I spend the whole first part of the day wracked with my suspicion. Helen is leaving work early this afternoon to attend a concert event at our son’s school. Afterwards, we will return home and there will be a little time before the school bus brings the kids back. I decided in advance that that was the moment to ambush her with the question.
I get to the school auditorium before Helen. I arrange two seats together for us. She arrives, sees me, but stands at the back of the room for a while. Then she pulls another chair over and puts it next to the free one I had already arranged for her so that there is now an empty chair between us. She sits down in her chair, then acts with a start as if she absent-mindedly hadn’t seen me all along and slides over to the empty chair next to me. The strained body language does nothing to ease my growing anxiety.
The event ends and we drive home in separate cars. We go inside and stand in the kitchen, recently renovated and the pride of our comfortable colonial house in the leafy suburbs. I can wait no longer. I come straight out with it.
“Are you having an affair, Helen?” I ask with as much composure as I can muster.
She looks straight at me and says nothing. I have my answer. My heart sinks. No, it plummets. There’s no preparing for this. For over a week I knew deep down, but this still hits with all the force of a sledgehammer.
As it had two years earlier when she’d confessed a previous extramarital sexual dalliance early in our marriage. That had been a one-off incident in response to a minor spat between us a long time ago she assured me, so while I was hurt, I forgave her for it and had never brought it up since. The fact that it happened with a colleague with whom she still occasionally dealt continued to bother me. So did the manner in which I’d found out – picking up the phone to make a call and overhearing her on the upstairs extension having an exchange of an obviously sexual nature with the man in question. They had referred to a previous encounter and he was clearly soliciting a repeat performance. To her credit, I suppose, Helen resisted.
I had confronted her immediately and she confessed the transgression. She swore it had only happened once, though they had continued to enjoy the occasional phone call of the kind I’d overheard ever since. Naturally, I demanded the calls cease immediately as a condition of my forgiveness. I now realise that that forgiveness was bestowed too easily, though in the back of my mind at the time was a fling of my own while on a trip abroad some seven years earlier. We’re even, I rationalised. I even allowed her to twist things and blame her infidelity on me because of the insensitive remark I’d made which she claimed drove her to it, which was incredibly foolish then and seems even more so now that she has done it again. Not only is this another betrayal, it is current and ongoing. I wonder how much worse it’s going to get. I demand angrily to know how long it’s been going on. She begins to confess, but is interrupted by her pager going off. Surreally, she reaches for the phone to return the page.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to return that page now of all times,” I say incredulously.
“I’m on call,” she replies coldly. “I have to return it.”
I stand there seething while she returns the page in as businesslike a manner as she can. After a few minutes which feel like an eternity, the call ends and she turns to me to continue her confession. She has been seeing him for about two months now. I demand to know who he is, suddenly gripped by the thought that it may be a mutual friend, compounding the betrayal. She assures me it’s no one I know, no one even in our area. She admits that’s where she was this past weekend, when she was away allegedly on business. Oh, it was some kind of business all right.
The fury at her betrayal of me is bad enough, but I’m also enraged by what I regard as her betrayal of her children. This is a woman who spends precious little time with her kids, reflected in a painting our daughter once drew in art class in school entitled “My Family” which featured the two children with me and the family dog – but not Helen. Now I’m finding out that she’s been taking yet more time away from them to travel out of state to engage in sordid, self-indulgent romps with another man. I am reeling. Angry, devastated, sickened. But I have still not taken on board the full import of what this all means. The kids get home from school, so we take the discussion upstairs to our bedroom. That’s when she administers the coup de grace and tells me her affair isn’t just a physical dalliance, she has deep feelings for the other man.
“I want a divorce,” she announces.
My whole world is crumbling around me. She’s telling me how she wants to make this as easy as possible on me and how she wants to do all this amicably. I don’t have to move out right away, I can stay as long as I need until I get myself together. She’s going to help out any way she can. She’s so sorry. The words have all the consolation value of an old time executioner reassuring the condemned man that his axe is sharp so the victim’s head should come off cleanly with a single blow. Barely any of it is registering anyway. I’m entering shock, becoming numb. I have to get out, so I stagger over to our friends and neighbours Steve and Angelina’s house. I must look like a zombie because right away they ask me what’s wrong. I tell them. They’re appalled, but not totally surprised.
“I thought she’d been having an affair for some time now,” Steve says. I ask him why. He says the BMW she recently bought herself, the change in hairstyle, the extended time spent away, and the distinct change in her attitude they’ve noticed over the past two years or so that has contributed to them backing off from our friendship since.
“She’s having a classic mid-life crisis,” Steve says.
I feel myself sinking into despair. It’s the initial grief phase of shock. I pour out all the reasons why this is mostly my fault.
My lack of ambition and career development. I don’t know why this is, but I’m untroubled by career motivation. If I were independently wealthy, I wouldn’t work. Some people would. They need to work. They enjoy it. Helen is like this. I’m not. This is in part because I’ve never felt like I’ve discovered my mission in life. Helen was lucky – she knew she wanted to be a physician from an early age and followed the clear path to get there. I’ve never felt such strength of direction, so I’ve tended to drift. When I found something I enjoyed, such as the small magazine I worked at for six years, I settled into a comfy rut even though it was a low-paying dead-end job. It did give me the flexibility to be there for our kids when needed, but despite that virtue I knew it bothered Helen. She was pleased when I finally left to take a position with a start up Internet company.
My staying at home after losing my job when the Internet company tanked after just one year compounded the problem. In hindsight, it was the pivotal turning point. We also lost our nanny around the same time, so it seemed natural for me to take over at home for a while. Helen agreed to this while our kids were still so young and because our son has a variety of learning disabilities, including Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, which require extra attention and put a real strain on all of us. I tried to do a little real estate work on the side, but it wasn’t right for me and it was too difficult to combine with my child care duties, so I quit. I quickly settled into another comfy rut of being a stay-at-home dad who whiled away the time between household chores and child care on Internet chat sites and engaged in trivial e-mail debates. I knew Helen rightly thought I was frittering away my time and talent in frivolity, yet I let the situation slide. I have issues.
Not doing more to contribute when I could have. I could have done more part-time work while I was at home, yet I remained mired in my rut, the eternal slacker. Helen thought I botched helping her collect some outstanding money owed on her outside consulting work. The money was coming in, but she thought I was doing it in a haphazard, disorganised fashion and eventually handed the task over to one of her sisters, whom she was obliged to pay. I knew that pissed Helen off, yet I didn’t address the situation or correct what I believed was her misimpression of the job I was doing. I have issues.
My arrested adolescence. I still prefer to wear t-shirts emblazoned with the names of my favourite rock bands and jeans or cargo shorts rather than acting and dressing like the mature, professional, accomplished man Helen needs at this point in her life. I regressed ever further into my bad ways while at home even while Helen’s career reached new heights. I knew she was beginning to feel like she was taking care of a teenage son rather than having a husband partner, yet I allowed the situation to slip into crisis. I have issues.
Not showing her enough affection. I’m not naturally demonstrative with my feelings, and Helen has always felt that I don’t tell her I love her enough or show it in other ways. I thought she was crazy to demand such things when I don’t require them and my love for her should have been taken as a given. Why couldn’t I see beyond the prism of myself and give her what she needed? I have issues.
What she perceived as my depressive demeanour and moodiness. I admit that I can come across as pessimistic and a bit morose at times, but I thought that was just me, take me for who I am. Helen and a couple of fellow physician friends believe I suffer from persistent low-level depression. I always resisted the diagnosis and taking medication for it. Helen finally talked me into trying one antidepressant a few years ago which had sexual side effects. That was hardly likely to cheer me up, so I stopped taking it and that was that. The result is my moods affected the whole family and contributed to the current disaster. Why didn’t I do something about it? I have issues.
The constant bickering over money. I felt like I had to act as the fiscally responsible one in our relationship because Helen was so reckless with her spending, but it also made me appear a killjoy. A European holiday last summer was partially spoiled by my worrying over the cost both before and after we arrived. I knew the trip was important to Helen as a sign that we’d “made it” and could afford such luxurious getaways, but still I couldn’t relax and let her enjoy it to the full. I have issues.
An impatient streak and an acid tongue which occasionally make me blurt out caustic, hurtful comments. This has been a problem throughout our marriage and Helen has urged me to get a grip on it. I always apologise and promise I will, but I never have. It has contributed to the death of our marriage by many small cuts. I have issues.
My fatal complacency. It was tangible how much Helen and I had been growing apart in recent years, particularly over the past year. It manifested itself in something as trivial as Helen’s changing taste in music. We used to like the same kind of music, rock broadly speaking, though Helen’s taste has always been broader than mine and included other genres. Lately, seemingly out of nowhere, she developed a strong liking for hardcore rap music, which I can’t stand. She listens to it almost exclusively these days. It’s just one small symptom of us moving in different directions, though there are many others.
The opposites in our natures that once attracted and made our marriage work (since it’s difficult to conceive how our family could’ve succeeded if we’d both been as career driven as Helen or conversely as lackadaisical in our approach to work as I’ve been) became unbalanced as we both retreated to our extremes and began to repel one another. I knew it, just as I knew my failure to deal with my other issues was becoming a bigger problem, but I just kept floating along in my little bubble of complacency, blithely assuming everything would stay the same. Now I know it doesn’t. I have issues.
Finally, in what I think was in many ways the proverbial and literal final straw for her, my failure to appreciate the severity of a back problem she developed last year. It came to a head when we took the kids to New York for Thanksgiving weekend and the pain became so unbearable she was literally screaming from it and had to return by herself on a flight in the middle of the night to check herself into the emergency room back home leaving me to travel back with the kids the next day. I thought she’d been making a meal of it because she kept rejecting my offers to call for medical help and I was amazed when she required emergency surgery to remove a shard of dessicated disc that had become lodged in her spinal column.
It was a colossal blunder on my part I had apologised profusely for, but in retrospect the damage done to our already teetering relationship was immense. Helen was furious with me for the cavalier attitude I’d taken to her condition. She said it proved I couldn’t be relied on to take care of her in a crisis, though I had been there for the kids, as usual. That cut no ice with her though, and it was clear I would never be forgiven for my mistake. I have issues.
I recall the showdown talk we had a little over a month ago when I agreed to start looking for work outside the home again. The discussion hadn’t gone well. There was a lot of resentment, confirmed in an e-mail she sent me the next day recapping all my shortcomings with such venom I was too stunned to even reply. Little did I know though how thin the ice really was – she’d already begun the affair by then and this day was but a few short weeks away.
I lay all this out to Steve and Angelina. It’s all true, I say. I can’t deny any of it. I can’t blame her for not wanting to be married to a loser anymore. I don’t know why I am the way I am or why I failed to address what are in some cases lifelong personal deficiencies. I was so damn complacent. I have issues. God damn all my issues. I need help.
They try to support me. They tell me not to be so hard on myself, that Helen has played a huge role in all this herself. They cite her single-minded career focus and neglect of the kids, taking for granted that I’m always there to pick up the slack so she can work and travel to her heart’s content; her lack of appreciation for the role I play in other ways running the household; the enormity of her betrayal, for which there is no excuse or justification whatever her problems with me are; and her sexually inappropriate behaviour in general.
Helen has always been preternaturally sexual. Tall, slim yet curvaceous, with dark hair and a fine alabaster complexion, she is attractive, vivacious, flirtatious, uninhibited, sexually adventurous, and of above average sexual appetite and experience. Interesting qualities in a practicing Catholic, but they were a big part of what attracted me to her.
By contrast, I have a relatively sheltered sexual history by virtue of having always been Mr. Long Term Relationship. Helen was only my third girlfriend. We met at university on the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast, where she had moved from upstate Pennsylvania to attend medical school and I was an undergraduate exchange student from the University of East Anglia. After a relatively whirlwind romance of around two years, some eight months of which were spent apart when I returned to England to complete my bachelor’s degree, I moved back to the same part of the U.S. to be with her and we married shortly thereafter when we were both twenty-four years old. We’ve been here ever since. At six feet four, I am tall, slim (though I have been carrying about twenty pounds of excess weight in recent years), and possessed of the dark hair and fair skin of my Anglo-Black Irish heritage. People always said Helen and I made a handsome couple, and the differences in our sexual histories never really bothered me, though I envied some of her exploits after failing to sow most of my wild oats in my youth.
The stories from Helen’s turbulent teen years were racy stuff indeed. There was no shortage of boyfriends with whom she was sexually active. She confessed to me that she had become pregnant during this time and had had an abortion. Another of the stories from this period that always stuck with me was the time she said she took a wrong number call at home. She got talking to the man on the other end, and they arranged to meet that night. He picked her up in his car, they parked somewhere, and they had a sexual encounter. When they were finished, he dropped her home, and that was it. I always used to marvel that that must be the luckiest misdial in history, and that guy probably talks about it to this day.
There had been numerous examples of Helen exhibiting her hypersexual traits throughout our marriage. There was her first extramarital escapade within a year of us being wed, of course. Then, following the birth of our son, she got a boob job to counteract the after effects of breast feeding, which left her formerly pert but shapely bosom flaccid and shapeless. This seemed to embolden her further, and she loved showing off her new boobs at every opportunity.
Not long after the operation, we traveled to England to visit my family. During a dinner at my sister’s house in which my entire family was present, including spouses and significant others of my sisters we were meeting for the first time, talk turned to Helen’s new boobs. Quick as a flash, she lifted up her top and gave the whole table, my parents included, a view of her ample new cleavage enhanced by a skimpy bra. I could tell a few were shocked, but we all laughed. That was Helen.
A few years later, Helen traveled across country to attend a meeting. Upon her return, she told me that a few of the participants had relaxed after a long day in the hotel hot tub. She said she had joined a group of four or five male colleagues in the tub wearing only a pair of G-string panties. I was shocked, but she assured me it was innocent and nothing more had happened. Nevertheless, I questioned the appropriateness of her behaviour and told her most husbands would be outraged by it. Ultimately though, I shrugged it off. That was Helen.
A few years ago, we started attending summer pool parties hosted by friends of ours. The group included some mutual friends and a lot of people we hadn’t met before. The format typically involved plenty of drinking, dinner, then frolicking in the pool for those who wanted to. From the very first party, Helen went into the pool wearing only a pair of G-string panties. At subsequent parties, a few other women also went topless, but never with Helen’s brazenness. We all laughed. That was Helen.
At a New Year’s party involving the same group, we all had a lot to drink and by the end of the night Helen was flashing her boobs again. She even posed for photos that way. By that time, everyone had already seen them from the pool parties, so it didn’t seem like a big deal. We all laughed. That was Helen.
Then at another dinner party hosted by Steve and Angelina, talk turned to the prospect of Helen’s fortieth birthday, which was approaching within a year or two. Helen announced during dinner that what she wanted more than anything as a present for the occasion was a threesome involving her, me, and another man. We all laughed, but she was serious. That’s what she really wanted. That was Helen.
Over the years, Helen also has expressed more than once the opinion that extramarital sex is little more than “glorified masturbation” if it's simply a physical act divorced from any emotional element. This should have been a big red flag to me, but I always used to shrug it off as simply an unusual point of view. After all, that was Helen, and I loved and trusted her. More fool me.
She has followed all this up since by joining Cake, a women’s club that hosts sexually themed events in New York, of which she has so far attended a few but not the most outrageous; frequently repeating her desire for the ménage a trois, which I have resisted; and expressing an interest in pornography featuring group sex and sex between white women and black men. We’ve always enjoyed pornography as an enhancement to our sex life, so I didn’t think anything of it.
Most recently, a few weeks before all this came to a head, she attended a male strip club with a female colleague for a “girl’s night out.” The colleague is African-American and she took Helen to a club she knows featuring all African-American performers. According to Helen, the dancers aren’t totally nude, but sheath their erect or semi-erect penises in pouches that leave nothing to the imagination. Helen told me during the course of the evening, one of the dancers appeared next to her at their table to do a private dance for them. She said she’d expressed doubt that his penis was real due to its large size.
“Touch it,” she said her friend told her. She told me she did, to everyone’s great delight. I was shocked but once again laughed it off. That was Helen.
Throughout all this, Helen has seemed either oblivious or uncaring to how this appears to others. I have seen women react to her antics with clear hostility in their facial expressions and body language, since she is viewed by them as sexually voracious and predatory and a threat to them through her flirtatiousness with their husbands. Angelina later confided in me how shocked she’d been at her dinner party by Helen’s expressed desire for the threesome and how sorry she felt for me because she thought I’d been publicly humiliated. I’d told her not to worry. That was just Helen. And besides, I have to confess that I enjoyed having such a wild and sexy wife, especially with many of my friends confiding in me how much their own sex lives had waned due to decreased interest on the part of their wives.
But it seems in part at least like these chickens are finally coming home to roost. I tell Steve and Angelina that while all that may be true, I’m still 70% to blame for creating the conditions that allowed all this to happen. They say it’s more like 51%-49%, and they think Helen’s the majority stakeholder. But I cannot be consoled and I leave their house in tears to return home.
Helen is interacting with the kids when I come back in, and a thought suddenly strikes me. I need to protect myself. I need proof of her adultery in case she changes her story on her lawyer’s advice. That kind of thing happens every day when lawyers get their hooks in. I go upstairs to her study to take a look at her e-mail while she’s preoccupied downstairs, suspecting there may be some evidence there. Nothing in her inbox or sent items. Then I check her deleted items. There they are – two exchanges between her and this other man that leave no doubt what’s been going on. Judging by the name on his e-mail address, Pascal, it seems he’s French – as if I need another reason to hate the French.
It's predictably tawdry fare. “I can hear your voice in my ear and feel you pushing inside me,” she purrs in one e-mail to him. “Mmmm. Feels so good, even just to imagine it. I can't wait to feel it for real,” she continues. In one e-mail, she signs off: “Kisses all over your gorgeous smooth body.” In the other, she bids him adieu with: “Feeling you kiss me all over.” They have even evolved a cutesie pet name for her, which seems ludicrously premature. Nevertheless, she refers to herself as his “porcupine.” Perhaps she neglected to shave her legs before she slept with him for the first time? God, I feel sick.
The words are like daggers twisting in my heart, but I need proof. I want to print them out, but there isn’t time because Helen could come upstairs at any moment. I forward them to my e-mail on my PC downstairs in my basement study, then delete the forwarding from her sent items to cover my tracks.
I also go through the bills, remembering that we recently received the phone bills in the mail. I check Helen’s mobile phone bill, and sure enough there are some thirty calls logged between her and an out-of-state number. Some are brief, presumably messages left; others are long, some almost an hour long. It’s obvious who they’re to. I make a copy of the bill and add it to the e-mails. I make multiple copies of everything and secrete them about the house.
The rest of the night is a haze. I’m definitely in a state of shock. A steel grip has clamped on my gut and won’t let go. I have no appetite and eat nothing the rest of the night. Helen says she’ll sleep in the basement guest room and I can have our bed for now. I don’t expect to get much if any sleep tonight. Helen gives me a Valium to help me sleep and goes downstairs as we begin our new life apart.
Excerpted from Diary Of A Divorce, by Richard Pearce. For more information, go to www.lulu.com See also Life As A Divorced Dad at http://www.singledad.blog.co.uk
