Red journal, revisited

Tuesday night I arrived home at 11, exhausted enough to have dozed off on the bus. Yet otherwise so wired .....real sleep would have been futile. So I searched the bookshelf for a distraction, settling on a red-cloth-backed journal my friend Rebecca gave me when I was still in my 20s. Inscribed on the frontispiece:

"A place to record all your steamy, tawdry affairs after going to the Big Cheesy, etc.!"

(Oh my. Tell me someone besides me, anyone, has memories of that dance club and random hook-ups with meat-market guys. Please. Incidentally, this red book is the only place one might find proof of a Craiglist encounter involving my red dancing dress....on several levels the damn best two hours of my life.....but I digress. )

Among the steaminess and thwarted love found in all such journals, sometime in 2004 I transcribed a passage by Canadian author Alice Munro. She is acclaimed by many as the finest short-story writer of this era. I concur: her writing is among the finest I have read.

The below comes from the story "The Children Stay," in 1998's The Love of a Good Woman. The "her" is a wife, a mother of two young daughters, in an adulterous affair, and whose lover is on the brain:

"The thoughts that came to her, of Jeffrey, were not really thoughts at all--they were more like alterations in her body. This could happen when she was sitting on the beach or when she was wringing out diapers or when she and Brian were visiting his parents. In the middle of Monopoly games, Scrabble games, card games, she went right on talking, listening, working, keeping track of the children, while some memory of her secret life disturbed her like a radiant explosion. Then a warm weight settled, reassurance filling up all her hollows. But it didn't last, this comfort leaked away, and she was like a miser whose windfall has vanished and who is convinced such luck can never strike again."

Several months ago I was party to an encounter with a man I should not have encountered....a fit story for the red journal, if I could divulge details here or anywhere else where someone might read. The affair from spark to awkward goodbye took less than a week. The other party and I knew both it shouldn't go on, and it did not. We have not spoken of it since.

But it stayed on my mind, of course. As inappropriate as it was, I'll admit to a certain pride in such a secret.....while doing everyday things like singing in church, going to the grocery store, sitting at the beach, knowing that no one knew but him and me. As if we had achieved something. Then like Munro explains, the comfort would leak away....I had behaved badly, and knew it, and had nothing to show but the regret, and guilt. Then the next day, perhaps, I would be glad for it again.....then the guilt....although with time the cycle trailed off.

In the same circular way, I don't know how to end this thought train on a positive note....or to even end it....and I can't tell you about my inappropriate encounter.....so.....what now...? Hmmm. When I started, it was mostly to share the Munro passage....didn't remember that I was, like always, going to have a ready-made personal correlation.

Oh well. I can tell you that I slept well on Tuesday night, once I did sleep.