Howard's story
Believe it or not, I actually got a call from Shelley that Sunday night, as I was reading through one of her logbooks.
That was very unusual. On most of her trips, she was too busy to call – or at least that's what she had said.
For about the first year or so that she spent traveling like that, I'd often call, and more times than not, I wouldn't reach her. I'd leave a message at the desk, and sometimes she'd return my call, sometimes she wouldn't. It finally got where I never bothered, because she was on the road so much.
But she called that night, and she sounded funny, like she was down in the dumps about something. She said she'd just wanted to hear my voice and tell me that she loved me. Considering what I was doing at that very moment, it struck me as quite odd and very ironic.
And it also served to completely confuse me to the point where I was walking around in a fog.
Truthfully, I was in a daze when I went to work the next day. Everyone noticed that I seemed distracted, and several co-workers asked me if anything was wrong.
What could I tell them? That I had spent the whole weekend learning that my wife – the woman I loved, the mother of my children and the person I had hoped to grow old with – was a lying, cheating slut? And that she had been deceiving me like that for seven years?
Actually, that's not quite true. I don't think she'd ever lied to me about what she was doing, because I had never suspected anything to the point where she'd had to lie about it.
And I wasn't sure if I could say she'd been lying when she said she loved me, because I think maybe she really did still love me in some form or fashion.
When I got home that Monday, after a thoroughly unproductive day of work, I had to think about what I was going to do.
Specifically, I had to figure out what, if anything, I was going to tell the boys. What was I going to tell them in the event that I decided that divorce was the only option? They would be devastated to learn the truth about their mother.
Shelley wasn't as much of a hands-on parent as I was, but she had been around enough to be a part of their lives. While I had been the disciplinarian, Shelley had been their buddy, their confidante. Both of them take after her as far as their personalities go, and they have always been close to their mother.
Don't get me wrong, my sons are both fine young men, and I never had to really crack the whip with them, just the normal curfew violations, a couple of times when they had a little too much to drink, but nothing major.
And I have a good relationship with both of them. But not like they have with Shelley. I'm worried that if it comes down to a divorce, that all of the ugly truth will come out, and our family will be split at the seams.
Another thing about a divorce, too, is the difficulty in dividing our assets. Our savings and retirement accounts – not to mention our house and belongings – are so intricately joined that dividing them could be a legal nightmare.
That means that no matter how much we might want an amicable split, if it gets in the hands of the lawyers, I worry that we'll become enemies in spite of our best intentions. And that was something I dearly do not want to have happen.
So I had a real dilemma on my hands about whether my marriage could survive, whether it should survive or whether it would survive.
A younger man would undoubtedly look at me and wonder why I would even consider staying with an adulterous slut like Shelley. But when you put 50 in your rear view mirror, you start thinking a lot harder about how you want the end of your life to play out.
And the cold, hard truth of it is that I still love Shelley, in spite of what I've learned about her, and I still want to spend the rest of my life with her. I'm deathly afraid of growing old alone, of having the joy of my later years sapped by the bitterness and loneliness a divorce would create.
I don't understand what is going on in Shelley's mind, but I don't know if I'm ready to give her up. I began to wonder, too, as I read through the last couple of logbooks, if Shelley really knew herself what she was doing, or why she was doing it.
Quite frankly, the last couple of years were some painful reading in some respects. It was like she knew she was hurting me, knew she was hurting herself, by some of the things she was doing, and that, deep inside, she really didn't care.
And it began to dawn on me, in some corner of my mind, that she had never fully dealt with the emotional trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks, and that maybe that had something to do with what she was doing.
Before that awful day, her log entries were fairly routine, all things considered. I mean, yes, she was having these affairs, but it was fairly conventional sex. After 9-11, however, I began to notice that she got a lot more reckless, started getting into a lot of borderline dangerous situations.
She got a lot wilder with all of her lovers, but in particular, I began to notice that she really went off the deep end when she visited California.
Sometime late in 2000, she had begun working on a big account with a distributing company in Southern California, dealing first with a client named Jim Pearson and then his partner Sid Huguet.
Like all of the others, it started with Pearson wining and dining Shelley, but then it suddenly got a little kinkier, when Sid Huguet started showing up in the logs along with Jim Pearson.
I read in disbelief – but also with a huge, painful hard-on – as my lovely wife went totally out of control...
Shelley's story
As I look back on the shambles of my life at the present time, and how I got to this point, I really think I passed a major threshold the day the World Trade Center towers were destroyed.
Like most New Yorkers, just the idea of those towers collapsing was traumatic enough, and, like most New Yorkers, we lost people we knew that day.
I had two clients who perished in the North tower. There was a woman from the neighborhood who died in the South tower. One of Howard's former co-workers was killed on the ground by falling debris. And there was a guy from my high-school graduating class who had become a New York City fireman who also died that day.
But what made it doubly traumatic for me was that I also should have died that day. You see, I was supposed to be on one of the planes, the one that crashed in Pennsylvania.
I had a meeting with Kelly Marshall's company in San Francisco scheduled for that Tuesday, and I had planned to fly out of Newark that morning. I still have the ticket: United Airlines Flight 93.
The Sunday before, however, I started feeling weak and queasy in my stomach. I'm very healthy and I rarely get sick, but when I do, it's a doozy. And this was a stomach virus that put me flat on my back. I couldn't keep anything down, and I couldn't keep anything up, if you catch my drift.
I writhed on the bed in agony that Sunday night, until I was either hugging the toilet or sitting slumped on the seat. I somehow managed to pull myself together that Monday to make it to work, and actually made it to the office without throwing up. But my boss, Bill Thompson, took one look at me and told me to cancel my meeting with Kelly and go home to bed, which I did.
After lying in the bed all day Monday, and sleeping decently through the night, I felt a little bit better when dawn broke on Tuesday. So I almost – almost – decided to go ahead and make the meeting anyway, but Howard put his foot down. He said I was still weak and in no condition to travel across the country.
As we've both pointed out frequently, Howard is very sweet and very mild-mannered, but he does have a backbone. He has been a manager in his department for a number of years and he was the one who enforced the rules with our sons. So he knows how to assert authority when he has to.
This time, he saved my life.
I went back to bed, and I had drifted back to sleep, glad that I hadn't made the trip after all, when the phone rang. It was Howard, and he told me in the strangest tone of voice to turn on the television.
I turned it on, and I was stunned by what I saw, all the more so when not five minutes later, the first tower collapsed. But I felt strangely detached about it, like it wasn't quite real, until the news came out about the fate of Flight 93.
The moment they said the name of the flight that had crashed in the Pennsylvania woods, I happened to be standing in my kitchen trying to heat up some broth.
When it hit me that the plane I should have been on had crashed, with all aboard killed, my legs turned to rubber. I fell to the floor and I screamed hysterically and uncontrollably.
I kept screaming in utter madness on the floor until David, my oldest son, came rushing in the door and then I just completely lost it. I cried wildly, as my precious baby held me tightly, until he finally managed to get me back to bed.
David doesn't work very far from the house, and when Howard saw the first tower collapse, he called David and told him I was going to need someone to come by and see about me. And I sure did.
I finally had to take a sedative to calm myself down, and I didn't return to work until the following Monday.