Chapter 6

Today is the day that a sane president of the United States got elected. It is also the day that I said goodbye to Eduardo, the poolboy who worked for me and also cheated on his girlfriend in my Beverly Hills estate (I had an apartment and a house because I’d done well for myself, but someone else was looking after the place. In fact I should probably check in on it in light of recent events.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, Eduardo has been having an affair with me for quite some time now. His wife, Camila, has no idea, but I’ve felt guilty in the back of my mind about it for years on end, and, I must confess, it has inspired many sordid love affairs in my romance novels: That’s what people seem to live for.

I continue typing but I have to stop because tears start rushing down my face. Irene asks me if I’m okay and I tell her I most certainly am not. I miss Eduardo very, very much, and there is no way on earth that I can forgive myself for what I have done to his poor wife Camila. She certainly didn’t deserve this. She had been nothing but my loyal housekeeper for years on end. Eduardo had recently come to New York to see me, and I myself, the writer and the mistress, had had the audacity to break it off with him, after paying for his flight nonetheless and pressuring to come over. There is something you might not know about me: Sex calms me down when I’m in dangerous situations. It always has and it always will. Of course I took a shower and all because there is a global pandemic going around, wreaking havoc on the entire planet, but I still totally lost my head for one night. I did it after the sex, of course, because I didn’t want to miss out on that. That’s what I was looking for, if I was being totally honest with myself. Companionship was not exactly what I was craving: It was just too much damn work.

I was sobbing now, praying to the Lord and then glaring at my phone, working on myself but then deciding not too. I kept going back and forth about whether or not this was the right thing for me to do, but as Irene pointed out so accurately, it was obviously the right moral course of action because this man was married.