It was my fault. Let me be clear: I realize it was all my doing. Whatever problems there were in my marriage, the affair was all me. So many things I should have done instead. I should have talked with Maria about the alienation, the disrespect, or the neglect I was feeling, but I never did. The failings I felt when she stopped participating in our sexual activities. No, she never denied me, but she would just lie there, no matter what I did. Obviously, I failed to excite her. I used to. I tried to step up our game, tried to get her to engage in different activities, different positions, but no. She would allow me to get on and get off, while she seemed to exude resentment. When we were done, she'd give me a quick peck, clean up and go to sleep. I would either hate myself for wanting a wife who obviously didn't want me, or I would just smolder in a growing resentment. Or most often, both.
Finally, when the opportunity for a sexual relationship presented itself, I didn't thing twice. Just once. With my little head.
Of course, it's easy to say in hindsight that I should have spoken to Maria, but how do you approach a cold, bitter shrew who attacks before you even get the first word out. It's hard. When we first married, Maria was fun, sexy, and a joy to be with. I enjoyed any time spent with her, even doing things I hated like shopping or doing laundry. I helped with everything, just to be in her presence. And she loved me, so much. It beamed out of her very being. I was the luckiest man in the world, and that was even before you factored in our compatibility in the bedroom.
We'd been married five years, and had just purchased a modest two-bedroom, one bath house in a modest neighborhood. All the houses had been built post-WWII, with one car garages and small front and back yards. But it was ours! We were on our way, homeowners, who were finally planning to start our family.
I should explain that Maria and I grew up in the worst areas of the Albuquerque. There were gangs, crime, drugs, and dropouts in our neighborhood and little else. Maria and I were blessed with close-knit families whose religious values and belief in education allowed us to avoid the pitfalls around us. Going to Catholic schools kept us from the worst of the pressures and set us on the path to university and higher education. With our degrees we both became teachers in the Phoenix school systems after graduation. Marriage and the new house five years later put us on a path to eternal happiness. Or so I thought.
The worm in the apple was Maria's friend Gloria. Gloria had made it through our parochial grammar school, just barely, but ran afoul of the rules in high school. As a sophomore, her uniform skirts were always higher up her thighs than allowed, her speech was littered with swear words and other curses, and she respected no authority at the school. She didn't make it through the year. She finished that year and the two following at the public school.
She soon had several homemade tattoos and a blatantly sexual persona, and a string of high school boyfriends (and some older than high school) who were either into gangs or crimes, or maybe both.
But Maria loved Gloria and remained her friend, through everything. Her parents did anything they could to keep those girls apart, so their interaction was limited. Maria was never allowed the "occasion to sin" with her friend, but still met with her friend for coffee or movies. Maria, for whatever reason, admired Gloria's independence and what Maria saw as her freedom.
Gloria came up to visit often when we were at uni, and often came to spend time with Maria at our apartment (and now, house) after our marriage. I tried to object but it led to the only arguments I had at the time with my wife.
I thought that Gloria was a slut. She'd already been married and divorced twice by the time she was 25. I made a joke once that Gloria's bed didn't have any bedposts because she'd made a notch for each of her lovers and all four post were completely gone. Maria was blind about Gloria's faults and shut me out of our bedroom for two days because of my joke.
Her first husband was a punk, a gang member whose job was being a lookout for the dealers. He was always hanging all over Gloria, massaging her breast idlily and openly while talking with Maria and me. Gloria would just smile, like she was proud at this display of her attraction to her husband. I drew the line at having them stay at our house, after the first time. That one night he stayed over with Gloria he walked out of the bedroom to the kitchen, naked, and pretended it was nothing unusual, when went to I stopped him. Maria was embarrassed, but when Gloria laughed about it, Maria followed her lead and chided me that it wasn't a big deal. The punk's reaction to that had been to turn around again to face us, thrusting his naked pelvis out, swinging his dick around, and saying, "What do you mean, it isn't a big deal?" It was a big deal, but I think I was the only one to blush. Gloria and the punk found that hilarious. Again, Maria followed Gloria's lead.
When her husband later started beating Gloria, she finally left him. She came to our house one night with a battered face, talking about what a monster her husband was. However, the little bits I could overhear as Maria tended to Gloria in the bathroom led me to believe that Gloria had been discover in flagrante.
A year later, Gloria met and married Matt. I liked Matt; he was a good guy and why he hooked up with Gloria, is beyond me. But he was good for her, having her childish tattoos removed, fixing her teeth and educating her in dress and manners. It was like he was her Henry Higgins. Surprisingly, Gloria was an apt pupil. She no longer swore and she dropped all the ghetto Spanish vulgarities that she had sprinkled her speech with. She began to come across as almost elegant.
The trouble for me, was somehow Gloria had landed this nice guy, who was well-to-do. Or very comfortable, is how Matt put it. Suddenly, Gloria was off to Europe or the Caribbean on vacations or shopping trips. Matt spoiled her, and of course she wanted to share these experiences with her mejor amiga. I had reservations, but not Maria. She danced off to Europe and Aruba with hardly a kiss goodbye to me.
She never cheated on me -- she told me that and I believe her at the time, because she also told me how Gloria kept throwing men her way and putting her in compromising situations. The slut wanted someone to play with and Maria was her target.
Yet when I tried to insist that my wife avoid the slut, I was shut down pretty quick. I'm sure Gloria had her believing that I was just trying to control her and didn't trust her, because that what she kept throwing at me. After those two big trips and a couple of weekend ones to New York and LA, they'd planned a tour through France and Italy, one that would take at least a month and possibly longer, requiring Maria to take a leave of absence from teaching. We could afford for her not to work, my job would cover the nut, but our scheduled savings for a house would be seriously delayed, as would our future family.
Luckily, in the middle of a huge argument between Maria and me about that trip, the doorbell interrupted her yelling at me. As I answered the door, expecting a neighboring apartment dweller to ask us to keep it down, I was surprised to see a morose Gloria, with two large suitcases.
She rushed past me and into my wife's arms, sobbing. Matt had thrown her out, not even willing to listen to her reasons why the pool boy was naked in their bedroom.
The bad news? Gloria ended up staying with us for three weeks before finding her own place.
The good news? At least the European trip was off, and Gloria would get enough out of the divorce that she could afford her own place.
When we finally bought our house, I was elated, over the moon, and expected the same from Maria. She was happy, and seemed content, but I was disappointed to hear her compare it to the beautiful home Gloria and Matt had shared. She had toured the house with Gloria the day before, and although she had been as ecstatic as I was about the house before that tour, afterwards it was obvious that Gloria had filled her head with comments about how small the house was, how it didn't have a separate dining room, the one car garage, the tiny rooms and the lack of a second bathroom.
I think that was something I saw as Gloria's first notch in the destruction of my marriage. She'd made my wife unhappy with the best house we could afford and robbed me of the joy of homeownership. The sourness was settling in on my wife's disposition. She wasn't my Maria anymore, but progressively more morose and shrewish.
