My wife is sleeping with someone else. Someone who is more sensitive to her needs, more attentive to her physical discomfort, a more reliable partner. His name is Bob.

She’s doing this out in the open because . . . she doesn’t care. Sure, it hurts me. I feel pained, but I figure it’s best for her pregnancy and, perhaps, she’ll come back to me after the baby is born.

I doubt that.

Bob is a body pillow.

This is one of the subjects they don’t teach you in fathering school. (They don’t have one? Well, they should.) Pregnant women have an innate need to be surrounded by pillows at all times. It’s for their comfort. Or, in case a roving movie crew needs to film her jumping off our roof and they forgot their airbag.

Our bed currently looks like one of those Indian fantasies where the Raj is sitting in a room of pillows, surrounded by harem girls. He’s getting fanned, while exotic women dance around him in gauzy silk. He thinks, “Perhaps tonight I will take Maryanne over Ginger. Hmmmmm.”

In my house we have the pillows, but no fanning. No gauzy silk. No exotic dancers. Only my wife, Bob and the cat. Yes, the cat has her own space on the bed. Bob is in mine. Currently, if I’m allowed in the bed at all, I have to cram myself into the upper corner, because the other three inhabitants are hogging the rest of the bed.

I’ve tried to move the cat. This is a bad idea.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Bob stayed in the bedroom, but he doesn’t. When we watch TV at night, my wife is wrapped around Bob like Mary Lou Retton around a Chippendale. Again, I’m relegated to the upper corner of the couch. The upper corner seems to be my area. At least I still have an area.

One of these days, I’m expecting to go home and find Bob wearing my clothes, sitting in my chair, eating my dinner. The kids will be calling him daddy and he’ll just sit there, in his feather pillowed indifference. My wife will divorce me for the perfection that is Bob. He has no needs. He has no wants, he has no desires. He’s never asked for a plasma television 18 times in one day. He doesn’t require 18 DVD and CD purchases a month. He’s low maintenance.

Eventually, their relationship will falter. My (ex)wife will wonder why Bob no longer speaks to her. Why he seems so flat and distant. She’ll find that after a few years of use, he isn’t as supple as he once was. And he never helps with the kids or does the dishes. The bastard.

Then she’ll come back to me. After endless sleepless nights, she’ll need a new body pillow, and she’ll seek out the original. Me.

Perhaps I’ll take her back. Maybe I’ll find it in my heart to forgive her cuddling infidelity. Maybe. If I can get a plasma television.