Lyin' Eyes Ch. 04

"Is it the sex Laura had with...this other man, Ma...Mr. Archer?" she asked. I shook my head.

"Neither Laura nor I were virgins when we got married," I explained. "I've already figured out that I'd probably be able to put the sex behind me...put him in the same place in my mind where her four previous lovers are. I don't think that's a critical thing at all," I told her. I stopped talking to think for a moment. The doctor opened a second notepad and flipped through some of the pages until she found an entry she studied intently while I was quiet.

"Doctor," I added, "I'm far less concerned about the sex she had with this guy than the reasons why she had sex with him," I said quietly. "This is the 21st century, Doctor. A man who meets a woman as late as her junior year of college doesn't expect to find a virgin for a wife." I looked into her dark eyes for a long time, debating whether to add anything.

"Have you seen the two tapes of her...encounters with him?" I asked finally. The doctor nodded. "Okay...I was going to suggest you view them if you hadn't," I said.

"The thing is, doctor, watching her have sex with that guy somehow decreases the impact rather than increases it," I said slowly. "It's no fun--it hurts and it's a terrible insult to me that she would share herself with another man--but it the ludicrous aspect of it deadens the hurt a little. I don't know what Laura's ideas are...but I thought the sex between them was pretty crude and...uninteresting, perhaps...certainly not very imaginative...not what I would have thought a cheating wife would want to experiment with." I waited while the doctor obviously tried to make up her mind.

"Laura told me to be completely candid with you, Ma...Mr. Archer," she said finally. A smile quirked her lips for the first time tonight.

"To use Laura's words," the doctor said, "he was pathetic." I couldn't help but give her a startled grin in reply, but it faded quickly.

"I don't understand. If she felt that way, why'd she do it, doctor?" I asked quickly.

"Mr. Archer, why Laura did what she did is going to turn out to be very, very complicated. Right now, I'm convinced she honestly does not know why it happened," she said slowly.

"Whoa, hold up there, doc," I said. "It didn't just happen...it happened, and it happened again, and again, and again, for I don't know how many times for nearly six months. And, oh by the way, that's ignoring all the steps leading up having sex with...ah...with Mr. Pathetic. All that took place over another six months or so. It's not just an event, a single happening that I have to deal with, okay?" I forced myself to settle back in the chair's comfortable cushions.

"I do know that, Mark," she said gently. "I wasn't trying to trivialize any of this...and neither is Laura." She leaned back herself, holding my eyes.

"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Archer, is that what I help Laura discover is probably not going to be a single, clearly definable reason for...as she puts it...betraying your trust and your love. It may turn out to be a jumble of things that all came together at the only possible moment in time when they could combust together."

The doctor abruptly leaned forward, dropping her head slightly to look me dead in the eyes.

"If that proves to be the case, Mr. Archer, will you be able to deal with that?" she said challengingly.

"I don't know, Doctor. What are you saying? Laura has some kind of mental condition that led to all this?" She nodded her head impassively. That was no help to me at all.

"If it can all be explained to me in terms I can understand, doctor...maybe. I'm willing to work at it anyway."

Doctor Jamison bobbed her head quickly down and back up. The expression in her eyes said that I was a good little boy and was coming through with the right answers.

"But, doctor," I said, holding up my hand to stop her from celebrating too much, too early. "Doc, I don't do psychobabble, okay? I'm an engineer. I'm used to dealing with absolutes...black and white, if you will.

"I'm going to be awfully, awfully skeptical of an "answer" to her problems that's hidden in some mumbo jumbo and gives her an excuse for what she did...but doesn't give me some kind of finality to it, Doctor."

I sat quietly for a moment. The thing about professional counselors is they let small silences build without feeling the need to rush in and fill them.

"I'm not talking about revenge, Doctor Jamison...though I've had some," I said, broodingly. "I made sure Laura got a taste of the humiliation she'd heaped on me. I made sure the process of serving the divorce paperwork on her was as done as publicly and as ostentatiously as possible for everyone she works with, and parties with, to see. I had to pay the server $500 extra, but it was money well spent.

"I also saw to it the pair of them were fired almost immediately. Laura loved that job and I know it hurt her when they let her go so unceremoniously. On top of getting him fired, I've filed a couple of lawsuits against Laura's little sex toy. If nothing else, he's going to be ruined financially for the rest of his life, just trying to pay his attorney fees...that, and whatever his wife gets out of his hide. I shared those videos with his wife and she's willing to use them to humiliate him even more in her own divorce action."

I was quiet for a while longer.

"I won't hide it from you, Doctor. I've enjoyed getting a little payback, and I've enjoyed telling you about it too." I smiled at her. "That's why I insisted I become your...patient also. I wanted to make sure the doctor-client privilege extended to anything I told you too."

I guess my grin had something of the shark in it. Doctor Jamison recoiled--not much, it was almost unnoticeable, but I'd trained myself to be able to read and interpret body language. It's an invaluable tool in business negotiations. The good doctor now knew that not only was I "ruthless," as she'd put it a few moments earlier, but I could also be vindictive. The latter was one of my faults. I've learned to live with it.

"That having been said, Doctor, I don't have much of a desire for retribution beyond what I've already exacted. This "Brian" guy is a broken man and he won't be bothering anyone ever again." I know a very satisfied look was pasted all over my face but I didn't care. As my doctor, she had to keep darn near everything confidential, including my boasting. She didn't need to know that I'd set up a trust for Brian's kids for college. They hadn't been the ones to do anything to me and I hadn't wanted them to suffer.

"I know Laura is suffering also," I continued, "whether that suffering has been generated by my acts of revenge or through her own shame at what she's done. But...there's no particular need in me to add to her misery, not anymore."

I was rambling now. The doctor had asked me a question and I still hadn't answered it.

"Doctor, I guess most of all, I want you to know that if I bite the bullet on this, there had better be some really big returns. If I try to live with what she's done...if I suppress all this anger and humiliation because Laura had some emotional hiccup or something, then I need some kind of reassurance that the same "issues" aren't going to surface again six years more into this marriage."

I stopped because the lady was shaking her head in negation.

"I won't be able to give you that, Mr. Archer," she said quietly. "No one can...but what we can do is strive for an understanding of what sparked a terrible behavior change that Laura and I have identified as occurring about six months before she started committing little indiscretions and, eventually, full scale infidelities nine months ago.

"What we can do is make her aware of what affected her so horribly and find out what all the other factors were that hit her so hard at the same time or a bit later. If these hidden problems are brought out where she can examine them "in the light of day," as it were, Laura should be able to deal with them and put their ghosts to rest. Nothing is guaranteed. Philosophers, and now scientists, have been working for ages trying to figure out how the human mind works and, in many ways, we're no closer to an understanding than we were when we were still living in caves."

"What we can do, is teach Laura...and you too, Mr. Archer...what the signs of emotional problems are, what their impact is, and most importantly, how to make sure you can bring them up with Laura before you two lose communication with each other again and you spiral down into something like what has happened now." The doctor had to pause for a deep breath.

"Emotional problems? What do you mean--?" I shifted in my chair, suddenly uncomfortable. "All right, doc," I said slowly. "You've got my attention. You're saying there are some deep mental problems involved in this? Not just a...uh...a hiccup? It wasn't a combination of boredom and...some kind of temper tantrum...and...uh...hormones or something?" The doctor was shaking her head slowly from side to side.

"Laura and I have gone back over her whole history of the past couple of years, Mr. Archer and unless she is flatly lying to me, there is no hint of anything untoward until she suddenly began responding to "Brian." Laura looks back on that as a rather skillful seduction that began about a year before you caught her acting out her faithlessness. Before that, she'd recognized his desire for her, but she never considered him as a sex partner at all. I've been in this business for twenty-six years, Mr. Archer. When there is that radical a change in attitudes and behaviors...something deeply, and emotionally scarring happened to cause it."

I nodded reluctantly. I couldn't say about her diagnosis--I accepted she had a good deal of expertise. Carl's investigators had also looked all the way back to Laura's and my wedding for any trace of adultery and had found nothing. What they did find dovetailed very closely with what the doctor was saying when she identified the start of Laura's infidelity to be about five or six months before the cameras recorded her having sex with Brian Collier. Carl's guys had collected enough anecdotal evidence from Laura's prior co-workers that suggested Brian had indeed been working on her for months before she started having sex with him. My training was as an engineer. I didn't believe in coincidences either. I could accept what the doctor said.

I sat quietly for a while, staring pensively over Doctor Jamison's head. I hadn't expected this. Laura had said she felt she was insane...but I'd assumed that was a way of putting off facing the underlying reasons of why she'd cheated on our marriage. I hadn't considered the possibility there was something mentally...emotionally wrong with her. I couldn't decide whether the fact that she might not be consciously aware of why she betrayed my daughter and me was a good thing or not. I decided to table that issue for now.

"Okay," I said at length. The doctor looked up from her note pad. She'd been scribbling furiously during the silence. She looked at me questioningly.

"Doctor, you say you're looking for some triggering event...uh, let's see...four months ago the bottom fell out of our lives...five, oh say six months before that she started fucking Mr. Pathetic...six months before that was when I first noticed a coldness...so something that happened right around sixteen months ago--almost a year and a half ago?" The doctor had been taken aback by my vulgarism but recovered quickly.

"Yeah, give or take," she replied. I thought for a while, believing I knew the answer but surely Laura had already told her counselor. I couldn't think of anything else.

"Doctor," I said slowly, not sure this was going to be productive. "Did Laura tell you her Aunt Ruth died right about that time...maybe a little before? Laura thought the world of her aunt and she was devastated when her aunt died so suddenly."

Doctor Jamison almost gasped. She shook her head.

"No, she didn't," she told me. There was a faraway look in her eyes. "Oh my," she said. "My goodness," she said distractedly. I tapped my forefinger on her desktop to get her attention.

"After she came home from the funeral, she cried for three days straight," I said, trying to be helpful. "I took off work to be with her...but there wasn't much I could do...just hold her and...uh, just be there, I guess." The doctor nodded. She'd heard me but she was concentrating deeply for a long time.

"Hey, YOO-HOO, earth to Doctor Jamison," I quipped. She blinked and came back to me. "You think her aunt's death might be significant, Doctor?" I asked. She nodded vigorously.

"Yes...and that she didn't think to tell me is even more significant, Mr. Archer," she said confidently. She stood up abruptly.

"Mr. Archer, thank you very, very much for coming in to talk with me. We have to stop now, but I think you've given me a critical area I need to explore with Laura. I can't really know what it means yet, but it's so very promising, I can assure you. Will you come back to see me some time?"

I nodded and gave her my card, after scrawling my cell phone number on the back.

"Doctor, that is my personal number. Call me anytime, day or night, for anything you need and you will have it," I told her. The good doctor looked startled for a moment. She wasn't used to taking instructions from anyone. We shook hands and I left.

I didn't know enough to be able to tell if Laura's infidelity could be laid at the feet of an emotional disorder...problem...disease...whatever. Still less did I know if such a thing made any difference in my heart or not. The basic facts remained. Laura had betrayed me and my daughter, wrecked two marriages, and created an enormous amount of pain. I wasn't sure there was anything that could be done to get past that.