I was ready for the week to be over. Long meetings, sleepless nights, too many connecting flights, and an oppressive amount of jetlag all added up to one thing: a very tired Kyle. Even when I was a young man, this kind of week would have been exhausting. But at forty-eight? It was making me regret some life choices. Thank God I only had to travel like this occasionally, unlike the bad old days.
When I opened the front door to my home, I'd been hoping to smell dinner all ready to go and maybe to receive a welcoming kiss from Samantha, my wife of nearly twenty-five years.The former was commonplace; the latter only slightly less so. But I found neither awaiting me. Instead, the house was mostly dark, with the only light being in the entryway, along with a dim glow coming from the kitchen doorway.
"Sam?" I called out her name as I hung my coat and arranged my luggage on the floor of the foyer.
"I'm in the kitchen." Her voice sounded strained, as if she was angry or had been crying. When I entered the kitchen and found her sitting at our small breakfast nook, I could clearly see that it was both. My wife's brown eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but also filled with a furious light. Her normally immaculate chestnut hair was disheveled; her ponytail and the strands that had escaped it put me in mind of a slowly fraying rope.
All of this was indicative of the type of conversation we were about to have, but the final detail cinched it: two manila envelopes on the table in front of her.
"Kyle, we need to talk."
I was too tired to put up with any crap, but this would have to be handled sooner or later. Sliding into the chair opposite her, I wearily said, "Sure. What about?"
Samantha wordlessly pushed one of the envelopes over to me. Inside, I found a selection of photographs. Despite their poor quality, they told quite the story: me dining with a gorgeous blonde woman little more than half my age; the two of us holding hands as we walked down the street; she and I locked in a passionate embrace in front of an apartment door, my hand sliding up under a curve-hugging red minidress to cup her nearly bare ass.
The timestamps printed on the photos then jumped to the next morning, with us saying goodbye as I copped one last feel, squeezing her small, firm tit through the negligee she had worn to see me off. The last shot was of me looking a little regretful as I left, but it was clear that I was disappointed to be leaving, not guilty for what I had done inside.
With a level, almost pleasant voice I inquired, "Where did you get these?"
"What does that matter?" There was no reciprocity in her tone, nothing even approaching congeniality. She was outraged, and I was mildly curious as to which made her most upset: that I had cheated, that my first response was to ask the source of her intel, or that I didn't seem at all perturbed.
With a flick of the wrist, I tossed the evidence of my affair back onto the table. "Well, mostly because they're not very good. Jenna looks way hotter in person, and she likes to leave the blinds partway open when we make love; any decent PI could have--"
"What is wrong with you!?" There were tears mixed in with the rage now.
I shrugged. "I'm cost conscious. Sue me. Oh, wait; you were planning to, right? After all, I assume those are divorce papers in the other envelope."
Sam was starting to sob. "What the fuck, Kyle? Is this a- a fucking joke to you?" I don't think this was the way she intended it to go. It's funny how people can have such different expectations, all based on what facts they do and don't have available to them.
"Oh, no, not at all. I'm sure it's tearing you up. It feels awful, I know." Leaning forward, I favored her with a particularly unpleasant grimace. "It just about killed me back then."
"What?" A small change in her tone; the wind hadn't gone out of her sails yet, but it was starting to shift.
"You know. When you cheated on me. Or at least when I found out about it."
Samantha's face went slack for a moment, glistening streams of salt and water still dripping from it. A new hesitancy followed the sudden realization that what she knew-- or even what she could prove-- didn't matter; it had always been about what I knew. And I knew damn near everything. Well, everything that really mattered, anyways.
My wife stuttered, "I- I- I- "
"'I' what, Sam? 'I didn't cheat?' 'I don't know what you're talking about?' 'I didn't mean anything by it?' 'I'm sorry?' Which 'I' were you going for there? Oh, I know, 'I should never have fucked Ronnie Perkins.' Was that it?"
"You knew?" Her tone was strangled, and I couldn't help but laugh. She sounded betrayed, even more than she had when I first sat down across from her. "Stop laughing at me! You knew!"
Wiping a tear from my eye, I managed to downshift from laughter to a chuckle. "Not at first. Not when you did it. Not for the four months you fucked him, not right after you stopped, not even for another year after that. I'd say you did a good job of hiding it, but you didn't. I just wasn't looking."
Now it was my turn to sound betrayed, as my finger jabbed angrily at her. "Because I trusted you! Because we agreed, we had ALWAYS agreed that the most important thing in a marriage, above fidelity or trust or even love, was honesty. That you can't have any of those unless you always tell each other the truth about the big things, no matter how painful it might be." Sam looked away so quickly that my words might as well have been a slap.
Shaking my head, I continued. "But Matt was a freshman in high school when I found out, and Riley had just turned twelve. I didn't want to ruin their lives."
My laughter then went beyond self-deprecating straight into flat-out disgust. "No, that's not quite right. God, it's gotten so easy to lie to you. I hate that. I hate that I can lie to my wife, and I hate that I can only do it so easily because I know how long she's lied to me.
"The truth is that I didn't want to be a part-time dad, and so I put up with knowing what I knew. I desperately hoped that maybe you'd eventually remember how important honesty was supposed to be in a marriage. Did you even realize how blatantly, openly unhappy I was there for a few months? Or did you even give a shit about me by then?"
She croaked, "I did. I've always loved you--"
"Fuck right off." It was said flatly and without affect. "You don't do that to someone you love, or at least not someone you're in love with."
Her eyes snapped back to me. "I did! I really did! I made a mistake, okay? I was lonely, and he was charismatic and--"
"Yeah, yeah. 'Oh, my husband is away all the time because he's got to work!' 'Oh, I'm sooooo lonely!' 'Oh, it's so boring now that the kids are at school!'"
"Stop mocking me!"
I snorted, "Oh, I'm sorry, was that too contemptuous? How unkind of me. I mean, it's not like you didn't treat me with contempt for a decade, but--"
"I did not!" She was trying to build a head of steam back up. Fuck it; let her rant. I knew who'd already won: neither of us. But I'd have lost a lot less by the time all this was done. "I made a mistake! Yes, I was lonely, and I was bored, and I was unhappy! I shouldn't have cheated, but it wasn't done out of contempt!" Sam's shoulders sagged, the energy animating her seeming to have left once more. "I was weak. I know that. I do, and I'm sorry."
Seeing that she'd at least paused-- and oh, how that disappointed me, how I wanted a fight after all these years and all her lies-- I continued to lay out her failures, trying to draw my wife out of her worthlessly contrite self-pity. "Let's put aside whether the cheating was contemptuous; I say it was, and I'm the wronged party--" With a broad smile, I waved my hand at the photos of my young lover. "--Well, I was then. Maybe not so much now.
"But what about hiding it from me? Not letting me decide what I wanted to do after you cheated on me? Are you saying that was treating me with respect? Really?"
Sam was breathing heavily, whether from fear or anger or panic, I wasn't sure. "It wasn't meant to be disrespectful or even dishonest. I loved you. Please, I did. It wasn't-- I had already fucked up. I didn't want to make it worse and hurt you more. I was never going to do it again, and I did everything I could to make it up to you."
"Except treat me like a fucking adult. Or even--" I laughed. "No, not even like an adult. Just like another person. Like a real human being, someone you respected enough to..." I drummed my fingers on the table. "Do you remember when Riley broke that vase? She was, what, six?"
"Five." Sam rubbed her arm while looking away. She knew where this was going and didn't like it.
"Right. Five. And then she tried to hide it from us. What did she get in the most trouble for? Hiding it, right? And you know what? She wailed and cried and said that wasn't fair, but you told her-- YOU told her-- that good people admit to their mistakes, regardless of the consequences to themselves."
"That's not the same--"
Stepping right on top of my wife's words, batting aside her defense, I continued, "And do you remember how proud we were of her after she got into that fender bender when she was sixteen? Riley had all sorts of outs on that one; it was dark, the streets had been slick, someone could have had their brights on. There were a hundred lies she could have told us and gotten away with it.
"But, no, our daughter remembered the lesson that we-- that you-- taught her and admitted that she'd gotten distracted by her phone. She took her punishment without complaint. I was so proud of her, that she had learned the lessons you taught her. That she did the right thing."
