adulteries and epiphanies

Independence Day

There’s nothing like being yanked from slumber’s womb because someone left an alarm on. A persistent, jangling poke in my eardrum. Dammit, the phone. It was the phone.

“Hello?” in my best I-wasn’t-really-asleep voice.

“This is Jane. Please tell Charlie I’m alright.”

“Wait. Jane? What is going on?”

“Just tell him I’m fine.”

Click.

What the fuck was that about?

Sleep fog cleared. Oh, shit. Jane. The wife of the man I was trying to end a crazy affair with. Pieces floated out of the haze and landed with a thud on the floor of my consciousness.

Oh, shit. I came home late last night after going to a movie with a friend. Charlie called. He was desperate because I hadn’t been home and he didn’t know where I was. I was irritated. Jesuschrist, there’s nothing more annoying than a clingy lover.

“Where the fuck are you?” I asked him.

“In the garage.”

“Shit, Charlie, this doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

“Jane’s fast asleep.”

If the conversation wasn’t a wise idea, phone sex was probably high on the list of truly stupid ideas. But it served two purposes: first, it got Charlie off the phone faster than the endless conversation of why we needed to stop this nonsense and second, I was wound like a top.

I like words; phone sex employed many I didn’t use in my daily vocabulary.

Charlie wasn’t bad either.

And Jane, it turns out, was not asleep.

I still don’t know at which stage of the descriptive conversation she picked up the extension. There really wasn’t a good entrance point. Not during verbal foreplay, mid-crescendo, certainly not during denouement…not even the post-coital chit-chat. It didn’t matter, the whole mess exploded (pun acknowledged) and I was standing there in the middle of the shitstorm.

So was Charlie but honestly I didn’t much care–his shitstorm was his problem. I was center stage for public stoning.

Genesis

Charlie and Jane were friends of my husband, Dave, and mine. I wasn’t really tight with Jane but I (obviously) liked Charlie. Actually Jane may have been my husband’s supervisor at the time. That still makes me cringe. This was the husband I had left some seven months earlier and was on my way to divorcing. This was my husband of seven-and-a-half years who had asked me for an open marriage two years after our über-traditional Mormon temple wedding. 

I’d always liked Charlie. 19 years my senior, he had a warmth and genuineness that I found somewhat lacking in my husband’s fellow corporate climbers. He was a throw-back to an era of patchouli and political rebellion. A grown-up Texas hippie with a job. Funny and sweet.

About the time I moved out of the house, Charlie had a stroke. He was in his early forties. Within our circle of friends, we all took turns helping out. (A circle of friends, by the way, who were closing ranks around my husband over my “finding herself” selfishness.) I went over and made Charlie lunch one day. As a student, my schedule had a little more flexibility than others so I got lunch duty. He was wearing a patch to strengthen his stroke-weakened eye. It was like he was playing pirate. Oddly charming. He could walk but was not completely steady. He was in good spirits for having had a stroke at such a young age. I thought it was all bravery but now I realize there may have been some plotting going on in his less than bi-functional brain.

I made sandwiches and we chatted. It was a delightful afternoon. When it was time for me to go, I went over to the couch where he was resting to give him a hug good-bye. As I turned from hugging him, our lips met. I would have sworn on a stack of scarlet letters it was an accident. How could I have been so naïve? I should have known that the man saw his chance and took it. Anyway, it didn’t matter—the fuse was lit and we were covered in accelerant. Oh, shit.

This was February. By April his obsession with me had cooled my passions and I was looking for a quiet exit. Unfortunately, that ship had sailed and sunk. He wanted to marry me. I promised him that the very last thing I was interested in was another marriage. If he left his wife, he’d better be ready to live alone because I had no intention of filling that void. In May, we had a moony, candlelit rendezvous in Taos under the guise of his going on a Buddhist retreat or somesuch shit. It was supposed to be our affair farewell.

But things dragged on. Of course, I bear some responsibility for not definitively cutting Charlie loose. I was on my own for the first time in my 25 years. I had a 5-year old and a 3-year old. My family lived 1,000 miles away and they were not happy with my decision to leave Dave. My circle of friends had sidled over to the poor, deserted husband. I felt truly alone. Charlie seemed like my last friend and his mid-life crisis coincided with my neediness. He thought I was the shit and that was hard to give up. Until the aforementioned July 4th explosion. Then, I told him, we were completely done. Over. Finis.

He started showing up on campus just as my classes would let out. Then, one day he was waiting for me outside my job. That was it. I threatened him with a restraining order and that threw some cold water on the crazy. He was no modern stalker...just a lovesick, impulsive, relentless, self-absorbed man. A real pain-in-the-ass.

Saint to Whore

The simplest backstory to all this was that I was raised Mormon. My overbearing father joined the church when I was eight years old. The family obediently followed the following year. Particularly suited to be a fanatic, I took to the structure and self-denial like a hermit to silence. I still find it disturbing how quickly I was absorbed into dogma. It’s complicated but safe to say I was the most straight-laced girl to emerge from my high school class. Pristine. Prudish. I didn’t drink coffee, tea or alcohol. I didn’t smoke or do drugs. And I was Acolyte to the Goddess of the Intact Hymen.

Engaged to marry as a college freshman, my fiancé’s clarion call was “Marry or Burn!” Romantic, right? I laughed along but wondered deep down if he really was marrying me just to have sex. But since pre-marital sex was verboten, I guessed this was the only way. I followed the letter and the spirit of the law with zeal. I didn’t just avoid sin—I avoided even the “appearance of evil.” At 18 I went to my wedding bed with my Girl Scout Virginity Patch sewn on. Tight.

I loved my husband. I did. But he was used to getting his way. Which meant I postponed my education while he finished his three degrees. Which meant any windfall we got (his parents were quite comfortable) was his to spend. Which meant he talked like a feminist but acted like the privileged white male he was. Three days after my 23rd birthday I gave birth to our second child. By that time, the concept of “happily ever after” was seriously tarnished. Sometime later I woke up and thought: I saved myself for this? 

My life was quite traditional, more like my mother’s than my peers’. Still, I loved being a mother. So, I went to therapy to bridge the widening gap between my dreams and my reality. My husband was supportive of me figuring out my problems so he didn’t have to deal with them. Couples therapy was out of the question.

When I left him, almost 3 years after trying to therapy-squeeze into that good wife girdle, my dutiful Mormon halo took a solid hit. Then, eight months later, on that dramatic July 4th morning, I completed the transition that had terrified me as a young zealot: I went from Saint to Whore. In 24-hours. The news was out. I was a double-home-wrecker.

Word spread fast. My estranged husband was indignant. (He’s the one that asked for an open marriage, why the moral outrage now?) Other friends damned me for being disloyal to Jane. Disloyal? Focus your attention on the one who married her, not me. I took no vows with the woman. They’d had this simple, two-dimensional image of me: young wife and mother. Suddenly, I was complicated and threatening.

The most amazing thing about the crossover was the relief. 

Not just relief but all-caps RELIEF. 

People now viewed me as a Jezebel. A woman without morals or self-control. No one had ever seen me as a fallen woman! Even if I was not all the terrible things they said, I would never again have to hold up that equally flawed façade of perfection. 

Accepting that people saw me as contemptible was intoxicating. I was drunk on bad reputation, completely okay with being judged and misjudged. I was free.