—C'est La Mort

It's not often that an old friend and mentor asks you to seduce her husband. I suppose it was the bizarre nature of the request that made me want to do it. Or perhaps it was because I knew that Melanie O'Reilly was at least partially responsible for my becoming a novelist. Or maybe I just agreed because I thought it would be a good way to get my mind off my ex-boyfriend, Anatoly Darinsky.

Whatever. The point is that after years of very sporadic contact Melanie invited me to lunch and asked if I would do her a big favor. My initial assumption was that she wanted me to donate some money to one of her favorite organizations or charities—the Salvation Army, the Symphony, the Boy Scouts…what have you. It even occurred to me that she wanted me to attend one of those five-hundred-dollara-plate dinners to support Flynn Fitzgerald, the majorly right-wing Contra Costa County congressional hopeful whose campaign was currently employing her husband, Eugene. The last really would have been a huge favor since I disagreed with almost everything Fitzgerald stood for, but for my favorite former writing professor I would have done it. But this…this one came out of left field.

It seems that Eugene had not been the same since he and a few of his evangelical buds had returned from a Moral Majority road trip, an excursion not unlike the MTV Rock the Vote road trip, except this expedition involved more vinced that the Jesus van had doubled as a magnet for wayward sluts, and that her husband had been nibbling on the forbidden fruit.

But I digress. My mission had nothing to do with Jesus, nor was I supposed to emulate the Vi