The revelation that Buddy Willard had carried on an affair with a waitress while presenting himself as innocent is a turning point in Esther Greenwood’s understanding of their relationship. What unsettles Esther is not simply that Buddy had a sexual history; it is that he had concealed it while making her feel responsible for his desire and implicitly subject to a stricter standard of purity. Her decision to leave him follows from that breach of honesty, even as an unexpected call from Boston redirects the scene before the break is fully carried out.

The conversation and its disclosure

After kissing and embracing Buddy, Esther feels a little better. Sitting at the end of his bed, she asks for a comb and draws her hair across her face so he cannot see it. Then she asks whether he has ever had an affair. Esther expects him to deny it, imagining that he would claim to have saved himself for marriage to someone pure and a virgin. Instead, Buddy turns pink, hesitates over what she means, and finally admits that he has.

The answer overturns the version of Buddy that Esther thought she knew. Since their first kiss, his comments and behavior had made her feel more sexually experienced than he was, while his own embraces and kisses appeared to be reactions that she had somehow provoked. His admission exposes that apparent innocence as a performance: he had been sexually involved with someone else while allowing Esther to understand him as inexperienced.

The waitress and the repeated affair

Buddy attributes the encounter to a waitress at the hotel where he had worked as a busboy the previous summer on Cape Cod. In his account, she had drawn his attention in the kitchen, and he describes her as initiating the relationship. He recounts her direct proposal and presents himself as the one who had been seduced. Esther understands that even this explanation lets Buddy cast responsibility away from himself: the story offers an account of how the affair began without making him straightforwardly acknowledge his own part in it.

Esther first assumes that the two had slept together only once. When she asks how often it happened, Buddy says that he cannot remember exactly but that it was a couple of times a week for the rest of the summer. Esther multiplies three times ten and arrives at thirty, a number that makes the affair seem far more extensive than she had imagined. Something in her freezes after hearing it. The count matters not only as a measure of repetition but as a sharp contrast with Buddy’s prior pose of purity.

Honesty, sexual standards, and the rupture

Esther is careful to distinguish what offends her from what does not. The fact that Buddy had slept with someone would not, by itself, have disturbed her in the same way if another young man had told her. She imagines that with someone else she might simply have asked for details, or even slept with someone herself to balance the situation. Her anger is directed instead at Buddy’s pretense: he had made her feel that she was the sexually bold one while withholding his own history, leaving her to carry an image of him that did not match his conduct.

That distinction makes the disclosure a test of honesty as well as a confrontation with the sexual double standard. Esther had been made to feel accountable for desire that Buddy represented as something she brought out in him, while his own past could be narrated as an episode for which another person was responsible. She does not condemn him merely for having had sex; she objects to the gap between his self-presentation and what he now admits. The injury to trust comes from his concealment and from the unequal terms on which he had framed their intimacy.

Esther also asks what Buddy’s mother thinks of the waitress. Buddy is close to his mother and regularly repeats her pronouncements about men, women, marriage, and security. Esther knows that Mrs. Willard is a strong advocate of virginity for both sexes, and remembers being scrutinized when she first went to the Willards’ home for supper, as if her own sexual history were under examination. In that context, Buddy’s admission makes the family’s stated standard newly uncomfortable: the principle of purity has been applied to Esther as a question of character even as Buddy’s conduct remained hidden.

The interrupted decision

Esther has decided to leave Buddy once and for all, not because he slept with the waitress, but because he lacked the courage to tell the truth openly and acknowledge the affair as part of his own character. Before she can act on that decision, the hall telephone rings. Someone announces a call for Esther from Boston, where Buddy is the only person she knows. She recognizes the call as unusual because he normally avoids the expense of long-distance telephone calls and had previously used a less costly means to send her an urgent message.

Buddy tells her that his annual fall chest X-ray has revealed tuberculosis and that he is going to a tuberculosis facility in the Adirondacks on a scholarship for medical students with the disease. He also says that Esther has not written since their last weekend together, asks whether anything is wrong between them, and requests letters and a visit during her Christmas vacation. The call does not undo Esther’s judgment about the affair, but it interrupts the immediate break with news that brings illness and a new request for contact into the relationship. The episode therefore ends not with a settled reconciliation or a completed separation, but with Esther’s intended decision overtaken by Buddy’s diagnosis.