When We Were Married Ch. 03B

"I guess it has something to do with the Bingham case. It's just that –"

I stopped and he just sat there silently. Just like prosecutors and reporters, he obviously had mastered the tactic of silence. It broke more people than any other tactic.

"Not the Bingham case per se. It's just that it made me look – at other things. At my life."

"So this is about your impending divorce and your wife's affair?"

I just looked at him.

"I told you, psychiatrists hear and know everything."

"In this case, so does everybody in the courthouse and a dozen adjoining blocks. It's not exactly a National Security secret."

"Granted. So, talk."

"I need to give you some background first so you'll have the context. I met Debbie at the University of Florida. She was a freshman, I was a junior. She was – hotter than she is now. She'd won some beauty contests, was in communications thinking about becoming a broadcaster. I doubt there was a guy on campus that wouldn't have had her. But the only guys that had a shot were jocks, BMOCs, guys that could afford a Maserati or Lexus because their daddies had more money than God

"Me, I was some guy raised by a single mom with no money. I was there on a scholarship because I'd worked my ass off in school and applied for every loan and scholarship anybody ever heard of. I got some money as the son of a deceased coal miner.

"I'd seen her around campus, but she couldn't have picked me out of a lineup. I was nothing special. She was. And then one night I was earning some extra cash by working at a frat party. Mostly scut work so the brothers could concentrate on more important things – booze and pussy. I saw her when she came in with some guy on the football team. She was drinking and having a good time. But I kind of got the feeling that the guy she was with was deliberately – getting her drunker. Those were the days before date rape drugs but, hell, you really never needed anything more than enough alcohol or cocaine to get most girls to spread their legs.

"You say, so what? She was nothing to me and for all I knew she'd been banging the whole fraternity on her own before that. So I didn't do anything. But I happened to notice her asshole boyfriend and a couple of other guys moving her toward the back of the frat house and I knew from working there that night that there was nothing there except for a few storage rooms.

"I guess it was curiousity, or maybe I had it in the back of my head that I was going to play hero somehow but I wandered back there and I could hear noises coming one room. The door was closed but not locked. I opened it and looked inside. There was a lamp on a table and there was enough light to see her on the bed with three guys on her. One was underneath her, one was in her mouth and the other guy was ramming it in her ass.

"I was kind of innocent and naïve in those days, although I wasn't a virgin, and I didn't know anything about anal sex, but it sure looked as though she was hurting, because the guy putting it to her was hitting her hard and each time he went in she kind of shuddered and whimpered. If I'd known more about sex at the time I might have just figured he had her going and she was enjoying it. But it looked like he was hurting her. And afterwards I found out they had all been rough as hell. They really hurt her, front and back."

I looked up at Teller but his eyes betrayed no emotion. I was pretty sure he had heard things that made the story I was telling him sound like a children's story from "Mother Goose," but the dark pools of his eyes were unreadable.

"Needless to say, Doc, nothing of this ever leaves this room. No notes. No talking about it with your receptionist. No case studies ten years from now. Right?"

"You wound me. I'm a medical doctor, as well as a psychiatrist. Nothing anyone ever says to me goes outside these walls and since this is completely unofficial, there won't be any written records as well. Does that suffice?"

"Okay. Just wanted to get the ground rules straight. Anyway, I looked at her and I made a decision. I know that part of it is that she was who she was. I like to think if she's been some ugly, little shapeless sorority pledge, I would have done the same thing, but honestly, who knows? So I went in there and grabbed the guy with his dick in her mouth and pulled him away and told them all I was calling the cops and reporting a gang rape if they didn't get out.

"We tussled for a minute or two and they were calling out and then there were two or three guys who were bigger than mountains – or that's the way it seemed – and they just pulled me off the guy I was wrestling with and threw me outside the room. The biggest guy just stood over me and told me if I kept on being a shit they were going to put me in the hospital. They told me to mind my own business.

"There wasn't much I could do at that point. It would have been suicide to go up against those guys but I couldn't leave it alone. I looked around until I found an equalizer in another storage room – a fireplace poker. And then I went back in the room."

"Three guys went to the hospital and the rest of their friends put me in a coma. I was in it for nearly a week. I probably would have come out of it anyway, but a guy named Henry Clark heard about what had happened and came to my rescue. He owned a PR agency in Jacksonville and he had a few bucks. My mom didn't have much health insurance and being a student I had none. He paid out of his own pocket, and called in a favor to a West Coast neurosurgeon who flew in to Gainesville and took over my case.

"I came out of it a week later, with no apparent long term damage that anyone could ever tell. I got hold of Clark a few weeks later and asked him why. I didn't know him from Adam. He told me he'd gone through UF nearly a decade before me and met his wife during a frat riot. Something about gorgeous women and frat boys.

"Anyway, after I got out of the hospital Debbie called me one day. She wanted to talk, to thank me for what I'd done. I should have said no. It was just opening up a can of worms, but I didn't have the balls to say no. We met and then we went out for dinner and it was plain as hell that she had some hero fantasy going about me. And I should have nipped that in the bud. But she was so damned gorgeous and I was 21.

"Long story short, I tried to play it cool and we didn't do anything for awhile, but it happened and we were together. And after awhile we got married. And the whole time we were together guys have always drooled over her. I couldn't take her to dances without guys trying to keep her out on the floor. They practically dry humped on the dance floor. I would have been in fights every time we went out if I'd let it get to me, but I could see that she could handle herself.

"And she said she loved me and the funny thing is, I always believed her. But I knew, guys would always be on the hunt. Guys who were bigger, better looking, richer, funnier. And if I hadn't been working at the frat house that night, I knew I'd never have known her socially and one of those guys would have married her and she'd have had their children."

I stopped. I had never told another living being what had happened and how I had felt about what had happened for the last 18 years. Teller just stared at me and puffed on that damned pipe.

Finally he said, "And..."

"You know the story. I think everybody in the courthouse does. She met a big, good looking younger professor at UNF. She either was fucking him or would have been if I hadn't found out about the affair – either emotional or sexual. Doesn't matter either way. And she's filed for divorce. The thing that's been in the back of my mind for 18 years finally happened."

"I repeat, and....?"

I leaned forward and asked, "The thing that's killing me, the question that I can't stand, is if I caused this to happen."

"I'm not sure I understand, Mr. Maitland."

"I've heard that people can – sometimes create what they most fear. When I first joined the State Attorney's Office one of the first cases I prosecuted was a Navy officer who had shot his wife and her lover. He'd come back from a deployment overseas, heard rumors about an affair, and managed to catch them together. It was pretty open and shut. But when I was working the case I had a chance to talk to him.

"He told me he'd loved his wife and was sure she loved him until one day when he heard a couple of friends joking about his wife and another officer. He confronted them and they told him it was just a bad joke because they'd known he was listening. And he accepted that.

"But it got under his skin and he started thinking about it. And he couldn't get it out of his mind. He started questioning his wife about what she did when he was away and who she saw. And he started watching her. Every time she came home later, every time she went out with her friends, he saw her with other men in his mind. And naturally, the more suspicious he got and the closer he tried to hold her, the more he drove her crazy and angrier with him.

"Eventually she wound up going to bed with another guy. It was inevitable. I was sitting with him in a cell when he told me that. He looked at me and said, 'I made her cheat, Mr. Maitland. I know that now. I've talked to her friends since...this happened. She had never cheated on me. She loved me. She was a good woman. And I turned her into a cheating whore. I made her what she was. Why would I do that? I never have been able to figure that out'."

"He was in Raiford until 2003. He upset somebody and they stuck a ice pick in his ear.

But I still remember what he said and the expression on his face when he said it.

"I've read enough psychology books to know that there's a name for this – a self fulfilling prophesy. It's where you create the situation you fear. I've read that it's an expression of the death wish, the negative side of the life force. I don't know if I believe any of that crap. But I do know that since I joined this office I've been retreating from my wife and family. There were too many nights when I wasn't home. Too many days I skipped holidays and school functions.

"I'm not blind. I saw Debbie working hard to keep herself hot. And I couldn't make myself go to a gym to try to sweat off a few pounds. I saw myself getting fatter and flabby. And I'm not stupid either. I saw the look in her eyes which turned into her not liking to look at me and then not wanting me to paw her in bed unless it was a night set aside for sex and her insisting that we shower and I brush my teeth.

"Not that there's anything wrong with that, but when you're 20 you don't think about shit like that. And the net effect was that any hint of spontaneity, or our just fucking for the hell of it when we felt like it, went away. It became...programmed...is the best way I can describe it."

I stared at the Rorschach patterns on the table in front of me and wondered why all I saw were shifting patterns of light and dark.

"She thought she was hiding her nights out with her friends from me. I...learned...that she had started going out dancing with women and men friends, her current lover among them. I...learned later...she told someone she wasn't cheating on me, that she just plain didn't like being around me anymore. She was making a shadow life for herself, one that didn't include me."

I don't know why, but I couldn't even tell Teller in the sanctity of a psychiatrists' office about the emails. God, I wished I had never found them. Even if she had caught me off guard with the divorce, even if it cost me alimony, I wish that I didn't know what I knew about her and Doug.

"I didn't try to discover it. It's just that she never went to a lot of trouble to hide it. Things were said, people reported things and I knew. I didn't know she'd given up on us, but I knew she had a social life that didn't include me. Anybody else, any other husband, would have done something..,,would have known instinctively that even if it was innocent, it couldn't be innocent. When your wife just doesn't want to be around you, that's a wakeup call.

"But I let it go. I never had it out with her. I never tried to join that life. I had never liked the social life, dancing and partying the way she had. But more, there would always be late night crises, people needing me, and it was easier just to pretend it wasn't happening. Because, what if I confronted her and she told me that I either had to join her life, or I had to get out of it altogether? I couldn't make that choice."

I stared into Teller's dark eyes.

"Did I destroy my marriage, Doc? Did I create the situation that drove my wife into another man's arms? It would be bad enough if my wife had fallen out of love with me just because...and I had to live without her. But I don't know if I can wake up every morning knowing that it wasn't her...it was me. How can I live with that? Because I loved her...love her."

"Talk to me, doc. Dammit. Talk."

He puffed on the pipe a couple more times and tamped it down a little the way pipe smokers do. Damned if I ever could figure out why. I think pipe smoking is a ritual more than a habit. But anyway, he finally took another puff, breathed it deeply and let it out. I think he was purposefully torturing me.

"Mr. Maitland, did you ever hear the old psychiatrist's joke about the cigar?"

I shook my head.

"After Freud became world famous and transformed the practice of psychiatry, many younger practitioners took his word as gospel. I'm sure you're aware of the view that everything has deeper meanings in the unconscious. One of the most famous examples is the phallic symbol. Anything long, straight and hard can be a subconscious representation of the penis – a sword, a knife, a cigar...you fill in the blank and thus there are sexual connotations to all types of apparently innocent objects.

"Well, it seems in his old age that a colleague brought a case study to the old man and started going on about the symbolic meanings of objects in his patient's life. And Freud looked at him and said, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

"The meaning of the joke, of course, is that since Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, everyone – and particularly laymen – tend to overanalyze everything. There can be, often are, deeper layers of meaning to things around us, to what we do and what we say. On the other hand, sometimes things are simply what they are. Thus, a cigar can be just a cigar."

He stopped and rubbed his chin.

"You realize, Mr. Maitland, that you are not my patient. Right?"

"Yes."

"When I see a patient, I generally spend months, sometimes years, working with them to understand and resolve the problems they have come to me seeking help to address. This can involve psychoanalysis, hypnosis, drugs, sometimes behavioral therapy. There are a number of different approaches. The one thing common to all of this is that there are no quick fixes. You don't discover the depths of your soul and transform who and what you are in a few sessions.

He focused his gaze on me so firmly that I had to stare back at him.

"We've spent a half hour, tops, talking about your life. We've talked about some of the deepest fears and concerns in your life. I think we have probably talked about things that you've never unburdened yourself to with another human being. It may be the first time you've ever put some of these thoughts and fears into words yourself.

"I don't know that God himself could in that short a time see into a man's soul and answer a question like that, a question that is intertwined with your history, your deepest beliefs and hopes and fears. And I'm not God. That may come as a shock to you, but I'm not."

He allowed a faint trace of a smile to flicker on his lips for a second. Then it vanished.

"That's the long way around telling that I can't answer your question. I would need at the very least months to answer that kind of question. And even then, I wouldn't be able to answer the question. At best I might help you find your way to an answer that you can live with. I can tell you this, however.

"The phenomenon that you discuss is real. So real that it has become a popular cliché: the person who creates the fear that haunts them. And I am sure there are cases, like the Navy officer you mentioned, where it does play out exactly like that. But there is no way I could even guess if that scenario occurred in your life. Because, you see, there are other alternate options to consider.

"You might have concentrated your attention and time and passion on your work as a means of escaping your marriage, as a means of driving your wife away. It is entirely possible.

"On the other hand, it's equally possible that as you became more and more involved in your duties, you became more aware of the impact they had on others' lives and perhaps – for whatever reason, you became less and less able to look at what you did as a 9-5 job.

"If you were a surgeon and people's lives directly depended on your time and energy and passion, the wife and family left behind is a cliché. And most people, even if they didn't agree, would understand that level of obsession. Doctors' wives know, or should know, what they're signing up for. It is quite possible that you changed from the man your wife fell in love with, the man she married. And it is quite possible that she did not sign up for the marriage that resulted.

"In that sense, it might be that you indeed precipitated the changes that resulted in your wife's growing away from you, in finding another lover.

"But what you have to ask yourself is whether that was entirely a bad thing. If you had known the ultimate result, would you or should you have done anything differently?'

I looked at him as if he had lost his mind and for a moment I wondered if I could have heard him correctly. Would I have done things differently if I'd known they would have cost me my wife and marriage?

He read my expression.

"I know that may sound strange, but let me explain myself, please."

He took another puff, then said, "You probably don't know this, but I'm Catholic, Mr. Maitland. Or at least I was raised Catholic. I've gotten away from the church, but I am still a religious man. There are things I've seen, things I've done, that have convinced me there is a higher power. And one thing I firmly believe is that most people, even religious people, have our relationship with God, or a higher power, completely turned around.

"You see, we ask ourselves why God allows bad things to happen to us, why he doesn't give us our wishes, why he would let your marriage rot away from inside and leave you alone in middle age?

"But there are many people who would say it's not important what God does for us, but what we do for him. In the scheme of things, none of us matter at all. We are here but a moment and we're gone. What we should be thinking bout is what we do for him, for our fellow man, for the greater good of the most people.

"If we look at it that way, you have spent ten years serving the greater good. You have attempted to secure justice for the victims of terrible crimes and given solace to families of the lost. You have extended mercy to those who deserve it and protected society by putting away the predators who would prey on others."

"In the process of doing that, you've become estranged from your wife and children, possibly lost your marriage and your family. That's a personal tragedy. But how many families are intact because you kept dangerous men and women who would have shattered those families incarcerated? How many shattered families have been able to mend because you gave them the closure they needed, the ability to bury their dead and move on.

"I know you don't want to hear this now, but there have been many men and many women who sacrificed their chances to have love in their lives, women and children to cherish, because they answered a call to duty. Everyone doesn't do that, most people can't, but the ones who can and do are special. I think you're one of those people, Mr. Maitland.