Folie a Deux, Episode 02

Emily seems a bit discomfited by the question. "I...enjoyed my first two years at college and did a great many things that college students typically do. Sexual activity was a part of that."

"Emily had the reputation of being a hellcat in bed," Bob says with a smile. "Of course I found that intriguing!"

"What did you think of Bob before you met him?" the interviewer asks Emily as she reappears onscreen.

"I thought he was gorgeous. He seemed a little shy and very sweet. I had heard he was majoring in sociology, which I've always found interesting," she replies. "I was hoping I'd get a chance to talk to him."

Bob again. "I finally got up the nerve to approach her and we ended up spending four hours talking, followed by about six hours in bed. It was a whirlwind sort of thing. We spent every free moment together for about a month, and then we sort of cooled off. I don't think we had as much in common as we thought at first. In fact, I hadn't seen her for a few days when she called and told me she was pregnant."

Emily reappears as the interviewer asks, "You weren't on birth control?"

"I can't use birth control, I have side effects that hinder my dancing," she replies. "We used condoms every time. Condoms are not 100% effective."

"And what did you think when you found out?"

"I was stunned, obviously."

"And was it a foregone conclusion that you'd carry it?"

"Not at all," Emily replied with a decisive shake of her head, "and even less of a conclusion that I would keep the baby. It entailed a major disruption of my life and my plans, after all, including scholarships and other funding. I was in a very great deal of turmoil, and to his everlasting credit Bob was there for me every step of the way. We spent a tremendous amount of time together over the next nine months, and by the time Michael was born, we had decided to try staying together."

"Were you happy?"

"In almost every way, Bob is a remarkable man," Emily says after only a moment's hesitation. "He never wavered, and he gave me every confidence that we could live a life together and raise our child - or rather, children, since Olivia came along less than a year later." Careful observers will note that she didn't answer the question.

Bob reappears as the interviewer inquires, "How was your sex life?"

"After Olivia came, it fell away to almost nothing," Bob replies. "We had two babies to care for, I found a full-time job with the County, and Emily went back to school for her dance degree as well as holding down part-time jobs to help us make ends meet. At the end of the day we'd be so exhausted that it was all we could do to make it to bed instead of falling asleep on the sofa."

"Sex became a luxury," Emily says, "to be indulged in when the rare opportunity presented itself. Even then it was more companionable than lusty and transcendent. Neither of us had the time or energy for a robust sex life when the children were young, and by the time they reached their teens, we found it easier to simply stay in our rut."

"Did you ever go outside your marriage for sex?" the interviewer asks.

"Not until Mike," she replies simply.

Bob tells us, "I had one...well, I won't even call it an affair. It was a fling, a woman I was with twice when I was...31 or so. She was a friend of a friend and we met for sex. I broke it off because I felt guilty, and then I simply buried it. I never told Emily."

Emily again as the interviewer asks, "Did you love your husband?"

Emily considers for a moment before answering, "Yes, absolutely. I still love him. There's so much to admire about him - his kindness, his compassion, his strength of character, his insight, I could go on. But by the time this was all going on, there was no passion in the marriage. None whatsoever."

"So I'd been gone for a few hours, I don't even know how long," Mike says. "I'd walked over half the damned city and wound up down by the water. I mean, you pretty much can't go anywhere in San Francisco and not end up down by the water. I actually ended up all the way on the other side of the city, by the Pacific, like right down by the zoo? Just walking on the beach."

"What had you been doing the whole time?" the interviewer asks.

"Just walking, man, just trying to sort shit out in my head. I wasn't panicking anymore, I just was so...ashamed. So guilty. I didn't want to face mom again with what I'd done to her. I couldn't even imagine facing dad! I just wanted to run away."

"Why didn't you?" the interviewer asks.

Mike smirks and says, "All my shit was back at the hotel. Anyway, I finally turned my phone on and there were like forty messages from mom and dad and Olivia. And I'd only had it on for like three minutes when Olivia called again and was all like, 'Where the fuck are you? Mom is freaking out! What did you do? Did you have a fight?' And then I realized that Mom hadn't told them anything that happened."

"Was that important?" the interviewer asks.

"Yeah, I mean I didn't want anybody to know what happened, obviously," Mike replies. "So I just asked Olivia to put mom on. I hadn't even gotten the words out when mom was on the line."

"Bob had taken me up to our room," Emily says, "and he and Olivia were trying to calm me down, but I was doing little more than crying at that point. When I heard Olivia talking to Mike, I asked her for the phone so I could speak to her."

"Emily was lying on the bed," says Bob. "When Olivia finally got through to Mike, Emily vaulted up off the bed, leaped across the room - seriously, leaped - and ripped the phone out of her hand."

"Mom was just bombarding me, like, 'Where are you? What are you doing? Are you safe?' All that stuff. It took a couple of minutes to get her settled down a little bit."

"Hearing his voice was very...calming," Emily says. "When he told me he was safe and was coming back to the hotel, I felt much more rational and in control of myself."

"When I could get a word in, I asked mom to go someplace private so we could talk without being overheard," Mike says. "I think she went out on the balcony because I was suddenly hearing wind. I asked her what she'd told them, and she couldn't really remember. She was pretty rattled. I told her just to tell them we'd had a huge fight and things had gotten personal and mean, and we'd talk when I got back to get the details of our story straight. She seemed OK with that."

"It was good to have something to hold onto," Emily says. "Part of my panic was not knowing what to tell my husband and daughter. Having something to focus on, even if it was a lie, gave me a point around which to order my thoughts."

"Emily came back in from the balcony," Bob says, "and said that Mike was fine and coming back. She seemed much more composed, but in a very...well, brittle way, as though she could snap again at any moment. Then she said, without any kind of preamble, that she and Mike had had a terrible fight that had left her very upset. Then she announced she was going to take a shower and locked herself in the bathroom for forty minutes."

"Did you believe her?" the interviewer asks.

"Of course not," Bob replied with a shrug. "She's the worst liar I've ever known."

"What did you think was bothering her?"

"I didn't know. I assumed that, between her and Mike, I'd get the truth out of them soon enough," Bob says.

"I walked back into the city and called a cab," Mike says. "I got back to the hotel about an hour after the call. Olivia was waiting for me in the lobby, and she was pissed."

"That you'd argued with your mom and upset her?" asks the interviewer.

"Ha! No," Mike says. "Well, a little about that, but mostly it was because all this 'drama' was ruining her time with her cousins. She was 17 years old, everything was about her. Normally I sort of blew her off, but I wasn't really in the mood this time so we ended up screaming at each other in the lobby. And then in the elevator. And then for like 15 minutes in the room we shared. And then we hugged and I told her to have a good time."

"Olivia later told me that she left the room after telling Mike to go fuck himself," Bob says.

"I took a shower," Mike says, "then called mom to tell her I was coming. Five minutes later I was at her door."

"I answered the door, let him inside, and then left them alone while I went down to the Market Street Grill for lunch," Bob says. "I figured they needed some time to work out whatever was really happening between them."

"So there we were finally, face to face," Emily says. Exhaling heavily, she adds, "And now we had to talk."

"Was it still awkward?" asks the interviewer.

"Surprisingly, no," Emily replies. "Of course, we didn't discuss what had happened at all."

"You...didn't?" asks the plainly surprised interviewer.

"No," she says. "There was no need to at that point. Well, of course there was a need to, a desperate need to, but there was something else to discuss. Namely, the details of the story we'd use."

"Why didn't you talk about what had happened?" the interviewer asks Mike.

"Because we had something else we could talk about instead," he replies. "And I think we'd both pretty much decided to avoid that topic as long as humanly possible. We'd have both been delighted if we could go the rest of our lives and never discuss what had happened. And yeah, of course we needed to talk about it, but we didn't."

"The cover story we devised was, I thought, quite good," Emily says, seeming proud of herself. "We decided that Mike had convinced me that he be allowed to drive Lou, and he was behind the wheel when we struck the deer. I was angry that he had destroyed my minivan and we argued, which spiraled into a series of wholly unfair accusations on each side. However, we had now said our profoundest apologies and forgiven each other, so there was no need for Bob or Olivia to bring it up ever again."

"And as soon as we'd figured that out," adds Mike, "I immediately got the hell away from her."

"I was very glad when he left," Emily nods.

"What did you do then?" the interviewer asks.

Emily blushes demurely. "I called Bob and asked him to come back to the room for...marital relations."

"Were you excited?" the interviewer asks.

"I...was and I wasn't," she says. "Or rather, I was and didn't want to be. And even that's not it. I was and needed it to be something that it wasn't."

"Can you explain that?"

"While I was sitting in the room with my son, we were talking about a lie we were creating together, but...I...found myself thinking about certain things that had happened the day before. About how good it felt, and about how much I used to love sex. I used to look forward to it all the time, and feeling what I had felt made me..."

"Made you what?"

"Made me want to want it that much again," she says, her blush deepening. "That's why I called Bob."

"Did you want it with Bob?" the interviewer asks.

Emily's blush goes maroon. "No. But I had to want him. Then, at that moment, it needed to be him that I wanted."

"I was surprised," Bob says, "but pleased. I went back and she attacked me the moment I got in the room. It hadn't been like that for us since...well, since before Mike was born. It was great."

"Was it good?" the interviewer asks Emily.

She shifts uncomfortably and shakes her head. "No. It was the same as it always was with Bob. He wasn't the one who reminded me how much I used to love sex before I was with him. How could he be?"

"Honestly, the next couple days were pretty fun," says Mike in voiceover as we see a series of photographs of various members of the family engaging in activities with unidentified people: Bob, Emily, and a dozen other adults at Fisherman's Wharf; Mike with several males around his age at AT&T Park for a Giants game; Olivia with a large group of teenage girls all crowding into a selfie with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. "There were all kinds of cousins there, some I never even met before, and it was fun just hanging out and doing whatever. And I only saw mom in the mornings and evenings, like good morning-good night stuff."

"Did you think about what had happened between you and her?" the interviewer asks as Mike's face reappears.

"Yeah. I mean, of course I did," Mike says. "Even when I was doing something else, every couple of minutes I'd start thinking about it."

"What, specifically?"

Mike shrugs. "How good it all had been. It was the best sex I'd even had, but there was more than that. It just felt so right when it was happening. I think that was what was fucking me up. I mean, yeah, good sex is great, but when we were actually doing it? We didn't even hesitate because it all felt so...right. We just clicked so damned hard, like nobody else I'd ever been with. That's really what I couldn't stop thinking of."

"It was constantly in my mind," Emily tells us. "Constantly. Even when I was with Bob...with him sexually, I mean. Especially then."

"How did that make you feel?" the interviewer asks.

Emily shrugs, then offers a wan smile and says, "Hollow."

"Did you think about Mike in a concrete way," the interviewer asks, "or in a more abstract..."

"I don't understand what you're asking," Emily says.

"I mean when you were with Bob, did you visualize Mike? Did you imagine yourself with Mike again? Or was it more the sensations you'd gotten with him?"

Emily nods. "Oh. It was a combination of both of those things. After having felt those sensations at Mike's hand, I couldn't pretend that I hadn't felt them, or that Mike hadn't been responsible. In the same way, I couldn't pretend that Bob could give me the same thing. I hated that knowledge, but I couldn't avoid it."

"I kept thinking about the way I'd felt when mom was down on her knees," Mike says. "I kept thinking about how it felt when I went inside her. I kept thinking about how strong and how complete it made me feel. I mean, I kept coming back to that no matter how hard I tried. And it made me feel so. Goddamned. Guilty."

The screen goes black and we see one line of text in white lettering:

June 22

"Bob was certain something else had happened that we weren't telling him," Emily says. "That morning, he asked me about what had happened. Mike and I had been avoiding each other very deliberately, and in retrospect it was probably obvious to Bob that there was a reason beyond an automobile accident. I told him again the lie that Mike and I had agreed upon. I...am not sure I'm a very good liar."

"The day of the wedding was foggy and rainy," Mike recalls. "And cold. When San Francisco gets chilly, it's chilly. I hadn't seen mom for more than an hour total over the past couple days combined, and always when dad was there too. Like, for breakfasts and then a little bit after we all got back to the hotel. But this was going to be a whole different thing. We were going to be spending the whole day together - well, afternoon and evening, between the ceremony and the reception and the dance and everything. And we were gonna be busy, yeah, but we were going to have deal with each other. And with dad. I was nervous."

"How was your father treating you?"the interviewer asks.

"He knew something was up," Mike says. "I know he didn't suspect what it was, but he knew it was big and that mom and I were avoiding it. That morning after breakfast, he pulled me aside and asked me about it again. I told him the same thing, and it was like, yeah, he wasn't buying it. It wasn't like he called me a liar or anything. He just asked me to talk to mom privately before the wedding."

"And did you?"

"No. I wanted to. I knew I should have. I knew we needed to just open up with each other and be honest, but I just didn't know how to start. It was...too big for me."

"It was a summer wedding, even though it was cold and miserable, so I had to dress like it," Emily tells in voiceover as we see a picture of her from that day. Her dress is a pleasant, unobtrusive yellow frock with lace trim, suitable for a woman in her late 30s, except perhaps that it's a touch shorter than one might expect. The relative brevity and her heels show off her perfectly-toned legs to great advantage. "In retrospect it might have been wiser to wear something longer."

"The wedding was this huge event," Mike says, "so they'd gotten Grace Cathedral." We now see a series of stunning shots of the cavernous interior of the cathedral, with its gorgeous stained glass and murals. In voiceover, Mike continues, "We were all pretty excited because the groom was the son of a Hollywood bigwig and there were going to be all sorts of stars there. Olivia had stayed with some of the cousins the night before and was getting dressed and stuff over there, so it was just me, mom, and dad. And I thought it was going to be OK until I met up with them in the hallway and saw mom's dress."

"What was wrong with your mother's dress?" the interviewer asks. "It seems quite normal."

"It showed lots of leg," Mike explains with a grin. "She has amazing legs, and...well, when I saw them I just kept thinking about what was between them, about being between them. About having them wrapped around me. When I saw her wearing that dress for the first time I had this crystal-clear vision in my mind of pushing her up on the table, flipping the dress up, and...well, you know. Sex. And she was standing right next to dad when I had that picture in my mind, which like tripled the guilt I was already feeling."

"I saw where his eyes went," Emily says, a faint blush beginning to color her cheeks, "and I knew what he was thinking. And because I knew he was thinking that, I began to think it too. It was...remarkably awkward, given that Bob was standing less than a foot away from me."

"Of course I didn't notice anything then," Bob says. "I was probably looking at my phone or something. There were dozens and dozens of text messages flying back and forth and I was trying to keep up with what was going on."

"I knew then that it was gonna be a tough night," Mike says. "And no matter how hard I tried, I just kept looking at her legs."

"It made me profoundly uncomfortable," Emily admits. "Not, of course, just because he was looking or even because Bob was there, but because there was a small part of me that didn't find it unpleasurable. It was the same part of me that had so much loved what had happened between us. And when I say the part was small, I was acutely aware that it might become larger if I encouraged it, and that terrified me, but at the same time I...well, I didn't crush that part. I don't even know if I could have. I think that part of me had been awakened from a long sleep and couldn't be put down again so easily. That part of me felt proud that Mike was looking at my legs and thinking...carnally about me, and was enjoying thinking the same about him."

"What did you do with that part of yourself?" the interviewer asks.

Emily licks her lips delicately. "I tried to isolate it. The shame was acute, and I know I leaned in and grabbed Bob's arm reflexively, as though he were a shield of some sort. And I..." Here she pauses and her flush deepens into an actual blush before she continues, "I looked at Mike to see what effect I was having on him."

"Looked at him?" the interviewer asks.

Emily's blush gets redder. "In the front. His front. Of his pants."

"I saw mom's eyes go right to my crotch like it was a magnet," Mike says, "and if I wasn't hard before, that made me so hard it hurt. And she just stared, her eyes kinda wide and her mouth open just a little bit, and God, all I could do was imagine the things she'd done with her mouth and her hands and her pussy, how insanely good that all felt and how completely fucking wrong it was that all of a sudden I wanted it again, and I knew she wanted it again too. And that was deeply, deeply fucked up."