Infidelity Read Online Free Page A

scratched, but I just keep scratching and scratching until it bleeds, because that word was fifty cents and that one a dollar, this one two, and after this sentence is done I’ll be able to buy a steak dinner.
    I thought that being a writer would satiate me. I thought once I was the greatest, the beloved, the celebrated, the critically acclaimed, the itch would finally relent. But it never did cease, and as time passes I become more and more paralyzed by my own success. By my own failure that only I call failure. It’s impossible to complain about success unless you’re paying someone $175 an hour to listen (which I do, thank you very much). No one wants to hear how dismayed you are by the fact that everyone adores you. About how you feel like you’re not doing enough to be adored. But I am dismayed. I live in a constant state of discomfort and dissatisfaction, amused by nothing and disappointed by everything.
    This feeling? This quiet nagging voice inside my head that proves I’ll never be satiated? This is where all the romance, all the “I’m a writer” bullshit goes to die.
    What once was thrilling—a “craft,” a “calling”—has become nothing more than an endless stream of tiny hotels and tiny towns, readings to a packed house and then readings where two people show up—one is a homeless man there for the snacks and the other is my publicist. Late nights spent away from home staring at the flashing cursor on a computer screen, paralyzed because nothing comes even though the questions of “how’s it coming” never cease. Interviews and discussions and talks about “process” and young men who smell like cigarette smoke and too much sex asking me to mentor them, to read and critique their manuscripts about consuming lady flesh and doing blow. I listen to them talk about authors and ideologies, and I am keenly aware that there is a certain type of female that falls all over herself to grind her pelvis against their corduroy crotches. The kind of female who thinks a poem written about her is a gesture with meaning, when really it has even less depth than a porn pin-up pressed under a mattress.
    I met Ronnie on a Friday evening in December at a university party at someone’s too-huge-for-two-people Annex house. The kind of house where the books are shelved chronologically by genre and dusted by a maid service. A well-meaning professor friend of mine invited me in the hopes of impressing the faculty with my presence, and I just drained the host’s expensive whisky offering, nodding my thank-yous at people who let me know they enjoyed my latest book.
    â€œOh, that’s good, because I wrote it just for you,” I longed to smarmily spit in their faces.
    But you can’t.
    You have to be grateful.
    Always grateful.
    Always humble.
    â€œThank you. That means so much to me. It’s an honour.”
    I don’t imagine I impressed anyone.
    I just drank more whisky and contemplated the diseases I could acquire from room-temperature decapod crustaceans prepared by imbeciles, and then Ronnie appeared. Tall and sleek and semi-clad, her hair so shiny, she walked across the room toward me in a little black dress—and she wouldn’t have cared about books if I had begged her to. A girl like that doesn’t care about books. A girl like that has a single shelf of mismatched volumes, gifts she’s never read from friends she doesn’t much like. One of the books is full of martini recipes and another is Horton Hears a Who! She reminded me of my irrelevance. She had no idea who I was in a room full of people who desperately needed to know me, people who threw empty compliments my way, female students who wanted to claim I had flirted with them, people so pleased that I would be the Massey College Writer-in-Residence in January, and who hoped I’d agree to attend their dinner parties. Judge their competitions. Mentor their