FRANCESCA AND ME
The Consequences of Denial - an allegory
I was reading an article recently describing how it was generally thought that women better than men can intuitively sense their spouse is cheating. It said this is a myth because men do but they are more inclined for one reason or another to deny it in their minds.
That was certainly true of me. I suppose I knew for years she was unfaithful but to who or when I did not know. There were probably several reasons. I was unwilling to find out because all of the shit I would have to go through financially and emotionally. I would rather let sleeping dogs lie and hope the problem would resolve itself. Then there were our two sons. I wanted them independent before I lowered the boom. In a way, using that excuse covered my procrastination. They were not that close to my wife at all. Francesca had virtually ignored them since their early teens.
The story I tell is a confession, my health, my life expectancy is now on the line and before I die, I really need to get this one off my chest all be it so long ago.
I had known Francesca since my high school days. We went to different schools, but we were both sporty and met socially through that. I played rugby and she, netball. Unfortunately, I was a hot head and a bit of a smart mouth in those days, and this got me into trouble on the rugby field. I was red carded a couple of times and I got disciplined by the school and told to go to an anger management course before I could resume playing. It was a big decision because I was in the school first fifteen. I had developed a reputation and as a result a bit of a marked man on the paddock.
I went to the anger management course; my parents took care of that but I never went back to rugby. I was too ashamed. Instead, I became more academically focussed and figured that although a promising rugby player, it would interfere with my engineering aspirations.
I did not actually get together with Francesca until after I graduated. She had graduated and was teaching at a local college. We met in a bar socially, remembering one another from school days. She had broken up with someone and I was at a loose end. Our relationship flourished and we were eventually married.
Francesca was the catholic daughter of a fisherman and a teacher. She was very exotic looking with her Italian heritage, Thick Jet black, wavy shoulder length hair, parted in the middle framing a cherubic face. Pale olive skin and a beautiful curvaceous body. Like me she had been sporty. I remembered watching her playing netball, and boy was she physical. She admitted to coming to watch me play rugby and was there the day I got banned.
Francesca could be a snob, she could be self-entitled, self-opinionated and self-anything actually. It did not worry me in those days as it was never directed toward me. It would amuse me socially in how she could put some obnoxious person down verbally.
We never really argued. Sure, she would take a hissy fit from time to time and wave her arms about shouting but it would always blow over quickly and never turned into a real argument. She also did not goad people like some wives would. She would just blow off. I think she knew there was a temper buried in me somewhere and it was not where she wanted to go. The upshot was that there was never ever any violence between us but then we were never forced to open up about things that were personal or were aggravating us.
In fact, in the early stages of our marriage we got on really well. Yes, when we got married, we were romantically and deeply in love and couldn't get enough of one another then as the reality of children and the humdrum married life set in, we were still there side by side supporting one another.
Our lives were comfortable, we had a good house, nice cars, we could go on good holidays mainly because I progressed in my career quickly and her income supplemented it nicely. Maybe in retrospect it was a little too comfortable for her, I don't know, I think in the end she took it for granted. Her life was never challenged, and she struggled for nothing.
She was a fantastic mother to our two boys up until their early teens. They were very sporty like their parents but as they tended toward cricket and football it was less of an interest to Francesca. I was a parent coach for a while and although Francesca came along to games initially, eventually she would be off with something else to do. To her credit she tried to get the boys interested in tennis so that we could all share a sport, but they faded with that one. They did get interested in golf and we would play occasionally but Francesca was not interested in that. As the boys went through high school cricket seemed to consume their free time along with gaming on their home computer setup.
Another gulf between Francesca and the boys was that her degrees were in languages and English literature. The boy's direction was science and eventually engineering like me. She was all over their homework when they were young but not so when they hit high school.
So, when did I first suspect that Francesca was stepping out on me? I suppose after 10 years of marriage. She was still teaching at the high school. It was just that her school working hours seemed to change. They became less regular. I was busy with work and the boys at the time, and she just seemed to come and go. It was the case that if I didn't see it in front of me, I did not worry about it.
Then she changed jobs. I don't know why, and it was all very sudden. She really did not explain the need, but I do know she took a slight cut in salary as at the high school she had been head of her department. She joined an up market private girls' school. The new job did make her more self-opinionated and dare I say it, self-aggrandising. It was during this time the boys drifted away from the tennis club. I had initially been going as well but I was the first to leave because of work commitments. The boys were to tell me later that it was her behaviour toward certain parents from her school at the club that made them uncomfortable and embarrassed. I was a bit pissed off when I first heard this as they had never said anything to me at the time. But I came to realise that parental relationships are a place that teenage boys fear to tread.
I have to say that at the time I thought as much that tennis was more than hitting balls for her. Why? I don't know, it was just the context of what was happening, the opportunity and an increasing off hand attitude toward me, emotionally and sexually. But I was unwilling to investigate it.
Francesca loved the girls' school. She was constantly talking about 'her' girls. She would also try to team them up with our boys. She was successful in that our eldest, Lloyd, eventually married one of the girls.
It was around this time she came up with a desire to have two more children. She said she was disappointed that she had not had any girls. Offhand it seemed impractical to me. It would be like having two families and besides we had started married life deciding that we would only have two children.
Now I was not totally against the idea, but I admit I was a little sceptical and she never pushed the case. It was convenient for me to just let it go. In retrospect, I look back at that as our biggest mistake.
The next event in Francesca's life was when she resigned from the school and joined a firm to train as a real estate agent. I was completely floored. She had been rabbiting on about getting a new house design and built and was even planning some ideas. I was not opposed to it, but she talked a lot to the boys about it but not so much to me.
She had previously always looked down on real estate people regarding them as intellectually inferior, so it was a doubly surprising move from my point of view.
A year or so later Lloyd left for a gap year before he went to Uni. He was the most enthusiastic of the two boys when it came to cricket and through connections hoped to spend a season playing cricket in England. This left our youngest son in his final year of college.
About this time, I had a major promotion, and I was made principal director for New Zealand by our overseas company. Now, Francesca had always accompanied me at work events, and she was very charming, going down well with my colleagues. In fact, my promotion also had a little bit to do with the overseas directors' impression of her as a suitable spouse. Despite this Francesca seemed oblivious to what I was doing there, my status and the big deal this promotion was. She always saw me as an employee and not the actual owner. For god's sake! For the New Zealand arm, I was the majority shareholder. I could not understand why she wasn't proud of me and showed so such disdain.
All this became a part of my creeping resentment that was gnawing away inside me. it was getting close to our youngest leaving, and I was starting to dwell on her probable infidelity which further fuelled my resentment.
Now being in real estate, it was the perfect job for a cheating spouse. I never knew where she was. Also, she was too smart to allow me to link phones. The work cars were in a pool which they shared so a tracker was out of the question on the car. I was just never going to know what she was doing.
It was not until I got a big wakeup call that I was galvanised into action. I had just got in, cycling home from work one day when my youngest son, Ben appeared out of his grotto he called his bedroom.
He had been gaming all evening having completed his homework and he had just received an Email with a picture attachment. It seemed to have gone to the wrong address and was from someone at Francesca's work. Ben's email address was similar to Francesca for historical reasons, so it was not surprising. It was a picture of Francesca standing with a guy, arm around one another in front of a partly finished house. It had an attached message like, "the pair of you with the lovely house looking good, all the best Sue." Whoever Sue was.
