(5 of 8)
The outsider is Alex, who meets Dan at the party. A business conference and a rainstorm reintroduce them that weekend while Beth and Ellen are in the country house hunting. Across the restaurant dinner table, Alex seems so hungry for him that you can hear her stomach rumble. "You're here with a strange girl being a naughty boy," she tells him, perhaps before he has even flirted with a naughty thought. But Dan is a man, and pathetically ordinary. From curiosity or concupiscence, from boredom or weakness, he goes to her apartment. Next thing, they are making mad sex by the kitchen sink. Dirty dishes clatter under her buttocks. Tap water lubricates their lust.
"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart," wrote Byron in Don Juan; " 'Tis woman's whole existence." Dan's fling is of Dan's marriage a thing apart. He can shrug off the sentiment as he showers off the sweat. No love for Alex, no guilt toward Beth. Thanks, hon, gotta run. After all, as he tells Alex, he's happily married; he has a six-year-old girl; "I'm lucky." When Alex pops the question -- "So what are you doing here?" -- he figures he can squirm out of it. But Dan has underestimated her fatal attraction to him. Before he leaves, she has slit her wrists.
It is the first of many cries for help. The first calls are to the office -- she has two tickets to Madame Butterfly, would he like to come? -- then to his home. She reveals she is pregnant with his child; he renounces her. He arrives home one evening to find Alex chatting airily with Beth about purchasing their apartment now that they are moving to the country. She pours acid on his car hood, and still he cannot confide in Beth. Fretting at his living-room desk one night, he glances up at Beth reading a fairy tale to Ellen. He still believes in his picture-pretty life. To tell Beth about Alex would be to deface the greeting card. He must deal like a man with the crisis he has helped create.
But Dan is not a man, at least not the John Wayne movie man. He is a soft guy in a tough spot. Even after Alex boils Ellen's pet rabbit on the country cottage stove, Dan cannot inform Beth that he and Alex were lovers; Beth has to elicit the fact by asking him directly. The women have the cojones in this picture. It is Beth who will earn the movie's first cheer when she tells Alex, "If you ever come near my family again, I'll kill you, you understand?" And Alex who will take Beth up on her dare, swiping Ellen from school for an almost innocuous afternoon kidnaping. The outraged husband tries taking matters into his own hands by strangling Alex back in her kitchen -- be a movie man, Dan -- but he can't finish the job. This demon will have to be destroyed by the only pure spirit left.