Excerpt from novel: WAR IN A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY

But in truth she had gotten bone tired of married men, their sneaky unsureness, the guilty reluctance that traveled alongside their propelling passions, so that every encounter was like watching an animal in the wild eat: they would take a bite and quick look over their shoulders. 

She had gotten tired of the drunken calls in the middle of the night after, sometimes, years of silence. “I love you. I love you.”
And they would cry. 

Tired of their adolescent confusion and emotional greed: "You know what I wish?" one of them told Nina as he was hurriedly putting on socks to catch the next train back to the suburbs, "I wish I could bring you home with me and we could all live together." He seemed to mean it, but Nina knew that the only things she would get from him were an umbrella and a shoehorn left behind.

She was tired of the inventive lying---of the man who would send theater tickets to one of her friends, his mistress, so she could be in the same audience as he and his wife, in order that all three could share the same experience. And if they couldn’t enjoy commenting to each other directly as the play unfolded, well, at least they could briefly catch each other’s eye in the lobby as the wife, innocently unaware, chatted with friends.

Tired of watching suburban families ice-skating together on bright winter Sundays: devoted father, comfortable husband, she knowing that he was no doubt also another person, a stranger to this same family, living a lie with the people closest to him, forcing on them a false life and the waste that comes with it, the shrinking of all their other possibilities as they lived in a land of their own making, all the major landmarks left off the map, taking them far afield of where they thought they were headed and where they would have chosen to be.
Some of it she understood. Nina knew that when you live with someone you lose appreciation for their best traits; that a wife, the woman who knows a man as well as himself, would have to become both ally and enemy. That married men love their wives for their familiarity and their history, but get bored with them for the same reasons. That they love their mistresses for their mystery and uninvolvement, but are removed from them for the same reasons.

No, she was not afraid she would get involved with Walker. Nor was she concerned with protecting the sanctity of his marriage. That was his job. In any case, Walker’s timing was bad.

His married predictability made her skin crawl.