[Author's Note: Sorry for the delay in posting this chapter--I had an emergency to deal with.]
I spent the rest of the session trying to calm and reassure Leanne.
"Mark doesn't strike me as a particularly rash person. He's obviously very upset, but I don't think he'll get on a plane and just disappear. It's much more likely that he's still in town, and that he'll find a motel for a few days, keep on going to work, and eventually make contact."
"And if he doesn't?" she replied, starting to weep again.
"I've done everything I can think of, Tom! I've told him I love him, and showed him I love him, every possible way there is! What more can I do?"
My answer didn't reassure her. "I don't think there IS anything more, Leanne—at least not right now. This is a struggle that Mark has to work out within himself, and all we can do is support him.
"Look," I said after a minute. "I'm supposed to see Mark again on Thursday afternoon. Let's at least try to be calm until then. If he shows up, and tells me he hasn't been in contact with you, I promise to call you right after the session to let you know he's still around, okay?
"In the meantime, do what you can to go on with life. See a friend, go to a movie—do things to take care of yourself, and to keep from sitting and worrying. Mark loves you very much—we both know that. His emotions got the best of him, but that doesn't mean he's gone for good."
It wasn't much, but it was pretty much all I had to offer in the way of comfort, and Leanne was a little calmer when she left my office.
****************
To my pleasant surprise, Mark walked into my office right on time the following Thursday. His manner was troubled, and a little sheepish.
As he sat down all he said was, "hello, Tom".
"Hi, Mark. Have you been in touch with Leanne since Tuesday?"
The sheepish look deepened. "Yeah, I, uh, left her a message yesterday during the day. Just saying that I was okay, that I'd found a place to stay for a little while, and that I'd be in touch."
"I guess you can imagine that she was pretty upset when I saw her."
"Yes, well, I ..."
He sat up, and looked straight at me. Sheepishness was gone, and seriousness was in its place.
"I just had to leave, Tom—I didn't have any choice. I felt like my head was going to explode."
I nodded, and said, "why don't you tell me about it?"
What followed was pretty predictable in its broad outlines—only the specifics were new to me. A series of incidents, each of them fairly minor in and of itself, kept reminding Mark of the pain and insecurity he was already struggling to work through. Or, rather, I should say "struggling to contain", because he frequently resisted the opportunities to work through it that both Leanne and I offered to him.
The previous Thursday he'd been home alone, because Leanne had a meeting in the evening, and he'd watched "Unfaithful" with Richard Gere and Diane Lane. It's a devastating film about a wife in a seemingly happy marriage who falls into a torrid love-affair; and needless to say it was precisely the wrong thing for Mark's frame of mind.
What made it particularly bad, Mark told me, is that at one point while having sex with her lover Diane Lane's character said something to him that was just like what Leanne liked to say to Mark in bed.
"It just freaked me out, I guess. Nothing but a coincidence, but my mind started careering down the track of Leanne having affair after affair, all the while pretending to love me."
When Leanne came home Mark didn't tell her anything about the movie, but he was uneasy. Unable to sleep, he found himself in his study, playing chess on the computer for half the night.
"By Monday I was feeling better—I'd put it out of my mind, I guess. Leanne and I made love, and it was really great. Long and incredibly satisfying, I think for both of us.
"We were lying in bed afterwards, half-asleep, and I was feeling really happy. Leanne was kissing my neck, just drowsily, you know? And she said, "baby, you're the best—the absolute best". And then she was asleep within another minute; I could feel her breathing change.
"I know she meant to be nice, to be loving. But what she said just started to eat at me! I'm the best? the absolute best? But you had to fuck dozens of other guys—hundreds of other guys? How can I be the best, if I'm not even good enough to satisfy my own wife?!
"I realized that I was being ridiculous, that I was taking Leanne's sweet remark and turning it into a knife to stab myself with—but I just couldn't help it! I lay there, feeling worse and worse, while she slept happily next to me.
"Finally, at about 2 am, I got up and went into the kitchen for a sandwich, and I remembered I hadn't put the trash out for pickup on Tuesday morning. I grabbed the bag out of the kitchen wastebasket and tied it shut, and carried it into the garage to get the big trashcans.
"And on the way I snagged the bag on the edge of a rake and ripped it open, and half the trash spilled out onto the floor of the garage. So I cursed, and got a broom to sweep it back up. And there on the floor I saw an open box of condoms.
"It was a box of a dozen, and there were three left. I went kind of nuts—I had to know exactly how many had been used! I laid down some old newspapers and poured out the entire contents of the trash bag, and sorted through it, but I only found two more. Five condoms. So there had to have been seven used—by one or more of Leanne's fuck-buddies, of course.
"I cleaned up the mess and threw it all out, but the whole time my brain was going a mile a minute. Could Leanne possibly still be fucking other people? I didn't want to believe it, and I really didn't believe it. She made a promise to me, and I honestly trust her, I do."
I must have looked a bit skeptical—not about Leanne, but about the depth of Mark's faith in her.
"You've heard her, Tom. She never cheated on her high school boyfriend, or on her jerk of a first husband, even though she was tempted. And I believe that she wouldn't have lied to me either.
"It's just ... well, it's kind of obvious. Were these condoms she was throwing out because she didn't need them any more? And if so, why throw them away now, nearly three months after she promised to stop fucking other guys? And where were the seven used ones?"
His face reflected the anguish in his voice. "Even if she HAS been faithful to me for those months, the condoms reminded me of all the years when she'd been spreading for ... when she'd been having sex with God knows how many men.
"The more I thought about it, the more I thought I could never feel confident that I was enough for her. Would she spend the rest of her life feeling confined by monogamy, wishing that somehow she could keep having her other lovers but restraining herself just so she wouldn't lose me? That idea hardly made me feel better!
"I stewed about it all night, getting more and more crazy. And at about 5:30 am I gave up—I said, that's it, I'm outta here. I packed a couple of bags, left my ring, wrote her a note, and got the hell out of Dodge."
We both sat for a moment, each of us lost in thought. Mark was tired and emotionally wrung-out. He'd been using his life-long strategy of pushing emotional troubles away rather than facing them, and it was tearing him to pieces.
It was obvious that he loved Leanne. And equally obvious that she loved him, that she was ready and willing to be the monogamous wife he wanted and needed. But I wasn't very confident that he could get past his agonized feelings about her sex with other men—certainly he wouldn't unless he started talking about them, with me and with her.
I said, "Mark, it sounds like you're in a lot of pain—but I don't hear you saying 'I'm done with Leanne, I want a divorce'. Is that right?
"No, I ...." He sat silently for a minute. "I love her. I've never stopped loving her. If only I could...I don't know, erase that scene from my brain..."
More silence.
"Listen, Mark—you experienced something traumatic, saw something that's very hard to see. But you know what? A lot of people have been through something like that in their lives, and gotten over it. Not right away, but in time.
"You're going to get over this, I promise. But not by pretending, not by acting as though it never happened. You have to talk about it."
He nodded, and said wearily, "I know that. I don't want to do it, but I know you're right. But I...."
He sat up straighter in his chair, and looked right at me.
"But I'm not ready yet to go through it all again with Leanne, okay? I'll come and see you, but ... but I still need some time away."
"That's fine," I said. "But do you think you could stay in touch with her, call her every couple of days? She's pretty frightened and upset, you know."
"I know—and I didn't mean to hurt her. Yeah, I'll call her."
****************
My session with Leanne that Friday was difficult. I genuinely felt bad for her, because I had nothing much to offer beyond vague reassurances.
She was calmer—a little tearful, but at least not hysterical and terrified. Mark had called her after seeing me, and they'd talked for a few minutes. Apparently he had promised he wouldn't do anything crazy—no quitting his job, no moving out of town. But he wasn't ready to come back home.
We were going over it and over it, with her saying, "...and I'm just about at the end of my rope," when I interrupted her, firmly.
"No, Leanne, you're not. You're not nearly at the end of your rope."
She blinked at me.
"You have a husband you love, who loves you. Yes, you're going through a hard time right now—but he's not dead, he's not in the hospital in a coma, he hasn't hit you or filed for divorce or moved in with a girlfriend or done any number of awful things that husbands sometimes do.
"I know you're hurting—and so is Mark—but you need to maintain some perspective, okay?"
Leanne looked shocked, and then a little hurt. Finally she nodded her head.
"Okay, Tom. I guess I ... yes, you're right. It's lousy but it could be a lot worse."
