearls. She wore a diamond tiara. The newly-wedded couple rode through the streets of London in a horse-drawn glass carriage. A fairy tale of a wedding and a fairy tale of a marriage and like many fairy tales, this marriage was rooted in the Middle Ages; that is to say, it was a marriage of the nobility with a clearly defined purpose. True, I have no idea what was in Charles's heart or head when he proposed marriage to Diana (assuming he proposed and not an emissary). Maybe he did love her, but likely greater than any love was the pressure on him to get married already and produce an heir to the throne. Unlike the fairy tale, the prince could not marry just any woman he fancied. There are guidelines, rules of order, lineage to consider. Diana fit the bill. Blue of blood, beautiful, graceful, a virgin (go find one of those in 1981) and fertile. In no short order, she bore two sons. An heir and a spare.

AVIVA LAYTON
If you’re going to be The Other Woman, then, traditionally at least, you should have the edge by being younger and more beautiful than The Wife. I fulfilled the first part of the equation but not the second. Not that I wasn’t passably pretty. Perky was the word often used to describe me. Perky and lively and bright and articulate. Betty Sutherland, half-sister of actor Donald Sutherland, was not only a serious beauty, she was also a talented artist who had designed all the covers of Irving’s poetry books. They seemed to be the perfect couple. Until her husband started sleeping with me, that is. It happened the day after our arctic drive and, when he left to go home, I lay on my lumpy bed knowing with absolute certainty that my ambition of emigrating to the United States had dissolved. Did I feel guilty about sleeping with another woman’s husband, the father of her children? Not for a second! The shameful truth is I didn’t give it a passing thought. Irving took up so much space, was such a large presence, there was no room for anyone else.

ELLEN SUSSMAN http://www.ellensussman.com
When I married my husband in 1979, love and lust were a package deal, two for one, life-long warranty, come on down. I was 24. I loved my man and spent a lot of time in bed with my man. Then two years later, I went to a writers’ colony and met A.G., a guy who made my heart race. And though all we did was talk—and talk and talk—late into the night, I had never felt so much need to touch someone in my life. I imagined his mouth on mine, his hands wrapped around me, his clothes splitting at the seams and flying across the room. Meanwhile we discussed our novels, our jobs, the state of publishing, our wonderful spouses, and no, we never ever discussed our desire for each other.

And finally, on the last night at the conference, he gave me a back massage. It was exquisite torture, that hour we spent with his hands roaming the terrain of my back, kneading my muscles as if he wanted to push his way through them and into my body, then lightly brushing his fingers over my skin, electrifying me. He left when he was done and I never slept that night. The next day, when I returned to hearth and home in Los Angeles, I was wildly confused. I loved my husband—how could I still desire another man? I was that young.

CAROLINE LEAVITT http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com and http://www.carolineleavitt.com
She knows it’s ridiculous on some level that she’s turned into a cliché, the woman who loves her shrink and hopes he loves her back. She spends one afternoon trailing him, and when she sees him with a woman, she goes to his office and demands to know who the other woman is. “You know that’s not your business,” he tells her, and then he says, “Her name is Nita and she’s a nurse, and that’s all you need to know.” One day, the first thing Emma says when she walks into Alex’s office is, “I love you.” She’s wearing jeans and an old t-shirt, and she can’t look at him without feeling nearly hysterical with desire. Alex stands up and comes towards her and she shuts her eyes. “Don’t give me a fucking Kleenex,” she says. He licks her eyelids. He kisses her hair, her mouth, her neck. He pulls her on the floor and every time he touches her, she feels a jolt of heat. She stops crying. He pulls her panties down and opens his pants, and then he’s inside of her, one hand gently over her mouth so she won’t call out and disturb the patient just outside the door. She calls me and tells me and I hold my breath in wonder. “I did everything for Dan for years,” she tells me. “He can’t sleep with me anymore. He won’t ever get better. I haven’t left him. Don’t I deserve happiness?”

SUSAN MONTEZ
Whatever Jewel’s intentions were for marrying Victor (I doubted love figured into it), I was at a loss as to what I should do with my own feelings. Aside from being in the grip of raging jealousy, I didn’t know what to do with my love for him. I had loved him for so many years, how was I supposed to just stop? My Buddhist friend said I was wrong. Just because he was getting married didn’t mean I had to stop loving him. No doubt she meant this in some Zen way I misinterpreted because I took it to mean I should wait like a spider until the first sign of trouble and then try to break up the marriage, and it wasn’t long before the trouble signs started popping up. I could say I felt guilty and immoral for loving a married man while waiting for his marriage to fall apart, but I didn’t. In my mind, Jewel had never played fair to begin with. I was a single mother on the threshold of middle age and she was young and beautiful, and yes, smart, albeit in a conniving sort of way. I had just turned forty and was not going to lose out on love without a fight. I decided to be patient and willing to go to any lengths.

SUSAN CHEEVER http://www.susancheever.com
The first married man I ever slept with was the one who was married to me—my first husband. The second married man I slept with was married to someone else. With the first one, after a honeymoon and blaze of passion and desire, we settled into a life of pleasant routine. Over a few years, that routine gave way to mutual irritation and lack of appreciation. We didn’t bother to dress for each other or to keep each other away from our most repulsive and intimate grooming rituals; he watched me tweeze my eyebrows, I saw him deal with his hemorrhoids. We told each other everything. I said that his children annoyed me. I complained when they were coming to visit and sulked while they were in residence. I hated his parents and they hated me. He was a writer and editor and when I read something he had written I told him exactly what I thought of it. The results were explosive. I accused him of being unable to take criticism. I disliked his friends who were older and seemed pretentious; he thought my friends were silly girls and often forgot their names. After a while, we took each other for granted, and after that we began to think of each other as heavy weights holding us back from the wonderful lives we deserved.

LAURIE STONE
I could feel his hand as I rode to the river. A breeze was blowing, and the air smelled of high tide. I moved onto the bike path, which was lighted in places and in others dark. A mounted cop eased along. I smelled the horse, summer sweat and hay. Other bikers and runners streamed by. I rode past beach grass and the hulking ruins of decaying piers that were near where I’d lived when I was young. My apartment had had a fireplace. Jed would come by and we’d sit and watch the flames. I was poor and collected splintery crates to burn. The wood crackled and spit and sometimes made little whistling sounds like a sleeping animal, and it was like having someone dozing on your lap, a child or a man, a head lolling on your thighs. There were sizzling sounds and pops, a language that wasn’t trying to express anything and that I preferred to words with their straining for exactness and disappointing revelations.

KATHLEEN ARCHAMBEAU http://www.climbingthecorporateladder.com
When I first met her at Trinity Place, I was seized. Struck by her beauty. Arrested by the clear stream-bed green eyes. Maybe it was the slight turn of her hips when she danced. Or the honest way she confessed to not having a very good time. When my arms first wrapped around her seafaring cotton ribbed sweater as we were leaving the bar, I was instantly taken. Our next date started innocently enough, in the stinging light of the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We stalked one another like jaguars, in the Italian architecture display. Later, we drove out to Ft. Funston to watch the sun melt, sinking into the ocean, to a rim of India red. She sat close. Her slender thighs touched mine and the dance of pheromones flooded my limbs. We never ate dinner that night. We stole into a South of Market inn. We took in one another’s bodies. First, the nipple, soft as a tea rose; then, the inner thigh, white as whipped cream. Stunned into kissing the raspberry lips. Finally, finding the tangled gates to a world we would crack open for the next 14 years. So natural, the fall into love.

KATHARINE WEBER http://www.katharineweber.com
When Angela came to dinner that first time, I had been warned in advance to say nothing about her missing right arm. I was told not to stare, not to ask questions. She lost her arm in The Blitz, my mother told me just before the guests arrived. I was six, and did not know what The Blitz was, but it sounded bad if you could lose your arm in it. All through dinner I had not said a word but I had watched Angela as she ate, using her only hand. She had long red nails, and pretty rings that sparkled. Someone must have helped her with her nail polish. She was fascinating. She was beautiful. She wore dark red lipstick. Her hair was tucked in a sleek chignon. The lipstick she could do on her own, but not the hair. She wore a dark green knit suit, and a matching little hat she never took off. She seemed unaware that she was missing a body part. She cut her meat with her knife in an inexplicably deft gesture and then picked up her fork, as if this were the most natural way to eat, as if everyone ate this way. Why had my mother served roast beef, of all things?

SHERRY GLASER
I’d been invited to teach a workshop on radical emotional transformation at the first annual Goddess Gather, a three-day event for women held on the Mendocino Coast. I was also slated to perform my one-woman comedy show, Oh My Goddess! My goal was to behave and focus on my work, instead of the beautiful women who surrounded me. But how could I do that, when I have an extremely potent libido and am notoriously incestuous with women I meet under circumstances like these? I walked out on the porch of the old Farmhouse to meet and mingle. She caught my eye and wouldn’t let go. Hmm? Who’s that? Here was a woman, though not all would agree at first glance. She stood over six feet tall and was leaning against the porch railing the August sunlight. Her hair. Her hair cascaded down her back and shoulders, shocks of pure white with long streaks of black and gray. It was unlike any mane I'd ever seen, even on a horse. Her wide nostrils flared with power; I expected her to rear up and whinny. And she had a billy goat's gruff—a beard. The bearded lady.

MARY JO EUSTACE
I figure that I'll head back up to the hotel room and give Dean a call. I pick up our infant daughter, who is lying next to me, and breath in her smell of sun and fresh air. She is growing at an alarming rate and feels solid and safe in my arms. I hold her close and kiss her sweet little face, still caught off-guard that she is actually ours. I gather up all the required baby accoutrements and head toward our room. On the way through the lobby, it hits me how nice it is to have Dean back home. Three weeks had felt like quite a long time. I had really missed him. Besides, let's face it, this “doing it all on your own” thing is way harder than I had anticipated. Looking back, it's funny the things you notice just before your life is about to change—nothing. Everything seems fine, quite beautiful, in fact. I am a little tired though, and I know something is not quite right. The distance between us and the unanswered phone calls have made me feel a little jumpy. But the weather is perfect, the resort is lovely, and I'm sure if we can just locate each other and connect, we will be fine.

GAYLE BRANDEIS http://www.gaylebrandeis.com
My parents, to their credit, were wary but accepting of their daughter’s shacking up with someone they hadn't even met. They asked me to come home to Chicago for the summer. I missed my family, but didn't want to spend too much time away from Matt. We agreed that I'd spend the first half of June with them and then head back to California to play house. The day before I left, Matt and I moseyed around San Diego. We went to the zoo and watched an orangutan pee into its own mouth, we touched 100 year-old tortoises and rode on the back of an elephant. Then we stopped at the house of one of his friends from his ski bum days at Mammoth Mountain. As his friend showed us the hydroponic pot farm in his walk-in closet, Matt told him, eyebrows raised, "You know, Ruby got divorced." Ruby and her husband had lived at Mammoth part-time while Matt was there. For all I knew, Matt had moved up there so he could be close to her. This was the first I had heard of her divorce. Matt's friend didn't seem too impressed by the news, but Matt sounded excited. Inordinately so. The humid closet with its garbage bag-covered window suddenly felt way too stuffy. I stepped outside to get some air.

PAM HOUSTON http://www.pamhouston.net
Let’s say, for the purposes of this conversation that the other woman lives in a foreign city. Let’s say it is Istanbul (though it is not Istanbul). Let’s say she is married to the minister of economics (although she is not married to the minister of economics). Let’s say she practices a religion that does not recognize divorce. Let’s say she and her husband have four children between the ages of two and ten. Let’s say that when the man in your life went over to the city that is not Istanbul to visit her, the man who is not the minister of economics hired other men in trench coats to follow them around. Let’s say one or another of these trench-coated men approached the man in your life in a coffee shop and told him that the price of a life in the city that is not Istanbul is one hundred dollars US. Let’s say the man in your life told you this story with an impish grin on his face and his palms raised to the ceiling, like, what is a poor American boy in love with an unhappily married Turkish Muslim mother of four to do?

JANE SMILEY http://www.janesmiley.com
I could have paid better attention to the signs. For example, I could have noticed that, both the first time around and the second time around, my husband Steve wooed me by detailing his exploits with other women, then flattering me by comparison—of all these women (dozens! hundreds!), I was the ultimate. Nevertheless, when he told me there was another woman, and that she was our dental hygienist, I at first didn’t believe him, because not two weeks before telling me, he had remarked, with a straight face, that, should I ever find myself in a vegetative state, he would keep me, and even cherish me, in the living room of our house, so that he could personally fulfill my every unconscious need. But this is only context. He left me for the other woman; it was a shock; I vowed never to get into another other woman situation again.

NANCY WEBER http://www.betweenbooksshecooks.com
In a long-term affair, one that is grand as well as good, there are two triangles. As the mistress is the shadow other woman in relation to the marriage, the wife is the other woman to the illicit couple--their vulnerable girlchild. Like a sleeping infant snuggled between her parents in the nuptial bed on a Sunday morning, the wife dreams she is safe, and the dream must come true. The adulterers know that protecting the wife's innocence is the non-negotiable price tag on the pleasure they share. And in affectionately colluding to that end, they fulfill a procreative and nurturing urge they must otherwise squelch.

DIANA ABU-JABER http://www.dianaabujaber.com
I was beginning to recognize her silhouette, the shape of her shadow. Her. Gliding past my office door as I consulted with a student. A pair of level eyes, dark as obsession. I never knew exactly when I’d see her. It all began years ago, at a college I no longer teach at, in a town I no longer live in. It was early in the school year and relatively early in my academic career. I’d been teaching for perhaps a handful of years. And there’d been plenty of others before her. I assumed she knew this. But perhaps I was giving her too much credit? Just because her eyes were so dark and stealthy and watchful? The way it worked was: I’d look in the wrong drawer, the wrong pocket, and discover exactly what I didn’t want to know. I scarcely had to look at all, the evidence was everywhere—scraps of paper containing women’s names and numbers, fluttering from a place marked in a book, tucked in a suitcase, even stuck under a shoe. I’d discover the clues. He’d confess and beg for forgiveness.