“I had an affair.”

A deliberate pause.

“There.  That’s out.”

For an instant, there was a physical hurt, a sharp twitch across my chest and throat, and then a flush down my arms and in my cheeks that felt like a fever.  The words had been unusually clear, as if recorded in a studio, background noise filtered out, distortion and fuzz cleaned up, midrange tweaked.  It’s a trick of the brain, the ear focusing only on the relevant sounds, like when the doctor announces you have cancer or a pilot orders you to assume a crash position.

And then they were gone.  The words did not linger; there was no echo.  There was only an enormous silence, followed by numbness, which is another trick of the brain.  The sensation, I imagine, is not unlike burn victims who at first cant feel their wounds because the brain shuts down rather than be overwhelmed by pain.

I’d always imagined that the revelation of an affair would be less casual.  There would be an accusation, perhaps, then a reluctant and tearful confession.  Months of suspicion, and doubt and miserable little clues.  To the extent I’d though about such things—and in nearly ten years of marriage, every man will—it had never occurred to me that it would happen after a pleasant dinner of pork chops and broccoli.

Her hands had disappeared from the table.  My field of vision had narrowed to a spot of pale blue, the label on a bottle of Tyrconnell Single Malt Pure Pot Irish Whiskey that we’d bought in the duty-free shop in Shannon.  I’d been nursing it for seven months because we couldn’t find it at any liquor stores in our neighborhood, and it was on the table because after a long week I was going to reward myself with an after-dinner nip.  She was part of the reason the week seemed do long. She’d been moody, emotional, occasionally weepy.  I did not know why.  I had asked, but she did not tell me and I did not suspect.  I can be dense that way.

Then that was out.  My wife fucked some other guy.

I poured whiskey into a four-ounce glass and swallowed half of it.

“Who?”

She told me.  I knew him.  A bit scruffy, bet he’d always seemed decent enough.

I swallowed the other half and refilled  the glass.  “When?”

She told me that too.

“How long?”

A few months.  On nights that she’d told me she was working.

I realized I had not raised my voice.  I couldn’t tell if I was angry or sad or disgusted.  I doubt she could, either.

I leaned my elbows on the table and told her about a woman we both knew who had made a very mild and very drunken pass at me some months earlier.  It was a ridiculous anecdote, and half of it wasn’t even true, but it seemed like a good story to tell at the time because it ended with a stammering rejection.  “I’m married,” I’d told the woman.  “I love my wife.”  Repeating it now was a spasm of ego, a flailing attempt to make myself appear desirable and morally superior.  I’m sure it sounded silly given the circumstances.

The numbness was ebbing.  That brain trick is temporary.  My chest was hurt.  I drank more whiskey, but it was hard to swallow.

I looked at her for the first time.  Her hands were in her lap, fingers laced.  He was staring at me.  What was that look?  Shame?  Remorse?  I couldn’t place it.  She seemed angry.

Contempt. That was the look.  My adulterous wife was holding me in contempt. 

And I was humiliated.  And I was ashamed because I was humiliated when I knew I should be enraged.

There.  That’s out.

I finished my whiskey and walked out the door, but it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as that sounds.

*******

Hoodlum Shrink lit another cigarette and shifted in his chair, a big, overstuffed thing covered in leather the color of cheap wine.  His real name is John A. Greene, but I’ve always called him Hoodlum Shrink.  It seems to fit.  He’s a big man in his mid-fifties, and handsome in a bar-fight kind of way, which is probably because he used to get into a lot of bar fights when he was belligerent, young drunk.  That was years ago, before he went back to school and became a psychologist.  He’s still kind of a thug.  If I saw him in an alley instead of his office, I’d be afraid.

I’d never considered him my shrink, though, in the sense that we’d only talked about my problems a couple of times and in the sense that I’d never paid the man for his time.  More to the point, I never saw myself as the sort of person who would have a shrink.  Where I grew up, on the west side of Cleveland, among cops and secretaries and telephone line men, the only people who were into therapy were referred by Ann Landers.  The rest of us muddled along, and if we couldn’t do that alone, we kept it a secret.

And yet, I had been here before, a few months earlier, sinking into the couch that matched Hoodlum’s, armchair.  I’d known him for a while by then, having met when I was trawling for a profile to fill a column in the magazine where I worked.  One of his specialties is counseling firefighters after one horror or another (years later, he would be dispatched to New York post 9/11), which made for a decent little story.  After that, we stayed in touch because we liked each other; and then, quite unexpectedly, I found myself sputtering to him as a patient.

The reasons were neither interesting or relevant—a death in the family, an overload of self-inflicted stress—and his diagnosis had been blunt.  “You’re neurotic,” he’d said.  “And I don’t mean that Woody Allen dickhead bullshit.  I mean clinically.  You worry bout shit you cnt control.  Stop it.”  he waited while I absorbed this.  “And you’re not going to like this, but you’re depressed.  Low-level and situational, but ddepressed.  It’ll pass.”  He got my general practitioner to prescribe me some low-level meds, taught me to meditate, and told me to fo to the gym.  Life went one, and for the better.

Until it all fell apart.

It had been four days since she told me.  I hadn’t actually left the house that first night, a Friday.  I’d made it only across the patio, where I tumbled into the hammock at about the time all that Tyrconnell flooded my brain.  She’d brought me a pillow and a blanket at some point, though I can’t say exactly when.  I woke up alone at dawn and drove downtown because I didn’t know where else to go.

It would have been easier if I’d been merely angry.  I understand anger.  I wanted anger.  I wanted fury and rage and a bright, clean line between her and me.  But anger came only in flashes.  In between were long spasms of grief and disbelief and some emasculation.  And in the light of that first morning, there was mainly just confusion.

My friend Robert met me downtown that afternoon.  He convinced me—it was not hard—not to go home that night, to wait until I calmed down.  Another friend, John, put me up the next night, Sunday.  Monday morning I left a message from a pay phone.  “I need a few days to clear my head,” I said.  But of what?  The scruffy guy?  That was the only flitting shadow, her and him, pushed from my imagination as quickly as it had appeared.  No, it was the contempt:  the small hands gripping the table, the squeak of the chair, that look.  “I’ll be fine,” I said.  “I’ll call you.”

She left me a message at work an hour later.  “Come home.  We have a lot of details to work out.  Call a lawyer.”

I went home Monday afternoon.  We talked.  She’d changed her mind.  She wanted to work things out.  She agreed, even, to go away for a few days, to relieve me from wandering from couch to couch.  She packed a small bag and left.

Some sympathetic friends came over with food later that day.  She arrived an hour after they showed up.  “To protect my property rights,” she said.  She saw people in the yard.  “A party?  What like ‘Ding Dong , the witch is dead’?”

No, I told her, it wasn’t like that at all.  But now she’d brought it up, why was she being such a bitch?

“You think I’m being a bitch no?  How about I tell the police I’m afraid of you?”

I was suddenly afraid.  In our state, I more than likely would have been arrested as a matter of routine.  So I forced poor Andrew, who was only there to make sure a depressed friend put food in his stomach, to witness the rest of the conversation.

Eventually, she left again.  In the morning, I was on Hoodlum’s couch.  He listened for more than an hour as I replayed that rough narrative, though in a considerably less concise form.

Then we were both quiet for a minute or so while he finished his cigarette.  It occurred to me that it had been my wife’s idea to write about him months before.  I never would have met him if not for her.  I wondered if that was irony or coincidence.

Hoodlum finally spoke.  “Your wife’s a cunt,” he said.

“Hey—”

I stopped myself.  What was I going to say?  Hey, pal, that’s my wife you’re talking about?  Was I going to defend her?  Protect her honor?

Yes, I believe I was.  Like one of Pavlov’s smaller, dopier dogs.  Or a gelding.  I remembered an old gelding iron I’d seen on a farm in Ohio, giant tongs with flat clappers to crush the testicles with one firm slap.  I squirmed then stared at him.  I needed to get my bearings.

“Isn’t that a little, you know…harsh?”

“No.  What’s a better word?”

I didn’t know.  I didn’t know anything.

That’s why I was sitting there, because I couldn’t think straight.

“Let’s go over this again,” he said.  “Your wife tells you, out of the blue, that she fucked some asshole, just blows up your whole fucking life.  She tells you to get a lawyer, she threatens to have you arrested, and the only thing she’s worried about is her ‘property rights,’ whatever the fuck that means.  Have I got that right?”

I wiggled my head and shoulders, something between a shrug and a nod.

“Okay,” he said.  “So now what part of cunt is unclear to you?”

“Well, when you put it that way…”

“How would you put it?”

I didn’t have an answer, and I was too defeated to figure one out.  So I looked at the floor for what seemed like a long time. 

“Divorce her,” he said.

******

I couldn’t divorce her.  It’s not in my lineage.  My parents have been married for forty-three years, my mother’s sister for almost as long, and her mother was married for sixty-two years before my grandfather passed away.  There was nothing inherently wrong with divorce, but, like therapy, it was something that happened to people I didn’t know.

We were young, though I didn’t think so at the time.  She was 23, and I was two days shy of 25.  Our marriage was not perfect, but I had believed that it was solid, even happier than most.  We’d suffered no obvious crises, endured no apocalyptic arguments or bitter estrangements.  From the afternoon we recited our vows until the night I slept in the hammock, nine years, one month, and twenty days had passed, and I had assumed we were still in the early stages.  Then in two short breaths after dinner, it was all gone.

But did it really happen in an instant?  Was there a specific moment, a particular day or month or year, that began the end?  Was there a black slash on the calendar that marked the point when my wife—my wife—was transformed into this contemptuous woman?  Or were there a hundred marks, a thousand even, a tiny scratch for every slight and humiliation, a slow accumulation of grievances and spite?  And why didn’t I see it coming?

I remembered a conversation I’d had with Hoodlum before any of this had happened.  He’d asked why I didn’t have kids.  The question caught me off-guard—we hadn’t been talking about kids—and I mumbled something about not being ready.

He interrupted.  “Let me guess,” he said.  “You both say you want to have kids but you never seem to get around to it, right?”  And then you say, ‘Next year.’  And next year comes and goes.  And you keep doing that, year after year and it’s too fucking late and you’ve got fifty-seven cats crawling around the house.”

“Uh-oh.  We’ve already got four cats.”  I gave him a dismissive smile.

“You laugh, but that’s how this shit happens.  Seriously, you’ve got to talk about it.  If you don’t want kids, fine, but you and your wife need to talk about it and decide what you want to do and understand it now.  Otherwise, you’re gonna be fucked.”

We were already fucked.  We went out to dinner that night , she and I, and she asked me how things were going with Hoodlum.  Fine, I told her.  He says hello.

“Do you ever talk about me?”

“No, not really,” I said.  “Oh, but he did ask why we don’t have any kids.”

“What did you tell him?”

“We weren’t ready.”

“What did he say?”

“He said we should talk about it.  It was funny.  When I told him we weren’t ready, he cut me off.  He’s like, ‘Lemme guess…’”  I did my best Hoodlum impersonation and told her the rest of the story, ending with the part about us already having a herd of cats.  I laughed.  “So why don’t we have kids?”

“He’s a pig.”

“Huh?”

“He’s a misogynist pig.  What, the whole point of being married is for the woman to have children?  Fuck him.”

“I don’t think he meant it that way…”

The look in her eyes spooked me.  I shifted away from Hoodlum.  “Whatever.  So, why don’t we have kids?”

“We’re not ready.”

I hadn’t thought much of it at the time.  But back on Hoodlum’s couch, after she told me, it occurred to me that in all those years we’d never had a serious conversation about children.  If something that basic had fallen into the void, “What else was lurking down there?”

“Divorce her,” Hoodlum said again. 

I shook my head.  “I can’t” 

“Why?  Because you’re afraid?’ 

“Yes.”

He nodded.  “Don’t be.  If you make a mistake, remarry her.  But the way you’re going is fucking stupid.  She throws a hand grenade in your life, and you throw your body on it.  How may times are you going to do that?  Until she kills you?”

I looked at the floor again.  I didn’t have an answer, and there was a long silence.

“Okay, go to counseling,” he said.

“You just told be to divorce her.”

“I know,” he said.  “But that’s me talking.  And you and I are very different people.  You’re a neurotic fucker.  If you don’t believe you did everything you could to save this, you’ll never forgive yourself.”

******

Our first appointment with the counselor was three months after the fact.  We were separated but the rage had receded.  There were moments when I though maybe we could forget she’d ever said anything, just start over, muddle through.  There were others where I felt guilty:  Hadn’t I made those same promises at the altar?  If I took the better, wasn’t I on the hook for this, worse?

The counselor was supposed to help sort out those questions.  We had ten sessions, give or take, some of which were useful and some of which were annoying.  There was some babble about burning down the forest so it could grow anew, which seemed a grisly metaphor for the old-growth trees involved.  There were platitudes about forgiving without forgetting and about strength  being born of adversity.  There was the question of why I couldn’t forgive a single mistake, which collapsed into a semantic debate because I considered that a months-long affair would, by necessity, involve repeated and deliberate behavior.

And from her in our fifth or sixth session, there was a question about blame.  “What I want to know,” she said, “is when you’re going to accept responsibility for your role in my affair.”

I studied her face, searching for a smile.  She had to be making a warped joke.  There was no smile.

“Come again?”

“Will you accept responsibility for your role?”

Alcoholics would call this a moment of clarity.  I saw one possible future, a lifetime of self-loathing over something I could not control.  I heard an echo of Hoodlum.

“Fuck that,” I said.

The counselor jumped in.  “I believe what she meant…”  There followed an unusually long string of sentences involving terms such as patterns of behavior and codependency and emotional estrangement.  “And that, I think is what she meant.” 

He looked at her for approval.  She nodded.  They both looked at me.

“Oh,” I said, “Fuck that, too.”

I knew then it was over.

We limped along for a few months longer, though the autumn and into the new year.  Winter was easing when I took her to get a drink at a small restaurant near my office.  We slid into a booth next to the window.  She smiled as if she was genuinely happy to see me, and or an instant I wondered if maybe I missed her, too.

“Did you ask them to play this?” she said.

I hadn’t been paying attention to the background music.  It was an old and slowStray Cats B-side from 1963, a song called “I Won’t Stand In Your Way” that we had on a couple of different CDs.  She recognized it from the opening chords, before the first lyrics;  I got a lowdown dirty feeling / That I’ve been cheated on and lied to…

I gave her a weak grin.  “No,” I said, “I’m not that cheesy.  Or mean.”

It’s strange, but I can’t remember the conversation after that.  I remember what I’d practiced, though, the bullet points, the general outline.  Too much damage had been done, I must have told her.  I didn’t have the decency to completely forgive or partially forget.  I would be suspicious and bitter, and she would be miserable because of it.  Didn’t she deserve to get on with her life, to find someone who would make her happy?  Didn’t we both deserve that?

It’s not you, it’s me.  A version of that, anyway, only with much higher stakes.  Everyone’s heard that speech.  No one believes it, because it’s never true.  It’s always you.

***

And yet the question remained:  Was it partly my fault, even obliquely, that my wife chose to roll around with some other guy?  Would that have made it forgivable, even required it to be forgiven?

I don’t know those answers, and I do not dwell on the questions.  There is no point.  The divorce was not precipitated by an affair—it was the revelation of the affair, the cold, almost casual admission that she had committed the deed she swore she never would.  The cruelty of that moment—those clipped phrases, the contempt in her eyes—was blindingly painful.  Ten years of marriage gone to shit with seven lousy words.

I’m still not sure why she told me, or why she told me that way.  She once said she’d needed to purge her guilt so that we could move forward, though toward what I have no idea.  I’ve always hoped that wasn’t true because it strikes me as terribly selfish.  Me, I used to suspect that she wanted out, that she knew me well enough to realize that such a catastrophe would force my hand.

We are neither friends nor enemies now.  We drift in separate orbits, far apart, never intersecting. 

The actual divorce was relatively tidy.  Her lawyer drew up the papers, and eventually we stood before a judge who processes dissolving marriages the way cashiers scan soup cans at the grocery store.  It must be a depressing job.

Then we sat on the steps of a nearby building and cried until our coffee went cold.  There is no such thing as a good divorce.

************

Hoodlum continued to look after me.  We still talk every week or so, mostly about work and golf and firemen.  At the time of the breakup, he occasionally gave me fresh advice about my personal life.  “Don’t get seriously involved with anyone for at least a year,” he said, which was reasonable, seeing as how a wounded and bitter man is apt to make awful romantic decisions.  “You shouldn’t date anyone older than 25,” which was ridiculously optimistic, considering the rather limited pool of women that age who are in the market for grumpy divorced guys ten years older.  “Don’t get married again for at least five years,” which also seemed reasonable until I met my future wife not quite three years later. 

He was wary.  Hoodlum had been divorced twice, so he’s a bit cynical about the institution of marriage anyway.  Not long after we’d been engaged, he invited my fiancée and me to his weekend house for the day.  That night, he took us to dinner with friends, and about midway through, he stepped outside for a cigarette.  When he excused himself, he jerked his head, as if he wanted me to come with him.  I was trying to quit but I followed.

“Nice lady,” he said.

Lady.  She must have made an impression.  “I’ve been talking to her.  She’s pretty fucking smart, huh?”

I nodded.  “Yeah, she is.”

“Good looking broad, too.”

I never know what to say to that.  Thank you?  It’s not as if I had anything to do with it.  “Yeah, I think so.”

He looked over his shoulder at me.  His expression was serious, as if he were planning to tell me she was a felon or that she was really a man.  “So what the fuck is she doing with you?”

He held the grim look for a moment too long and laughed.

“Fuck you.”  Then I bummed a smoke off my Hoodlum Shrink.