I had always loved being married. What I wanted was a happy home, a happy spouse. I had assumed that after twenty years of marriage that this was true, we were happy. In our own way, in a way that suited our unique idiosyncrasies. We seemed to agree on all decisions; not with difficulty, but with ease. “What should our marriage be like?” It wasn’t a question I asked. This was our marriage; this was a mutual process and this was the result we had reached after twenty years together. What I quickly learned was that it’s only true in a relationship with no secrets.
Are secrets suddenly revealed? When the truth comes out, it can seem abrupt. In reality, the signs are there but they remain obscure. “How did you not know your husband was having an affair?” it played on my mind over and over in the days after the reveal. Is it because he didn’t want to face the obvious? No, it is because an affair is not always obvious to the spouse. Without staying up late No lipstick on the neck. No unaccounted time. No weird phone calls. Where was he supposed to look? My husband kept an eye on his and his family’s routine.
The routine was broken one day. I walked into his office and he was huddled over the phone, whispering into the receiver with a wide grin on his face. He had forgotten that I would meet him that morning. He looked at me while he was still on the phone and said, “I have to go.” The conversation was very friendly; My first thought was why can’t you share with this person that I’m here? When he hung up the phone, I asked, “Who were you talking to?” He stumbled and replied, “No one.” I replied, “You sounded like you were having a good time.” Then he replied, “It was Elise.” My heart fell. Immediately, I started thinking, Elise? Elise moved out two years ago. She was your secretary. Why would you be talking to her? I flushed with embarrassment and walked out of his office into an adjacent empty office. He followed me and closed the door. I immediately blurted out the words “Did you have an affair with Elise?” “No” he shook his head and said “No” again. I didn’t believe him, but I couldn’t conceive of him lying to me either. He had never lied to me before, why now? What I can do? It seemed so fundamentally wrong to accuse your spouse of having an affair, and yet there it was, the words hanging in the air between us. All I could do was leave to avoid the awkwardness.
My husband called constantly for an hour. When I finally answered the phone, he said that he called Elise after I left. He told her that it was wrong to keep her friendship out of respect for me. He assured me that there was nothing between them and that he would end any further contact. At that moment, I believed him. I did not review the incident and often wonder why. I was on the cusp of discovery and hesitated. I can only say that the hesitation came from wanting to marry the person I knew and trusted.
Two weeks passed and the incident never crossed my mind again. So, I came home late one night and he had left his work email open and the inbox contained a message from Elise. As I looked closer, wait, there were several messages over several months from Elise. I’ve never opened her email before, but I did this time. To discover the truth? No, seek the assurance that it was just what he had said: a friendship. What I found were not steamy love letters, but messages with clues that were impossible to ignore. A note that ended with “I love it” and another that talked about how much fun it would be to see each other at a conference.
The slow process of disassembly began. I could feel the heat rising from within my stomach spreading to dizziness as the ground seemed to move. I took several deep drinks and knew this wasn’t just a friendship. How could I ask him? What was she going to say? I stayed up for three hours before I finally woke him up. Those three hours were endless. He could hear the clock ticking as he tried to think of what he would do. I needed to know I had to know I lay down next to him, repeating Elise’s name over and over as I slept. “Please, please, just give me a night dream confession.” I pleaded in my mind. There is no such luck. Clearly, there was only one way to get the truth and it was from him. The passage from unsuspecting wife to hapless torturer happened quickly. At three in the morning, I started crying. She woke up and asked me what was going on and I blurted out, “I know you had an affair with Elise. Just tell me. Tell me now. This is my life and I have a right to know.” Dazed to wake up, he quickly replied, “I did. I did.”
I wanted to hit him and I did. I stopped hitting. I didn’t stop because I felt it was wrong. I stopped because I didn’t know what kind of violence I was capable of. At what point could she go from the wife she thought was rude asking if her husband was having an affair to a cunning killer? She didn’t know it, but certainly this act of confession called for an answer to the question. The more rational part of me won by jogging. I needed to have answers. The storm broke out and the questions rained down. If you were our neighbor and unlucky enough to be awake, you would have heard the angry voices and screaming. We were the couple you hear late at night when the voices are so loud you don’t know which house they’re coming from. The couple so desperate they don’t care if you hear them fight. If you were our neighbor, you would think that only the stupid and ignorant fight like this. We were that couple.
Suddenly everything stopped. “How long was the adventure?” to which he replied “Four years”. The room began to swim and I began to fall. I was falling, but I was still standing. It’s not unlike that moment in Alice in Wonderland where she’s ready to chase the White Rabbit and you’re not sure if she’s dreaming or still awake when she falls down the rabbit hole. Alice screams in terror as she falls, but she begins to realize that the fall is so slow and ridiculously long that she can’t stand the fear. She soon begins to experience the event as a simple fall and wonders when she will land. The hours seem to go by and she stares at the walls as she descends. There are jars of jam on the shelves, plates, cups of tea and books. She sees them all, but she continues to fall, so she can’t figure out why they’re there.
When you discover that your spouse has been unfaithful to you, you never land. You travel through the hole believing that there are days that you have landed at the bottom of the well. Do you tell yourself that you feel so horrible, that surely it couldn’t be worse than this? Surely this must be the background? You want the background. You long for the bottom of the hole just to land somewhere. Like Alice, if you land, you can find out where you are instead of wondering where you’re going. Once you land, can’t you plan your return trip?
With infidelity there is no landing to start your journey back to what it was. What you knew is gone. Imagine suddenly becoming homeless with no friend or destination in mind to help you. You look for a place to sleep, to eat something, a place to shower, but it is never enough to restore you. You are never clean enough, you never get enough rest, and food just doesn’t seem to quench the hunger inside you. He wants more, but even after a few nights of being homeless, he can no longer remember what it feels like to live inside a house. The memories of safety cannot hold you because if everything was taken from you, how can you feel safe knowing that?
Death was in my dreams. I opened doors and no one was there. Glass shattered but no one was there to hear it. I looked for my children, but I couldn’t find them. No one was ever there in my dreams. He was alone, searching and on the verge of a violent death. If she found someone, it was usually Elise, the other woman. I woke up from the dreams as if I hadn’t slept and my body throbbed with pain. I faced the day but I couldn’t do anything. I would do what I must, but nothing more. I fed the children, did the housework, went to work, but each activity took me away from the thoughts I didn’t want to leave. My job was to deal with this deception, even if dealing with it amounted to absolutely nothing. It occupied my whole being and pushed everything out of my mind.
I wanted to kill her. he had met her. She had met my children. She had attended parties at my house. She had sympathized with her stories. I defended her when my husband complained about her job performance. He had moved 2,000 miles away, but I hung around her old home. Crying and wishing he could knock on her door just to touch her face. While she was driving, could she cross the street and I would hit her with my car? “Officer, I never saw her cross the street. She was crossing the street.” Surely this is why defenses against insanity were devised?
Drawers and more drawers full of pieces of paper, coins, matchboxes, old numbers began to acquire a new meaning. They were treasures of possible clues about the past that he had never known about. My children asked me what I was doing and they said I was cleaning. Yes, cleaning that was it. I was trying to cleanse the past, make sense of it, and make sense of everything that I had missed. I really hadn’t lived through those years. Oh, I thought I did, but you can’t when there’s such a big lie. I was struggling under and over the walls of memory to fill those gaps with this information. The knowledge came as shards in the discarded junk drawer. In the midst of innocent conversations, I would ask my husband questions that just wouldn’t rest. “Did you drive down the freeway with her? Did you ever eat together? Did she make you breakfast?” Relentless, meaningless questions, but the balance of my emotional state rested on the answer. If only I could put the pieces together, I could put myself together.
The answers came, but they were not enough. The gaps and gaps of those years remained. Between discussions, we sat and ate, watched TV, slept together. We were passionate. We proclaim our love and our commitment. I was dying. The days turned into months and eventually we got to the point where we got over the anger and disappointment. It went beyond arguments. It was quiet for my husband and he welcomed these hard-earned days after months of my tumult. Peace may seem calm, but it is also despair. Anger was life and it was a way of trying to take over my life and reshape it. Twist it, bend it, turn it back into something you knew and understood.
I didn’t know where things were for my husband and me. I thought I knew on most days. He was the repentant spouse who saved this marriage. I was the one who had reached the brink of sanity, but he was coming back. He could forgive, but he couldn’t forget. That seemed absurd. How do you forget? Would anyone forget that he has cancer? Would they forget a car accident? My husband and I had lost touch over the years; something I now know, but could not understand without his confession. The rabbit hole seemed to have light at the end of the tunnel. I wasn’t going to land, but maybe I’d start walking out on my own; exploring the contents of the tunnel along the way.
