The Body Politic : THE EROTIC SILENCE OF THE AMERICAN WIFE, <i> By Dalma Heyn (Turtle Bay Books: $22; 304 pp.)</i>

Not long ago, a friend, a seemingly happily married woman, startled our other dinner guests by precipitously announcing that her husband had just joined Sexaholics Anonymous. Since his recovery mandated spontaneous ritual public confession, this normally retiring fellow described with some shame and also some swagger his addiction to furtive, pick-up sex with more than 300 women a year.

By now, such moments are less of a shock than a reminder: No one knows what happens behind the neighbor’s bedroom door. Those who may have suspected this will find their suspicions confirmed by “The Erotic Silence of the American Wife.” Moreover, as author Dalma Heyn suggests, lately it’s women as often as men who are, in the words of a Raymond Carver narrator, “going outside the marriage.”

“The Erotic Silence of the American Wife” is a curiously schizoid book. That is, it appears to have two rather different agendas, two parallel stories to tell: the story meant for the talk show, and the story on the page.

The talk-show tone is, as one might expect, brassier and louder. One can imagine Heyn shepherding a group of cheerful, unrepentant adulteresses past Oprah or Donahue; one can even imagine the subscript under their names: “Being Bad and Feeling Better.” The news flash here is that extramarital affairs are the low-cost recessionary equivalent of a week at a chic spa. Indeed, one woman Heyn interviews says: “When I went to the spa and when I went to bed with Charlie . . . (were) the two times in my adult life that I felt the best the longest.”

How heartening to learn that the overworked American wife, juggling family and career, is somehow making time in her busy day for guilt-free, enriching adulterous passion--on her lunch hour, on business trips, after dropping the kids off at school! Illicit sex with nice guys is a bracing tonic with cosmetic and social benefits: These women look prettier, become more loving wives and mothers, quit compulsive shopping and, best of all, no longer get punished like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, for whom, sadly, adultery turned out to be a capital crime.

At least here we’ll be spared the spectacle of Shere Hite, poutingly defending her research methodology. In case any serious person still believes in the results of statistics and surveys, Heyn, who writes a column for Mademoiselle (“The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex”), admits that her evidence is anecdotal. Every woman she interviewed knew someone who was having an affair and wanted to be interviewed. The breezy, voyeuristic thrill of her book is in reading women’s accounts of their romances, the gossipy, attention-grabbing, first-name-only (“When Mary first met John . . .”) mini-narratives that make magazines the escapist drug-of-choice for nervous airplane travelers.

But that breeziness, the banner headlines, quickly make one grumpy, tempted to raise rude questions like: Who are these women, exactly, and what planet are they on? I couldn’t help noting that Heyn’s friends must be more upscale than mine, who lately are so panicked about jobs and money that they hardly have time to think about sex. (The immediate motive for Emma Bovary’s suicide was not love, by the way, but that more grievous bourgeois sin: overborrowing on your credit line.)

One marvels at the ease with which Heyn’s women finesse thorny ethical dilemmas. Anyone bothered by a conflict between her desires and her children’s interests will want to read the section on how kids may benefit when Mom has an affair. Each time Heyn describes these romantic choices as “revolutionary,” one wants to suggest a course of reality therapy on the subject of women’s social and economic status--say, a quick reread through Susan Faludi’s recent book, “Backlash,” which Heyn quotes on the incidence of illness and depression among married women.

Does Heyn imagine that sexual choice is the same as social and political power? What happens if these women get pregnant by the wrong guy--and Roe v. Wade has been repealed? How can Heyn acknowledge the lawless aspects of passion, yet make sex seem less messy and more orderly than a jog around the block? What about AIDS?

Still, what keeps one from dismissing “The Erotic Silence of the American Wife,” despite its corner-cutting, vapidities and contradictions, is the echo of that other, deeper story beneath its brittle, glossy carapace. It’s almost as if this parallel story had been written by a smarter writer, one who reads Virginia Woolf, knows the work of psychologists and theorists--Carol Gilligan, Carolyn Heilbrun, etc.--and who makes some incisive observations about women’s lives. This writer is less invested in touting the restorative aspects of afternoon trysts than in listening to what women actually have to say.

What they tell her is at once predictable and amazing. Now it becomes more interesting that these women are outwardly comfortable, because their comfy marriages are, as they describe them, abysmal: lonely, alienated, loveless, mired in dull sex and duller conversation. Most revealingly, these women feel that some essential part of themselves has been lost; they have complicitously changed into Perfect Girls, Perfect Women, robotic Stepford wives who live only to mirror and serve their children and spouses. Throughout, the subtext is the (one would think) obvious fact that women have sexual natures, an idea men find so dreadful that they insist women have no desires, or at least that women keep quiet about them or risk winding up under a train.

In the process of telling this less titillating, more subversive story, Heyn addresses the sexual double standard as well as current myths about female sexuality--such as recent surveys “proving” that what women want (are you listening, Dr. Freud?) is not sex but “cuddling.” By far the most provocative sections of the book deal with the question of what women do in fact want--what they look for and value in men with whom they have affairs.

Leaving aside, for a moment, one’s surprise that so many women seem to have found saintly lovers--and one’s observation that the truth about sex is tricky enough to elude the sharpest interviewer, which Heyn is not--one is struck by the fact that these women’s lovers are not especially handsome, dashing or brilliant. Rather, they belong to that rare breed of men who treat women like adult human beings and not like moronic children. Lovers--unlike husbands, it seems--make women feel interesting, likable, free to be moody or difficult instead of relentlessly “nice.” The book’s most striking single moment comes when a women says of her lover: “He looks me straight in the eye when he talks and he lets me finish my sentences.”

If “The Erotic Silence of the American Wife” makes a splash on the talk-show circuit, there will be men in the audience, men who may have had the wrong ideas and fears about what causes wives to stray. One hopes--one can always hope--that men will intuit the message of this book. It’s really less about a hot new trend or a new breed of lusty, self-actualized woman than about women’s preference for men who have learned the difference between sweeping a woman off her feet and letting her finish a sentence.