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enormous number of good qualities. She's attractive, well-read, politically aware, and good at her work (she does PR for St. Elizabeth's Hospital). People who know her consider her a loyal and caring friend, the kind of person you can count on in hard times and emergencies. After five years of marriage, her virtueswere so familiar to me that I hardly even noticed them.
    What I noticed more and more in the months leading up to the election were her shortcomings. There weren't many, but I guess I kept my eye out. Her underwear bored me. She ate an awful lot of ice cream that went straight to her thighs. She couldn't have told a joke if her life depended on it. She interrupted my reading. Sometimes I'd look at her and find myself thinking about Jack Dexter, wondering if I was finally beginning to understand.

TRACY FLICK
     
    PEOPLE KEPT USING the term “sexual harassment” to describe what happened, but I don't think it applies. Jack never said anything disgusting and he never threatened me with bad grades. Most of our time together was really sweet and nice. I even cried a few times, it felt so good to have him hold me.

MR. M.
     
    JACK WAS JUST like me. We started the same year at Winwood, and were friends within a matter of weeks.
    We ushered at each other's weddings, played Friday night poker with a couple of his buddies, and made it a habit to get absolutely plastered once a year, on the last day of school. Both of us had electric guitars and vibrant fantasy lives, which we indulged every now and then in his basement, turning the amps up to ten and scratching out every three-chord anthem we could remember, plus a few that the world hadn't heard before.
    The poker games ended in 1990, when Sherry Dexter got pregnant. I guess I wasn't too broken up about it. The games had gone from weekly to monthly by that point and had begun to emit the stale odor of rituals that have outlived their usefulness. But Jack acted as though something important and sustaining had been subtracted from his life. He started talking about poker all the time, wistfully, as if we'd been big-time professional gamblers instead of young married guys puffing on pretzel rods, biting our nails over a pile of nickels. If you asked about Sherry, he always said the same thing, with the same disheartened expression.
    “She's enormous, Jim. Big as a frigging house.”
    Sherry was six months along when Jack started up with Tracy Flick. I know because he told me about it at lunch the next day, half bragging, half confessing his sins.
    They were working late on the Valentine's Day edition of
The Watchdog
, just the two of them, whenthe conversation somehow turned to the subject of dating.
    “The boys in this school are so immature,” she complained. “They don't even know how to conduct a conversation.”
    “Oh?” said Jack. “So you'd prefer an older man?”
    “As a matter of fact, I probably would.”
    “How old?” he asked, not quite teasing.
    She pondered him and the question together.
    “How old are you?”
    “Me? Thirty-two.”
    “Thirty-two?” Her tongue made a thoughtful circuit of her chapped lips. “That sounds about right.”

TRACY FLICK
     
    IT SEEMED EXCITING tome, a new frontier. Jack had been flirting with me all year anyway, commenting on my clothes, telling me I reminded him of this girl he'd been in love with in college. He watched me all the time.
    Yes, I knew his wife was pregnant. Everybody knew. Somehow that made it even more exciting.
    It was the stupidest thing I ever did, but I wouldn't trade that first kiss for anything. And for all the trouble I caused him, I'd like to imagine Jack feels the same way, though I wouldn't blame him if he didn't.

MR. M.
     
    I WAS APPALLED and jealous at the same time. I didn't want to lecture him, didn't want to offer even implicit approval, and couldn't quite conceal my curiosity.
    I also had to accept a certain amount of responsibility. I'd been egging him on for years about the girls at