I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (28 page)

On a Saturday morning late in September, everything fell apart for good. I don’t remember exactly what the catalyst was, but
kaboom,
I exploded. Jim was sitting on his “big man” chair, Kassidy was sitting on the sofa, and I was pacing back and forth across the family room just ranting and raving about everything that I had kept inside for weeks since starting school. I was trying, if perhaps not very clearly, to explain how hard school was for me, and how unfair it was of Jim to pick the week of my midterms to have elective surgery. Why couldn’t
he have the operation the following week? Or the following month? I was unhappy that Benjamin was so far away. Why did Jim have to travel so much? Why did he have to work all the time? Everything just poured out randomly. There was no apparent order to my rant, and no real point or purpose. It was just a lot of bottled-up emotion that had to get out.

When I was finished, I stared at Jim. He had been quiet while I had been exploding all over the family room, and now he just said, “If that’s really how you feel, I guess we’re done.” He said it with such a tone of finality. “What? Done?” I was beginning to panic again just that quickly. “Do you mean done with this conversation?” “No, Su. We’re
done
done. Finished. I had no idea about how unhappy you were with your life with me. I can go and move in with Patrick while we figure this all out.” And he walked out of the room. I fell into the elephant chair, exhausted and confused by what had just happened. Kassidy was still sitting on the couch.

“I love you, Mommy.”

“I love you, too, darlin’.”

“Mommy, do you want to watch some
Gilmore Girls
?”

“Sure. That would be great.”

The next eighteen hours are a blur. I think there were a lot of phone calls back and forth. Jim called Benjamin and Patrick. Kassidy called Benjamin and Patrick. Benjamin called Kassidy. Benjamin called me. Patrick called Jim. Benjamin, I think, was the one who convinced Jim to settle down and not make any hasty decisions. I think it was Benjamin who also mentioned to Jim that marriage counseling might be an intelligent next step for the two of us to consider.

When Kassidy and I got home from church the next day, Jim
called me into the library and said he wanted to show me something he found on the Internet. Instead of going through our health insurance list to find a marriage counselor, he had found a program online. He had been researching it all morning and it looked legit. What did I think? “Sure, why not? How does it work?” Jim pulled up a kind of online questionnaire, and told me that we needed to start with that before we could get any of the other materials. I sat down on a chair next to him in front of his computer. Kassidy was doing homework on her computer just a few feet away.

The questionnaire was set up so we could answer each question independently and then see the other person’s answers when we were both done. The questions started out painless enough. What is your partner’s favorite color? What is your partner’s favorite food? What is your partner’s favorite song? Favorite book? Favorite movie? Eventually, they got more personal. How often do you and your partner have sex? How often do you get together with your family? With your in-laws? When was the last time you and your partner went on a date together? Went on a vacation together? Do you and your partner have the same level of education? Do you and your partner both work outside the home? There seemed to be about a million questions. The very last one was “Have you ever had an affair?” I was happy to be done with my questions, and I was hungry. Jim was done, too, and he asked, “Do you want to do this now?” I looked confused, and he explained that we were supposed to go through each question and talk about them. Jesus Christ! Really? This was going to take forever, and I wasn’t sure what could be gained from this exercise. (Silly me!)

We went through the questions one by one. Some we laughed about. (What was the worst present your partner ever bought you?
Jim bought me a vacuum cleaner for Christmas one year.) Some we reminisced about. I began to think maybe this was a good idea after all.

When we got to the last question, I showed him my “no.” Of course I had never had an affair! Then he showed me his answer, and my world as I knew it ended. He had written “yes.” I sat there staring at that word.
Yes.
I was no longer hungry.

—Coldplay

O
n the outside I was calm, cool, and collected. On the inside I was screaming! And I continued to scream for about two or three weeks. I went to class, took notes, asked questions, and screamed on the inside. At home I did laundry, walked the dogs, cooked meals, and screamed on the inside. I attempted to interact with Kassidy the same as always, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to Jim. I avoided even looking at him.

At some point, I called my parents again. I can remember sitting on the bench outside the theater building at Montgomery College. I told them what I knew. They told me I could come to Roanoke if I wanted to. Or they could come up to Maryland if I needed them. They said they loved me and that everything would
be okay. But how was everything supposed to be okay? How on earth could I get the screaming in my head to stop?

I knew I had to talk to Jim eventually. So I did. One evening I asked simply, “Who was she?”

“Who was who?”

“The woman you had an affair with.”

Sigh. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“I met her online.”

“So you haven’t actually met her? Just online?”

“No. I met up with her when I was on one of my trips to California. She doesn’t live too far from Benjamin.”

That was how it all started: a simple conversation that proved how stupid, naive, and too damn trusting I had been for so many years. I am staring at the words on the computer screen now. That conversation was just the beginning of what I was to eventually learn about my marriage. Jim ultimately admitted to several affairs that had dated back a decade and a half. And he would tell me more about this affair, which was still going on. And he would tell me the real reason he hadn’t gone to Ocean City with Kassidy and me in August: He had flown his lover to D.C. and he had taken her to the ultrafancy Swann House bed-and-breakfast in DuPont Circle. There had been no urgent project that had suddenly come up for Jim at work, after all.

I was to learn where much of our money had really gone for the past fifteen years or so: various strip clubs as far away as Thailand and Canada and as close as Crystal City, Virginia. Strip clubs on Jim’s way to visit his family during the holidays. Strip clubs where he went every Thanksgiving when he was in Atlanta. Strip clubs where he offered to take Benjamin and Patrick to the one
and only time they went with him to Atlanta for Thanksgiving. Strip clubs where he would pay several hundreds of dollars for lap dances and group sex in hot tubs. Jim would peruse websites of strip clubs in the various cities he would be traveling to for work, and choose clubs with features, activities, events (and, of course, women) that appealed to him. He would then visit those establishments regularly and pay thousands of dollars to the strippers and dancers that he had handpicked via the Internet. It was so easy! I learned about another woman with whom he had carried on an affair. He paid for vacations, hotels, restaurants, gifts, and plane flights. We were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt because of years of Jim’s “creative playtime.” I did not have a dime to show for the years I had worked. He had spent it all, and then some. He had maxed out more than thirty credit cards, some of which had my name, and in turn my credit, linked to them.

Once I became aware of what Jim had been doing all along, I had to know everything. I asked him a considerable number of specific questions about people and places—business trips, money spent, and lies told. And I insisted he answer each and every one. I was beyond angry and beyond hurt, but I still had to know everything. I wanted desperately to understand how and why he had engineered such a double life for himself. I began to refer to every bit of information that he told me as a
shoe
as in “waiting for another shoe to drop.” Within just a few weeks, I was waist-deep in
shoes
. After a few months, I was completely immersed. I could no longer breathe because I was buried alive in
shoes.

Many of the names of people and some of the places sounded familiar to me. Of course they did. These were the people and places of his nighttime rages and abuse. He relived his expensive, degenerate, and brutal fantasy life with me in our own bed. Lucky me! I
had to do something to hurt him. I angrily made a hasty decision and impulsively dug up every single piece of jewelry he had
ever
given to me, including my wedding ring. I found a pawnshop in Gaithersburg, and I made Jim drive me there. I sold
everything
for $350, and told him that I would
never
wear a wedding ring again.

—Simon and Garfunkel

I
wanted to hurt Jim like he was hurting me, but I didn’t know how. I was feeling a kind of intense pain that was both physical and emotional and it never seemed to let up, even for a minute. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I thought that if only I could get even—if I could somehow manage to cause him similar shame and discomfort—I would feel better. I tried hard to convince myself that I didn’t care about anything Jim thought; I didn’t want to give a damn about any of his feelings. The notion I had had to impulsively sell all my jewelry, for a mere fraction of what it all was worth, in order to upset and outrage Jim, while at the same time helping to make me feel better, turned out to be not such a good plan. And it didn’t work anyway. Jim didn’t
seem the least bit affected by what I’d done and I certainly didn’t feel any better. Especially later, when it really hit home how deeply in debt we honestly were, I wished I hadn’t been quite so rash.

For years Jim and I had been unknowingly going through cycles. Jim remembers realizing that for most of the time he and I truly existed on “opposite ends of the earth” and he often wondered if he just wanted to be done with me. He talks about how he felt so alone. Jim: “The differences between us had built up so much; created too vast a distance.” He would often think about wanting to move out and get his own place. He says now that at any time he could have easily “left me holding the bag” and gone anywhere he wanted. For good. He frequently held that threat over my head. During the lowest points of these cycles, Jim would move his stuff downstairs to the guest bedroom and bathroom, and we would basically try to avoid each other as best as we could.

But this time when he moved downstairs, it was different. I realize now that this was the first time I knew that my marriage to Jim might not be forever. I had always thought that Jim and I were married. Period. And wasn’t marriage supposed to be “forever”? But now there was a very real possibility that he could leave me and never look back. I was terrified, angry, and hurt. Plus, having Kassidy around made the hostility we had toward each other all the more awkward.