Devil Inside

He did not call his wife.

Monday dawned bright and early and he got the kids in the car to go to the local Korean Montessori school which was less Montessori and more of a classical education with a modern flexibility. When he went to school, the teacher's lounge smelled like coffee and cigarettes; here, it smelled of yerba mate and weed, but like most realistic men, Richard did not buy into categories much. Some hippies were good, just like some oil company executives were decent, honorable men. It was a complex world out there, more difficult even than emotion.

Dashing off to work, Richard made friendly small talk, then hammered away on his keyboard, phone, and file cabinet for a good ten hours before turning home. Sue gave him a few wary looks, but he returned a slightly absent smile, conveying an enjoyment of what he did coupled with determination. When you are the boss, you have to lead for the good of your people, and if you have to deceive them, it must -- with no exceptions -- be in their own interest, even if they don't know it, he thought.

Speaking of tyrants, his wife breezed in the door late once dinner was already on the table, and announced that she had eaten, then fled for the shower. The kids exchanged knowing glances. Richard looked at his children, a cross between his wisdom and his wife's raw intellect and passion, and knew that they would not be fooled.

"Look, guys," he said suddenly, choking up a bit. "You know I love you, right?"

They nodded, bright wet eyes looking up at him.

"I'm always going to be here for you, and Mommy too," said Richard. "If you trust me, worry about nothing. We're going to get through this."

Surprisingly, this worked. Children -- creatures of an age of innocence that peeled away almost invisibly like onion skin -- trusted the firm word of an adult who seemed to have a plan.

He got them situated with homework, helped with some algebra that he had not known he remembered, and then put on his old beater fishing hat and headed down to the boat. He wanted to look at that keel again, and saw with new eyes how the crack might well be something the original builders did not see, maybe a knot in the wood or some deep rot. He made a mental note to buy a replacement, then began dismantling the boat. Maybe he could oil and sand the replacement wood a bit further, making the seals tighter.

As he headed toward the trash cans with an armload of dead wood, he heard Karen on the phone. She was looking into the living room, oblivious to his presence, so he stopped to re-arrange the heap of wood scrap he carried.

"When I came back in the morning," she said, twisting around slightly to reposition the phone under her eye. "I --" she said, and stopped. He looked up and saw her eyes in the mirror on the wall leading to the living room. She looked right into his eyes.

"I-- I mean evening," she continued loudly, walking into the next room and leaving behind whatever she had been tidying up in the kitchen.

At that moment, it began. Richard leaned forward, wood scattering around him, and projectile vomited onto the small concrete plateau on which the trash cans lived. He heaved once, twice, three times, spattering a batter of half-digested food, a soda pop he had unwisely had at work, and stomach fluid so acidic he could hear it hiss and crackle as it spread on the concrete. With nothing in his stomach, he wiped his mouth, then got the hose and sprayed down the concrete. Gathering the rotted wood, now faintly reeking of phosphoric and hydrochloric acids, he tossed it into the trash, then let the lid fall limply.

Before that point, he had suspicions. Now he knew in his gut, but had no proof. He was not even sure that he wanted it, or it mattered, but the part of him that rigidly stuck to "fair play" insisted.

He mulled over those thoughts as he climbed the stairs. As soon as he entered the master bedroom however, he was running for the toilet, tossing out even more of the contents of his digestive tract. The retching contorted him so much that tears flung out of his eyes and he fell to the ground. Oddly, however, he did not feel sick; he was simply vomiting with great violence, sending rancid fluid rocketing into the toilet. He felt not unwell but unreal, unmoored. His condition was closer to seasickness or carsickness, or heartsickness, he realized.

Mumbling something about not feeling well, he grabbed a pillow and went downstairs to the sofa. Soon he was fast asleep.

The day went surprisingly well. He got a lot done for a man who had experienced his life being torn apart. He drank extra water all day, did a solid job, smiled whenever any of his three employees passed by, and made it home early to cook dinner for the kids. They had a great time until Karen came home, at which point Richard found himself dashing toward the bathroom, water in his eyes and spit leaking from the sides of his mouth. He wretched like a man flinging himself to suicide, his body whipping forward and back, bringing points of light before his eyes and vertigo.

This time, however, the guest room provided no refuge, so he bundled up some blankets and took the key to the boathouse. A simple cabin, it was designed for storing boats, and had double doors, its own air conditioner, and a refrigerator for the beer-soaked boat parties he had hoped once upon a time to have. He fell asleep on the old sofa he had inherited from his grandmother, wrapped double in blankets, shivering not with cold but an icy terror that had come from within.

The next morning, he waited until she went to work, then took the kids to school and pulled in at his office. He told Sue he would be working remotely, took a few files and his laptop, and turned to leave.

"You remember your rules about fair play, Mr. Thomas?" said Sue. "And how you should do what's right for people, even if they don't know it?"

She handed him her car keys. "I heard some things, Mr. Thomas," she said. "I hope they're not true, but if they are, you'll want to know every last horrible detail, won't you? It's what all of your friends said: Richard takes the pain. So take my car, the tank is full, and do what you need to. She won't recognize it."

He stared down at the keys. "Thank you, Sue. I owe you," he said, handing her his keys, unable to meet her eyes.

"The hell you do," she whispered after he was gone.

In her tiny Honda (which had surprising pick up) he drove to the tony little mini-mall, sandwiched between a school and a church, where two real estate offices and an old colonial retrofitted with one-way mirrored glass housed the ad agency. Parking at the church, he got out his binoculars, and then on his legal pad, made note of the cars in the lot as well as their plates and descriptions. He logged the times they came and went. Luckily, the office had no enclosed parking, so when Jeb came out, Richard was able to clearly see Karen get in the car. He got some pictures using Daniel's old camera.

As soon as they left, he did nothing. The light cycle there had them trapped, so he waited a couple minutes before sliding out and almost catching up to them at the next light. Staying a dozen cars behind, he used the binoculars over one eye to know when they were signaling. He went a block ahead, turned down a side street, and spotted them at a distance, catching up. He knew this area of town well enough to guess where they were going, the old Bayou Ridge hotel right on the edge of the woods. It's where I'd go if I wanted to conduct a sad affair, he thought.

Finally, the little Honda slid into the parking lot and he got the pictures he needed: the two entering kissing in the car, entering the motel room, and leaving an hour later. He let them go, then lazily drove back to the office. They were just going inside. He saw Karen look up and around, as if she picked up a warning, but then she went through the door. He thanked Sue again in his heart for having had the foresight to get him an anonymous car.

After he sent the kids to bed, Richard began his nightly ritual in the boathouse. If he stayed too long in the main house, he started to get the first inklings of heaves, the spit flooding his mouth, his eyes watering. Once he got into the quiet of the boathouse, waves lapping against the little seawall twenty feet away, he was able to sleep well and hard on the giant solid sofa his grandmother had bought decades ago. He felt like she was still watching over him, fingers crossed that things would turn out alright for him.

What did Karen think of all of this, one might wonder. Her husband vomited profusely in her presence, spent no time with her on weekends, and seemed to be ignoring her dalliances. They had not been having much sex before her affair began, but afterwards, it dropped to nothing, in part because her husband threw up violently whenever in her presence.

It took Richard several months to process what had happened and start counteracting it.

One of the links bookmarked on her computer (yes, you can find the second Windows account because there's another folder for it in the User directory which you can see if you boot a repair disk in admin mode) described how to basically shame or cuck your man. You broke down his confidence, forced him to know about and accept your affair, then cut off all affection but bossed him around on daily issue. He'll come around, it promised.

The article left a bad taste in his mouth. Written by some purple-haired sprout of a person with a masculine face and wild eyes with three sides of white showing behind her thick glasses, the article took a jubilant tone. Men, it said, had killed women for ages, enslaved them, and controlled them. It was time to strike back, by taking out the nice ones apparently. It reveled in manipulation and belittling. At this point Richard realized how truly dead and gone his marriage was, because no one who loved him would treat him that way.

This was abuse, and his wife was an abuser. He remembered his high school counselor warning the boys against men who wanted to be their friend: "Anyone who does something that is not in your interest, but serves their own, is not a friend. That is a predator, or a parasite, or at least someone who wants to use you, and that's not love. That is never love. Get away from this person as quickly as possible."

The story that rarely gets told in questions of infidelity, whether sexual or merely rejection of the esteem of the spouse that forms the absolute emotional and moral bond which allows marriage to work, is that of the children. How does this affect them? Let us take a snapshot:

Robert, Kaya, and Suzanne called up Daniel at college to tell him what had happened.

"Dad is living in the boathouse," said Robert, annoyed at how thin and cracking his voice sounded. "Mom spends all her time at her job,...including nights, especially nights -- and she's gone on trips a lot."

Daniel sighed. "I was worried about this," he said. "Mom has always had self-esteem issues because she rushed into marriage and missed out on what her friends did, partying it up at college like in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and having lots of boyfriends, traveling to little villas in Italy like in Under the Tuscan Sun, having adventures like Eat Pray Love. She sort of acts like she is living in The Handmaid's Tale or The Hunger Games. I think she is worried that the movie of her life just does not have enough of a spotlight on her."

"She's not really here for us," said Kaya. "We have to find her to talk to her, and she's always gone. She's never home."

"All my other friends' mommies are there at night, and on the weekends," chimed in Suzanne. "She's just not here. It's like she's left us."

Daniel thought for a moment. "What does Dad say?"

"He keeps saying that he'll never leave us," said Robert. "He's always around. When we're in bed, he goes to the boathouse and sleeps there."

"Trust my family to be totally weird," said Daniel with a laugh. "Well, there you have it. They're having problems, but you've got Dad. It's not really any different than what happened to Davis and Shelly when their mom left to go be with that personal trainer from her gym, or when Christine's mom bailed to go live with her boss, or even Jake's house, where his dad got a new girlfriend so his mom has an apartment by the mall."

"So what should we do?" said Kaya.

"Do?" Daniel pondered. "Welcome to adulthood, kid. Other people are going to flake out on you. Dad won't, he's too fair and generous. Mom might come back after she has her little adventure, but it's probably like when Roger's mom ran off with that traveling preacher man and then came back, it'll never be the same. Or when Cara's parents had an open relationship, and they're now like roommates. Or, you know, how our next door neighbor started dating her psychotherapist, and when she came back she and her husband were just sort of flat, not real lovey-dovey. Stick around Dad and as soon as you can, get out, come to college or join the Air Force or something."

"What's an open relationship?" Suzanne wanted to know.

"I'll tell you later," said Kaya quickly. Later, like when you're eighteen, she thought.

"Thanks Dan," said Robert. "We'll take it from here." It sounded more adult than he felt.

Back on the canal, Richard finally got the boat afloat. He had replaced the keel and numerous boards, but the old sailboat shined and had a beautiful woodgrain. He redesigned and rebuilt the cabin, replaced the erratic motor that he suspected was simply dead from metal fatigue, and motored down the canal so that he could take to the wind in the lake. He reflected on the old myth:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

— Plutarch, Theseus

He had replaced a few planks in his life, too, but now it was more watertight than ever. He had no intention of drowning for the decisions of someone who clearly no longer cared about him and had not for some time. Even though the old boat was only sixteen feet long, he rediscovered the joy he had experienced sailing with his grandfather and later father, and found the old skills came back quickly as well.

Karen walked in the door after another hard day at work. Despite what Jeb had told her all those years ago, the workload did not seem to be declining, nor did her firm seem to be rising above where it was. The press had favored them with lots of great articles about their benevolent work in the third world, but the money was not coming in as fast as she had anticipated. Her head was beginning to throb but she wanted a drink.

Instead, she saw to her surprise, Richard sitting at the kitchen table.

"Richard," she said. "How...?"

"Pills," he said. "The doctor found something that interrupts the gag reflex. I went to doctors for years, looking for a cause to the vomiting, and they were all baffled. One finally asked if I threw up at night and I said no. He figured out that if it did not happen when I was sleeping, it was in my head and not my stomach. They did a brain-scan, I mean MRI, which was terrifying but there are no tumors. It's just psychological and always was. I don't even have an ulcer. Apparently a somewhat common stress reaction. This drug turns off the gag for a few hours so we can talk."

"So," she said. "What are we talking about today?"

"Nothing big," Richard said quietly. "The kids are gone, so it's time for us to think of the future. We're both getting seniority, so it's time to protect our assets. The papers before you are for the formation of a corporate trust in our names which will handle our assets and shield us from legal liability. Especially since your firm plays close to the line of the law, and the rumors are getting thicker about that, let me tell you, we need insulation. Have your lawyer look at it and return the signed copy to me, if you will."

She looked at the papers, scanning them with a practiced eye. This was indeed a legal trust, incorporated in their state, with their attorney as one of the principals.

"Thank you for asking about me, by the way," said Richard. "I'm still living in the boathouse and having a grand time. You wouldn't recognize the place with all of the renovations I've put in. It even has its own mailbox." He waited to see if she grasped the significance of that.

"I don't know if I need this," she said, looking at the paperwork. "We're doing fine as we are."

"I'm going to sign it, and if I do, I need to start taking my income out of the family finances and putting it into the trust. That leaves you with only your salary. Keep in minds that this incorporates our 401(k) plans into the trust, so it protects those as well. It will also pay out for the children in trust income, probably not enough to live on but enough to get a little boost in life, after we pass on."

"Fine, I'll take it to my attorney," said Karen.

"Thank you," said Richard. With that, he was gone.

He resumed his regular relaxed behavior at the office. Sue waited six months to make her move. Richard had just completed a final bill on a matter for one of their oldest clients, and when he turned around, she was there in the door with the early afternoon sunlight pulsing through the window behind her. She looked nervous, her fingers dancing a little on the outside of a folder.

"Sue," said Richard. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm glad you're back," she said. Neither of them needed to elaborate. For the past months, it had seemed as if they knew each other like old battle comrades. She could anticipate what he was thinking, and he knew her vocabulary -- the words she liked to use, what their use implied, and how they rated her confidence in any given activity -- and she seemed to do the same for him. If only he had met her first, he mused, but that was impossible, and he would never take back his children. No, it was just another dream, an impossible dream.

"Yeah, what's done is done," he said. "Actually, I'm just over it. I was told by people on the internet that I would have rage, and I had sadness. I was told that I would drink a lot of bad whisky, but I still think the stuff tastes like cough medicine. People said you never got over it, but if I have any revenge, that is it: I am over it. Anything I do now is for the kids."

"And what about for you?" said Sue, raising an eyebrow. She was very glad her old boss was back.

"Vintage horror," he said, then chuckled at her shocked face. "Movies, Sue. I like old horror films, 1960s through mid-nineties, because everything went Blair Witch Project or M. Night Shyamalan after that. Karen hated them and said they made her feel scared like when her father and mother fought when she was a kid, so I just gave up. Set it aside. Now I'm catching up."

He told her about the boathouse, the large-screen television with surround sound, and other details he was implementing as he formulated his A.K. (After Karen) life. "But what did you come here to see me about?"

Sue colored. "I've been prospecting some new business," she said. "It's complicated though. A potential client was once in a merger with another firm, but now that the merger has partially dissolved, might be open to new business. However, their former business partner wanted that segment of their activity. So I'm wondering if it's fair game to toss out my name, even though technically, the two firms are still linked."