Second Life

He realized in this moment how futile it was to keep caring about his marriage. Love stood above ideas; it was something that came from within, in the murky depths of dreams and character. Ideas could be bent because we can all artificially narrow our definitions. Take, for example, "respect." To him it meant that he would never betray her, a set of actions which included having sex with another woman or even setting his heart on another woman. To her, it meant that she would give him certain tokens of respect, but then do what she needed and if his needs became inconvenient, well, that was too bad, so sad and not particularly relevant to her decision. They both respected each other, each with his or her own definition, and the two had stopped meeting. This meant that the system would not work, and he needed to build a new system while keeping this one on life support.

"How was work, sweetie?" he asked, as he always did.

"Oh, it was fine," said Dana. "Lot of paperwork. I'm bushed, I --"

"No problem," said Travis gently. "I'll be working late in my office."

And that was that. She went off to the bedroom, stopping by the garage to get her second phone, he assumed. She would hide her panties from today in the laundry, pack herself another bag with the set she was going to wear tomorrow at her lunchtime meeting with goofus, and take her pill on the way out the door, or maybe use the condoms. He wasn't sure why both were there, but he suspected that she suspected that her beau was hanging the horns on more than one husband, and she didn't want to pick up an STD. Not because she cared about Travis, but because that would give up the game, and he could imagine the thrill of having such an illicit pleasure, a vibrant secret, among what she saw as her humdrum life.

He finished the book he was reading, took a pillow from the couch and blanket from the closet, then bedded down on the olive green 1950s-era sofa he kept in his office. It was one of the few things he had from his parents, who had systematically destroyed all traces of their former lives after the divorce. That might be genetic, he thought. On a trailing impulse, he went downstairs to the laundry room. Pulling on a pair of the latex gloves he kept for field work, he dug in the hamper until he found the peach panties with a suspicious crusty stain in the crotch. He stuffed them into a fresh sandwich bag, and went back to his office, shucking the gloves into an old lunch bag -- he could not leave them in the trash, where she might find them and wonder -- and gently sliding the full sandwich into his laptop bag.

Sighing, he went to sleep.

Having sent Marcus a text message saying that he needed those couple days off, Travis slept late. His wife and kids were gone, bundled off to work, school, and daycare, when he awoke. He fired up his laptop and began printing messages, then archived all the files from her phone on a remote server he kept for transfering large files in the field. Then he researched Timothy Flannigan.

It turned out that Flannigan came from a family which had moved out here from Boston after the second world war and made good on the mineral rights under the family farm. Scanning the newspaper archives, Travis found that Flannigan had indeed come from a weighty educational background -- Harvard undergrad, Brown for graduate -- and from the looks of things, had a trust fund. He found an address at a downtown condominium that no teacher could ordinarily afford. Property records listed a wife as well, and on Facebook her found her, a dour-faced thin woman with long blonde hair. Numerous adulatory articles listed his awards in work with the underprivileged, abused, and impoverished.

"Well, how can I compete with that?" Travis chuckled.

He set to work on what he called Operation: Black Box. He figured that since he knew nothing about her, a power gap had been created, and he needed to even that one up by making himself even more inscrutable. he stopped at the hardware store and bought a new door lock, then hit Walmart to get a burner phone, and finally stopped by Walgreens to get a deluxe family pack of multi-colored condoms, choosing a brand other than the one he had found at home. On the way back, he stopped at the Blue Bell Bookstore.

"You don't happen to have a copy of The Last Man by Mary Shelley, do you?" he said to Agnes, who was today wearing baggy khakis and a fuzzy sweater so thick it looked like she was trying to hide in it.

"Here you go," she said, sliding a book from one of the shelves after a moment of searching. "Thank you for your recommendation of an electrician."

"You liked old Greison?" he said, surprised.

"Yes, we got along quite well," she said. "I don't judge, either, when I meet people in person. It's through third party reference that's so hard."

"What do you mean?" asked Travis.

Agnes paused. "You know, how everything is a chain... I tell you something about someone else, that I heard from someone, who in turn heard from someone else. This puts that person into a category, which is like a little island -- have you read Island, Robinson Crusoe, and The Possibility of an Island? -- and we decide whether we want to venture there, but really, it is nothing more than a chain of links made of gossip. Some detail about a person, like being an alcoholic, tells us a detail, not the whole picture. When you say he is a good electrician, I want to visit that island but then, he's on alcoholic island, and who wants to go there? Then I meet him, and he's an island unto himself. Taciturn, evasive, obviously still hurting... but afraid to let go of that pain, since he does not know what is left of himself underneath it."

Travis looked at her quizzically. "That's a lot of thought for a lady in a bookstore."

"Oh, please. This is my shop; it is my baby, since my husband left and I got half of the house. After spending seven years following his dreams, I wanted to chase my own, and experience real adventure in life. Not the kind where you jump out of planes and shoot terrorists, but the process of creation. I've never run a business before! And now I know much more. I needed to do this to take myself to the next level, to know myself, after having lost myself for too many years."

Travis felt shocked. "It's a nice bookstore. It takes a brave soul to venture off into this trade, especially with all the big bookstores out there."

Agnes looked up at him, her eyes darkening slightly to a cobalt blue. "I'm waiting for something. Not waiting for something to happen, but be ready to happen. To be what it always was. Oh, listen to me, rattling on, and we've barely met."

"Hey, you don't happen to have those other books you mentioned?" Travis asked, taking the conversation to a lighter note, he hoped.

Leaving the store, he drove home and with a little cussing, installed the office lock. He took out the strips of condom packets, tore the packets apart from one another, and hid them strategically in places where only his wife would look: the utility closet, on top of the water heater where she stuck things found in pockets while doing the laundry, and at the back of the medicine cabinet behind the mango-pomegranate mouthwash that her friend Ella had convinced her to buy. He used the burner phone to sign up for a new Facebook account and sent a friend request to "Linda Carter."

Then he started strategizing quickly:

1. If he were to divorce her, which would formalize her decision to leave the union, the state would give half of everything he had to her. He knew this from his many friends, coworkers, and family members who had gone through divorces. The drunk frat-bro down at the bar says, "You know why divorce is expensive? Because it's worth it!" That is half of the equation. The other half is that you lose your retirement, house, and investments by having them cut in half, plus usually have to pay alimony.
2. He might make out better by staying married to her. His attorney, Allen Stewart, was of the firm belief that any attempts to liquidate or reduce value would be viewed as fraud by the court and end in a jail term. However, anything done before the divorce, including "errors" of judgment resulting in loss, were untouchable. To put it bluntly, whatever he got rid of now would not be something that she could later take. This gave him a mandate to spend on anything he wanted that was intangible, and if he converted that into income, it would be an unknown. Even better, many of these things could be deductible so he would not have to pay double for them by normal taxation.
3. At the present moment, he had no future to move toward. He knew the marriage to Dana was dead, and in fact even if she did the usual BTB/RAAC act of swearing that it was all her fault and she'd make it up to him by living as his sex slave in the basement, she would cheat on him again. She no longer respected him, by his definition, which meant that she was missing one of the ingredients for love, which in turn meant that she would always flee their loveless marriage for the arms of another. But until he had somewhere he wanted to go, he might as well not rock the boat much.
4. She was leading a double life, which meant that over time, her burden would increase to the point that she would want to exit the marriage, at which point he would have the strongest bargaining position. For some reason, he felt like she no longer wanted the kids around, since they were going to slow down her exciting new lifestyle. If he became a force of drag, like a parachute trailing behind a race car, on the marriage, she might just blow him off and go somewhere else. At that point, she had no claim on his assets whatsoever.

Travis knew himself to his bones, and that he was not someone trapped in a Victorian morality, but someone of a 3000 BC morality. He believed in the time-proven values of honor, pride, fidelity, chastity, loyalty, and reverence. He had no interest in the trends and fads that flitted across the television screen like bats on meth. As his mentor at school, Professor Dodson, used to tell him: "Things only matter if they endure a century or more, otherwise they are footnotes, and over time will be omitted from future editions of the history books. We will remember Charlemagne, Beethoven, Keats, and Newton for all time, but will The Beatles and Picasso make it past a century? Time will tell. Nothing matters except that which endures, and this means that it takes decades, centuries, and even millennia to see what was important. Only in their afterlife do things reveal their true value." Since his marriage was definitely in its afterlife, he could see what it was: two beautiful children, some good years, and then Dana giving up on their enduring future in order to seize the moment and feel better about what he thought was a momentary bump in the road. Still, he was glad to know now, instead of a decade from now.

On a rainy morning he hauled himself into his attorney's office. "Allen," he said -- they had worked together for years -- "tell me something: can I file an in rem suit against a DNA profile?"

Stewart considered it. "That's pushing the legal envelope a little, but we can try it," he said after a few moments. "I think it's slightly more likely than not that the courts will entertain it, if nothing else, the novelty. What gives?"

Travis slid a piece of paper across the wide oak desk. "I'd like to sue this DNA profile for loss of the comforts of marriage, which we can estimate based on this price schedule," he said, sliding three gaudy brochures across the desk.

"Let's see... an au pair, an escort service, and an instant friend chat hotline."

"Yes, because thanks to this guy, I'm not getting full enjoyment of my wife. She's having an affair, so her affections are elsewhere. I take care of the kids, the sex has become objectionable, and I no longer have any companionship to speak of. Those brochures tell us the going market rates for a wife, if you add them up. A couple hours of conversation a day, sex twice a week, and the au pair for a couple hours every evening and on the weekends."

Allen knew his friend well enough to roll with it. "I'll file this, and send you a bill," he said. "The court will either dismiss the lawsuit or not. If they do not dismiss, you have to find out who this person is."

"Thanks, pal," said Travis, shaking his hand warmly.

Life settled into a pattern. Travis reflected that marriage was like a partnership. You signed a contract, but even more, had a meeting of the minds. When one party betrays that, it means that their goal has changed and no longer includes the partnership. That means that to them, the partnership is a means to the end of whatever else they want to do. For that reason, they will keep up the appearance of the partnership for its value while subverting it privately. You can beg or threaten a partner to come back into the fold, but then they are simply acting out their role, and like most acting, this will be fake. Unless they have a desire to make the partnership work in their hearts, they cannot be trusted. They will just be acting so they get the social reward that comes from the partnership.

With that in mind, he re-adjusted his view of the affair. The problem was not that she was sleeping with, being in love with, and spending time with another man to the neglect of him and her family; it was that she had decided to do this, and in doing so, had revealed how she felt about the family for who knows how long. To her, it was a possession, like a car or new television, that gave her a certain status in the community, but she did not intend to honor it. That meant that she was not his loving wife. As his mother said: "no one who loves you tries to hurt you; someone who says they love you, but hurts you, is an abuser, not someone you can afford to love."

Travis did a little research and realized that goods and services came in a few categories. Some had liquid value, meaning that they could be converted instantly to cash, like stocks, gold, or even guns. Others were consumable, meaning that their value decreased radically after being used or went away entirely, like a fine steak dinner. They could not be re-sold. Others had intangible value, which meant that their actual value was immeasurable, like goodwill in the community or expertise. He was trying to convert marriage to an estimated value by measuring it as a service; in the meantime, it made sense to convert his wealth to consumables.

A few weeks later, he went into the bookstore again and came out with an armload of books.

"You're not doing this because you pity me?" asked Agnes.

"No, and you're not my type," said Travis. "I don't 'do' pity, generally. It's a nasty form of condescension. This is my favorite bookstore, and if you don't mind me being here, I'm going to haunt it. I have a little more free time now, and I've always wanted to read more."

Something in the color of his face changed with the words "free time," and Agnes found herself moved to empathy. "You are always welcome. You're not my type either, but I like knowing that these books go to good homes. And I would never pity anyone, since it is a way of suggesting that they cannot rise again."

Travis nodded, but she was already digging in a pile of books. "Here's another, on the house."

"Steppenwolf? Like the band?" he asked.

"Other way around, by my guess. It's a book about -- well, maybe you'll like it."

He thanked her profusely and left. He drove by the office, then visited a work site out in the hill country. His days now consisted of work, reading in his office, sleeping in his office, and spending the weekends at a cabin a friend owned in the hill country that he rented for cash-in-hand. It was not cheap, but it got him and the children away from the house for a couple days, since the place had a bad air about it. It reeked of neglect and disinterest. His friend had hinted that he would sell the cabin, which would go fairly cheap, for cash as well, and even help with financing. He couldn't justify buying a place so far away, but it put an idea into his head.

Months passed. Dana never mentioned the condoms, but looked slightly unnerved. Travis reflected that men who sleep with other men's wives knowingly got something out of it that was more than sex and a guilty pleasure. They got the satisfaction of having destroyed something better than themselves. Most humans have a desire to subvert stronger things because this is easier than making oneself strong. Making oneself strong requires knowing oneself, and that means looking into all the things for which we might pity ourselves. Travis felt the pressure of time, because sooner or later, Timothy would tire of his new plaything. He visited Allen again and left with a single document.

The next morning, he planted the seed: "Hon, I'm going to be visiting a friend tonight. She just found out that her husband was cheating on her for the past year, and it's going to be ugly, so I want to be there for her."

Dana just looked at him over her coffee cup, seeming more annoyed than anything else.

At this point, Travis resembled the average American more than ever before. Trusting in social security, he spent whatever he got, most of it on things that lost value: trucks, boats, books, clothes, and time up at the cabin. Of course, he returned or resold a large number of those things, effectively laundering money from credit into cash, which he stored in the bank account of a dead partnership he bought off one of his field workers. Originally designed to sell oilfield services, it now sold scented candles online and never posted a profit. However, its bank account swelled.

Two days later he came home and headed up to his office, only to see his wife on the stairs. Someone cleared his throat in the living room.

"Let me guess... we have to talk?" he said to his wife. They sat down in the living room. Timothy looked pale and slightly sweaty, giving his skin an oleaginous sheen. The kids were playing upstairs, and outside, someone was mowing a lawn. Travis felt connected to these sounds more than what was about to play out before him. He held the folder next to him more tightly than he wanted.

Travis rose up and got everyone a beer from the fridge in the kitchen. Dana could not remember him stocking beer there, nor buying a brand as high-brow as Warsteiner.

"So..." he began, and she cut him off, as he knew she would.

"Travis, do you love me?" she asked.

"Of course I did," he said, softening the last syllable.

"Then you want what is best for me?" asked Dana.

"Of course, dear wife," said Travis, slurping the delicious pale lager. It was more real to him than these words, he realized. To be alive, to have a moment of full appreciation for what it was to live, even in something so mundane as a delicious lager.

"Then, what will you do for me if I need it?" she ventured, more slowly.

"Oh, anything," said Travis, looking out the window. It was the right answer, both socially when speaking to a group of people he wanted to like him, and in theory, on paper.

"I haven't been fulfilled for some time," she said. "I have needed experiences that I missed out on before our marriage." They had married during his graduate schooling while she had worked on her own degree, after having known each other mostly from their time together at a volunteer group on campus. He remembered having a lot of hope, but wondered if it had been all in his own head.

She continued: "For some time, I have realized that I need to experience other men in order to fully realize my love for you."

Travis said nothing, gazing at her with open emotionless blue eyes. Timothy cleared his throat again.