Rusty and Carolyn Begin Their Affair

Rusty and Carolyn’s affair begins with a small change of destination: a drink that Rusty suggests having at Gil’s becomes an invitation to Carolyn Polhemus’s apartment. For Rusty, the exchange opens onto an obsessive attachment that soon becomes a regular part of his life. In retrospect, he sees the hope of that first moment alongside the turmoil that followed, and the affair’s intensity in contrast with the ordered domestic life he had maintained with Barbara.

The Invitation and Its Unequal Promise

Carolyn proposes that they have a drink, and Rusty first suggests Gil’s. She instead names the place where they had ended up on Friday: her apartment. Rusty responds with inward exhilaration, but Carolyn has already turned back to work before he leaves. The moment holds both the promise he reads into her invitation and the difference in their immediate attention: for him, it seems momentous; for her, work resumes. Rusty later looks back on himself at that threshold with pity. He recognizes how much hope he had invested in the encounter, and how little he understood what it would demand of him. His account presents the beginning not as a mutual declaration or a settled romantic commitment, but as an opening that acquires overwhelming significance in his own mind.

From Encounter to Routine

The relationship soon becomes a recurring private arrangement. Rusty says he visits Carolyn three or four nights a week. She leaves her door unlocked, and the news is on when he arrives. She may be cleaning, drinking, or opening her mail; a bottle of white wine sits on the kitchen table. She does not hurry to greet him, and their time together often begins with the ordinary business of her evening rather than an immediate reunion. Their conversations frequently turn to the office and local politics. Rumors that Raymond Horgan may not run again interest Carolyn, who gathers political information from the office, the police force, and the bar association. Only after this stretch of separate activity does she turn toward Rusty and welcome him. The repeated pattern—arrival, conversation, waiting, and eventual intimacy—makes the affair less a single sudden escape than a routine built into Carolyn’s working life.

Desire Against Domestic Life

Rusty frames the affair against his seventeen years of faithful marriage and the settled concerns that had accumulated around his life with Barbara. Their household includes everyday strains, such as repairs to the rain gutters and Nathaniel’s reluctance to study mathematics; his work, too, has become a source of dissatisfaction, as Raymond increasingly attends to its defects rather than its successes. Rusty describes his married life as crowded with these responsibilities and with memories and worries that seem to intrude even into the couple’s bed. Carolyn, by contrast, becomes for him an experience that seems to break those familiar patterns. He recalls feeling disoriented and as though fantasy had become real. That contrast explains the affair’s force in his memory, but it also exposes its imbalance: the relationship is bound up with Rusty’s hunger for release and his idealization of Carolyn, while the observed routine shows her continuing to manage her work and ordinary affairs on her own terms.

The Affair in Retrospect

Rusty remembers his love as passionate but rarely joyful. He describes the desire as insistent and obsessive, and its onset as a force that left him feeling divided from his previous sense of himself. His later account therefore complicates the apparent happiness of the invitation: the affair offers escape from a slow domestic routine, yet becomes a source of turmoil rather than uncomplicated fulfillment. The beginning also establishes a contrast that shapes Rusty’s recollection of Carolyn. He treats her as an extraordinary presence, while the details of their meetings repeatedly return her to the everyday world of news, mail, office talk, and political rumor. The affair’s decisive significance lies in that collision between his consuming interpretation of the relationship and the ordinary, recurring circumstances in which it takes place.