My blood ran cold and I almost blacked out when I saw the return address on the lavender-tinted envelope on the hall table where the maid had left it. The simmering guilt shot right up to the boiling point. I had lived in fear for twenty years of seeing that name on an envelope addressed to my wife. With trembling hand, I reached for it, but it was too late. Joan was at my elbow.

“Anything interesting in the mail, Hon?”

“Mainly bills,” I responded in the calmest voice I could handle. “But here, there seems to be a letter from Lena Gerson. God, it’s been years. Is she even on our Christmas card list still?”

“Yes, silly, of course she is,” Joan replied, as she reached for the lavender-tinted envelope. “If you spent any time reading the cards and letters at Christmas, you’d know we have maintained contact since the KL days. She’s in Winston Salem now. Retired.”

“I thought she’d take on the family business in Kuala Lumpur,” I said weakly. I had to act naturally. I couldn’t have managed to keep Joan from seeing the envelope. Was this it, then? Surely not, if she’s been sending us Christmas cards for over twenty years. But Winston Salem. That’s just down the road from Roanoke. God. I couldn’t let Joan see me sweat, but I felt like melting into a pool right there in the foyer.

“Ah, well, what’s Cook got on for lunch?” I asked, desperate to indicate that I wasn’t ruffled.

“You’ve got a tennis and lunch date at the club,” Joan answered. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that.” And then she gave me a peck on the cheek and turned and marched toward the back of the house, waving that lavender-tinted envelope and provocatively swinging her hips. She was still beautiful, trim, and auburn haired after all these years. Still something to look forward to going to bed for. But would whatever was in that envelope change all of that?

Tennis. That had been my nemesis to begin with. That and the fact that I went out to the embassy in Kuala Lumpur four months before Joan was able to join me.

The Hamiltons had been the toast of the KL English-speaking expatriate community when I got there. Lena—Lena Hamilton then—came from one of the wealthiest foreign business families, the major carpeting importers for the entire country. The Gersons were Americans and maintained their citizenship, but they’d been living in Southeast Asia and doing business there for two generations. Vance Hamilton had been the tennis pro at the English Club, at least until he landed Lena. After that he was just the handsome boy toy face in the company showroom and in the dining room (and bedroom, as necessary) for the company’s big spenders.

They were probably the most handsome expat couple in the country when I got there to take up my economic attaché posting at the American embassy. Because of their resemblance in looks and attitude to two of the reigning American movie stars of the early 1980s, they were referred to in social circles as Kathleen (for Kathleen Turner) and Harrison (for Harrison Ford). In Lena’s case, the resemblance was startling, down to the throaty voice, which, like Kathleen Turner, Lena put to good use in the local English-language theater company.

I found these nicknames amusing, not the less so when my wife finally arrived in KL and she and I were promptly dubbed Ken and Barbie.

Several things intersected to entangle me in those first few months of what was my first foreign service assignment at the attaché level. It was made clear to me that I was to foster friendships and service to the American business community, Lena was a spoiled and demanding heiress of the American business community, I had been trained to the theater and had the minor assignment of fostering American arts in Malaysia, Lena was a sultry-role actress in the English-language theater in the capital city, both Lena and I played pro-level tennis, Lena was sexy as hell and begged for servicing in every smile she flashed, and my wife was nowhere to be seen yet.

The day I got roped into playing mixed doubles with Lena and Vance at the English Club was the same day Lena dumped her husband for me as a doubles partner on the regional tournament circuit as well as the same day that I serviced her in my temporary digs in the embassy housing compound. She would have been irresistible even if I hadn’t been told to please the local American business community in any way I had to and even if she hadn’t told me in no uncertain terms what she, as the heiress of a leading American business in the country, would consider good service. It hadn’t been a seduction, and I wasn’t the one calling the shots in what wasn’t a seduction.

Our doubles tennis match had been hard fought and went on longer than I anticipated. I was running late for a cocktail party and my ride back to the embassy flat was long gone before the match was completed. Vance had a singles match and Lena said she was going to the same cocktail party I was and would drop me by my flat where we both could shower and change. She told me she’d wait for me while I showered, but I discovered that she was waiting for me in the shower. She sucked me to excitement and then I raised her hips up, back against slippery wall tiles, spread her legs, and, crouching my thighs under hers, lowered her puckered cunt onto my throbbing tool. Sliding her up and down on the wet tiles, I fucked her under the cascading water until her sexy, throaty moans brought me to ejaculation. Then, as the bed was between the bathroom and the door, neither of us made it to the cocktail party.

Within a couple of weeks, I found out what kind of leash she had Vance on, because he came upon Lena and me fucking on a chaise lounge in her company’s cabana by the club pool one afternoon, and, rather than make a scene, he stripped off his swimming trunks and joined us. I was pretty squeamish at first, but they feel right into the threesome as if they did this all of the time, which I’m sure they did. At first, all of the concentration was on pleasuring Lena. Whatever position we took, I took care of her cunt and Vance took care of her ass. We met somewhere almost every day or night, though, and it wasn’t long before I found Vance fondling me—and then kissing me—as often as he was servicing Lena. It was sort of a gradual thing. I had no idea, really, when we had progressed into that. But Vance was a very attractive and sexy and inventive man. And I found that I was excited when he kissed me and invaded my ass with his fingers while I was fucking Lena.

I had always thought that I might be bisexual, that it matter less that it was a woman than that the other’s body was divine, I could get it up, and both of us could get off on each other. Now I knew. I, indeed, was bisexual. I got it up and got it off as well with Vance as I did with either Joan or Lena.

The day came within two months of my arrival that Vance sought me out without Lena and romanced me into fucking him.

I kept up the three-mode subterfuge—Lena and me, the three of us, and Vance and me—for a couple of months. I’d never done anything like this before, and it was an intoxicating experience. But, of course Lena eventually, inevitably found us, naked, with my cock pumping up into Vance’s ass, and she screamed bloody murder and made all sorts of threats. Three days after that Joan arrived in Kuala Lumpur. And on that day my simmering guilt was born and sat there for years as a threat over my head—until years and several foreign assignments up to the ambassadorial level after that, it just faded away in the understanding that it was all in the past. Now, with the arrival of a lavender-tinted letter, more than twenty years later, it was all back on the front burner. And my wife was telling me that we never really had lost contact with Lena.

The foolish affair with Lena was just the start of my two-year Kuala Lumpur tour. I had a job to do. And I couldn’t do that job and avoid Lena on multiple fronts. I obviously had to maintain connections with her family business. And she insisted that we team up for the regional tennis circuit, all the more important to her now, because she unceremoniously dumped Vance, who managed to find a British expat club in Manila that needed a tennis instructor. She also wanted juicy parts in the English-language theater’s plays, which she could get on the strength of her own looks and acting ability, but which were assured when I took on directing duties for two plays a year at the club. But our affair had already stopped, dead in its tracks, three days before my wife arrived in KL.

The irony was that Lena and Joan became instant and almost inseparable friends. The even greater irony was that some months later, when Lena and I were winning our tennis matches and traveling all over Southeast Asia to defend our record and titles—and when Lena popped up in a starring role in every play I directed, the rumors started throughout the community. Lena and I were lovers. We had to be. It no longer was Kathleen and Harrison and Ken and Barbie. The whispers were all Kathleen and Ken—and poor Barbie.

My wife took it all like a queen. She never questioned me once. Her friendship with Lena never flagged. She never showed an ounce of jealously or any indication of having heard the rumors at all. And she never had a reason to suspect that anything happened after she arrived. I’d had my little, titillating, naive fling with the jet setters and the whole sexual liberation bit. Well, sure, over the years I fell off the wagon now and again—with both women and men—but these were always brief couplings of circumstance, immediate need, and momentary heat. But each time I fell off the wagon, the simmering guilt of those three months in KL jabbed at me.

I was in agony for the rest of the day after the envelope arrived. I even lost my tennis match, which I still almost never did. I dragged home, up the oak-lined drive, to that old plantation house south of Roanoke that we’d lovingly restored as we prepared for our retirement from the foreign service, fully expecting to find my suitcase on the portico when a sticky note attached telling me that Joan would use our family lawyer and I could jolly well find my own right after I’d found someplace else to live.