Excerpt from The First Time by Joy Fielding, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

They talked about abortion; they talked about adoption; ultimately they stopped talking and got married. Or got married and stopped talking, Mattie thought now, emerging from the water into the brisk fall air and grabbing at the large magenta towel folded neatly on the white canvas deck chair, sprinkled liberally with fallen leaves. She used one end of the towel to dry the ends of her hair, wrapping the rest of it tightly around her body, like a straitjacket. Jake had never really wanted to get married, Mattie understood now -- as she'd understood then, although they'd both pretended, at least in the beginning, that their marriage would have been inevitable. After a short break, he'd have realized how much he loved her and come back to her.

Except that he didn't love her. Not then. Not now.

And truth be told, Mattie wasn't sure that she'd ever really loved him.

That she'd been attracted to him was beyond question. That she'd been mesmerized by his good looks and effortless charm, of that there was never any doubt. But that she'd actually been in love with him, that she didn't know. She hadn't had time to find out. Everything had happened too fast. And then, suddenly, there was no time left.

Mattie secured the towel at her breast and ran up the dozen wooden steps toward her kitchen, pulling open the sliding glass door and stepping inside, dripping onto the large, dark blue ceramic tile floor. Normally, this room made her smile. It was all blues and sunny yellows, with stainless steel appliances and a round, stone-topped table, decorated with hand-painted pieces of fruit, and surrounded by four wicker-and-wrought-iron chairs. Mattie had been dreaming of such a kitchen since seeing a picture layout in Architectural Digest on the kitchens of Provence. She'd personally supervised the kitchen's renovation the previous year, four years to the day after they'd moved into the three-bedroom house on Walnut Drive. Jake had been against the renovation, just as he'd been against moving to the suburbs, even if Evanston was only a fifteen-minute drive from downtown Chicago. He'd wanted to stay in their apartment on Lakeshore Drive, despite agreeing with all Mattie's arguments that the suburbs were safer, the choice of schools better, the space unquestionably bigger. He claimed his opposition to the move was all about convenience, but Mattie knew it was really about permanence. There was something too settled about a house in the suburbs, especially for a man with one foot out the door. "It'll be better for Kim," Mattie argued, and Jake finally agreed. Anything for Kim. The reason he'd married her in the first place.

The first time he'd been unfaithful was just after their second wedding anniversary. She'd stumbled on the incriminating evidence while going through the pockets of his jeans before putting them in the wash, extricating several amorous little notes, the i's dotted with tiny hearts. She'd ripped them up, flushed them down the toilet, but pieces of the pale lavender stationery had floated back stubbornly to the surface of the bowl, refusing to be dismissed so easily. An omen of what lay ahead, she thought now, though she'd missed the symbolism at the time. Throughout the almost sixteen years of their marriage, there'd been a succession of such notes, of unfamiliar phone numbers on scraps of paper left lying carelessly around, nameless voices lingering on the answering machine, the not-so-quiet whispers of friends, and now this, the latest, a receipt for a room at the Ritz-Carlton, dated several months ago, around the time she was suggesting the possibility of a second child, the receipt left in the pocket of a jacket he'd asked her to take to the cleaners.

Did he have to be so blatant? Was her discovery of his indiscretions necessary to validate his experience? Were his conquests somehow less real without her, even if she had thus far refused to acknowledge them? And was acknowledging his affairs precisely what he was trying to force her to do? Because he knew that if he forced her to acknowledge his infidelities, if he forced her to actually confront him, then that would mean the end of their marriage. Was that what he wanted?

Copyright © 2000 by Joy Fielding