In the absence of someone readily available to blame, she blamed her gynecologist first. She blamed his violating hands, his considerate touch; she blamed his entirely professional and clinical technique for investigating her sex and she blamed the Good Housekeeping and Martha Stewart Living magazines he kept stocked in the waiting room, but in the end it didn’t stick. Try as she might, Gretchen couldn’t blame her gynecologist any more than she could blame the wine or the wedding or her failing sense of self-worth.

She first met Simon on her wedding day, and this was just how David had introduced them to each other: he’d said, “Love of my life, meet my best friend. Best friend, meet the love of my life,” and even though he’d already introduced her to half a dozen people the same way, there was a moment between them—between her and Simon—where they smiled, and wondered what else they might have in common. Gretchen thought it was no wonder David had waited until this day of all days for them to meet. Simon was enormously good-looking, and she thought any earlier and it might have been an altogether different ceremony.

“I’m sorry,” said Doctor Dreyfus. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean what it seems like it means. If your husband uses a gym, for example. If he happened to share a towel. And there are other ways to spread it. People don’t realize how contagious these diseases are.”

Gretchen wondered if Doctor Dreyfus had really assumed it was her husband who’d had the affair or if it was just professional tact that had led him there. He’d said it could be spread by sharing a towel, but she wondered if bed sheets were an equally contagious host. Bed sheets from the Holiday Inn on South Airport Way, for example, because that’s where it would have come from, any one of the four times—five times if you count the day Simon actually remembered to bring a condom, and if she’d gotten it off the bed sheets why not count that time? Five times, then.

There was of course the possibility that it really had come from David. From the gym, like Doctor Dreyfus suggested, or maybe from another woman, another airport hotel. Only David didn’t go to the gym, didn’t need to, and he never wasted an opportunity to tell her just how much he loved her. “Love of my life,” he would say in bed, at the dinner table, sitting in the living room reading the paper or watching television, “do you know how much I love you? If each grain of salt was your average I love you, my I love you would be all the oceans and the Seven Seas and the Great Salt Lake,” he would say, and she would scowl and he would say, “And the Salt Flats.”

The first thing she did after the appointment was call Simon, but Simon didn’t pick up his phone. She had taken the day off of work for the appointment and the appointment had been at eleven o’clock, so that she found herself at midday with a pharmacy bag full of bad news and no one to tell it to. She went to the mall.

Gretchen only ever went to the mall when bad things were happening because everything in her life was judged by comparison and bad things didn’t really seem so bad anymore after she’d spent an hour at the food court, after she’d found her dress size in the petite section of the Ross store. She bought an Orange Julius and tried calling Simon again, but it was still just ring, ring, ring, and then his voicemail.

The nights and afternoons bled into one another so that she couldn’t tell them apart: David—her husband—was the one who always said I love you when he climbed on top of her, the one whom she couldn’t look in the eye. They’d had sex two nights ago, on a Tuesday. Simon was the one who’d shave at lunchtime so it wouldn’t be too rough against her cheeks. They’d had sex Monday afternoon.

After they’d had sex, after they’d held each other for a significant enough amount of time to convince themselves this was real, Simon had turned to her and said, “When I was about seven, I used to go visit my uncle a lot down in the city, in San Francisco. He was an obscene man—not in a dirty way but in a violent way. I remember he used to show me around the city. He’d drive me down the Tenderloin and point out all the prostitutes and the drug deals going down, and then he’d drive me down the Castro and shout ‘Queer!’ out the window.”

“What’s this got to do with me?” she asked. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Just sharing, I guess.”

I’ve got to tell him, she suddenly thought, and for the first time in a long time “him” was not Simon—who’d basically been “him” since the wedding—but David. Because at first she’d just considered not telling him at all, letting him find out on his own, having his own doctor, Doctor Berger (and why were they all Jewish anyway?) say, “It doesn’t necessarily mean what it seems like it means,” and then go on to assume he’d gotten it at the gym or wherever else he went like the gym where he could get it. Now she realized she had to tell him because if she didn’t tell him, he was going to tell her. “Darling,” he was going to say. “Love of my life, there’s something I have to tell you,” and then later: “It doesn’t mean what it seems like it means,” and he’d repeat the whole gym towel straight out of Doctor Dreyfus’ mouth and she just didn’t see how she could sit through all that again, so she was going to tell him. She was going to tell him before he told her.

She arrived home an hour before David was supposed to be home, at six, and on the way she stopped by the florist and picked up some flowers. For forty-two dollars she filled every vase in the house except the largest, on the dining table, from across which they sat and ate and looked at each other or didn’t. There was always her mother’s she could go to, her old bedroom with her childhood blanket and the brand-new exercise equipment her mother had bought off late-night television. She was still young enough to survive a failed marriage, chalk it up to life experience and move on, but maybe there was still room enough for love, for forgiveness. She called the Chinese restaurant from down the block with the crispy eggplant David liked so much and ordered food to be delivered at six-fifteen; Szechuan so it’d be spicy, to confuse the tears.

After that everything went like clockwork. David arrived home at six o’clock, kissed her on the cheek and looked around at all the flowers. “Some special occasion?” he asked.

Gretchen shrugged. “Maybe.”

He grinned. “It’s not our anniversary, is it?”

“Nope,” she shook her head. “I ordered food from The Lamplighter. It’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

“Oh, I meant to call and tell you,” he said, and the pitch of his voice raised just a note, but she noticed it. “I had a late lunch. James had some things he wanted to talk about and we went to Dalloway’s and—you know how much I like Dalloway’s—”

“It’s fine,” she waved her hand away. “Eat what you like and take whatever’s left to the office tomorrow.”

At six-fifteen the food arrived. Gretchen paid, and even though the last time the boy had forgotten the rice she still tipped him generously, and because she had already set the table David barely had time to take off his jacket before the food was ready and on the table. He sat down and tucked his napkin into his collar. “Maybe I’m hungry after all,” he said. “Maybe all my appetite needed was a good kick in the rear.” He took a bite. “Is it a little spicier than usual?”

“There’s something I have to tell you, David,” she said. “Something you should know.”

He put down his fork. He looked at her across the dining table, over the flower-less vase, and without mentioning the gym or the gym towel, Simon or Doctor Dreyfus or any of the rest of it, she told him. “What?” he asked.

“Herpes, David. Genital herpes.” It sounded obscene coming out of her mouth—not in a dirty way but in a violent way.

He stood up, the napkin still tucked into his collar, and walked out of the room, and maybe that was what she’d wanted after all. Maybe it was better this way, she thought. She followed him into the living room because the living room was on the way to the bedroom and that’s where her suitcases were. He had his back to her. “I—I didn’t—” he began, and she stopped. “Oh Jesus.” He turned back to her and she saw there were tears streaming down his cheeks and she could think of nothing but to go to him. “Oh Jesus!” He buried his head in her lap. “I’m sorry!” he cried. “Christ, I’m so sorry!”

Her hand hovered just over his head like she was unable to trust it, like it was just playing dead and any moment it was going to jump up and bite her. She knew that two wrongs don’t make a right but these weren’t wrongs, she told herself, they were—what was the word? Indiscretions. No one ever said anything about that, and why not anyway? Why not? She let her hand fall down into his hair and it didn’t bite and it wasn’t playing dead and she thought to herself, maybe everything’s going to be all right as he laid his head in her lap and cried tears into her crotch and later, when she’d look back on that night, of what she’d said and what she should have said, she’d think it was as if she’d been sinking in quicksand, as if she’d reached out for a tree branch to save her, grabbed at the nearest thing and pulled, only it hadn’t been a tree branch; it’d been a python, and if it hadn’t bit then that was just because that’s not what pythons do.