10:43—We announce that it’s time to go to bed.

10:45, 10:47, 10:51, 10:54, 10:56 & 10:59—We announce that it really is time to go to bed Right Now and we are Not Kidding.

11:03—Robert actually gets into his bed. We tuck him in, kiss him good night, and creep silently out of the room, alone at last.

11:17—Robert falls asleep and is immediately awakened by a terrible nightmare caused by being in bed with his face six inches from a rubber Godzilla doll. We remove it.

11:28—We kiss Robert good night and creep silently out of the room, alone at last.

11:32—Hearing noise from Robert’s room, we return to find him sobbing loudly. So upset that he is barely able to choke out the words, he explains that he has just realized that the mother bird in Horton Hatches the Egg loses her baby in the end, and even though she was terribly mean, she is probably very sorry by now, and very lonely. We try to explain that this is not at all the point that Dr. Seuss was trying to make, but Robert is inconsolable. Finally we agree to let him climb into bed with us, but “just for one minute.”

2:47 A.m.—We return Robert to bed, kiss him good night, and creep silently from the room, alone at last.

3:14, 3:58, 4:26, 5:11 & 5:43—The household goes on Red Alert status as various routine nightmares occur, each one causing us to stagger, half-asleep, down the hallway, like actors in a scene from Night of the Living Dead Parents.

6:12—Dawn breaks.

Whenever I read newspaper stories about people who have, say, nine children, I never ask myself: “How do they manage to take care of them all?” I ask myself: “Where did they find the time to conceive them all?”

I don’t mean to suggest, by what I’ve said in this chapter, that children are bad for a relationship. Because in the end, the negative aspects of being a parent—the loss of intimacy, the expense, the total lack of free time, the incredible burden of responsibility, the constant nagging fear of having done the wrong thing, etc.—are more than outweighed by the positive aspects, such as never again lacking for primitive drawings to attach to your refrigerator with magnets.

My first piece of advice is that if you’re planning to have an affair, you should read this chapter in a safe place, such as the linen closet. You don’t want to be sitting around the living room, in plain view of your spouse, reading a chapter entitled, in great big letters, “How to Have an Affair.” I recommend that you hide this book under your garments and say to your spouse: “Well, I guess I’ll go sit in the linen closet with a flashlight for a while!” Your spouse will never suspect a thing. Unless you don’t have a linen closet. That would be a dead giveaway.

Another dead giveaway is acting guilty. Let’s take a typical person—we’ll call him “Ed”[1]—who is having an affair with a woman at his office. If Ed has a guilty conscience, he may accidentally reveal this in casual conversation with his wife:

ED’S WIFE: Would you like another corn muffin, dear?

ED: I’m having an affair with a woman in my office!

Even if Ed’s wife is not a trained psychologist, she might conceivably gather, from certain subtle verbal “clues” Ed is subconsciously dropping, that something “fishy” is going on. Ed must make more of an eff ort to watch his words:

ED’S WIFE: Would you like another corn muffin, dear?

ED: I’m not having an affair with a woman in my office!

Most affairs occur at the office, of course, which leads us to another important rule of affair-having: Never be discreet at the Office. To illustrate why this is important, let’s consider two people, Ellen and Chuck, who have worked together in a large corporate office for several years, and have recently started having an affair.

Up to this point, Ellen and Chuck have probably been behaving the way men and women always behave in offices, which is to say: constantly winking and leering and engaging in loud and fun suggestive sexual banter. Behaving like lust-crazed fools has been a major form of entertainment in offices for as long as anybody can remember; in terms of total American corporation employee hours consumed, suggestive banter ranks well ahead of work, and only slightly behind making Xerox copies of personal documents.

But like so many couples, Chuck and Ellen, now that they are engaging in real, as opposed to pretend, sexual activity, suddenly decide they have to be discreet. They never banter. They never eat lunch together any more. They walk past each other without even looking at each other. When they are forced, by circumstances, to be together, they display the same kind of warmth and closeness toward each other as the Vice-president of the United States displays toward deceased heads of state. They are formal and cool.

They are also morons. The other employees, who, if they have been in the corporate world more than six weeks, have already witnessed hundreds of other major office affairs, will immediately recognize the cause of this sudden change in behavior. Ellen and Chuck might just as well go around wearing convention-style nametags that say: HI! MY NAME IS ELLEN! I’M HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH CHUCKI!

Within days everybody in the office will know what’s going on. The affair will be discussed extensively in staff meetings. It could well appear in the annual report to the stockholders.

What this means, of course, is that if you want your affair to go unnoticed by your co-workers, you have to be blatantly obvious about it. Chuck should wait until the office is extremely quiet, then stand up at his desk and shout across 47 desks to Ellen: “HEY ELLEN! WHAT DO YOU SAY WE MEET AT THE OUT O’TOWN MOTOR LODGE AFTER WORK TODAY AND HAVE SEXUAL INTERCOURSE!” And Ellen should shout back: “HECK YES!! I HAVE MY DIAPHRAGM RIGHT HERE IN MY PURSE!”

Chuck’s and Ellen’s co-workers would never suspect a thing. “What a couple of kidders Chuck and Ellen are!” the co-workers would chuckle.

You can always tell. No matter how careful your spouse is, he or she is going to make a mistake somewhere, and you’ll catch it, if you know the Major Warning Signs, which are:

1. Your spouse acts strange.

2. Your spouse, trying to trick you, acts normal.

If you notice either of these Warning Signs, you should wait until your spouse is in a vulnerable position, such as reclining in a dental chair, and then you should point-blank ask the following gently probing question (if your spouse is male): “Well? Who is she?”

Now listen closely to the answer. If it’s something specific like: “You mean the person I’m having an affair with? She is Dorina Mae Swiggins,” that means your suspicions are probably justified. But if it’s something evasive like: “What are you talking about?” or “Who is Who?”, then you quite frankly have to ask yourself how come your spouse is refusing to answer a simple direct question. Either way, this would be a good time to read the next chapter.