That email was quite a shock. I had no idea my wife had been fooling around. As if that wasn't bad enough, I had to find out via email that I was wearing horns. I have no idea why I responded to that message, and I've doubted the wisdom of doing so ever since. I shouldn't have gone to the orientation meeting. I really shouldn't be standing up here tonight. Nevertheless, here I am and here goes nothing.
"Hi, I'm Adam, and I'm a cuckold."
"Hi, Adam."
I had no idea Katie was cheating on me. I probably never would have known if you guys hadn't sent me that first email. The question remains: Should I thank you for opening my eyes to what was going on, or should I hate you? I still don't know which one of you sent it. I guess I never will. At this point in time, it's not important. I just have to decide what to do about the situation. Do I ignore it? Do I encourage it? Or do I try to stop it?
It took three weeks for me to work up the guts to confront Katie. Then I had to decide the best approach. It's not exactly a subject for discussion over dinner, especially in front of the kids. One doesn't casually say, "Honey, there's a rumor going around that you're sleeping with other men" in front of a three-year-old. You know he'll tell you she stays awake with them. Teenagers are embarrassed by the way adults breathe normally. The thought of the two of us having sex would mortify them. Either of us having an affair would give them heart attacks. I had to find another way.
Maybe the neighbors could help me, but how would I enlist their aid? How do you ask a friend to spy on your wife? The men would always be at work, just as most of the women would be. The few stay-at-home moms would cover for her, assuming they knew. There were so many reasons she could be away from the house meeting some guy at a motel, or at his place, for a tryst -- shopping, club meetings. The list would be endless.
Should I just ask her some night when we went to bed? What would be the point? She'd simply deny it, and then be pissed off because I dared to ask. We would have a big fight, and we wouldn't be able to sleep well for weeks. There would be the question of whether she would forgive me for accusing her of cheating on me.
I had a good job with a good paycheck. I still couldn't afford to hire a private detective to keep an eye on her. It might take weeks to catch her. Perhaps the whole thing was a big mistake. Maybe I could rig a camera in the bedroom to record whatever happened on the bed while I was gone. I would have to do it while she was out, which was very seldom on my days off. I'd have to exchange the dresser mirror for a one-way mirror. A camera would require some extra space behind the mirror, which would be a giveaway that something changed in the room. If she was getting laid someplace else, it would all be a waste of time and money. The only good that might come out of it would be that we had some videos of ourselves making love. That I had made them on the sly would provoke another fight. Talk about a lose-lose situation.
One good thing about my job is that I spend most of my time out of my office in the stores I supervise. I had moved up rather quickly in the company. I started as an assistant manager after I graduated from college. A year later I was a store manager while most of my classmates were still senior assistants. Three years later I was promoted to district manager. Turnover at that level and the next one up was very low, so I knew it would be a long time before I moved up to area manager. I was between stores one afternoon when the solution hit me.
I was only a few blocks away from home, so I detoured past the house. To my chagrin, there was a strange car in the driveway. It looked familiar. I couldn't remember where I had seen the car before. It didn't belong to any of the neighbors. Nobody in my family or Katie's drove one like it. The email was still preying on my mind. I parked down the street and walked back.
The front door was unlocked. Katie never left the door unbolted. Even when she knew I would be back from a five-minute errand, she insisted that I lock the door. Slowly I pushed the door open and looked inside. No one was in sight. Silently I closed the door and tiptoed into the living room. No one was there either. I started to get worried. The kitchen and dining room were also empty. When I entered the hallway, I heard voices. One was definitely Katie's. The other was a man's. I had heard it somewhere before, but where? As I got closer to the bedroom, the voices became louder. They were in the bedroom. The email was right; Katie was cheating on me. I knew his voice from somewhere. I had heard it dozens of times. Hearing it in an unfamiliar context made it difficult to recognize.