I wake up several times in the night. A Valium finally helps me get a few hours’ decent rest. I get the kids off to school then head for my doctor’s appointment. I tell him what’s going on and he prescribes Zoloft. I get the prescription filled immediately and start taking it. My doctor says it will be a few weeks before the medication gets properly into my system.
I spend a good part of the rest of the day preparing a list of issues to discuss in our first couples therapy session set for tomorrow morning. I’m most concerned about what Helen’s real motives may be for attempting to reconcile. I note that doing it for the kids alone isn’t enough. Doing it to help build me up to a point at which she feels better about dumping me isn’t enough. I know she’s been copping hell from her family since she broke the news to them a few days ago. Her parents and her father in particular are livid about her adultery. It seems he has a better grip on the Catholic church’s view on the matter than his daughter. But I’m concerned that Helen may be offering only a token effort to reconcile to try to save some face with them. I intend to lead the counseling session tomorrow off with this, because if Helen isn’t sincere then there’s no point wasting everyone’s time.
After dinner, of which I eat little, I go down to my study in the basement to find Helen going through my e-mail. She has discovered the exchanges I forwarded between her and Pascal in my deleted items file. How could I have been so stupid? I had caught her in the same way, yet I had failed to cover my tracks by not emptying my own e-mail trash. Helen wears an expression of utter shock, then turns to regard me with fury. This is it, I think. Reconciliation over before it even starts. Helen storms upstairs and we get locked into an immediate heated argument.
“How could you betray my privacy and do something so sneaky?” she demands, outraged.
“After what you've done, I owe you no debt there,” I counter. I ask her to put herself in my place that first night and to understand my need for proof in case she decided to change her story during divorce proceedings. She insists she never would, but admits that the first question her lawyer asked her when she’d told him she was having an affair was whether I had proof. Precisely my point, I say. Whatever her intentions toward honesty now, this is what happens when lawyers get involved. That’s why I had to protect myself. That’s why I needed proof.
Helen is embarrassed by the tawdry nature of the e-mails and asks if I’d consider exchanging them for an affidavit from her attesting to the affair. I say yes, but only after legal consultation. I have an appointment with my lawyer tomorrow and I promise to bring it up then. We go back and forth like this for a while, then, incredibly, the tone changes dramatically. We calm down. We start having another long, positive, constructive dialogue again. The perpetual roller coaster nature of this thing is truly amazing. Helen tells me that part of her attraction for Pascal wasn’t just physical, but that she really felt a connection to him in a way we’d lost.
“I felt like I was dealing with an equal with him rather than a dependent,” she says. “He told me all about the physics involved in natural resource exploration and drilling for oil, which was fascinating,” she continues. Yeah, I'll bet, I think. Then he busied himself with a little natural resource exploration and drilling of an entirely different kind. The thought is like a hand reaching up from my gut to squeeze my heart into pulp like an overripe tomato.
She goes on to say that she’d become embarrassed to tell people that I stay home with the kids, and that she’d taken to lying about what I do when asked.
“I tell you this not to hurt you,” she says, “but to make you understand my feelings so that you can try to address them.” I’m not hurt, I respond, at least not any more than any other revelation about her lover, because I’ve never felt ashamed of the role I play taking care of the kids and running the household, which I feel Helen totally takes for granted. But I tell her I know it’s an issue for her I’ve got to address if she’s to regain her respect for me and give any attempt at reconciliation a chance.
Helen then once again reveals her failure to adequately grasp the situation by asking if I’d mind if she contacts Pascal every six weeks or so to let him know how the reconciliation is going. She feels she “owes” him that. Incredulously, I respond that we don’t “owe” Pascal anything – he knew he was fooling around with a married woman.
“In no way would such continued contact with him be appropriate for the reconciliation or fair to me,” I tell her. If she doesn’t want to take my word for it, I invite her to ask the couples counselor what she thinks of this idea tomorrow, since I know full well the counselor will agree with me.
Helen also expands on what she meant the other night in the car when she said she didn’t think her affair was a mistake.
“I didn’t want to insult you by making you think that I’d do something as drastic as ending our marriage over something as trivial as a mistake,” she explains. “What I have with Pascal is much deeper than that.” Oh, well, that’s all right then, I think while I just stare dumbly at her. I can think of no way to respond to this that won’t cause tempers to rise or devolve into a pointless game of tortured semantics over the meaning of the word “mistake,” so I let it drop. Suddenly, I’m seized by a thought that hadn’t occurred to me before.
“Have you possibly exposed yourself to HIV or any other sexually transmitted diseases or even pregnancy through your liaisons with Pascal?” I ask her forcefully, since any of these consequences obviously would doom things between us. She shakes her head.
“We used condoms,” she quietly assures me, if any reassurance or consolation can be found in such a revelation about my wife's sexual activity with another man. But it’s something, at least. I must take what crumbs of comfort I can from the situation. I ask her to please confirm her next period for me nonetheless.
We talk for four hours, until almost 1:00am. Unnoticed by us, the kids have put themselves to bed, bless them. A night that started off in the worst possible way has ended up feeling positive again, but I know the issue of the e-mails will resurface and be a problem as we move forward. It would have been much better had she not discovered I had them. We say goodnight. I have no doubt I’ll need a Valium if I’m to get any sleep after all this.
Excerpted from Diary Of A Divorce, by Richard Pearce, available for £8.99 from www.amazon.co.uk or for $14.75 from www.lulu.com
