MARRIAGE: A DUET

Two tight, elegantly composed and from-the-gut novellas about the rupturing effects of adultery in essentially loving marriages make up TV commentator Fleming’s (Motherhood Deferred, 1994) natural first foray into fiction.

The restrained and quietly affecting first tale, “A Married Woman,” finds Caroline Betts dyeing her gray hair in the bathroom of the USLA hospital room where her lawyer husband of 40 years, William, lies in an irreversible coma. The two grownup children who visit occasionally, self-engrossed lawyer Katie and sensitive chef Steven, are concerned about their mother’s newly calm state—suspicious, even, that she’s having an affair. But the hair-dyeing is Fleming’s device to wade into Caroline’s memory stores as she sits vigil over her beloved husband, alternately begging him not to leave her and cursing him for the shattering affair he conducted 15 years before with one of Katie’s law school friends. Caroline intuited William’s affair with April, allowing him, magnanimously, to decide for himself whether to return to their marriage or leave. William, a “serious man” and seriously in love, does return to Caroline, but the damaged marriage must reinvent itself. In “A Married Man,” by contrast, Fleming allows her outraged commentator’s opinions to assert themselves, often to hilariously ironic effect: 40ish California financial wizard and uxorious husband David vents his spleen at the TV “forgiveness” therapist that his wife, Marcia, drags him to after she reveals her one-night-stand in the backseat of a car. Ultra-efficient Marcia and their two young boys are all that David desired in life, and her seemingly senseless affair with a Vietnam vet who wears alligator shoes is the ultimate outrage—until he’s forced by adultery-specialist Mr. New Beginnings to forgive and forget.

Fleming’s transition from first-person opinion pieces to fiction is for the most part effortless: she’s an adept writer unafraid of the darknesses (and sex lives) of her characters.