Lisa Johnson, "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman: Adultery and the (Third-Wave) Feminist Desire for Alternative Heterosexualities" (page 2 of 4)

With This Ring . . .

Could some artificer
beat it into bright stones, transform it
into a dazzling circlet no one could take
for solemn betrothal or to make promises
living will not let them keep?
—Denise Levertov, "Wedding-Ring"

Paul and I are holding hands across a small table at a bistro near the club where we will hear a mandolin concert in about an hour. I am so happy to be out on a date in public with my married boyfriend that I actually skipped down the sidewalk after we parked the car. This scene strikes me as very Hollywood—fading into the anonymity of a nearby city, staring into each other's eyes over appetizers and wine, intensely focused on the arc of energy passing between us. We almost parody romance in this iconographic couplehood moment, but it feels good and we go with it. Or at least I go with it. Paul seems less bubbly, and I ask why. This pattern will dominate our affair, eventually becoming intolerable to me, but at this point I still cheerily listen to stories of domestic struggle and work diligently to lift his spirits with my illicit girlfriend superpowers.

He recounts a conversation with his wife riddled with unmemorable marital nitpicking. In the story, he was sitting at the kitchen table, a spot that evokes coziness in my mind, not strife. She stood in front of the stove making a grilled cheese sandwich for their son. The son did not finish it and gave the second half to his dad. Paul keeps talking, but my eye stops here, deliberately resisting his narrative gaze; I linger over this image, this grilled cheese sandwich intruding on the romantic ambience of our bistro table. His wife might as well have pulled up a chair and joined us. I had imagined only tension between them, not the relaxed intimacy of grilled cheese.

With this new domestic detail in mind, I go from holding Paul's hand to rubbing it aggressively, wearing a hot groove along his heart line. My possessive angst neutralizes whatever was bothering Paul, and he becomes content, playful. Still immersed in the brine of emotional sadomasochism, I smile and announce:

"I want to wear your wedding ring sometime while we fuck."

I expect him to say no. I expect him to chide me for petty jealousy, for getting hung up on the accoutrements of marriage as somehow meaningful.

"You can wear it now if you want."

My stomach flips over and my cheeks go red. The taboo of it all! I slip his simple gold band on my left ring finger behind a birthstone ring to hold the loose boyfriend-sized jewelry in place. He tells me his wife's name is engraved on the inside. I admire my faux engagement set from the corner of my eye as I drain a glass of Blackstone merlot. I feel wild. At the concert, we overhear a conversation between a woman and a couple sitting in front of us. "So," one woman quizzes the other, "what are you?—girlfriend? fiancée? wife?"

Paul rolls his eyes, leans over to whisper, "What difference does it make? Everybody thinks they have a right to know which label to apply."

I laugh, agreeing: "Like they need the categories established first, so they know how to interact with each other." I like theorizing together about other people's behavior, holding ourselves apart from the sheep-like acquiescence to social roles all around us. We reassure each other and ourselves that we are not like them. We are not part of the marriage police.

At the end of the evening he sees me into my apartment and I hold my breath as he leaves, wondering if he'll really go home without his wedding ring. I wait till his car pulls out of my driveway to take the ring off and look at his wife's name, faded with 12 years of wear. I put it back on, push my hand between my pillow and the cool sheet, and fall promptly asleep.

The meaning of the ring seemed dramatically altered by its placement on my finger (the body of the Other Woman). Instead of representing the sanctity of marriage, or the facile cultural myth that true love never ends, or the symbolic binding of two people into one, the ring worked like a pageant dress on a drag queen, calling into question the cultural codes of state-sanctioned heterosexuality, revealing them as performances and approximations of this socially constructed role rather than natural, inevitable, fulfilling behaviors. It served as a reminder of the widespread inability among the married to live up to the monogamous reproductive heterosexual imperative. It had the effect of queering marriage, opening it to critique, making explicit the hidden agendas and human failings it shelters. It also spoke to the question of entitlement—who is allowed to wear this insignia of social status, what must one sacrifice in exchange for this privilege, what official channels are required to grant juridical and psychological meaning to this token of love—and it broke the viselike hold on social entitlements that wives traditionally have enjoyed (or solaced themselves with).[5] The ring on my unmarried, improper, wandering hand marked my physical embodiment as a space of carnivalesque irreverence for dominant cultural norms surrounding female sexuality, marriage, and the husband as private property. I experienced it as a sign of transgression—going where I wasn't supposed to go, doing what I wasn't supposed to do, wearing what I wasn't supposed to wear—a practice of "creative disrespect" toward the institution of marriage and its attendant stigmatization of single women and others who have not consented to state-controlled sexuality.[6] In fact, I want to emphasize the disrespect of the action as a conscious distancing from discourses of respectability, in particular respectable womanhood.[7]