In our twenty second year of marriage my wife began a sexual relationship with an old boyfriend named Leonard Foyle. They'd kept in touch over the years, ran into each other every few months at various union functions. I'd met him myself, once or twice, always cordially. The last time, as I recall, on one of our infrequent trips to the big city, he'd brought along his teenage daughter, a lovely young woman named Sarah. He'd been separated from her mother for several years by this time.
Our own marriage had reached a dead-end. We were both depressed and unfulfilled, trapped in an empty relationship but unable to do much about the situation no matter how many counsellors we saw. I suppose we stayed together because of our two daughters, one of whom was on the autism spectrum. Cora was highly functioning, but her condition did present tremendous challenges and this no doubt contributed to our marital difficulties. But the feelings of our daughters, their happiness, their security, we always put first. And so we stayed together, and the years passed.
Our sex life, by the start of our third decade together, was virtually non-existent. For some time we'd slept in separate bedrooms, though this wasn't so much to do with our lack of intimacy. We'd rarely had sex late at night, before sleep. We were always way too exhausted, or sometimes working on different shifts altogether. No, we slept apart because I was a restless sleeper, forever scratching and twitching, and Kelly was, to put it politely, a heavy breather. She sometimes snored like a lumberjack.
A crisis point came one evening while we were doing the dishes together, of all things.
"Mason, I have a question for you," Kelly began, pausing for a second to gaze out the window. "Are you still in love with me?"
What a question! Over the dishes yet! And I couldn't answer. In part I was stunned by the question, but mostly I was hard-pressed for a response. I finally gave her some rigmarole about feelings evolving over so many years of marriage and so on and so forth. For in truth I didn't want to confess that I probably wasn't in love with her. Or even worse, that I doubted I had ever been in love with her. What a realization, after two decades of marriage!
And of course the question arises: why then did we marry in the first place? Well, neither one of us was getting any younger. I was in my early forties, Kelly her early thirties. I for one had never, I'm ashamed to say, had a lasting, successful relationship and was under no illusions about the likely opportunities as I entered middle-age. Time was running out for both of us and we were more than ready for something stable.
Just how stable a set-up were we in for? Neither one of us was an immature teenager or twenty-something. And Kelly for one had had a couple of lasting live-in arrangements. But I was doubtful about myself. I'd been unsuccessful with the ladies, it's true, but if a person lives alone as an adult for a couple of decades there are sometimes other reasons than bad luck or incompatibility. There's the matter of choice. I loved my freedom. I liked living alone. I liked sleeping alone. Was I ready to give that up? And with someone like Kelly, who, attractive as she was, struck me sometimes as something of a flake? Or at least not the best choice for me. She was sociable and out-going while I was quiet and deeply reserved. She was moody and unpredictable while I was even-tempered and pretty set in my ways. She was personally untidy and disorganized and I was neat and meticulous. When I first began seeing her she was living in a run-down east-side apartment, could not qualify for a credit card, had no driver's license, much less a car, and she was a smoker.
So there was incompatibility there from day one, and yet we ended up married. Why? I'm embarrassed to confess that a major reason for me was that after a couple of decades of near-celibacy I was ready to get laid regularly. And there was one other thing. Kelly asked me.
Yes, Kelly proposed to me one afternoon after I'd been staying over at her place on weekends for two or three months. I didn't hesitate. I said yes. How could I do otherwise without ending the relationship completely?
The reason she asked me, twenty-odd years later, if I was still in love with her, was that she couldn't stop thinking of a certain person, no matter how hard she tried.
Oh really? And who might this person be? None other than Leonard, her old boyfriend from years back, several years before she'd known me, in fact. Way back then she and Leonard had first grown close during trade union functions, and this had blossomed into romance and an eventual moving-in together that had ended only because a previous girlfriend of his, one Louise, had become pregnant, apparently by Leonard, shortly before their break-up. Ever the decent fellow, Leonard determined, at no small cost to his personal happiness, to do the right thing, since his ex was determined to have the baby.
Still with me? There's more to this story, but for now fade to black on the star-crossed trade unionist lovers, skip over the twenty-odd years of marriage to me and the two daughters, and fade in to a renewal of the friendship/romance with Leonard, again at union functions but now conveniently away from home, since we moved from the big city many years back, the better to raise our children.
A wife who is lonely and depressed and feels abandoned. An old boyfriend who is now free and who lends a sympathetic ear and tells her he's never stopped caring for her. The inevitable starts to happen. And so over the dishes one evening Kelly and I come to an arrangement.
I tell her I don't mind if she starts up something with faithful old Len as long as our family life remains stable and our daughters are not upset. She agrees, since her first priority is also our children and she has no intention, for the present, of leaving me to move back to the city, Len or no Len. She'll go visit him every six weeks or so. A few years down the line, once our daughters are young adults, maybe something more permanent with Len could be arranged. Divorce for us? At this point, who knew? We never got that far in our discussion. For now, the die is cast.
A sense of relief, of impending freedom ensues. For both of us. Freedom from a marriage that has been slowly suffocating us for years. The wife is in love with an old flame who feels the same way about her. Maybe now I'm free to look elsewhere myself, catch up on all I've missed in my younger days. Everybody's happy, right?
But then what happens? A union convention is upcoming. Kelly books an extra two days off work, for a total of four. And thence begins the longest, most miserable weekend of my life. For within twenty four hours of our 'arrangement' it dawns on me what I've agreed to. I've given my wife the green light to sleep with another man. And not just any other man, but someone she's had feelings for, of one kind or another, for a very long time.
Why should that bother me, if I no longer love her, if I've never been deeply in love with her at all? Is some kind of primitive territorial imperative kicking in here? "It's all over between us, isn't it?" she'd commented that evening over the dishes. And though that gave me a pang, I'd agreed.
