The Other Side of the World
Published in Issue #8(A story adapted from a forthcoming novel)
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My affair with Jin-gen had been going on for nearly a year before she told me about how she’d met Larry. The three of us were members of the same synagogue—Congregation B’nai Israel, in Newton, Massachusetts—and her stepdaughter and my son were in the synagogue’s bar and bat mitzvah class with Larry’s son. Week after week, our children moved in a pack with about a dozen others—in and out of shopping malls, to and from classes and services, and to elaborate parties on Saturday afternoons and evenings. Late Sunday mornings, Jin-gen, Larry, and I, along with other parents, would wait in the synagogue’s lobby to pick up our children from their class, after which we’d drop them off at the Chestnut Hill Shopping Mall in Newton, where they’d hang out for a few hours, during which time, on the Sundays Jin-gen and I were the designated family drivers, she and I would adjourn to a nearby motel or, if both children were planning on a stay of more than two hours—usually for a movie—we’d drive to a town fifteen or twenty miles away—Milton, Winthrop, or Chelsea most often—and find a place there.
And twice, when we knew our children would be occupied for four hours or more, we drove up to Gloucester. Our second time there, waking from a lovely post-coital nap—this happened five weeks before Jin-gen’s daughter’s bat mitzvah—I told Jin-gen that as wonderful as these afternoons were, what I’d been wishing for was to find a way for us to...
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