Across The Savannah

And then it comes crashing down, this white-hot phosphorescent thing called life. Perhaps it's an anonymous tip, a suspicious change in routine, or a suggestion of unfamiliar perfume. It could be a confession wrung out by guilt or a note on a pillow—gutless retreat.

It's a tragic drama acted out over the ages. A man leaves his wife for a younger woman. For the woman left behind, the pain and grief are never ending ... like the longest train ever, going slower than slow. It crawls. For the man who takes flight, guilt as heavy as an ocean freighter sooner or later gets him—if he has a conscience. The other woman, I suppose, feels victorious. Her day will come though.

I've reached that point in life where I see more and more victims. Wave after wave of women duped and dumped. I feel like a war correspondent near the front line. The victims straggle in, wounded, destroyed, some near suicidal, each with a sad tale of love lost. The world they know has disappeared. Post-traumatic stress disorder lashes its tentacles around them. They're incredulous at being stranded. "Why didn't I see this coming?"

Yes, why.

The pattern is easy to see. The woman is usually in her late 40s or early 50s. For years she has stood by her hardworking husband. She raised their children, spent evenings alone while he worked. Tucked in the kids telling them that dad loves them, and for sure he does, but he's away on business. Sometimes it's monkey business.

An old fool's desire for a younger woman, more often than not, causes this heartache. It happens so often it's the great cliché of our society. The workplace is the great Petri dish of illicit romances, and the romances it cultures get dismissed with a wave of the hand.

"Well, I guess you heard about Eric's midlife crisis."

"No. What's he up to?"

"He left his wife for his 20-something secretary."

And so it goes. I was in a restaurant one day having lunch. Nearby, in a corner booth, a man and woman clasped hands across the table, cupid's arrows darting about. They wore wedding rings. They could not take their eyes off one another. They left holding hands.

When the waitress brought my tab, I said, "Now that was a happily married couple."

"They're married," she said, "but not to each other. They live out of town and meet here now and then. They told me their secret."

Adultery and affairs have given writers material throughout the ages. And why not. What's more intriguing than matters of the heart. One writer takes an interesting angle on the topic. A recurring theme in James Salter's novels is the fact that we live too long now. "Till death do you part" takes a lot longer than it once did and it wears some people out.

American's life expectancy topped 78 years in 2008, a record high. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was only 58 for men and 62 for women. That's an additional 20 years of exposure to temptation, stress, and the opportunity to become jaded.

Not all, of course, outlive love, and they stay together until the end. Others succumb. "Beautiful lives frayed by time" as Salter puts it. Time takes its toll all right. Some couples drift apart so gradually, they don't notice when, precisely, they cease to be a couple.

I know a woman whose contempt for her ex-husband flows from her hot and thick, the lava of love lost. He left her for a woman he worked with. She devoted her whole life to him but received little in return for time spent as a homemaker, wife, and mom. She gave up everything while he carried on with his livelihood and education. The judicial system did not help her, merely dragged things out. She holds no interest in the past, not even memories, because "as we all know, we remember the bad more often than the good." She's beautiful, could be a model, ought to be a model, but that didn't keep her from being abandoned. "I'll never love again," she tells me. "I'm not taking that chance."

"Beautiful lives frayed by time" is right sure enough.

No one's immune to betrayal. It does not respect race, age, gender, appearance, socioeconomic status, or level of education. It's simply a virus seeking a host. Marriage. I tip my hat to those who remain a couple for life. That's quite an achievement in the age of "me, me, me" and self-indulgence.

We try to take the high road here in this country. Other cultures take a different route. In Europe having a mistress is no big deal. Women have their paramours as well. Often, they all travel together and socialize. Having an affair is not cause for divorce. They simply look the other way, believing no one person can meet another person's needs all the time. Europe's culture is much older than ours and they seem to have worked things out. Here, it can be your ruination as we see all too often.

So, what is it that causes so many to plunge headlong into this vortex known as an affair? Is it about feeling good, feeling attractive? Yes. Do people marry the wrong person? Yes, it happens all the time. Is it all about "growing apart?" Yes, time numbs some people to the person closest to them. It's sad and for some it may be unavoidable despite all the platitudes and hours spent sitting on a pew. A wandering eye is a hard thing to discipline.

The problem goes deeper than we think. It goes to the very core of our DNA. Some experts say man is hardwired to be polygamous. The rules of the game are not in our DNA; we were not born with them. We made the rules to quell the urge to roam.

I know that does not sit well with many of you. It's unsettling. Every time I encounter yet another victim, an abandoned woman, tears in her eyes, hands trembling uncontrollably, I keep going back to something James Dickey told me. We were discussing people and their ways and adultery came up. And then he mentioned the Ten Commandments. "Ever notice," he said, "that the Seventh Commandment says 'thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife?' It doesn't mention your neighbor's husband. You better believe the men who wrote the commandments were looking out for themselves."

Some men always do, don't they ladies? And when they do, someone's bound for Heartbreak City. Someone's got a ticket to isolation and loneliness. But let me be fair. Women leave their husbands, too, and the destruction is just as devastating to the men left behind. Heartbreak City doesn't care. It's a big place filled with sad hotels, and there's always a vacant room waiting for another lost soul.

Email Tom with feedback and ideas for new columns. tompol@earthlink.net