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T he day Harris Jonathan was buried, my chlamydia was at its worst. Since Harris was the one who gave it to me, I took it to mean that even his bacteria mourned him. This didn't surprise me; Harris had always been very popular.

Harris would have hated his funeral. He disapproved of any event that put me in black or forced his mother to wear sensible shoes. I wasn't the only one who sensed this - shortly after the eulogy, I was cornered by one of the pallbearers. "As soon as this is over, we're all going drinking," he whispered. "It's what he would have wanted."

I smiled politely, even though I knew I wouldn't be joining them. I was taking doxycycline, which isn't supposed to be mixed with alcohol. Already, it had cracked my bowels wide open - movement of any kind was proving torturous. Not only was Harris gone, but it seemed I would have to endure it in nauseous sobriety.

Amy did not believe that whoever had infected Harris was at the funeral, but I wasn't so sure. Harris had lots of lovers; surely some of them would be here. I studied the mourners carefully. Since I imagined everyone could see the disease in my eyes, I believed I'd see it in someone else's. But it was a sunny day and most people were wearing sunglasses.

I pointed randomly to a blonde. Amy shook her head. "Harris would never sleep with her. She doesn't look a thing like you."

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Brody, looking equally dapper and somber. "Sorry I'm late," said my husband. I smiled and squeezed his hand. My stomach shifted. The doxycycline was continuing its assault.

***

With the exception of my wedding, Harris Jonathan liked to insist that the only time he had ever been in a church was four years ago, when we had been forced to ask for directions. "We're a little lost," he said. The priest promptly began talking about God. "No, no," said Harris. "We're looking for the beach."

"God's at the beach," replied the priest.

"Well I promise not to disturb him," said Harris. If I had said it, the man would probably have bludgeoned me with a Bible. But Harris Jonathan is a little charmer. Not only did the priest give us directions, he also told us where we could find cheap parking.

Later, as we lounged on matching beach towels, I said that we should go back and have the man marry us. Harris almost didn't respond; the sun had made him drowsy and it was with great effort that he didn't respond to my proposal by falling asleep.

"I'm not religious," he reminded me.

"What does that matter?"

"We'll get married later."

"I'm pregnant," I told him.

Harris opened his eyes. Then he glared at me suspiciously, as if I had somehow willed the embryo into being.

I should have known better than to try and impose marriage on a man under twenty-five. He babbled as he rejected me. Then he continued to tan while I pretended I had not been irrevocably destroyed. A fat man with a long white beard walked by in a bathing suit. Harris laughed. "You see?" he said. "God really is at the beach."

"Go to hell," I said. It took me six hours to walk back to the city. I didn't see Harris again for nearly three months. It's not everyone who can have both marriage and pleasure, but for two years I had Brody for one and Harris for the other. I imagined myself an envied child of fortune, the only woman on the planet who had figured out how to have her cake and cheat on it too.

It helped that there was no one to challenge my ethics. Amy was in full support from the moment she discovered us kissing beneath the mistletoe. "I don't care what holiday it is," she declared. "Either you two are sleeping together, or I've been getting this tradition completely wrong." She liked Brody, but her romanticism was incurable. To her, adultery was the last truly romantic institution.

"You don't have to be in love to commit adultery," I informed her.

"But you are in love," Amy protested. "I mean, you two were supposed to be married." I smiled sadly. Marriage to Harris had once seemed so self-evident that when I married Brody, everyone thought they were in the wrong church.

Amy's support made her an excellent accomplice. She was thrilled to be my alibi. On Tuesdays, when Brody worked late, I would pretend to be with her. I kept waiting for her to become as judgmental as the rest of us, but it never happened. Even at the funeral, she remained somehow convinced that even my chlamydia had beauty. I don't know how she did it. There's nothing romantic about bacteria - after all, it's asexual.

At the wake, Harris's mother presented us with vegetables, dip and an impressive array of cheeses. The sheer variety made me resentful. When one is in mourning, one should not have to choose between cheddar and gorgonzola. Brody wasn't having any problems. He had barely known Harris, and his plate was piled high.

"Are you going to tell him?' Amy asked me.

I shook my head. Where would I start?

Eddie sat down next to us. "This wake sucks," he declared. "We should have gone drinking with the pallbearers." He rolled up his shirt sleeves and I noticed several scratches running down the length of his arm. I recognized the handiwork; Harris Jonathan's cat had mauled me several times over the past year. Eddie nursed his wounds in disgust. "I don't know why Harris left me that damn cat," he said. "I don't want the damn thing. Do glue factories buy cats, or is that just horses?"

"Don't you dare do a thing to that cat," said Amy sternly.

"I won't get a chance. That thing will probably do something to me first."

Brody's belt began to beep. He looked down at his pager and winced. "Sorry," he said, looking at the display. "It's probably Mrs. Feldman's triplets."

"It's fine," I said. I didn't want Brody around anyway. I was finding it hard to look at him. It's easy to commit adultery when your husband is a waste of manhood. When he's sweet and noble and wears a suit to your ex-boyfriend's funeral, one's sense of moral superiority goes slightly askew.

As soon as he was gone, I asked Amy to drive me to Harris's apartment.

"Why?"

"I want to grab what I can before his mother has everything bronzed."

Harris Jonathan's loft was a bachelor's paradise, complete with high ceilings, hardwood floors and a balcony that overlooked the park. In the summer, Harris liked to drink wine and watch people fool around. In this manner, he once saw a local celebrity cheat on his wife; it was also, incidentally, how he found out about me and Brody.

Amy waited downstairs. I fished the keys out of my purse; they were always buried at the bottom where Brody would never see them. Whoever had come to save the cat had left everything else untouched; the apartment smelled of stale air and milk gone sour. I stood bewildered in the middle of the floor. Our entire affair had been conducted in nine hundred square feet of books, furniture and vinyl jazz. I wanted to take something for sentiment, but what could I take when the entire apartment had been my sanctuary?

My stomach did another violent twist. I went to his desk, took out his address book, and stuffed it into my purse.

Harris had been so restless that for weeks all he did was bake bread. Loaves and loaves of the stuff kept turning up on my porch. Exactly why could not be explained. His lethargy was notorious; he was the idlest of all the idle rich. When we asked him about it, he just mumbled something about not being able to sleep.

I was content with this explanation, but Amy wasn't; while I had been quietly stuffing them in my freezer, she had been quietly stuffing her face. It was starting to affect her waistline. "Tell him to take up gardening," she demanded.

"He doesn't have a garden," I said.

Amy threw up her hand. "At least ask him to use low-fat milk."

By the time we learned the truth, Harris was already in the hospital. By then, it was only a matter of time. It wasn't the chlamydia. That was just an added bonus, which I'm not sure the doctors ever bothered to cure. Curing chlamydia in a dying man is probably the dictionary definition of Wasted Expense.

Brody told me there was nothing to be done, but I knew he was wrong. As soon as he left the room, I slapped Harris across the face.

"I'm dying," he reminded me.

"You better be."

"I couldn't tell you," he said. "I couldn't tell anyone."

But we had never kept secrets before. Even when we hated each other, we'd been quite certain to make sure the other knew about it.

I asked if it had been guilt that had provoked the frenzy of wheat and focaccia. Harris nodded sadly. "I needed to do something," he said. "The last thing I wanted to do was sleep."

I was so angry I had to resist beating him with his bedpan. "What the hell am I supposed to do now?" I asked. In the bathroom, I turned the water on full blast, started the automatic hand dryer, and made a knee-weakening scream. I sat down on the toilet. I was so miserable, I barely noticed the burning sensation as the urine dribbled out of me.

Chlamydia is a silent disease. Most people never show symptoms. Those who do, however, will manifest them between one and three weeks after infection. Given that I had been sleeping with Harris Jonathan for nearly two years, I knew I was looking for someone he had slept with in his last month.

"That Harris," said Amy in wonder. "He was dying, and he still found time to sleep with women."

I phoned the first girl listed under "A". "Hello," I said. "I believe you knew Harris Jonathan. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but Harris recently died. "

"Did he leave me money?" asked Vanessa Aaronson.

"Were you expecting him to?" I asked.

"No," said Vanessa. "But why else would you be calling? I haven't spoken to him in years."

I crossed her name out with a pen. "I'm just calling people to let them know."

Vanessa snorted. "What a terrible way to spend an afternoon."

There were a few more names listed under A, but I had no luck with any of them. I was about to call Mary Jane Bradbury when I had a sudden flash of what might have been common sense. I put the B's on hold and called my doctor.

"I have diarrhea," I said.

"That's a normal reaction to doxycycline," she replied calmly.

"Are there any other side effects I should be aware of" I asked. "Like impaired judgement?"

"Not that I know of," replied my doctor. "Why? Have you been exhibiting strange behaviour?"

I glanced at Harris Jonathan's phone book and told her I wasn't sure.

Vanessa Aaronson was right. This was a terrible way to spend the afternoon. Most of the women had specific opinions about Harris Jonathan that they were more then happy to share. Mary Jane Bradbury admitted she got more affection from her brother. Kerri Cohn said she got a free dinner and little else. And Sally Detroit exclaimed, "He's dead? So that's why he never called me back." She sounded as if her faith in the universe had been completely restored.

I left a message for Laura Fitzgerald and phoned Amy. "He told me he had lots of other women," I said. "I couldn't have been the only one." I was beginning to feel horribly guilty. On every day but Tuesday, I had still been Brody's faithful wife. I had never expected Harris to stay loyal when I was betraying him six days a week and on major holidays.

Amy, meanwhile, was thrilled. To her, Harris's chastity confirmed all her romantic impulses. "You see how much he loved you?" she said.

"He gave my chlamydia," I reminded her. "Obviously, he slept with somebody."

Amy was undaunted. If nothing else, she seemed determined to believe that Harris was the first man in history to manifest a venereal disease by himself.

I phoned everyone from G to Z, convinced I would eventually find an army of angry lovers and at least one illegitimate child. But the women at the end of the alphabet were exactly like those at the beginning. There was nothing sordid in Harris's little black book; it was little more than twenty six pages of platonic dinners and unrequited lust.

Then Laura Fitzgerald called me back.

"I don't understand," she said, sounding truly distraught.

"He was dying," I told her. "Apparently, he knew about it for a long time."

Laura Fitzgerald started to cry. "But I just saw him. I just saw him last month." She explained she had been out of town. I quickly did some math and then asked if we could get together.

"Harris left something I think you should know about," I said.

***

Brody hadn't been a doctor for very long when I came to see him. You could tell he was new because he was still getting tangled in his stethoscope. He was also overworked. My usual doctor was on vacation, leaving poor Brody to blush and stammer about my miscarriage.

"How long ago was it?" he asked uncomfortably.

"Six months," I replied.

"And you want to start trying again,"

"I want to start having sex again," I replied.

Brody assured me that I had nothing to worry about. "You and your husband can proceed at your leisure," he said. I told him I didn't have a husband. Brody smiled and began flirting pathetically. I let it go on for a minute, then put him out of his misery and asked him to dinner.

Amy was furious. "What about Harris?" she asked.

I told her I didn't want to think about Harris. After I lost the baby, he had come to visit bringing a look of such supreme relief that I wanted to have him shot. "You see?" he had tried to joke. "We would have married for nothing."

"Well we wouldn't have wanted that," I snapped.

It was a year later when he phoned and said he had seen me and Brody from his balcony. I smiled smugly. It hadn't been accidental. Brody may have chosen the park, but I had chosen the tree.

"I don't like him," he announced.

"We're getting married," I replied. I invited him to the wedding. Harris came, and spent the entire time by the open bar.

I didn't like Laura Fitzgerald; she was too tall and didn't seem to mind talking with her mouth full. "I hate that I missed the funeral," she said. "I wish someone had told me."

"Laura," I said. "Did you and Harris sleep together?"

Laura Fitzgerald frowned. "What does that matter?"

"Because I think there's a chance he might have left you...something."

Laura dropped her teacup. "I don't understand," she said. "I thought you could only get it through sex. Don't tell me there are other ways." From her expression, I could tell she was suddenly terrified she had infected half the girls at the office. Only when she was breathing properly was she able to tell me that, like the others, Harris had also never slept with her.

I became inarticulate. Laura Fitzgerald had been my last hope.

"It's not that I didn't want to sleep with him," Laura said. "He just wouldn't do it. He wanted all the affection of a relationship, but none of the commitment."

"This may sound strange," I said. "But do you have any idea where he could have contracted chlamydia?"

Laura sniffled. "I think he was in love with someone else. I never found out who. Maybe he got it from her."

Our minds can be blessedly sluggish. I walked back to the car, thinking miserably that Harris had spent his last days obsessed with some woman who wasn't in his phonebook. Only after I popped my next dose of doxycycline did it occur to me that instead of digging in Harris Jonathan's backyard, I should start looking in my own.

Brody's credit card bill revealed several restaurants and hotels I didn't remember going to. That was when I realized I had completely underestimated my husband. It was humbling to learn that Tuesdays had been as important to him as they were to me.

He went crimson when I told him about the infection. "I guess I should have been more careful." he said.

He was gone by the time Amy showed up. When we went into the kitchen, I noticed that the last of Harris's bread was sitting on the counter. Brody must have taken it out to thaw. Suddenly it was the saddest thing I had ever seen. I collapsed into Amy's lap. Harris was gone. My marriage was over. On the counter, an uneaten calabrese was going stale. Life seemed completely intolerable.

"Put it back in the freezer," I begged.

"It's just bread," said Amy.

"It's not," I said. "It's all I have left."

It wasn't until later that I realized that wasn't entirely true. That night, I drove to see Eddie.

"Give him to me," I said.

Eddie looked at me as if I was crazy. "Are you sure?"

I nodded. Marriages end and chlamydia gets cured, but cats live for years.