It’s 5 p.m. Do You Know Where Your Husband Is?

ZIPPERING HIS COAT, John leaves the nondescript office building where he works as a computer systems specialist and begins the walk of shame toward 13th Street, his hands shoved deep inside his pockets. His wife doesn’t expect him yet. He has time.

The walk takes 10 minutes, but feels a lot longer to him given what he’s about to do. He crosses Broad Street with long strides, follows Locust to 13th, then takes a left. It’s busy at rush hour, so he cocks his head away from the street, to conceal his face from the drivers sailing by.

At Chancellor, he turns abruptly and — ascending a couple of stairs — pulls open the door to Club Body Center, one of Philadelphia’s two bathhouses. Inside he’ll find other men, preferably other married men, with whom to have sex. His head feels like it’s on fire, swirling with a toxic brew of guilt and longing. He’s fought the urge for a few weeks now. But today, it wins.

The process at the front desk fills him with a kind of primal fear: the first glance from the man who takes his money and looks at his ID, the waiting for change, the presentation of a towel, room key and condom. Gathering them in his hands, he darts quickly out of the light of the front entrance, into the dim corridors of the bathhouse.

His eyes adjust. He can make out the forms of men loitering in the halls, naked to the waist, clad only in snug bath ­towels. They pad along in bare feet, flitting through the shadows like figures in a barely remembered dream. Their faces are obscured, but their presence registers in the tremors of blood pounding through John’s veins. By now he’s so wired, so shot through with the electric current of his desire, that it’s almost as if he has stepped outside of himself. This sensation caught hold of him the moment he decided to come here, and it’s only when he attains this state of consciousness — in which he has no more sentience than a robot — that he can come here at all.

He checks the room number on his key chain and starts down the hall, feeling like the last to arrive at a party, all eyes appraising his plain looks and middle-aged gut. The bathhouse is a big place, a maze with large tiled areas reminiscent of a spa and a series of hallways with private “rooms” — really just stalls — ­lining either side. Finding and unlocking the door to his room, he quickly switches on the light, illuminating a space no larger than a prison cell. Its cheap wooden walls don’t even reach the ceiling. He tosses his things on a narrow wooden platform that holds a thin rubber mattress, quickly strips naked, wraps his towel tightly around his waist, and steps back into the hall.

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