On the day after Marianne ran out of my apartment, I called and left her a brief message at home, reminding her that I would be away for the next four days, through the weekend, at a conference in Atlanta. I was friendly, but I didn't offer any sympathy for the night before.
Actually, I was looking forward to getting away for a couple of days. While at some moments I felt more optimistic that my marriage had a future, my love for Marianne was mixed with a ton of anger. There probably wasn't any ten-minute period in my day when I didn't hear in my mind the sounds of her with Eddie in the motel, and my rage just boiled up in me each time. She had fucked him behind my back for eight months! She had lied to my face about it, when she had the chance to tell me the truth! The fact that I loved her and that I cared about our children mattered a lot—but did they outweigh what she had done to me?
At work I told Steve all about what was going on with Marianne and me, and asked him to share the news with Andrea. He smiled when I told him that my stories about Carrie were making Marianne so crazy, and I reminded him again to be sure not to let Marianne know that Carrie was my fictional invention.
I expected the conference to be pretty routine, but it turned out to be anything but. Most of my time was spent in paper sessions, where engineers give presentations on the latest in load-bearing measurement technology or advances in thermal window design. After each presentation there is time for questions from the audience, and occasionally the questions get quite contentious.
At the Friday afternoon session, a young and clearly inexperienced engineer gave a somewhat shaky paper, clearly his first talk in public. An older man in the audience started in with a series of aggressive, almost nasty questions. He challenged not only some of the speaker's conclusions but, by implication, his fitness to be an engineer.
This really pissed me off—it was a more experienced man picking on someone more vulnerable than he was. Fortunately, the paper concerned issues I knew a lot about, so I rose to ask my own question. I carefully formulated it so that it would be a friendly one, and would give the speaker a chance to regain his composure and sound more sure of himself. It also shut his attacker down, and he never got to ask any more questions. I was glad to see the young speaker make it to the end of the question session feeling better about himself.
The dinner that evening was a buffet, and after I went through the line I didn't see anyone I knew to sit with. I joined a group at a partially filled table, a group that included a striking young blonde woman I had noticed at the afternoon session. Her nametag said that her name was Kristin, and that she was from Norway.
Dinner conversation was mostly relaxed shop-talk, as it tends to be at conferences. Kristin seemed bright but shy—she mostly listened, only occasionally contributing her own thoughts. But as the group was breaking up, she surprised me by putting her hand on my arm and asking if I would stay a minute.
When we were alone, she said, "I noticed what you did in the session this afternoon. That was a very generous and kind act, to give the speaker a friendly question and let him recover his composure." She spoke excellent English, but with a little bit of an accent that I found charming.
"Thank you, Kristin," I replied. "I thought the guy asking all the hard questions was being a jerk, and I hate to see a younger engineer put on the spot so unfairly. It made me a little angry."
"I have seen a lot of that in our field," she said. "But it's much rarer when someone steps in, especially as discreetly and gently as you did. I'm not even sure he knew he was being rescued!"
We chatted for another couple of minutes, and I asked her if she felt like getting out of the hotel and taking a walk around Atlanta for a bit, and maybe getting a beer. She looked pointedly at my left hand, which still had my wedding ring, and I just laughed.
"Yes, married!" I said cheerfully. "Look, I didn't mean to make a pass at you—I just thought a walk would be pleasant, and I'd be delighted if you would join me." In fact I was very attracted to Kristin, but I hadn't planned to do anything about it. She was slim and lovely, with high Nordic cheekbones and a fabulous complexion. She wore her blonde hair short around her head, and her figure was very youthful, almost boyish, with slim hips and small breasts.
She smiled back at me, and said, "in that case I'd love to! But I'm not very impressed with American beers. Maybe we can find a place that serves some good Scandinavian ones."
It was a terrific evening. We walked around in the warm evening for a couple of hours, then settled at a place that specialized in beers from around the world, and we each tried a couple of unfamiliar ones. I learned that she had just finished her graduate degree in engineering at the University of Washington, and was looking for a job somewhere on the West Coast. Before that she had lived her entire life in Norway—she owed her English largely to a very good school system there.
Somewhere during the second beer for each of us, the conversation turned more serious. I found myself telling her about my marriage, and Marianne's cheating. Just the short version—I spared her what I'd heard on the tape, just told Kristin that I had taped them making love in a motel. She grimaced, and said only, "that must have been awful. I am so sorry."
It may be that my honesty inspired her, but after a few minutes she told me about her one and only serious love affair, with Ben, a fellow graduate student at Washington, that had ended very badly. He had courted her gallantly and patiently for months, with flowers and candy, etc., until she had been willing to go to bed with him. (She had had only had one lover before him, a brief romance during college.) But once they started having sex, he turned out to be controlling and violent. He liked it rough, and it excited him whenever she refused or hesitated.
After two months of increasingly frightening sexual encounters, and a beating that nearly sent her to the emergency room, she tried to break up with him. Ben told her he'd kill her if she ever left him. Terrified, she dropped out of school and flew home to Norway, abandoning her work in mid-semester. She didn't return to the university until 10 months later, after making sure that he had graduated and taken a job in the Midwest.
The whole experience had clearly been horrifying for Kristin. As she told me the story her voice became quieter and more hesitant, and she looked down at the table, not meeting my eyes. At the end she said, looking back up into my face, "I haven't ... been with anyone since then—that was two years ago."
