Breaking and Entering

When her lover is in town, Louise tries not to let herself drive by his house. Why be reminded that when they are not together he exists somewhere else, sitting down to morning coffee with a woman who isn't her, a ratty flannel robe tied loose around his waist (Louise knows he sleeps naked and this drives her to despair). She is achingly obsessed but can control those impulses that might make him stop seeing her. His wife might be home. When Natalie isn't repairing computers in their attic she spends most of her time preparing kosher food, even kosher cosmetics, since she doesn't trust the few supposedly kosher products sold at Kroger's. Louise drives a red Voyager, as conspicuous in its color as the wig Natalie wears, a wig Louise would hate to see floating past the window as she drives by their house.

Her lover - his name is Ames - is a Unitarian minister. He could be home working on a sermon or walking his dog at any time. If he notices Louise's van circling his block he won't believe her promise that she can keep their affair in its place. Capable of driving by his house, she might also be capable of parking in his driveway and ringing the bell or standing up at services and announcing to his parishioners: Your minister and I make love to one another every other week at the Potawatomie Inn.

But Ames and his family have been away in New York. Natalie and the girls are seeing the museums while Ames takes part in a symposium on Christian-Jewish-Islamic relations, and Louise feels drawn to all reminders that he eventually will come back. The first few days he was gone she kept finding excuses to drive into town - Louise and her family live seven miles beyond the limits of Potawatomie, which itself is a city with little to distinguish it but the Michigan State Prison and factories that produce canned onion rings and twine - so she could detour past Ames's house. She managed to stay away for the remainder of the week, but Ames is coming home today, and Louise is so excited that she has already driven into Potawatomie twice. "I'm going in to buy fish for dinner," she told her husband, at which he made a face that expressed some concern or fear he couldn't bear to put in words. It is only four o'clock, and Ames can't possibly get back from the airport until five. If she drives past his house much earlier than that he won't have arrived yet and she will need to try again.

Instead, she takes a tour of the landmarks of their affair. The first is Ames's church, a small brown stucco structure with a billboard quoting Emerson to the effect that "Life consists of what a man is thinking of all day," a message Louise interprets as a love note left by Ames. She has spent hours at this church, helpingAmes and his committee fight the city's fundamentalists. She never loves Ames more than when he is guiding this committee to the resolutions they will draft, or, at meeting's end, when he exchanges a soul shake with Matt LeGrand - the blind, rotund minister of the A.M.E. Church - or heartfelt hugs and back pats with Loretta Paterson and Mary Walz, who represent the Quakers, or Jack Lovecraft, the gay rights activist who heads the AIDS coalition, for which Ames and Louise also volunteer. Afterwards, she and Ames retire to the shed behind the church where clothes and food are stored until they can be delivered to the poor. Overtaken with her memories of the hours that she and Ames have spent amid those bags and boxes, Louise gives herself over completely to her dream - hallucination is more accurate, that's how three-dimensional it is. She closes her eyes and leans back, moving her mouth and hands, wondering if she might be the only woman who gets off on imagining herself going down on a man the...