Is The Past Prologue?

We were having our traditional after Saturday golf beer, talking about the one that got away – wait, that's a different sport – and other things, when Jerry took advantage of an opening and started telling me about his marriage. He ended his rant with a complaint about his wife: "I'm an affectionate guy, and she just isn't responsive."

"I don't know of a marriage that doesn't have its rough parts, Jerry, you'll work it out."

"Wait a minute," he said. "You and Jayne have been married for what -- a dozen years? What do you know about rough parts in a marriage, from what we can tell, yours is perfect."

"The key phrase, good buddy, is 'from what we can tell'. We've had our bad times, some really bad times, about three years ago." I thought for a moment and decided to tell him about it: if he knew we worked our way through a difficult time, he might realize they could, too.

After he heard the story, he summarized it: "so you guys just weren't paying enough attention to one another, and you each thought the other was really insensitive and inconsiderate?"

"In a nutshell, that was it," I agreed.

"I remember now, you were both acting strangely back then. How bad was it? Was your marriage at risk?"

"I didn't think it was, but I will admit to doing some stupid stuff.'

"You, being stupid? Come on, that's not the Tony I know," Jerry said. "How stupid could you have been? Oh, I know. You drank a little too much once or twice."

"More stupid than that, Jerry."

"Confess, dammit. What did you do?"

"Well, I had an affair, it lasted a couple of months during that time."

Jerry's mouth fell open: the beer mug he had at his lips leaked foam onto his shirt, and he didn't care. "You were fucking around! And you're still alive? I would have bet Jayne would have killed you, or at least cut off the offending parts."

"What Jayne doesn't know," I told him, "won't hurt either of us."

"You were able to have an affair and keep it secret from your wife? She's smart and perceptive, how did you do that?'

"Maybe because I'm smarter and more perceptive."

"Oh. Well, maybe. What about Jayne, did she have an affair, too?"

"Of course not," I assured Jerry, "how could she have, and keep it from me?"

Jerry just looked at me with a smile on his face: "Tony, you're right. You could keep an affair secret because you're smart. And Jayne – we both know she's damned smart too, I don't think she's the kind of woman who would screw around, but then again I didn't think you were the kind of guy who would, either. But if she did and wanted to keep it a secret from you, I bet she could."

It was getting to be time to go home. I got our golf clubs in the car, drove him home, then started towards my house, thinking. Could she have had an affair?

Never.

But could she have?

And kept it secret?

The short answer was, yes.

I thought about my wife, how she looks, how when she wants to how sexy she can look for me. I didn't go right home, I went to a county park that overlooked the ocean and sat there for a while, thinking.

Thinking.

Thinking about Jayne maybe deciding to look sexy for someone else. If she had an affair, would she be like she was with me when we first started dating? Lots of kisses? I remembered – it might have been on our second date, sitting next to her on a sofa, and kissing her, until somehow we were lying there and how I felt her move, then fumble with my belt, and how it felt having her pull up my shirt and that first touch of her fingers on my belly, and how she kissed me harder and those fingers and that hand moved down across my groin, and out along my shaft, and under it, holding my scrotum.

Did she do that to someone else? Then did she take his hand the way she took mine, and move it under her dress, and lift up so that guy could move her panties aside and touch her, too?

Somehow the memory of that brief fling I had with Diana faded – I used to think about Diana and hotel rooms and two people married but not to each other using the other to try to feel alive. Those thoughts stopped, now I was thinking of how Jayne would look, nude, open, welcoming different lips on her breasts, a different penis into her body. Damn Jerry for putting that idea into my head!

Did it happen?

"NO!" my emotional mind shouted, "NEVER!"

"Ah," a more rational mind suggested, "ah, but it could have happened. It really could have."

Would I ever know?

I drove home, feeling uncertain, shaken to my core. "But it's over nothing," I kept telling myself. "She'd never do something like that."

I tried to put it out of my mind. Not successfully, it turned out. "Tony, something is bothering you," Jayne said Monday night. "Something happened last weekend, I'm sure of that, and whatever it is, it's not good news for me."

"What do you mean?" Was I that transparent?

"The last time you acted like this was three years ago when we had that trouble. Tony, I don't want to go through that again."

"Jayne honey, we fixed that, remember? We weren't paying enough attention to each other, and now we do."

Jayne looked at me very carefully. "I remember that as part of the problem, but it wasn't that simple, Tony. Come on, sit down, we need to talk."

I sat, but claimed there was no problem, nothing that needed talking about. Jayne became really upset.

"Damn it, Tony, have you been with her?"

"What? Who?"

"With Diana, the woman you had the affair with. Is that going on again?"

"What? How?"

"The last time you were like this is when you were having that affair. Don't insult me by denying it, Tony. I hoped when it ended it wouldn't happen again. Is it happening again? All of the symptoms are there, and I won't stand for it again."

"What? You knew? How did you, ah, ah, -- but no, I haven't seen and heard from her since then, but, but, you knew?"

"Tony, I probably know you better that you know yourself. You can't keep secrets, you'd be lousy at poker. Why. . ."

I interrupted her. "You knew? How did you know, why didn't you say something, I mean. . "And I was stammering.

"I remember like it was yesterday, Tony. I think the first time you fucked her was near the end of that big project for Nike (she was right!). You came home from a late night at work you said, you looked freshly showered but your clothes were the same ones you went to work in, and they looked like they had a hard day at the office. I put two and two together, and the answer kept coming back that you were having an affair and had to shower to remove any traces of her perfume. You forgot that the Marriot soap has an unusual scent than your soap at the gym or at home and you smelled of that. Then I began watching what was going on more closely. It was easy to figure out. When you talked about team members you never mentioned Diana, but before then you talked about her a lot. That was when we stopped having sex, too. Usually sex patterns change when someone is having an affair: usually they have sex more often with their real partner, but sometimes a lot less. You were one of the 'a lot less' guys. Isn't Diana long gone?"

"Uh, she quit about then, went to work on the west coast. She divorced her husband."

"Divorced him? Was it so she could be with you? Was that the plan?"

"No, no. Oh, she might have liked that, but no, I didn't want to be with her. Jayne," I was almost crying" I wanted to be married to you. I still do."

"Well, I'm glad that's all out in the open. Thank you for not denying it, I couldn't have taken that. So what's going on? If it isn't Diana is it another affair? Something at work? What?"

We learned being honest it best. "I was talking to Jerry after we played golf, and he was telling me about the problems he's having in his marriage. Anyhow, he thought ours was perfect, so I told him a little about the trouble we had so he could understand they could work through all of those problems if they wanted to."

"That doesn't explain what's been affecting your mood."

"When I was telling him how bad it was for us, I guess it slipped out that I had that affair."

"Remembering that made you sad? Are you wishing that it had gone on?"

"No, nothing like that. I told him you didn't know about it. Boy was I wrong. But then he asked how I knew you didn't have an affair at that time too. I said I knew you too well, that I'd know."

"He said maybe I wasn't so good at hiding things, maybe you knew, and maybe you had an affair that I didn't know about. I was sure you didn't. Then I got to wondering about that on the way home, and I got pretty upset. I mean, maybe I don't know you all that well, I wasn't sure. I just wasn't sure, and I got upset and jealous, all that stuff. Now I found out you knew about what I was doing all along."

"Yes, I did. I almost wish you were better at keeping secrets, Tony."

There was a couple of minutes silence then, we were both lost in our thoughts. I felt really unburdened, knowing that a dark secret was out in the open. Confession IS cleansing, I decided.

I remembered what started all of this in the first place. "Honey, you knew about what I did, right?"

"Sure did. It nearly led to me leaving you."

"I'm glad it didn't."

"Me too."

"But what I was really wondering about was you. Did you ever, you know?"

She looked at me, staring right into my eyes. "Tony, I learned about you just by paying attention. Why do you think I was having an affair? Were there any clues back then?"

"No, nothing. I was never suspicious of you, not for a minute."

"Well then?" she asked.

"Well, I guess I don't know for sure. You knew, so fair is fair. Tell me, when things were bad, did you have an affair, too?"

She looked ever so carefully at me, then a smile spread across her face.

"What?" I asked.

"This is so sweet," she said. "Tony, I learned about what you were doing by watching what you were doing and how you were acting. You didn't have to confirm anything, I already knew. And as for me? Well, sweetheart, if you didn't know before, you're not going to know now. But besides that, now I'm horny." She took my hand. "Let's go fix that."

She wasn't going to tell me!

And a few minutes later, we were nude on the bed, I was over her, ready to push in, and my mind flashed an image of her like that with someone else, with someone else's cock ready to push into her.

"You're wondering, aren't you," she said. "Do something, do what you think might have happened."

I did.

And I'll never know if 'might have happened' was really 'did happen.'