I May Be Dumb . . .

It was late when we got home, so after I had paid the babysitter, we headed right for bed. As I brushed my teeth I was half erect as I kept remembering scene after scene from the film. Of course, the fact that I hadn't been laid in several months only added to my arousal.

We climbed into our separate sides of the bed and I turned out the light, still lost in an erotic fog. Then, to my astonishment, I felt Julia's hand on my back. It snaked over my side and down into my boxers, gripping my now fully erect penis.

Suddenly, I was panting so hard I couldn't catch my breath. In a frenzy I rolled over and grabbed Julia. As I kissed her open mouth, I realized that she was panting too. We clung to each other awkwardly, desperate to connect, desperate to sate the lust that had overcome us. Then I was on her and in her and plunging into her because I could do nothing else. Her legs were wrapped tightly around my hips her arms were around my back, urging me onward, faster, deeper until neither one of us could stand it any longer and we exploded in orgasm.

As I collapsed onto my back in exhaustion and sleep descended on me, the only thought I could muster was, "Make-up sex really is the best."

I woke next morning to the sound of Julia doing her make-up at the bathroom vanity. I lay there for a minute, savoring memories of last night, filled with a resurgent optimism. "It's going to be all right, it's going to be all right," I kept repeating in my head.

By the time I had taken my shower and had shaved, Julia was dressed and ready for work. As I sat on the bed pulling on my shoes, she turned to me and said, "I've found a place to live, and they'll let me move in next week."

I felt as if I'd just taken a heavy-weight punch to the gut.

"But what about us? What about last night?"

"That didn't mean anything. I'm still getting a divorce," she said blandly.

At that moment I felt like a child denied a special treat. I wanted to scream out, "But you promised, you promised!" To have my hopes built up and then dashed again filled me with anger, and I yelled at her, "Well if you want a divorce so bad, why don't I just go ahead and divorce you on grounds of adultery?"

She turned to me and calmly said, "In the state of Georgia, once a spouse makes love to his partner after having knowledge of her infidelity, he is presumed to have forgiven her."

I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid. Julia had no training in the law; she must have gotten that information from her attorney and memorized her little speech!

At that instant I began to realize just how treacherous and deceitful she was. "She planned the whole thing!" I thought. "We didn't make love last night because she wanted to reconcile. She fucked me in order to take adultery off the legal table."

Then I realized it went further than that. "She didn't suggest we go out with the Andersons because she wanted to socialize with me. She used them to set me up, to get me drunk and then take me to the hottest movie she could find. She planned this out days ago, and she manipulated me like a child!"

For the first time I realized what she really thought of me: not love, only contempt. And I, in my blind optimism, had fallen for it. This new betrayal hurt so bad I'm ashamed to admit I collapsed on the bed, weeping anguished and angry tears.

She had no need for more scheming now. On Monday I was served with a petition for divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. On Tuesday I came home to find that she had moved out during the day. All her clothes and cosmetics, of course, were missing, along with some linens, several pieces of furniture and half of the kitchen pots, pans and utensils.

And there was something else missing: Josh and Jake. On the kitchen counter I found a note from Julia saying, "I've told the boys what's happening. I've taken them with me; you can have them next week." For the second time in a matter of days, I broke down and cried in my empty home.

I don't like to think about the next few weeks: they were filled with nothing but pain and humiliation. I had the "pleasure" of telling my friends at work and having to listen to their condolences. I found I didn't have to tell our mutual friends; Julia seemed to have spread that word herself. The following week when I picked up Josh and Jake from the nanny, I had to act as though everything was fine and normal. ("How do you like Mommy's new house?' I asked them in the car in the same tone of voice I would have used to ask about a trip to the park.) The rest of the time I just wandered about in a pain-filled fog, asking myself repeatedly why this had happened and what I could have done differently.

It didn't help that Julia had picked December as the month for her departure. Hearing the commercial holiday cheer pouring out of the shopping malls and television was like having iodine poured on my fresh wounds. I couldn't believe it when Josh and Jake came home after one of their weeks with Julia bearing a nicely wrapped Christmas present for me from her. I angrily returned it to her unopened.

Julia and I had made arrangements for the boys to spend the day before Christmas with me, and Christmas Day with her. Julia's parents came into town for Christmas, and I invited them to dinner Christmas Eve. I had always liked them, and they seemed very fond of me. I was glad to see them, but dinner was strained and uncomfortable; none of us knew what to say to each other. I wasn't going to curse their only daughter, and they weren't going to be disloyal to her, although they were clearly saddened and mystified by what she had done.

"This will probably be the last time I ever see them again," I thought sadly to myself.

By the time dinner was over, we were all quiet and depressed. The awkwardness was compounded by the fact that they were to take the boys with them back to Julia's new home so Josh and Jake could wake up at her place Christmas morning. We wished each other a Merry Christmas, there were quick hugs all around, and then they were gone.

The old song calls it "the most wonderful time of the year." I woke up on Christmas morning alone and miserable. Absolutely everything that makes Christmas special was missing that morning. There was nothing for me to do, nothing to get my mind off my pain. Finally, in desperation, I pulled on some warm clothes, got into my car and drove out to a wildlife refuge with hiking trails. It was completely deserted, of course, so I walked in solitude for hours and miles, hoping to exhaust myself into numbness. It was the worst Christmas of my life.

I can't say that things improved once the holiday season was over, but at least life settled into a routine. It wasn't comfortable, but I had gotten used to it, like a scab over a gash.

By now, Jake and Josh had graduated to a daycare center. I would pick them up on Monday afternoons. They'd be with me through the week; then, on the following Monday I'd drop them off, knowing that Julia would get them that afternoon. This arrangement proved to be good for the boys because they didn't get confused about where they'd be staying from one day to the next. For that, at least, I was grateful.

I knew the boys were hurting. I asked one of the workers at the daycare center how they were doing. She told me, "They're better now, but for the first few months I didn't think they were going to make it." I cursed to myself when I heard that. My only consolation was that it wasn't me who had done this to them.

Once our divorce was under way, I made myself a promise that I would never use Jake and Josh to get revenge on Julia. I'd heard horror stories of children whose lives were ruined because their angry parents made them weapons in their post-marital battles. So I vowed I would never try to turn them into little spies to peep into Julia's new world and report to me. Children shouldn't be forced to choose sides between their parents.

At the same time, I wanted to know what was happening in their lives while they were away from me. It's not easy to do a good job of parenting when you know nothing about half your kids' lives. So I'd always ask them how their week away had been, if they had done anything fun or interesting, or if there was something coming up in "my" week that I needed to know about.

Over time, I noted a new name beginning to pop up in their recounting. "We played in the park with Mr. Spencer's kids," they'd tell me, or "Mr. Spencer took us out to dinner." That could only be Allen Spencer, I thought, Julia's boss. What was he doing on the scene?

As the comic book hero used to say, "My spider senses were tingling," and I began to bring up his name when I'd see mutual friends. They readily confirmed that Julia and her boss seemed to be spending a lot of time together. Then it got worse: a woman we both knew casually let slip that the two of them had attended a charitable event a number of months ago -- while we were still married! I recalled the event; I had wanted to take Julia but she told me she had to work that night. That told me there'd been something going on long before she'd confronted me.

Now everything began to become clear. There was no mystery lover in Washington, D. C. -- Julia was having an affair with her boss. No wonder she wanted me to think otherwise: if I had known and filed for divorce naming Allen Spencer as co-respondent, it might have caused problems for his firm, not to mention his own marriage.

"But why didn't she simply file for divorce?" I wondered. "Why the elaborate charade about an affair with some guy in Washington?"

Slowly it came to me. "She was trying to get me to file so she wouldn't have to pay for the divorce," I thought.

That led me to another realization: "No wonder she was so annoyed when I proposed we go to counseling!" But she hadn't let this set-back disrupt her; she simply incorporated Willard into her plan.

"When she met with Willard alone, I'll bet she told him exactly what she intended to do. When it was clear to him that reconciliation wasn't in the cards, he probably felt all he could do was get me to face the inevitable."

What a complete fool I'd been! She'd been deceiving and manipulating me for months, and I'd never seen it happening.

All my anger and sense of injury returned in full force as I finally came to realize the extent of her treachery. Yet I could do nothing about it. I'd already stretched the patience of our friends by droning on and on about the divorce and our relationship. If I launched a new round of complaints, they'd begin avoiding me like a leper.

For that matter, although everyone who knew us must be aware of how I'd been played, I had no desire to provide them with even more proof of what a dupe I'd been. More importantly, I didn't want to do anything that might hurt my sons. If I began bad-mouthing their mother all over town, they might pick up on that in some way, even at their young age. I was determined not to let that happen, so I stewed in silence.

Doing so wasn't always easy. There always seemed to be some new incident to pull the scabs off my wounds.

For example, early on, Julia told me she planned to retain my last name after the divorce. I was dismayed: the last thing I wanted was people to think that we were still married. When I questioned it, she told me, "I want to do it for the boys. I don't want them to be confused or have to answer awkward questions." When I heard that, I stopped complaining. The boys' welfare trumped everything else as far as I was concerned.

All of which was fine until the divorce became final and she casually told me that she'd taken back her maiden name. I was stunned. When I asked her why the change of heart, she told me, "I need to have my own identity. Besides, I've already told the boys and they don't care."

After I hung up, I had to leave my office and walk around the block several times to cool off. "What a selfish bitch!" I thought, not for the first time.

The next cause célèbre occurred that summer. Julia took the boys on vacation with her to the coast. But apparently she had planned to spend the last weekend alone with Allen, so she sent the boys home by themselves on the airplane. They were five and three at the time.

I couldn't believe she would do something so irresponsible. "What if the flight had been delayed and they missed their connection?" I stormed at her over the phone when I learned what had happened. "Think how frightened they'd have been."

"But it wasn't and they made it home just fine," she replied blithely. "Besides, kids fly alone all the time. The airlines are used to it."

Maybe so, I thought to myself, but if it happens again, I'll be going to court to get full custody. I know they need both parents, but not when one of them is ready to risk their safety to carry on her dirty little affair.

Fortunately, nothing like that happened again, or if it did, I never heard about it.

The news I got in the fall was also shocking, but in a different way. I picked up Josh and Jake after preschool one Monday, and, as usual, asked them how their last week had gone. They told me everything was fine, nothing out of the ordinary, so I asked how their Mom was doing. (OK, I guess I was snooping a little. It's just that I hadn't heard from her in quite a while and our old friends never mentioned her. I was curious.) "Oh," Josh said, "Mom has a new job."

"Oh really," I responded, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice. "What's she doing now?"

"She's selling real estate," he replied, as though that were the most natural thing in the world.

I knew there was little chance of getting any more information from my sons, especially not about the questions I really wanted to ask, so I changed the subject. But my head was spinning from this unexpected development. Why would she suddenly leave such a good job headed by the man with whom she had fallen in love? Why in hell would she go into real estate, which can be challenging in the best of times and downright impossible in a down market like Atlanta was experiencing at the time. And what did this mean for her future with Dr. Allen Spencer?

Over the next few days, casual conversations with friends confirmed my suspicions: she and Allen were no longer an item. I never did learn what precipitated the break-up, but it seemed clear to me that he had dumped her and she was trying to get as far away from him as possible, at least career-wise.

I remembered seeing a word in a literature class when I was an undergrad: "schadenfreude." I had no idea what it meant and had to look it up. The definition was something like "delight in the suffering of others." That's exactly how I felt when I heard the news about Julia.

"Now she's getting a taste of her own medicine," I thought to myself with glee. "Everybody knows that office romances never work out." The news did nothing to help my situation, of course, but I felt I had a small measure of revenge.

My glee was short-lived. Not long after I heard the news about her change in careers, Julia called me to discuss our sons. "I don't think I'm going to be able to afford my share of their school costs," she calmly informed me. Of course, I knew what I had to do: I sucked it up and paid the whole tab. I was determined to do whatever was necessary to take care of my sons, but I bitterly resented the fact that her bad choices were again putting me in a bind. "Even now we're divorced, she keeps coming back to haunt me," I complained.

I haven't said anything about my social life so far. There's a reason for that: it was lousy. The typical way for a single guy to meet women, I suppose, is to go to a bar or a club. That may work for some men, but not for me. First, I'm a lousy dancer. I'd be embarrassed to be seen attempting to dance. Second, I'm not much of a drinker. I have a low tolerance for alcohol, and I'm also not one of those people who can sit down next to a stranger and strike up a conversation. So meeting women to date was never easy for me.

It didn't help that I was handicapped by living a schizophrenic existence. For seven consecutive days I was a carefree, unencumbered bachelor, able to go wherever or do whatever I chose. In truth, my choice as often as not was to work late at the office, pick up some take-out food for dinner, and watch TV until I fell asleep. But if I somehow did manage to find an opportunity for socializing with the opposite sex, I was free to take it for those seven days.

But the following seven days I was a single father, solely responsible for the wellbeing of my two young sons. On my "dad weeks," I was a monastic figure. There was no going out on week nights under any circumstances; my sons were getting older, and they began to have homework to complete and after-school activities to attend. I certainly didn't begrudge these activities -- I knew they were a normal part of parenthood. But the net result was that every other week I pretty much dropped off the dating radar scope.

Despite these handicaps, I did manage to find some women who were interesting and attractive, and I was successful at getting them to go out with me. Here are a few examples:

Cecily

Cecily was a single mother with a son in the same daycare as my two boys. I finally got up the nerve to approach her at an open house at the daycare, and we soon were dating. She was a redhead, sexy and hot as a firecracker. She liked to have me bite her nipples -- hard. I really liked her, but she dumped me because she thought her son didn't get along well with mine.

Donna

I met Donna at the office of a friend. We got to chatting and I asked her out. The night I picked her up was the night her divorce became final; she cried the whole evening. End of story.

Betty

On my kid-free weeks I joined a mixed-doubles tennis group in hopes of meeting someone who shared my interests. When I saw Betty in her short skirt, I thought I'd made a pretty smart move. In bed she moaned like I was torturing her, and she begged me not to stop until she came. However, she wanted to become exclusive right away, and when I wasn't ready, she hit me in the nuts with a tennis ball. Game over.

Rosemary

I worked with Rosemary, and had always admired her from afar. She was a warm, sweet woman, but she had an ex-husband who wanted to get back together, and she couldn't make up her mind what she wanted to do about him. Three's a crowd, I decided.

Millie

I met Millie while volunteering at the United Fund. She was smart and caring, pretty and outgoing. We dated for a long time, and I began to wonder if I might build a life with her. There was only one problem: her laugh sounded like a horse's whinny. I felt terrible about being so shallow, but in the end I just couldn't imagine listening to that for the rest of my life. No laughing matter.

So my life went on, and I learned some valuable things about myself. Despite the advice from the marriage counselor, I found I really didn't enjoy sowing my wild oats. I learned that I liked married life, liked being part of a traditional family. I wasn't looking for a fling, I was looking for a wife. Not having one no longer made me miserable, but I wasn't happy about the situation. I could survive without being part of a couple if I had to, but I learned that wasn't the kind of life I wanted for the long term.

The truth about being divorced with children is you're never totally divorced from your ex. There's always some situation that requires coordination, some unexpected expense that has to be covered, something that requires the two of you to talk. You can either use those times to renew open warfare, or you can be civil for your kids' sakes. I chose the latter.

So when Julia called me one day to say "We need to talk about the boys," I wasn't surprised. If we needed to work something out for them, I was willing to go over to her house to discuss it.