Folie a Deux, Episode 06

"What were you studying?"

"Initially I thought pre-law, but the way things played out I got really excited about the sciences and I ended up switching to a geology and hydrology major pretty quick."

"Were you involved in extracurricular activities?"

Mike laughs. "Besides with mom?. Well I had always been a two-sport athlete, with football in the fall and baseball in the spring, but I knew I wasn't good enough to do anything but ride pine at the college level, and the idea of taking time away from my studies -- and from mom -- led me to drop athletics once I got to college. So I got involved in some campus organizations, geology club, French language club, some other stuff. Some political organizations. As much as I had time for. I made a lot of friends and hung out with them too."

"And were you tempted by college girls?"

Mike smiles. He is handsome and charming, and with his commanding presence it is easy to imagine college girls flocking to him. But he simply says, "I already had the best girl in the world at home. Nobody else even registered."

"You never even looked?"

"Oh, I looked. I wasn't dead. But my heart was very firmly taken."

We return to Emily again. "Mike entering college was an adjustment for me, and it was not always an easy one. The year one enters college is perhaps the most transformative year of a person's life. The person who comes out of their first year is seldom the same person who went in. As a university professor, I saw that continuously. What Mike and I were sharing was new and fragile and infinitely precious. I knew all too well that his tastes might change, or that the experience he was getting might well lead him to conclude that we couldn't continue to be lovers."

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

"It was very stressful. I would do everything I could to hold onto him, but I was also aware that he might simply slip away from me. I had made up my mind that, if he truly wished to end it between us, I would not fight him or do anything contemptible to hold onto him. I had to allow him to become a man, his own man, and hope that the man he became still wanted me to be his woman."

"It sounds like a difficult position to be in."

Emily concedes the point with a nod. "I lost more than one night of sleep over it. But of course I was a teacher, so my schedule increased around that time as well. I could throw myself into my work and distract myself somewhat."

"And did you and Mike still continue your physical relationship during this time?"

"Whenever possible," Emily nods, "though that was more difficult. We had decided that we could not make love in the house when others were there, or even when there was a small chance of them coming home, so we had to steal moments where and when we could."

"We began running errands together," Mike tells us. "Shopping or whatever. We'd just get in the car and go, just to spend some time together."

We see a picture of Emily from that period, standing in front of a new Toyota Avalon hybrid, deep blue in color, holding up the keys and smiling. We are informed that Emily replaced her minivan, "Lou," with a Toyota Avalon which she calls "Avy."

The interviewer asks Mike, "You didn't take those opportunities to have sex?"

"No, like I said, we were being extra careful. No messing around where we could be seen or caught or anything. I would have loved a repeat of the road head incident, but we had to be good."

Emily now, who smiles. "I loved our trips together. Mike would drive and I would sit in the passenger seat and watch him. When we were out together we really felt like a couple. We weren't merely illicit lovers. We were doing the stuff of ordinary life together, the little everyday things that make couples rely upon one another. It felt so very natural. It felt so very right. And it made me want much more of that."

"And there was no hanky-panky on those trips?" the interviewer asks.

"There was not, as difficult as it is to believe!" Emily laughs. "We held hands. We kissed. In the car. There was the occasional...petting session, shall we say? Strictly over-the-clothes. We always stopped before things got too heated, and we behaved ourselves as much as we could."

We return to Mike. "That was hard, man. For a while during the summer it had been multiple times per day, but even after Olivia caught us and we got a lot more cautious, it was still multiple times per week. First couple weeks of college, we did it one time, on a weekend when dad was over at his brother's place and Olivia was at lacrosse. One time. And it was an awesome time because we were both so hungry for it that we just ripped each other apart, but still...multiple times per day to once in two weeks. Not an easy adjustment to make. Pressure was building. On everyone."

We see Olivia for the first time. Her nose is still crooked from being broken, but her black eyes are gone. Her hair has faded from candy apple red to reddish-orange and is coming in dark blonde at the roots. She is wearing a classy black sweater, which makes her already slim frame seem girlish. She tells us, "By the middle of September I was picking up on vibes from dad. He was kind of tense all the time, like he had something big on his mind. And it was around then that I started seeing him stare at mom, like...like when she wasn't looking, he'd sometimes just stare holes in her. And then she'd turn around and he'd be back to normal in a flash."

"What did you make of that?" the interviewer asks.

"It made me nervous. Those were suspicious, angry looks. I was hoping dad wouldn't find out about mom and Mike." She pauses, then says, "Well, I was hoping he wouldn't find out until after I'd graduated high school."

"You assumed he would find out, though?"

"Well...yeah. I mean, mom and Mike were insanely in love with each other. They were being a lot more careful now and not doing stupid shit that would get them caught, but if anything, what they had was getting deeper and stronger, not less so. You can't keep that under wraps forever."

"That must have been quite strange for you."

"Well of course it was!" she laughs. "Of course. When I thought about it, it was creepy and disgusting and gross and everything else. But...look, you can't keep being freaked out by the same thing constantly. Sooner or later you make room for it. It became just a weird secret I had to keep, and I guess every family has a few of those."

"With everything that was happening, what did you think the most likely outcome would be?"

Olivia takes a moment to consider, and then shrugs and says, "I was a high school girl. I didn't know. I was trying not to think of it. But...but even I knew mom and dad weren't going to last. Dad just didn't know it yet. Well, except that he did."

Back to Bob. "When a marriage nears its end, things usually get pretty bad between the spouses. Disrespect, anger, accusations, straight-up loathing. I certainly walked that road, but there was absolutely none of that from Emily. Her behavior toward me didn't really change. I don't even know if her feelings for me changed, as odd as that sounds. She was still the same Emily, except happier and filled with joy in a way that she hadn't been since before she got pregnant with Mike."

"But you say your feelings for her changed?"

"Obviously."

We see Emily again, looking pensive. "I began to notice Bob's attitude toward me shifting. It was a series of small things, but after 19 years of marriage -- 19 very routine years, I must add -- those small things were remarkable."

"Such as?" the interviewer asks.

"He began to stay up later, so that I would be asleep when he came to bed. He actually spent several nights on the sofa, claiming he'd fallen asleep while watching television. On one of the first very chilly nights in September, I rolled over to cuddle with him and a few minutes later he got up, went to the bathroom, and stayed there until I fell asleep."

We see Bob again, who is frowning. "Sharing a bed with her was becoming more and more difficult. For all I knew, she'd been using our bed for her affair, and that idea made it hard to lie there. Most nights I had to force myself into bed with her. Some nights I couldn't manage it at all. And I could take touching her or being touched by her when we weren't in bed, but in bed her touch began to make my skin crawl."

Back to Emily. "Once when I was changing, I looked in the mirror and saw him watching me. That was not unusual -- he always liked to watch me dress, even after our sex life had dwindled to nothing. This time, though, the look in his eyes was...angry, resentful, hurt, almost enraged. I recall I actually gasped when I saw it, but when I asked him what was wrong, he simply smiled and said nothing was wrong at all."

"It was the unprotected sex thing that was getting to me," Bob tells us. "For all I knew, she was having sex with this guy every day. She might be carrying another man's cum into our marriage bed every day. I remember lying wide awake one night wondering if right at that moment, some man's sperm was fertilizing her egg. Every minute I was dealing with the uncertainty of it, knowing it was happening but not knowing the facts. Which is always the problem in an infidelity situation, isn't it? The, um...the 'wronged' spouse, for lack of a better term, always wants to know all the details even though it's more painful that way. It's a constant itch you can't scratch. It wears you down. It just wears you down."

The screen goes dark again, and we see another set of dates:

September 22 - October 17

"Tuesday night lacrosse practice," Olivia tells us as we see her again. "September 22nd. It was a drizzly evening, I was muddy and soaked to the bone and sore from getting into a couple of collisions. Dad came to pick me up. I dumped my stuff in the trunk of the car, got into the front, took one look at his expression, and said, 'Ohhh fuck, this is bad.' He looked like a pot about to boil."

"It's not always a big issue that sets you off," Bob relates. "The straw that broke the camel's back is a real thing. I'd just come from home and Emily looked so god-damned bubbly, so happy, and all I wanted to do was smack the smile off her face. I have never hit a woman and I will never hit a woman, but Christ I wanted to."

"Why?" the interviewer asks.

"Because hers was the mood of someone who'd just had great sex. I knew without a doubt that she had been with a guy that afternoon, that he'd probably come inside her, and she was tracking that shit into my house."

We see Emily, who admits, "Tuesday afternoons were very quiet in my department. Mike had visited me in my office that afternoon -- this became our pattern, in fact, as I could lock my door and we could be together without being seen. It had been a quick session, but was rough and thrilling and entirely satisfying. I was in a very good mood."

"I hadn't forgotten Olivia's new shoes and clothes," Bob tells us. "She'd stopped getting them so whatever situation it had been had apparently resolved itself, but it was still something that I, as a father, should address. That's the kind of itch you scratch when you can't get at what's really driving you crazy."

"I thought maybe if I was quiet, dad wouldn't come at me," Olivia says, "but after like a minute of silence, he asks if there was anything I wanted to tell him."

"What did you make of that?" the interviewer asks.

"I thought he'd found out about mom and Mike. I was too scared to say anything back. He kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye with this really angry expression, so finally I was like, 'Nooooo...' And then he asked me about shoes, of all things."

"I asked her if someone had bought her all the new articles of clothing she'd picked up," Bob says.

"I'd gotten all that stuff from the money I'd gotten from Mike," Olivia explains.

"The money you'd extorted from him?" the interviewer asks.

Olivia gives a loud laugh. "Shit, dude, extortion is an ugly word...an ugly, accurate word. Yes, the money I had extorted from Mike to keep my mouth shut about him and mom."

"What did you tell him?"

"Well I hadn't expected him to ask that. I was expecting something more along the lines of, 'How long have you known about your mother and brother?' So the shoe question really threw me. I didn't know what to say. He asked if a boy had bought them for me, like a boyfriend. I wasn't really doing boyfriends at the time, just hookups, but I wasn't gonna tell him that I was just having casual sex with a few different guys and none of them were paying me in fashionable footwear. Finally I said something about buying them with birthday money."

"Unlike her mother, Olivia is perfectly capable of telling a lie," Bob says. "But I knew that was BS. She'd blown through her birthday money five minutes after she'd gotten it. There was no way she had hundreds of dollars to buy things all of a sudden. I accused her of seeing an older man. Things...spiraled down from there."

"All of a sudden he was insisting I had a sugar daddy," Olivia says. "And this was out of the blue for me, right out of left field. I mean if I had been seeing someone a few years older and he'd bought me some nice things, and dad had asked respectfully and kindly, then I would have told him. Probably. Maybe. I dunno, I probably wouldn't have. But with the tone he had, I wouldn't have told him if I was engaged to Jeff Bezos. So I got mad, then he got mad, then we both got madder, and by the time we got home we were screaming at each other."

"Not my finest parental moment," Bob concedes. "No excuses offered."

"I was livid," Olivia says. "My dad was almost calling me a whore. That would have been more than enough to set me off, but the circumstances made it even worse because the stuff I bought and the money I got and dad's continually edgy mood all traced back to what mom and Mike were doing -- and I couldn't tell him that! I hated lying to him, it made me feel like shit, but it was happening and I was involved and it made me feel disgusting.

"I was covered in mud from practice. Usually I would go down the basement and change clothes before going into the house, but that night I ran upstairs and into Mike's room. I didn't even take off my cleats."

"I was in my bedroom studying when Olivia storms in and slams the door behind her," Mike tells us. "She slammed it hard enough that it knocked a picture off my wall. And then she starts tearing into me about how dad tore into her about shoes or some shit. I didn't even know what she was talking about for a couple of minutes, and when I did figure it out I was like...bitch, nobody told you to blackmail me."

"He was right, of course," Olivia says with a sheepish grin, "but I didn't care because fuck him. The family was coming apart because of him and mom and...well, no, the family was coming apart because of that bunch of biker shitbags, but I wasn't thinking of that at the moment. To me, at that moment, it seemed like Mike and mom were deliberately ripping the family to pieces for their own selfish reasons. I blamed them both, and I took it out on him."

"I wondered why Olivia followed up our argument with another argument with her brother," Bob tells us. "I wondered how he was involved in all this, because that argument made it clear that he was in it somehow. And no, I didn't put two and two together yet, but...let's just say I was reaching for my calculator."

"Over the ensuing days, things became...claustrophobic," Emily tells us. "I had initially expected Bob's mood to be transitory. After all, everyone goes through rough patches. But it was not passing, and indeed it was getting worse day on day. I had tried talking to him about it several times, but he always assured me that nothing was wrong."

"What did you make of that?"

Emily considers, then says, "He had always been open with his problems and concerns before. We were very close in that way -- we could always rely upon one another to provide emotional support and understanding. That he was now excluding me was alarming."

"Did you think he suspected you?"

"I could think of no other explanation."

Mike again, who says, "It was becoming pretty obvious that dad knew something was up. He's a smart guy, so once he was on the trail I think we all knew deep down that it was a matter of time until he pieced it together. But what could mom and I do? We'd already stopped doing anything when there was any chance we could get caught. We couldn't do less than nothing."

"What about how you and your mother were behaving toward each other in other ways?" the interviewer asks.

Mike shifts uncomfortably. "Well...I mean...we weren't obvious about anything."

Olivia now, who smirks as she says, "Mom and Mike were walking around eye-fucking each other constantly. They couldn't have been more obviously in love if they were wearing matching tee shirts saying OBVIOUSLY WE'RE IN LOVE. There were times even I thought it was cute. But dangerous as hell, of course."

Returning to Emily, she tells us, "If Mike and I had been having a purely physical affair, then it would have been easier to conceal. But the emotions we shared were so intense that, in retrospect, I suppose it was too much to expect that they wouldn't be noticed."

We see Bob again. "The first time I had a real suspicion about Mike and Emily was the first third of October, like the 7th or 8th. Emily had taken to giving Mike rides home from college -- Mike wasn't attending the University, so it meant she was driving a few miles out of her way almost every day to pick him up."

"I was not picking Mike up from his college," Emily explains as we cut to her. "He was taking a bus to meet me at my work. As I mentioned before, on Tuesdays we were making love in my office, but on other days we would simply spend time together. I wanted to spend every moment with Mike. When I wasn't with him, I was thinking about him. Simply sitting and talking in a place where we could express ourselves freely was a joyful experience."

"When Emily came into the house," Bob says, "she was just oozing satisfaction. I don't know whether it was from sex or not, but she was sooo happy about something. I looked at her and said, well, there's a woman madly in love. Mike was right behind her, watching her as she walked, and he had the same expression. Exactly the same. And I was like...huh. Huh."

"You knew then?' the interviewer asks.

"Not...not knew. But suddenly I thought of it. Suddenly the possibility occurred to me. And it instantly fit so much of what had happened. It rearranged all those pieces I'd been wondering about, and suddenly they all just clicked together. A lot of things that had seemed unimportant or inexplicable at the time now made a pattern."

"What sort of things had seemed inexplicable?"

"A lot of it was how...I dunno, deferential to Mike Emily was becoming. When he made a suggestion, she went with it. When he had a preference, what was what we did. When he wanted something, Emily got it for him. She hadn't done that kind of thing for him since he was six years old, and then...well, then it was a totally different context. Then it was a mom doing things for her kid. Now, though, it was...well, once I thought of them together as a couple, it seemed pretty obvious that it was a woman doing things for her man."

"Was that typical of how she treated you?"

Bob snorts. "No. No it was not. She had never treated me that way, not even when we were first together. We had always been a partnership of equals, but this looked...well hell, it looked submissive. And that was not the Emily I knew at all." He pauses, then shakes his head and adds, "Which I guess means I never really knew her as well as I thought I did." He pauses again, a miserable expression on his face, until finally he admits, "So...I guess I did know it was true. I guess I did. Yeah."