Someone else’s wife is with my husband right now, in the Meat Packing District not far from Mark’s office. They just bought her a new pair of Louboutins at Jeffrey and now they’re lunching. Sometimes they simply stay in her loft which, if it’s anything similar to the building I toured next door, is filled with layers of rust-red brick, hard to clean and harder to look at.

Someone else’s wife might be sending me a message, or mocking me, because she uses Obsession by Calvin Klein, and not in the least sparingly.

Last week I saw someone else’s wife coming out of my favorite card store. I ducked behind a rack and when she’d gone I quizzed the teller on her purchase but the man—a foreigner with a turban– arched his eyebrow and felt under the counter and told me to leave.

My honest belief is that someone else’s wife would likely be a better mother to my daughters. I imagine she would bake sweet flakey things dusted with powdered sugar and that the girls and her would share gossip and giggle once they saw their faces dusted white.

Someone else’s wife is not so beautiful. Really. Her hair is thin and flat and her eyebrows need a thorough plucking. In ten years, when she’s my age, all that eating is going to catch up with her.

Besides, someone else’s wife wears white in winter. Her oversized jewelry and glasses shrink her face and make her like tawdry and pallid, as if she’s trying too hard to be Jackie O or Anna Wintour.

I can taste someone else’s wife on my husband’s mouth when he comes home. She tastes fishy but fresh, hooked yet still squirming. I swirl my tongue around his and we become two slick-skinned porpoises playing tag. “What’s gotten into you?” he asks. I keep my eyes closed. I used to always keep them open when we kissed, mesmerized by my husband’s beauty, but also curious the way his face would wince and wrinkle in response.

Someone else’s wife agrees to meet me for lunch and I’m late on purpose and she knows it, of course, but still says, “I thought you’d had a change of heart.” I was a young actress in high school. I could cry on demand. Now I devour my salad and crush the garlicky croutons between my molars so loud that the woman next table over turns. I keep my eyes on someone else’s wife. I don’t want to beg but I do anyway, no tears, but plenty of authentic quivering. When she tells me she’s pregnant I take my hand from my purse, off the gun I’ve brought, and I do the bravest thing. I say, “Congratulations.”