Ari Ch. 02

I did leave phone messages about once or twice a week; at first simply saying that I loved him and how very sorry I was for hurting him, later saying that I'd meet with him whenever he wanted to talk about the house and our things. I mentioned that I'd quit working for Charlie and was living full-time in Columbus now.

I heard not a word for over two months; then a lawyer sent a letter serving me with divorce papers and demanding that I produce a list of all financial assets. I sat in Dr. Erickson's office and cried, while we discussed what to do.

"It's simple," he said. "You have to play along. You have to be the submissive, apologetic wife who screwed up and is willing to take the consequences.

"Get your own lawyer and make sure he or she sets up a settlement conference at which Bobby will be there. Then go in dressed modestly, nothing flashy. Be totally cooperative, completely forthcoming about your financials. Make clear that you're willing to let him have the divorce and that he will get half your assets, no argument.

"I'm betting this will shock him. Good, that's the point. 'Why is she doing this?' he'll be thinking. 'Ari sure has changed!' That's the goal."

It all went beautifully, though it was still about the saddest day of my life. Four of us in a room for nearly an hour, and Bobby never spoke to me. He looked, though—and I could tell that my modest look—conservative outfit, hair down, no make-up—had an effect on him.

When Bobby's lawyer started blustering about "hidden assets" and so on, I just interrupted him and spoke directly to my husband.

"Bobby, here on this sheet is a list of everything I've earned from my years working with Charlie, right up until the day I quit. You can see that there's a cash balance and a stock position that together are worth about $3.1 million. That should be split 50/50 when we divide our marital assets, because it belongs to the marriage. I couldn't have earned that money without your love and support."

Bobby's jaw dropped, and his face turned a little red. I knew that my cooperation, and the offer of half my assets, was the last thing he would have expected.

He and his lawyer huddled for a few minutes, and then the lawyer came at me again. "In light of your client's flagrant marital misconduct, my client accepts the 50/50 split of your client's assets, but insists that the marital home and belongings and the contents of my client's retirement account remain his."

It was a ludicrously unfair settlement, and everyone in the room knew it. Before anyone else could speak I said, "I agree."

Bobby looked at me in shock, and I knew I had a brief window. "Bobby, I'm totally to blame here and I know it. I still love you, more than you know—and all I want is to be your wife. But since I know you want to divorce me, I'm not going to stand in your way. Take the money. It was never about the money for me anyway."

I watched him, and I saw his face soften and a tear start to appear. Then he looked away, wiped his eye with his finger, and grumbled to his lawyer, "are we done here? Can we just go?"

The lawyers murmured their "we'll be in touch" remarks and then Bobby was out the door, without another look back. My lawyer thought I was crazy, and told me so for the next twenty minutes; but I remembered the look on Bobby's face and I clung to it.

************************

About three weeks later the lawyer called to say that Bobby wanted me to go through the house one more time, so I could have a chance to take any possessions that were special to me before he sold them all.

Dr. Erickson said, "this is an opportunity you can't miss. You need to be in the house with Bobby, to have a chance to reminisce with him, to remind him of some of the good things in your marriage. After all these months, the heat of his rage has cooled a bit. He's still full of pain and confusion, but it's easier now for him to remember how much he loved you."

At first I couldn't make it happen. Bobby insisted he not be present when I went through the house. So I did it his way, I went back and spent a painful hour, looking at the pictures and the vases and the housewares we'd bought together, reminding myself of the life we'd built.

But I left without taking a thing. I wrote a short note telling Bobby that some of the items were very meaningful to me, but that I simply couldn't take any of them without his approval. Then I just waited. I knew he wanted to sell the house, so I hoped that time would be on my side.

After another two weeks, his lawyer called again and told me to go over to the house on Saturday afternoon. Bobby would give me an hour.

Dr. Erickson and I had two dress-rehearsals that week. I knew this was a big chance, and I wanted all the advice he could give me.

"No recriminations, no disputes, no anger! That's first," he said. "You are the guilty party, you are sorry beyond measure for the wonderful marriage you ruined, and you're taking your punishment.

"Beyond that, be wistful. Look for ways to remind him of happier times—the sculpture you bought together in Tuscany, the portrait of you both from a trip to the Southwest, whatever. Try to get him to smile and reminisce with you.

"Most likely, a happy memory will bring out his rage and his hurt all over again. Don't be surprised by that—expect it! Thanking of how much he loved you will remind him again of what you did to him, and he may lash out. All you can do is take it, and apologize again.

"If you get lucky—and it's a big if—he might say something like, 'Jesus, Ari, how could you have done this to me?' That's a big opportunity—grab it! All this time he has never let you tell your side of the story, and you have no hope of ever getting him back until he's heard it and understood it.

"So tell it, and for God's sake be totally honest! You don't have to puff up the sex, but don't minimize or excuse anything. This will be your ONE chance to lay it all out, to begin the process of Bobby getting over it."

When I got to the house that Saturday the door was open, but I rang the bell anyway. I wanted to make sure that Bobby saw me. He came into the front hall and gestured me in without a word; he kept his face blank, but I could see him devouring me with his eyes. He still cared about me!

He said, "I'll be in the den--let me know when you've assembled the things you want, and I'll come out and look through them. If there's nothing important to me you can just take it all."

As he turned away I said, "Bobby, please wait. I already have the list--let's just walk through the house together. I can point things out to you room-by-room and we'll be done much more quickly."

He looked resistant, and I said, "I know you want me out of here, and this will be the fastest way to do it."

He shrugged, and so we did it my way. The living room, the kitchen, the dining room... In each room I pointed to the one or two things I wanted to take, though my aim was really just to get him talking to me. I said, "that flowered bowl, could I have that? It reminds me so much of when we were on our honeymoon..."

I tried the same trick five or six times, and each time he just said, "sure, okay," and walked on in front of me. Finally I said, "there's just the photo albums left, Bobby--let's sit and quickly go through those."

Before he could stop me I'd pulled them off the living room bookshelves and sat down with them on the sofa. He reluctantly joined me, sitting several feet away, but I just shifted over closer to him so he could look on as I paged through the book.

I half-expected him to say, "fuck you, Ari, just take the whole goddam pile of albums, I don't give a shit about them anymore," but he didn't. He let me turn the pages and reminisce about our happy times together--our wedding, vacations, parties with friends in the back yard--and then suddenly he jumped up and started pacing around the room, his fists clenched.

"All those good times," he said, his voice harsh. "All those times when I was so happy, Ari--so sure I was the luckiest man on earth.

"How could you do it to me? How could you stab me in the heart like that? Make a fool out of me? I really thought you loved me, almost as much as I loved you!" There was agony on his face. I started to cry.

"Honey, I do love you--and I'm so sorry! I know I've ruined everything."

Before he could interrupt me I launched into the story, just the way I'd told it to Dr. Erickson. I made sure to stress that my sexual relationship with Charlie had been part of my job from long before I ever met Bobby--it just felt like something entirely separate from my personal life. The same thing with my occasional whoring with customers. I knew he would never see it the way I had, but it had been of no emotional significance to me at all. It simply had nothing to do with my marriage or my love for him.

And I reminded Bobby about my own personal history, which I'd shared with him when we were falling in love. My parents had a pretty unsuccessful marriage, though they did their best to make a good home for me and my younger sister Sarah. My dad slept around relentlessly, and after awhile it was so obvious to my mom that she stopped even fighting it. She had affairs of her own, and by the time Sarah and I were teenagers we realized that both our parents were adulterers.

In their own twisted way, mom and dad loved each other; but they sure never taught us about the importance of a loving sexual relationship within a marriage! On the contrary--we saw from their behavior that sex was something casual and not particularly emotional. It was pleasurable and sometimes exciting, but it didn't have anything to do with marriage or love.

I'd lost my own virginity at 16 to one of the stars on the high school basketball team, and had my share of partners (I didn't think of them as "lovers") after that. I guess I had almost a typical male attitude: sex was for fun, and there was no need to care for one's partner beyond feeling a sexual attraction.

In college there were four occasions when a professor or a graduate assistant came on to me, offering a better grade in exchange for sex, and in three cases I went along with it. Why not? The sex was fun, and I had a couple of Bs and a probable C turn into A's that helped me stay on the honor roll. (The fourth guy was just too old and gross for me to ever let him touch me.)

With a history like that, it was a perfectly logical step to have a sexual relationship with my boss at work--pleasurable, profitable, mutually rewarding, and in no way romantic or deep. And the same thing with fucking an occasional client. That began when there wasn't a man in my life, and it simply continued, a couple of times a year.

I watched Bobby as I talked. He gradually calmed down, and plopped himself down in a chair across from me. I could see him trying to make sense of it, trying to put what I was telling him together with the picture of me he'd formed over the years we'd been together. He looked puzzled and concerned, but not furious.

When I was done there was a long silence. I waited, and finally I said once more, "I am so, so very sorry, Bobby. I would give anything not to have done this, not to have hurt you. I love you very much, and I was a total fool."

"A fool, or just a cheating, lying, whoring cunt?" The words hurt, but he said them calmly, almost thoughtfully. His white-hot rage had been months earlier.

"Okay, then. A cheating, lying, whoring cunt--but not because I don't love you. Because I was an idiot, and because of what I'd learned growing up about what sex meant. Until I fell in love with you I didn't even know it could mean anything else."

More silence. "Okay," he said. "Thanks for telling me all that, Ari. It doesn't change anything, but it ... it helps, a little. I think.

"At least I won't spend the rest of my life thinking I was a rotten husband, or a lousy sex partner, or something."

"Oh, no, baby," I cried, "it was never any--"

"But that doesn't mean all is forgiven," he rode right over my words. "You are a whore--okay, you were a whore," he said, seeing me start to protest, "and you lived a lie with me, and now you're losing me. And that's that."

I looked at his face, through my tears that were starting to come again, and I could see that he was sad too. He didn't look angry, just very sad.

"I'm sorry, Bobby. I can't say it enough, even though I know it doesn't do much to make things better."

"I'm going to go," he said abruptly. "You can take the things we talked about--just pull the front door closed when you leave." And before I could say another word he'd gone into the kitchen, grabbed his car keys, and disappeared out the front door.

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"It doesn't sound like it went so badly," Dr. Erickson said. I was sitting in his office, crying a little as I told him about Saturday.

"He told me I'd lost him!"

"Yes, Ari, but we knew that already. You HAVE lost him. What we're working on is finding you a way to get him back--and you're far too smart to think that it's going to be easy.

"The strategy now is just to stay in touch. An occasional call, and maybe in a month or two a possible lunch date. Finding a way for you to stay in his life, even a little bit.

"Because he's pretty much over the worst of his rage and his hurt. He's sad, and he's thinking about what he's lost. And he's still angry, because it's your fault--but now that he's heard your side of it he can't hate you as much, partly because you're so miserable too.

"Which in turn makes him more angry! It's always easier when you can just hate the person who's hurt you; now that he can't, he'll have a new round of anger to work through."

"Jesus," I said, "nothing complicated about this, is there?" I was feeling a little better.

"The human mind is complicated, Ari. That's why these things take time."

************************

I left Bobby a low-key phone message, thanking him for letting me come to the house and talk to him, apologizing yet again for what I'd done to our marriage; and then I left him alone for a while.

Five weeks later the divorce papers had to be signed. I hoped I'd see him at the lawyer's office, but he'd signed them the day before. I didn't even cry. After more than eight months without Bobby, this was just a formality.

Since I had less need of Dr. Erickson I cut back to two appointments a week, and I went back to work. With a strong recommendation from Charlie I had no trouble landing a good position without travel responsibilities, at a large pharmaceutical firm in Columbus. The job was in the financial side of things, a great deal less interesting than my work with Charlie, but it gave me a reason to get up in the morning.

I still called Bobby about every other week, following Dr. Erickson's advice. Usually I got his machine, but once he picked up and, to my surprise, didn't hang up on me. We had a pretty civil conversation--he told me about his work, and seemed mildly interested in my new job.

He also told me all about the new house he'd bought, a little further out of town than the one we'd shared, and how great it was to live in a quiet, wooded area. He seemed really happy about it, and I was thrilled to be hearing about it.

But he also made a point of telling me about a new woman in his life, whom he'd met at a client meeting about two weeks after the divorce came through. Laura was young and blonde and very sexy, he said, and I knew he was telling me all this on purpose.

"She sounds great, Bobby," I replied; "I'm happy for you." I don't know if that surprised him, but I was thinking about what Dr. Erickson had predicted: "he's going to test you, and you have to be ready."

We continued to have an occasional phone conversation, always when I called him; and after another few weeks he even agreed to meet me for lunch.

"It's going to be about his new girlfriend," Dr. Erickson said. "He's going to rub her in your face, so don't be surprised."

Dr. Erickson was right. Bobby showed me several pictures, so I could see that she was short and pretty and very stacked, and he talked about her non-stop--she was so bright, so devoted to him, so kind and affectionate. And the sex, he said, was out of this world.

"I didn't know it could be so great," he told me, with a straight face; and I gave him a warm smile and said, "I am so glad it's working out--she sounds terrific!"

Did I mean it? Hell no! But I knew that there was absolutely no point in crying "but she'll never love you like I do!" or anything like that. There were two possibilities. One was that he'd really found his next true love, in which case there was nothing I could do.

And the other was that he was using Laura to get back at me--which meant that there was still hope. That he still cared enough to want to punish me, rather than just putting me in his rear-view mirror.

************************

Life went on. Bobby and I met for an occasional lunch, or a cup of coffee, and it started to feel a little like a real, if casual, friendship. Not what I wanted, of course, but far better than no contact at all. We chatted about our jobs, about local politics, and the rest. I was actually pretty amazed he was willing to see me.

But a part of every get-together was devoted to his singing the praises of his Laura, his beautiful and devoted new girlfriend. And I never failed to sound interested, pleased, delighted for his good fortune.

To my surprise he invited me to his house for dinner, making clear that Laura would be doing the cooking. I knew what I'd be getting, but of course I went anyway.

Laura turned out to be brash, dumb, and a bit silly. She WAS quite attractive--a bottle blonde but nicely built, with tits that were almost too big (if such a thing is possible for the average man). But she was clearly much less intelligent than Bobby or I, and I couldn't believe he didn't find her syrupy devotion a bit cloying.

Dinner was marked by her hanging all over him, smiling at me as she told me how marvelous he was, and giving him big hugs and long soulful kisses at every opportunity. Bobby seemed to bask in all this unsubtle attention, though I wondered how much of their lovefest was a show put on for my benefit.

So I took my medicine: I smiled and praised the food and told Bobby how lovely and charming Laura was, and how happy I was that they'd found each other. I even put up with her dull conversation about shoe-shopping and her frequent sly references to my failed marriage to Bobby--even to my whoring for Charlie. I was the soul of politeness.

And I went home, a smile still firmly pasted on my face, wondering how Bobby could possibly sustain a relationship with such a twit. Sexy, yes--but he needed far more than that to be happy--I knew him!

I talked all this over with Dr. Erickson, and he suggested that the relationship (at least on Bobby's side) might really be more about getting back at me than about true love.

"Or," he said, "Bobby is still licking his wounds about being betrayed and cuckolded by you" (I shuddered at those awful words) "and what he really needs right now is unconditional devotion and lots of sex, even if the woman providing them is not remotely his equal."

This made sense to me, and helped me keep my hopes up. I had two more dinners with them, once at a nice Greek restaurant and another one at the house (where Laura seemed to be more-or-less living), and I never let my good manners slip.

"They're going to up the ante," Dr. Erickson warned me. "Just wait and see."

Again, he called it exactly right. About three weeks later they invited me over again for a Friday night dinner, and when I arrived precisely at 7:30, a nice bottle of white wine in my hand, the front door was standing wide open.