Fiction Review: Sometimes Mine

FICTION
It's not easy to put in a good word for the other woman. She is the wicked witch of marital bliss, the one who threatens destruction and heartbreak. And she certainly deserves no defense, but as cardiologist and novelist Martha Moody so perceptively describes in "Sometimes Mine," circumstances occasionally upend conventional wisdom.

Moody's narrator, Genie Toledo, is also a cardiologist. Divorced with an adult daughter, Claudia, Genie lives in suburban Columbus, Ohio, where she is in private practice. Her colleagues respect her and her patients trust her, but Genie has a secret she has only shared with best friend Tessa and Claudia.

For 11 years, Genie has been having an affair with the married Mick Crabbe, the popular basketball coach at a West Virginia college. Every Thursday she drives 84 miles on the interstates to a hotel in Marietta, Ohio. There, she and Mick make love, catch up on their lives, and Mick shares his coaching concerns.

Genie is content with the arrangement, "How could I taint such peace with pleadings for divorce or separation?" But contentment in a novel is the literary equivalent of the ticking bomb in the backpack: Trouble is soon heading their way.

It first comes in single spies: Claudia has a new boyfriend Genie's not sure she likes; Mick is being criticized for coaching decisions; and when his daughter, Jessica, develops heart disease, Mick asks Genie to help. Which she does, reluctantly. Genie finally meets Karn, Mick's wife, who turns out to be much nicer than she had imagined.

Diagnoses of terminal diseases tend to concentrate the mind, and when Mick is told he has prostate cancer with an aggressive tumor, Genie's peaceful world disintegrates. Mick decides to delay surgery until the basketball season is over, which worries both Genie and Karn, and inevitably, Genie becomes more involved with Mick's family.

Moody could easily have turned this into a three-hankie sobfest, complete with angry scenes and accusations of betrayal, but cleverly she concentrates, instead, on the evolving relationship between the other woman and the wronged wife. Both women defy the stereotypes, acting with grace -- Karn is human enough to be initially angry about Genie's relationship with Mick -- and generosity of spirit as Mick ails.

Poster diseases and love triangles can in the wrong hands disappoint, but Moody is talented and wise enough to defy conventional wisdom in this affecting story of the other woman.

Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.