I’ve been having an affair for more than a year, but it’s over now. At least I think it’s over. It’s kind of hard to tell.
    
Let me start at the beginning. Actually, I’m not precisely sure when the beginning was – only that at some point last winter, I noticed there was a guy at my health club who worked out at the same time I did every week. We both seemed to have added a furtive ogling of one another to our exercise regimens.
    
I like to flatter myself that he started the ogling, but it could just as easily have been me. Once I realized it was happening, I had to acknowledge that I found the guy attractive. He was my type: clean-cut, about my age, good taste in clothing, friendly smile – all things that could also be said about my husband. Perhaps when I first saw him, laboring, say, on the lateral pull-down machine, some pheromones made the leap across the sweaty air between us, and I let my eyes linger on him for a few more 
seconds than an innocent glance would encompass. And then perhaps he felt 
my glance, and returned it.
    
Suffice it to say that soon enough we were eyeing each other almost openly, and we even exchanged the occasional restrained “Hi” when passing one another by the leg press. I found myself looking forward to my weekly workouts in a whole new way. The mere presence of the guy I’d begun thinking of as “my gym boyfriend” made working out exciting and gave me the energy to make it through the dreaded abdominal series with unusual ease. If  he wasn’t there on a given day, I felt let down, as though I’d been stood up by a date.
    
Had we lived anywhere other than an island where it’s tough for inhabitants to get farther than twenty miles from each other, the story of my gym boyfriend would likely end there – in the gym. We’d leave after our workouts and go our separate ways, never meeting anywhere but the gym. The gym would be its own world; inside it, we’d have our flirtation, and outside it, real life.
    
But when two people live year-round on Martha’s Vineyard, where there are a limited number of restaurants, grocery stores, and gas stations, it’s only a matter of time until their real lives 
intersect. Ours did so on the ferry, very early in the morning, when we were both leaving the Island. I was sitting with my two children, one of whom had just spilled chocolate milk on the seat we were sharing, when He walked in. My hand, clutching the wad of soggy paper towels, paused in midair as our eyes met.
    
“Oh, hi,” I said, flustered.
    
He smiled, nodded, took in the scene with the kids and the chocolate milk, and sat down a couple of seats 
behind me, across the aisle. While I 
finished cleaning up, I came to a decision: I could not spend the rest of the boat ride ten feet from someone I’d seen doing gluteus-strengthening exercises 
on a weekly basis and not go say hello.
    
“You guys wait here,” I said to my kids. “Mommy’s going to talk to a friend.”
    
Boldly, I crossed the aisle and introduced myself. We shook hands. We talked workout. We said where we were going that day. After about ten seconds, both my kids bounded over.
    
“Mom,” they asked, “who’s he?” I introduced him to them by first name only, since in my nervousness I’d forgotten his last, and we chatted for a few more seconds.  Then the kids and I went to the snack bar to get more chocolate milk. My husband was up there. I took him aside.
    
“Honey!” I whispered. “You’ll never guess who’s on the boat – my gym boyfriend!” (I had told my husband about Gym Boyfriend after having my first R-rated dream about him. Our policy is, fantasy is fine, if it stays fantasy.)
    
“You’re kidding!” my husband replied, instantly grasping the momentousness of this event. “Which one is he?”
    
I told him where to look when we went back downstairs. As it turned out, some friends had sat down between my row of seats and Gym Boyfriend’s, and when we started a conversation with them, my husband was able to get a good view. (He also, I should note, couldn’t stop himself from putting a territorial arm around my shoulder: back off, Buddy, she’s mine.)
    
“He looks better from the front than from the side,” my husband pronounced later, when we were in the car.
    
Back in the gym the next week, Boyfriend and I had the second-longest conversation in our history, reporting briefly on our respective vacations. 
After that, things went back to normal,
or almost. There was still some eye contact and the occasional hello, but it seemed possible that seeing me with my family had slightly diminished the ardor of Boyfriend’s weekly attentions.
    
Two or three months later, my husband and I were having dinner with another couple in a noisy Island restaurant. We were all leaning in toward one another to hear better, so I hadn’t noticed who else was in the room. Suddenly, a voice behind my husband said, “Excuse me, but is this your jacket, sir?” It was Gym Boyfriend, holding up my spouse’s jacket, which had fallen to the floor.
    
“Yes, thanks,” said my husband, 
taking it. Oblivious to his benefactor’s identity, he turned again to our companions.
    
“Oh, hi,” I said to Boyfriend. He smiled handsomely, but as I watched him walk away, I knew it was over. Boyfriend had just committed a fatal error: he’d called my husband Sir, which makes me Ma’am, and Ma’am is not who I want to be. Probably he was merely being polite, but to me, Ma’am has powdered wrinkles and a helmet of teased gray hair. Ma’am listens to Lawrence Welk. You don’t get called Ma’am in the throaty tones of your fantasies.  
    
My gym boyfriend bubble had burst. Off-Island, when you have fantasy boyfriends they generally stay just where you found them – beneath the car at the mechanic’s, behind the counter at the deli – and you don’t have to worry about their real selves intruding and ruining your illusions. Here, where there are at most two degrees of separation among all of us, you’re likely to find out that the cute guy you quip with at the convenience store is taking Viagra, or that the hot waitress you tip so generously is frequently heard at Karaoke night singing really, really badly. Fantasy Island this is not.
    
I haven’t seen Gym Boyfriend since the sir thing happened. I wonder whether he’s deliberately changed his workout schedule. Maybe he was ultimately as put off by something I did as I was by being indirectly Ma’am-ed. I’ll probably never know for sure. But in any case, I think my affair is over.