“We Were In Our 20s and We Didn’t Have a Clue” by Peter Orner

An essay by Peter Orner appears in the The New York Times:

Always hard to believe the ways details vanish. Even what John Cheever once called the marvelous skulduggery of illicit love, time chips away and scatters, and what you’d thought would be seared for life? Reach for it, it’s gone.

We were still in our 20s though she was already married, a weird novelty. My first conflict with that specter: husband. Society’s great, dull bulwark. We met at another wedding. She was a friend of the bride’s. I was an old roommate of the groom’s. The husband hadn’t joined her. I’d come alone also. We were both in the wedding party and had been assigned to walk down the aisle, arm in arm. She wore a lemon dress. It was my first time in a tuxedo. . . . continue reading here.