Folie a Deux, Episode 02

"I don't imagine most people can understand what a horrific moment it was," Emily says intensely. "To be coerced into sex with my son in the first place, and then to be standing in a hotel hallway with him aroused by me and I aroused by him, and my arm around my husband. It was a very quiet elevator ride to the lobby."

"It got worse," Mike says. "We had to take a taxi to the church, and dad had me get in first and mom next, so she was sandwiched between us after he got in. She was pressed right up against me, shoulder against shoulder, thigh against thigh. I could feel her warmth. I kept trying to think of something else, but...yeah, get real. Not gonna happen."

Emily will only say, "I wished it had been pleasant so we could have walked."

We see a series of photographs of Grace Cathedral exterior and interior, from posed shots of the entire wedding party on the steps (the bride is lovely, the groom and groomsmen are handsome, and the bridesmaids are attired in a shade of peach that makes them look plump and sickly so as not to upstage the bride) to celebrities arriving (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner walk in arm in arm, Johnny Depp climbs out of a limo in a bizarre ensemble, Emma Stone smiles hugely as she bends to accept a flower from a little girl, Julianne Moore stands laughing with George Clooney). In voiceover, Emily says, "To say we were dazzled would be an understatement. We were simple provincials from the Midwest, and suddenly it seemed we recognized someone famous everywhere we looked. And everything was so lovely! It all seemed like quite a fairy tale."

"Grace Cathedral is pretty big, so it's not like mom was sitting on my lap or anything," Mike says. "But we were close, and she was still wearing that dress, and I kept looking."

"Mike was still...aroused," Emily says. "It was quite obvious, and I found it difficult to keep my eyes away from it."

"Every few minutes," Mike says, "one of us would catch the other one looking, and it was the most embarrassing thing! I mean, my cousin was getting married in a cathedral surrounded by celebrities and rich people, and I can't stop perving on her and she can't stop perving on me. It was getting out of control, and I hurt. I mean I hurt."

"His erection looked rather painful," Emily says demurely and with a blush that the little smile at the corner of her mouth belies.

"So the ceremony is going on and there's singing and scripture readings and shit," Mike says, "and all I can think is how good it felt to sink my cock into my mom and how good it would feel to do it again and how much I know she'd love it too and my dad was right there and we were in a fucking church and I had to do something about it because it was driving me nuts and my mom wouldn't stop looking at my crotch like she was a starving woman looking at a steak - so I...excused myself and went to the bathroom."

"When Mike slipped out, I knew that he was going to...to masturbate," Emily says, and it's clear she's working hard to keep a smile off her face. "And as guilty as it made me feel - and it made me feel terribly guilty - I felt a horrible, thrilling element of pride. My son had to go masturbate himself because I was wearing a short dress and he could see my legs, and because of the sex we'd had. I'd lived without sex for so long that I'd forgotten it, forgotten the power that arousing someone else can fill you with. It's despicable, I know, but at that moment I was so...wet."

"What did you do?" the interviewer asks.

She blushes deeper, but the smile breaks out a bit more. "I sat and looked smug, I think. And...I imagined what Mike was doing and what it looked like. I tried not to, but I didn't seem to be able to control my thoughts. Images kept creeping in no matter what I did."

"I got into the bathroom," Mike says. "Nobody else was around, thank God. I went into a stall, pulled it out, stroked it maybe twice, and then came so hard my knees almost buckled."

"What were you thinking about when you came?" the interviewer asks.

Mike laughs. "I didn't have time to think. It went too fast. After that I felt a lot better. I cleaned up and headed back to the service."

"When Mike came back, I couldn't help but look at his face," Emily says. "He wouldn't meet my eyes, but now I learned what he looked like after he orgasmed, and it was obvious that he had just done so."

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

"Shameful," she replies, "and triumphant. Mostly shameful, especially because seeing that expression on his face made me even more aroused. Mike came back and sat next to me and I think we kept our eyes to ourselves for the rest of the service, but as soon as the service was done, I went to the restroom and..."

"And?" the interviewer asks.

Emily goes red. "And I relieved tension."

"So. I'd jerked off to my mom in the middle of a church wedding," Mike says sheepishly. "That's one thing off the bucket list."

"The reception was at the Ritz-Carlton, just a couple of blocks away," Bob tells us. "The sun had come out during the receiving line after the ceremony, so we walked with a group of relatives. I had noticed some tension between Emily and Mike during the service, and once it was over they wouldn't even look at each other."

"And you still had no clue it was sexual tension?" the interviewer asks.

"No. It's not like you logically leap to the conclusion that your wife and your son are having problems in their sexual relationship," Bob says a bit harshly. "I thought that it was more of their argument leaking through, and I was getting tired of it. Emily walked at the very front of the family group heading to the reception and Mike walked at the back. We were all heading home the next day and I made up my mind that I was going to lock those two together until they sorted out whatever was bothering them once we got back to Minneapolis."

"There was some time before the reception started," Mike says, "but I didn't have to hang with mom so it was all right. And with the edge taken off I could actually think of other things. It was kind of like a vacation."

"The dinner was lovely," Emily recalls. "The Ritz-Carlton is gorgeous, of course, and the food was wonderful. None of the celebrities had stayed for the reception - no one I recognized, at least - and so it felt like more of a family affair. Although...well, Mike, Bob, Olivia and I were all seated at the same table and there were a few moments of...tension."

"I was to mom's right," Mike says, "and our feet kept meeting under the table. I mean it probably happens all the time to everyone when you have four people eating at a small table, but we were both really noticing it this time. And every time they touched we'd pull back fast and look at each other with the guiltiest expressions. It would have been funny if I had been watching two other people go through it because it was just awkward and stupid and it kept happening over and over again. But it sucked to be the one dealing with it."

"After dinner came the dance," Bob says, "so of course Emily had me out on the floor as soon as she could. I suggested she dance with Mike, and she turned white and said no. So she and I danced almost continuously."

"I watched mom dance with dad," Mike tells us, "and she was hanging all over him, just draped on him in a way she didn't usually do when they danced. And she never even looked at me once, which was as good as staring at me the whole time. Of course I was watching her."

"I knew Mike was watching me," Emily says. "Of course I did. He was making no secret of it. After a little while I realized that I was dancing especially close to my husband. It hadn't been deliberate before then, but it certainly became so once I had realized."

"Why is that?" the interviewer asks.

"Not to make Mike jealous," she answers quickly.

"I don't think she was consciously doing it to piss me off," Mike tells us, "but I think it was definitely a 'This is my man, not you,' kind of thing, and it did make me jealous. I mean, I'd have died of shame and embarrassment if she were hanging off me like that, don't get me wrong, but a part of me was pretty envious, which is why I ended up with Brianna."

We now see a series of pictures of a young woman of about 18, a brunette with a dazzling smile and an hourglass figure. In the first she is on a beach in a bikini that shows off her figure to advantage; the second is a duckfaced selfie with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background; the last is her at the reception in a slinky blue dress with one arm around the bride and another around a bridesmaid who strongly resembles a slightly-older version of Brianna.

The subtitle reads Brianna Salazar.

"Brianna was the little sister of one of the bridesmaids," Mike tells us on voiceover. "She was my age and when I asked her to dance, she said yes. Girls who aren't married tend to get pretty horny at weddings, and she had sneaked some alcohol anyway and was pretty loose. By like the second dance we did, she had her tongue down my throat."

We see a disapproving Emily, who shakes her head and says, "Mike was making a display on the dance floor with that girl. They were kissing and pawing each other and making quite a scene. Bob seemed amused by it, but I certainly wasn't! I was about to send him over to break the pair of them up when suddenly the girl led him off the dance floor and right out the door! Of course I knew what they were going to do."

"Were you jealous?" the interviewer asks.

"No!" Emily snaps entirely too quickly. "I was not. I was ashamed that my son would be so accepting of the advances of a drunken...floozy and make a spectacle of himself that way in public. I wanted Bob to go stop them as they left, but he refused."

"Go get 'em, champ!" Bob says cheerfully.

"She pulled me right upstairs and into bed," Mike remembers. "We went at it like three times."

"Was it good?" the interviewer asks.

"Well, yeah," Mike replied, sounding less than convincing. "I mean, yeah, it was good. It was just that a few days before I'd had the best sex ever and I hadn't stopped thinking about it since, so it sort of paled next to that. But hell, it was fun."

"Did you think about your mother during it?"

"Of course I did," Mike says with a shrug. "I mean, I didn't wish it was her in bed with me or anything. Nothing that...well, that concrete. She was just always there in my mind. Mom was so good, and being with her felt so perfect. Brianna was nice and enthusiastic and good and everything, but...well, whatever comes after 'perfect' is going to be a letdown, right?"

"Mike's behavior left me quite upset," Emily sniffs. "I didn't enjoy the night very much after that, and Bob and I left early."

"I made it back to our hotel about 3:30 in the morning," Mike says. "Olivia wasn't there yet. She got back after I was already in bed. We had a 2:00 PM flight back to Minneapolis that day."

"We went through a pocket of turbulence as we passed over the Rockies," Emily recalls. "Mike got a little airsick. All I could do was think that there had been some turbulence at about that spot on the way out as well. I'd always liked the mountains before, but they'd lost their luster for me, I think it's fair to say."

"The next couple days after we got back were no better between Emily and Mike," Bob tells us. "I'd had a fleeting hope that they'd leave their troubles on the coast, but if anything it had gotten worse. They couldn't even be in the same room with each other."

"The tension was palpable," Emily admits. "Furthermore, I could tell when Mike entered a room I was in even when I had my back turned. I could feel when he put his eyes on me. I would tense and..." she trails off.

"And?" the interviewer asks.

She blushes again and shrugs. "And it would become uncomfortable."

"I was sick to my stomach for the first couple of days," Mike says. "I couldn't stop thinking about her, about it, and there was this mass of guilt and lust and self-loathing, so much self-loathing. I took three cold showers a day and nothing helped. Every time I saw her, every time I even heard her voice, I'd get this massive erection and there'd be this spike of...of longing and disgust and need and almost nausea. I wasn't sleeping. I could barely eat. No way I could look her in the eye."

"It was very difficult," Emily confirms. "I recall once when I went to take a shower and discovered that Mike was already in there. The door was locked. I didn't see him in the shower. But I knew he was there with the water splashing over his nude body and the air would be hot and steamy and I had the most perfectly vivid image of slipping into the bathroom silently, disrobing, opening the shower door and stepping inside, seeing the look of shock on his face and silencing him with a kiss, and then him putting me against the wall and...taking me. I could picture how my legs would wrap around him. I could imagine how the water would feel running between us as we...mated. The image lasted only a moment, but it left me incredibly aroused!

"And then I turned around and saw Bob," she continues, her face darkening. "He wasn't looking at me. He was doing something else, not paying me any mind whatsoever, but the sight of him made me feel...unclean. Deceitful. As though I'd deliberately betrayed him." She shakes her head fiercely and wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. "I wanted the thoughts of Mike to go away. I wanted things to be the way they'd been before the accident. I wanted my son back. But I wasn't in control of my thoughts."

"After a couple of days, I was completely fed up," Bob says. "By the third day Emily and Mike couldn't even be in the same room together. I was eating breakfast with Emily and we were talking about some work we needed to do in the back yard. Olivia came in, we talked with her a bit and then went on talking about the yard. A few minutes later Mike walked in, and Emily jumped up in the middle of a sentence and said she had to go. She actually left for work 20 minutes early because Mike walked into the room. I'd had enough."

Against a black background, we see:

June 27

"The day after that was Saturday," Mike says. "I'd planned to go to a backyard party with some friends of mine. Hannah was supposed to be there and I was going to ask her out."

We now see a photograph of a girl of about 18 years, a pretty, freckled redhead with a happy smile; the subtitle is Hannah Williamson. In voiceover, Mike says, "I was looking forward to it because I figured if I could get involved with another girl, I could stop obsessing about mom. I thought I could move past it.

"But then dad walked into the room," Mike continues as we see his face again. "He told me to follow him. He took me into the living room, where mom was...dusting or cleaning or something. I remember the look of panic in her eyes very clearly."

"I had known Bob was getting tired of the strain between Mike and me," Emily recalls uneasily. "I didn't know he was about to do something so precipitous."

"I told them that I didn't know what had happened on the trip," Bob tells us, "but I was tired of it and it had to stop. Olivia was going to be gone for the day and I told them I was leaving too, and they had to address it. I told them they could yell or scream or throw accusations or whatever, but when I got back, I wanted their problems sorted out and whatever was bothering them to be resolved. And then I left."

"Mom and I just stood there staring at each other for the longest time," Mike says. "We knew dad was right, we needed to talk, but neither of us knew how to start."

"After several seconds I sat down on the sofa and had him sit next to me," Emily says. "Neither of us was comfortable. We were both quite stiff and awkward."

"I didn't want to sit next to her," Mike agrees. "Across the room would have been more comfortable. But I sat down and looked at the floor and tried not to smell her."

"Smell her?" the interviewer asks.

"Yeah. It was a warm day and she'd been working. She had a little sweat going, just enough to make her glisten. I could smell it very faintly and it reminded me of when we were together, her scent - all her scents. It was making me hard."

"After some time I said something inane," Emily tells us. "Something along the lines of 'You mustn't blame yourself' or 'Nothing that happened was your fault.' I felt stupid even as I said it."

"Wasn't it true?" the interviewer asks.

"It didn't matter that it was true," Emily says impatiently. "It was irrelevant. The tension between us at that point was much less about what had happened and much more about our reactions to it. We'd both loved it and neither of us could stop thinking about the other in that way. It wasn't about what we'd done, it was about what we wanted."

"Which was?" the interviewer probes.

"Each other," Emily says with an eloquent shrug.

"So we were just sitting there spouting bullshit at each other," Mike recalls with a disgusted shake of his head. "Just this meaningless crap. It was all, 'I was just glad you weren't hurt, oh it could have been much worse, we got away lucky if you think about it," and none of it was even touching on what we both needed to talk about. After like three minutes I wanted to scream but we just kept jabbering like idiots at each other."

"One thing working at a university has taught me is that if you ladle enough inanity on any problem, it goes away," Emily says. "I was beginning to think we were doing just that when I said, quite casually, that I was disappointed in how he behaved at the wedding reception when he went off with a girl."

"When she said that, it was like this weird shadow play we were doing just dropped, just fell apart," Mike says, "and I got pissed. I was like, 'What the fuck? I'm an adult, you got no claim on me!'"

"Mike told me that my reproach of him was about jealousy," Emily says, "which was ridiculous. As his mother, I would have chided him about promiscuous sex regardless of what had happened between us. This didn't mean I hadn't been jealous, because I'd been incredibly jealous, but at that moment I wasn't about to be scolded by my son for trying to be a mother to him, so I replied that his attitude was inappropriate."

"So she yells at me that I'd better remember who I'm talking to, and I yell that she'd been trying to make me jealous by hanging off dad during the dance, and then she yells that I had a lot of nerve going after her for being affectionate with my father," Mike says. "We were both yelling and pointing our fingers in each other's faces and then she told me that I'd been a pig for jerking off to her during the wedding. And that's when we both got mad."

"Mike informed me that he knew that I had...pleasured myself after the wedding," Emily says. "Furthermore, he said that I had been...looking at him lustfully when I thought he wasn't looking."

"Had you?" the interviewer asks.

Emily blushes. "I may have been. Occasionally."

"She didn't like having that thrown in her face," Mike says with a frown. "She told me that I'd been acting like an asshole since our time together. Well, she didn't use that word. I think she said 'uncouth' or something like that. She said that I hadn't made an effort to talk about what had happened, which was like, yeah no shit, neither did you, you know?"

"There were other words exchanged, each of us accusing the other of things we were equally guilty of doing," Emily says as a blush begins to color her cheeks. "After some period of time, I told him that I thought he had actually enjoyed what we had done."