I seem to recall giving an undertaking that I would be less opaque and less oblique this year and I've only inadvertantly been as good as my word.
Oops.
The banal truth is that the only affair I'm involved in is the one where I'm the 'betrayed' wife, my husband is 'the cheat' and she is the fool. More fool me, I guess.
So that's that.
If you want intimate details of a sordid little bit on the side by cheater, or the cheatee (?) fuck off elsewhere. God knows there are plenty of whoppers and wet ones out there in cyberspace for your delectation.
We were married back in 1993 full of the sort of high expectations most people carry into marriage, even those of us who are closer to thirty than twenty and who have one or more failed marriage behind them [he'd been married before, and although he didn't tell me afterwards hadn't actually got himself properly divorced before he started dating me, though he described himself as divorced].
It took perhaps a year for the scales to fall from my eyes, which by curious coincidence is about exactly the same length of time it took for his first wife to decide she'd had enough and go home to her parents. Had I been in my home country, let alone my home town I would have walked. But I was on the other side of the world, my mother had made plain she disapproved of him, I had too much pride to go home broke and with my tail between my legs. And crucially I didn't see then how bad the thing I'd got myself into actually was.
I was a disaffected wife, disappointed with what went on in the bedroom, disgusted with what went on elsewhere: in the kitchen, bathroom, and lounge-room which were the other three rooms in the single bedroom flat which was our first home.
It was not until a couple of moves down the line that I could see clearly how feckless he was and is at heart; the extent to which he was taking advantage of my near compulsive need to 'do the right thing' (like pay the rent and utilities on time, eat well, keep the house tidy, engage in a healthy social life). Had I been naive in agreeing that bills be in my name? Of course. Would I make the same mistake again. Fat chance: my credit rating is shot to shit and I'd be lucky to get a contract in my name ever again.
So I kept my head down, saved what I could and prayed that one day a little light representing the 'end of the tunnel' would appear to guide me 'home'.
Right about the time I thought I could see it I found out I was pregnant. I'd been told when I was 20 that I'd not conceive without assistance (IVF) so this, given we'd had sex about twice in the previous twelve months, came as a total shock. Being already more than five months pregnant (no obvious symptoms, yes some health problems; see above) I hadn't time to sort things and get out, fly home and be a single mother.
Besides, if I'm honest, I thought this might be the wake up call he'd always needed. Hmmm, can I be stupid.
First reaction: "there goes our life style". Promise? Ha Ha!
Second reaction: "of course if its a boy it will be called x (for his father) and if its a girl it will be called y (for his mother).
Quite what was going on in his mind when he uttered this second reaction is something I've gone over and over and over again.
For almost everything else he ever did I can just about acquit him of malice. Almost everything else pretty much looks like stupidity or feckless or something similar.
But not this. Because about three years later, when we were finally confronting his infidelity, he told me that he hadn't believed until not long before that he was the father of our daughter. Suspicion over the parentage of the child was not going to get in the way of him inflicting, without any consultation
AT ALL, one of other of his ghastly parents' ghastly names.
I had limited paid maternity leave entitlement so I sought assurances from him that our savings (including shares (stocks)) were intact, just in case we needed them if things got difficult, were I to extend my leave for a few weeks unpaid. He looked me straight in the eye and promised that they [the share certificates] were in the house.
During the months I had off I cleaned and reorganised and in the course, naturally, I found the sales receipts. He'd sold them, all of them, sometime almost immediately after they'd been obtained.
The downside of this discovery was far outweighed by the upside. Finally I had incontrovertible evidence that
It Was Him, Not Me.
I'd been wondering if I was actually losing my mind: how could someone insist and say often that he loved me, and do things that he appeared to do and treat me as he appeared to treat me. So I must be seeing a distorted picture of his behaviour or my own understanding of what constitutes normal behaviour within a marriage must be somehow wrong [after all, my father was dying of cancer from when I was six, and his fight for health dominated our lives for the next four years, after which my mother didn't re-marry; so did I really have a real idea of marriage?]
This was therefore a watershed moment because afterwards, paradoxically, I believed in myself once again. I had the courage and strength to apply for a transfer from the support side of the business to the fee-earning side, where the respect and the money are. I'm bright and hard working and the promotions came and after a time I worked myself (us) out of debt and onto a stable financial footing. I kept him on because he was cheaper than a full-time nanny (although less use in that role, and God forbid he should do a shred of housework).
Was this demeaning? Was I undermining him as the man in the marriage by going out to work at six in the morning, flying about the country to client meetings, working until the early hours of the morning to deliver client assignments on time and of the highest quality?
If you're suddenly thinking that, read back from the start; I got back to being career orientated and 'used' him as home help after he'd had years of chances to go out get a job, keep it and make a contribution to the family income - when I (we) had a child to keep in food, clothes, warmth and so on, and no other obvious choice except welfare.
By the way, not only did he not do a shred of housework, but his child minding duties were limited to getting his daughter out of bed, breakfasted, washed, dressed and to the woman I paid to care for her on time. For the four years this lovely woman cared for my daughter her complaints about the state in which our daughter would arrive and the lack of punctuality were a constant. Somewhere in the past I posted about the financial strain of this in the early days before the promotions came. The point is he did fuck all, absolutely FUCK all.
Then came September 11, 2001; he decided to get in touch, using the website Friends Reunited, with a woman he'd been at university with.
They began an email correspondence which led to an invitation to him to join her for a visit in the US.
By this time he'd got himself a job as a 'weed-sprayer' with a local weed spraying company (of the sort that gets contracts from railway companies to spray their lines and verges, etc). The job had taken him away on field trips a couple of times so the first couple of times a trip away was no problem.
In fact it was some time before I untangled the chronology of all of this. In the August of 2002 I had to take two weeks leave to cover for my child minder being away. During that time, and he was away with her I decided to clean the house thoroughly and paint the master bedroom. I discovered that the panel in that room behind which the boiler is concealed had been loosened. From behind it I extracted a supermarket plastic carrier bag and in it I found some emails, some boarding passes, some restaurant tickets and other detritus.
Somewhere else among the squalor I found her business card and other bits of stuff (like american sweet wrappers, Philadelphia newspapers and other bits and pieces). I moved the bed around to clean properly. Underneath it I found a couple of girlie magazines dedicated to very young woman. Not children, but young woman only just emerging from childhood. Somewhere else I found a couple of videos. What was almost amusing was the women in the videos, just judging by the pictures on the cases were raddled old hags. I knew he was catholic but this a new dimension of his catholicism.
I also found the bills he'd not been paying. It was this long fortnight I sat down and negotiated the settlement program that enabled me to pay our way out of trouble.
In the years since I confronted him about the affair I've had an undertaking from him he had no intention ever of keeping that he'd be discrete, lived with the knowledge that his friends and colleagues and plenty of other people in the small town where we live all know and have to some extent or other conspired in the affair.
So much time has passed we've both got stuck in this new and bizarre rut. Lack of money means he no longer gets to visit the US once a month as he once did.
Among the emails was news that she was embarking on IVF treatment, having never had a child whether within her own failed marriage or outside it. It was not absolutely clear that he was the donor, in fact it read as if she'd started this before he got in touch with her, but there were also exchanges that suggested they were trying 'the old fashioned way' when they could be together.
Then later there were clipped articles on inter-country adoption, so I guess she never did succeed with IVF. If she's adopted she's presumably receiving fewer airmiles, which she was using to fly him about.
I was able to look her up in the Philly phone directory and find an address that tallied with a scribbled note I once found, but the listing is no longer there. Either she's moved from Philadelphia or had her listing removed. Does she think I'd stalk her? Christ I'm not that interested.
The only things I want to know from her are
- why won't she take him off my hands completely rather than keep us in this dreadful limbo and
- if she's tried option 1 and not succeed why has she not asked herself what the fuck he thinks he's doing and
- if she's figured out he's a complete shit, why is she still phoning him up here in the UK at work?
I did stick her name in a search engine after I found the business card and was astonished by what it produced. Not only is this woman a senior Vice President in a US owned multi-national company that is a leader in its sector, but she's clearly a major player at a national level within her own area of professional practice. Up till then I'd been assuming the other woman to be some sad and desperate figure. The two don't fit together.
The affair did appear to taper off (much less time away). I thought perhaps she'd got wise or got bored or got lucky with someone better [and I hope that one day she does]. I did just very occasionally wonder if it was still rumbling along: had she moved to the UK or Europe to be closer to him since he couldn't move to be with her?
I guess I'd convinced myself that our only problems were the ones we'd always had, the ones that were part of the 'marriage' before our own 9/11, the deceit and indolence and so on. And apart from the shock of hearing her, actually
hearing her calmly, casually announce herself and ask for him, that's why the phone call was so upsetting.
These two people. What is going on in their minds? What does she think she's doing? He's not got some hugely responsible and demanding job with some big company making it difficult for him to be with her (contrary to what he's told her in the past) and I'm no obstacle to them being together either.
In one of her early emails to him she expressed sympathy that he found himself in a marriage 'that made him miserable' [in fact, I've probably misquoted, but it is something like that - one day I'll transcribe the emails for your entertainment].
Perhaps he's told her that I've made things so miserable and difficult for him that he's had to leave that job with so much responsibility (and presumably a commensurate pay level). She knows where he works - she's phone him there and presumably more than once. Well he's a shelf stacker and occasional check-out operator, dear. That's about the most responsible job he's ever held down and he has absolutely no prospects whatsoever of promotion. He has been promoted to his own particular level of incompetence, and remains there because the paucity of talent in this town is such that the local supermarket could not get someone better on the money it is able to offer.
Well I don't know about you, having waded through all that, but I feel a hell of a lot better.
