Married, but alone.

Despite being newly 'single', I had no urge to fool around. I was married and still believed that one should not do that kind of thing, even if opportunities were manifold, and they were. I was young, well-mannered, good-looking and successful. And, to all intents and purposes for the majority of the people I met and worked with, single. I chose to ignore a lot of the clumsier come-ons, not wishing, as one does, to shit on one's own doorstep. Still, one night, I caved in. Big time.


There was a group of about five of us out one evening after the show. I still remember saying something stupid to one of the Australian dancers, who didn't warrant my gauche behaviour; I'd miscalculated her feelings for me, or, at least, her own set of morals. It took years for that to heal, and I freely admit acting like a twat. Nonetheless, one of the other girls, a sassy, emotional New Yorker, made her feelings for me quite clear. She looked like one of the girls from Sex and the City and sang like Barbra Streisand. We talked, and how...I ran her home. We talked in her kitchen until 6am, when it became time to go to bed. I undressed her and caressed her. She went exploring. It was heaven. We didn't go to sleep until about noon, sticky, sweaty and wet. Then we started again. Hot, musky and sticky, until we could no more.

Afterwards, I had a pang of conscience. We talked the next day. I was sorry, I was married, this couldn't continue. There were tears. I found out a couple of years later that I needn't have been so conscientious; L had done the dirty on me a good three months previously and not just the once, either. I got this information from her then paramour, Klaus, as we later sailed towards Venezuela on a cruise ship. Klaus, L and I had met years before on a cruise and hit it off famously. Klaus turned out to be L's first refuge when things were not going sparklingly with me. I was incredibly grateful to him; life with L was so much easier and better with her after they'd had their affair and took the edge off Maria's call to me when L and I were in the midst of our final summit meeting, but more on that, later.

Looking back on those extraordinary few years, I'm surprised any of us surfaced from them without at least some form of mild STD. We desperately thrashed around in search of the truth and a better way to lead our lives, taking way too many other people emotional hostage as we went. Interestingly, a lot of the women I encountered in that period have been back in touch recently.