House of Cards Ch. 10

"I had actually noticed some of that," I said. "I don't know when it started, maybe a few weeks ago, but you have seemed more relaxed when we're together—it's been great." I smiled at her. "I'm glad that the therapy is helping, Marianne. What you say about your parent's marriage certainly makes sense to me. It makes me wish I had known about your feelings, so I could have looked into your eyes and said, 'You can trust me Marianne—I'm not your dad'. But I know it doesn't work that way."

She squeezed my arm. "No—I wish it did. Instead we had to go through all this ... all this SHIT for me to start to understand it."

Suddenly she stopped walking, and looked intently into my eyes. "I am so very sorry, Tom," she said seriously.

"I know, Marianne," I replied, with equal seriousness. After a long moment I smiled at her, and we continued our walk in the cold.

**********

Sometime in March, as the dreary winter weather dragged on, I began to feel uneasy. I still don't know what set me off, whether something actually happened or I caught the suspicion virus out of the air—but I began to worry about Marianne's fidelity.

We had been doing well, I thought. I certainly had been feeling better about our marriage, and she seemed very happy at our greater closeness. Her therapy was continuing to help her. So what vague instinct was it that started me worrying?

I'd been checking the hidden recorders in the house twice a week, more or less. Now I checked them every other day. I put a recording device back into the spare-tire compartment of Marianne's car, with a listening device hidden under the front seat and another one in her purse. I checked those every day.

I began listening more carefully when she described her activities at work each day, trying to pick out inconsistencies. I called her at the office occasionally, and if she wasn't in I made sure to ask casually at dinner that night what she'd been out doing when I called.

On two days, when she'd told me ahead of time she had various business errands outside the office to do, I'd actually parked down the street from her office parking lot and trailed her car around town for several hours.

The result of all this renewed suspicion, worry, and investigation was exactly zero. There was not a hint of any inappropriate behavior on my wife's part. However, as a professor of mine in college liked to say, "Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence".

I knew, after all, that Marianne had cheated on me with Eddie for eight months without my catching on. I was much more suspicious now—but that didn't mean she wasn't being much more careful!

After about three weeks of this I felt depressed and frustrated. I'd found just what I'd hoped to find—nothing—but it seemed to be making me feel worse rather than better. I didn't want to talk to Marianne about this, so I dragged Steve out for a long lunch one day and told him what I'd been up to.

Bless his heart, Steve didn't laugh at me. He listened carefully, looking serious, and he didn't make light of my fears.

"I know this can't be any fun, Tom, but it is good news that you haven't found anything. Andrea just saw Marianne the other day, and she told me that Marianne just went on and on about how well the two of you are doing. She said Marianne seemed happier than she's been for a long time."

"I know this is somewhat irrational, Steve. I haven't got a single shred of anything to base my worries on. But I keep remembering what a fool I was the first time. Marianne is smart as hell!"

"Tom, I'm your friend, and I honestly don't know what to tell you. I guess it makes sense to continue being watchful, but I'm sorry that your suspicions are making you so crazy. Is there anything I can do?"

I sighed. "I guess just listen to me rant every once in a while. I'm going to have to live through this phase one way or another."

My hypervigilance lasted another week or so, then it gradually receded, like a low-grade fever returning to normal. I went back to checking the recorders less frequently, I stopped asking Marianne leading questions—in short I relaxed. My worries didn't ever disappear, but they became bearable again.

**********

As the summer approached, Marianne began talking about what we might do once the kids went off to camp again. "Tom, how would you feel about a vacation we've never done before? Hiking in the Rockies, or up in Canada somewhere? Maybe staying in a national park?"

I liked the idea, among other reasons because I was still eager for us to do new things, things that had no possible sting of memories from the pre-adultery days of our marriage.

We went ahead and booked a cabin on Ross Lake in the North Cascades National Park, in Washington, and spent some happy hours reading guide books and looking on-line to learn more about what we'd be seeing.

The day after we dropped the kids off at camp, we were flying out to Seattle, where we rented a car and headed for the park. We found a rustic two-room cabin with an indescribable view, nestled in the woods overlooking the lake with brilliantly white snow-capped mountains in the distance beyond.

Every day of that week we found something new to delight us. Making love didn't get neglected, but there were so many outdoor activities beckoning to us that some days we came home too exhausted (but happy) to do more than snuggle together in the past-its-prime queen-size bed. We hiked, we rented a canoe and explored the lake, we sunbathed, we hiked some more, we cooked steaks over a campsite fire we made ourselves—and we relaxed, reading together for hours or just lying in the sun.

One day I got adventurous, and I talked Marianne into letting me screw her partway up a tree, deep in the empty woods. The tree stood in a tiny glade, with branches arranged up its trunk almost like the steps of a ladder. I persuaded Marianne, giggling like mad, to strip off her shorts and perch on a sturdy branch about 10 feet off the ground. Then I stood in front of her, naked from the waist down, on a branch about three feet lower, bringing my excited cock to just the right height.

We had to hold each other tightly around the shoulders to keep from tumbling to the ground, and it wasn't all that comfortable, but it was a lot of fun. The position was too awkward for wild orgasms, but we took our time and enjoyed the "outdoorsness" of it, feeling the breeze cooling our naked parts as we went at it. Towards the end our fucking made the branches we were on sway unnervingly, adding to the danger level of the adventure.

"Well, that will be a story to tell when we get back," I said with a smile after we were finished, and were clinging to each other tiredly.

"To whom?" she replied, "the children?" We both laughed. "Who are we going to tell about this?"

"Well, at least Steve and Andrea," I said. "Didn't they make it once in a Sunfish in the middle of a lake in New Hampshire? This is at least as good a story as that one. Wait, Marianne! Don't climb down yet—I want a picture of you, bare-ass up in that tree."

She laughed, and quickly yanked up her shorts before I could snap the photo. What I got instead was a shot of a lovely woman, more-or-less dressed, standing on a tree branch, smiling broadly at the camera and extending the middle finger of her right hand.

**********

On the morning of our next-to-last day, I slipped out of bed very early, pulled on some sweats, and went outside to enjoy the cool air and the subdued light just after dawn. I sat on the porch, looked at the lake, and thought about what I wanted to say to Marianne.

I had planned for weeks that this trip would be the time to tell her the truth about Carrie—that there was no Carrie, and no lengthy affair, just a brief two-night stand with a young woman at a conference the previous summer.

I had thought over and over about how to raise this ticklish subject, how to tell Marianne that I had deceived her by NOT having an affair. "Honey," I thought I'd begin, "I have something important to tell you. It's actually good news, but it may not sound that way right at first. In fact you may be angry with me—you may feel I've betrayed you—but when you think about it I hope you'll agree with me that it's a good thing."

I imagined her face when I told her—utter shock, confusion, and then perhaps rising anger. Maybe she'd tell me off, then stomp away to be by herself for awhile. After an hour or two, she'd return, ready to complain good-naturedly to me for deceiving her and thank me for not having avenged her affair with one of my own.

But what if it didn't go quite that way? As I sat there in the early morning light, my plan to confess the truth seemed less and less like a good idea. I could also imagine a much more furious reaction: "you mean you made me suffer for weeks—for MONTHS—with images of you and that voluptuous woman, snuggling together in your apartment, having wild acrobatic sex that I could never compete with—and it was all made-up bullshit? You bastard! What kind of fucking sadistic thing is that to do to someone you say you love?"

"All those months," I could hear Marianne continuing, "when I was suffering about you and Carrie, and reminding myself that it was my own fault, I'd brought it on myself, you were probably just chuckling to yourself about how easy it was to turn the tables on me! You insensitive, vengeful PRICK! And after all that, you still have the nerve not to trust ME? Well, fuck you, husband! All you've told me today is that I can't trust YOU!"

And then she'd stomp off into the woods; but when she came back there might be hours, or even days, of angry silence.

No one wants to be played for a fool. I had learned that, in spades, when I was first shattered by the knowledge of Marianne's adultery. Since that time we had made our way back from the brink, from the possible end of our marriage. We had done it slowly, painfully, with a lot of hard work. Why would I want to jeopardize that now by confessing to a lie that had undoubtedly done more good than harm?

Life was messy, and unpredictable. The symmetry of Marianne's long-term affair and my fictitious long-term affair had not been planned. On the contrary, I invented Carrie as a way to get Marianne to understand the pain I was in, in the wake of learning about her and Eddie. It had served its purpose. It had hurt Marianne a lot, I knew, but it had also helped restore some degree of balance to our relationship. I even think that my 'affair' helped Marianne begin to forgive herself for what she had done, faster than would have been possible otherwise.

I could no longer see any reason for not letting my secret lie buried.

As I sat musing, the screen door squeaked, and a moment later I felt Marianne's arms encircling my neck, as she kissed the top of my head and murmured "good morning, sweetie!" into my hair.

I reached back and pulled her around and onto my lap, where she snuggled her head into my neck. We rocked back and forth for a few minutes, enjoying the quiet and the feel of one another.

"Is today the day?" she asked me.

I looked at her in surprise. "For what?"

Looking directly at me, she said, "for whatever it is you're planning to talk to me about." Amused by my look of total shock—my mouth must have actually fallen open—she continued, "I know you pretty well, Tom. You've been more and more thoughtful, even abstracted, the last couple of days. You're working something out in your mind, and I figure that either today or tomorrow you'll be ready to tell me about it."

I just laughed, shaking my head at the sensitivity and intuitiveness of my wife, things I had appreciated for years but that had disappeared for a while at the end of her affair.

"You are something, you know that? And yes, I do have something to say, and this is the moment. Let's go down and stand by the lake."

Arm in arm, smiling together, we ambled down the path to the water's edge.

I turned her to face me, and we stood a foot apart, holding one another's hands, looking into one another's eyes.

"This is what I have to say, Marianne. This past year has been the hardest one of our marriage. But here we are—still standing. Next year is going to be much better, and the year after that, better still."

"We've gone through a hell of a lot together—and I want to be married to you for the rest of my life."

I stopped talking. Her eyes were filled with tears, and she couldn't speak. Instead, we embraced. She gave her body completely to me, stretching her arms up over my shoulders and letting her hands dangle behind me, the embrace that meant "I am utterly open to you, I am totally yours". It was a gesture from our past together, one that I treasured.

My own eyes were suddenly full of tears, and she saw them after a minute when she pulled back a little and gazed at me.

"I love you, Thomas Card," she said.

"And I love you, Mrs. Card," I replied.

THE END