You're Not Pretty Enough (10 page)

When I arrived home, he gave me a hug. “Have you made a decision?” I asked into his neck. He gently broke the hug to look at me.

“Yes. I want to be with you.”

I was surprised and suspected the turnaround had more to do
with things souring between Leo and Charlotte versus a renewed commitment to our marriage. But I said, “OK,” and we trudged along together into Christmas. Things did seem better. When I cooked, he ate my meals with a forced smile. He
even put his arm around me or held my hand at our respective families’ houses during the holidays.
Maybe Charlotte leaving for a new job will give us a clean slate,
I thought.

But he didn’t want to talk about it. I’d try to bring it up
and figure out how to repair the damage, but he didn’t want to play. He didn’t want to go to counseling and “go backward,” he said, but I couldn’t move forward. I decided even though I didn’t have proof that he had cheated, he had
still treated me like shit, and I deserved better, or at least the truth. It’s crazy how obsessed I became with “learning the truth.” I decided to give him a final opportunity to tell me, so one night after work I sat him down.

“Listen, I know this is not easy to talk about, but we have
to…talk
.
I know you say that you and Charlotte were, are…just friends and that I’m just paranoid and we have our own issues, but I’m going tell you the ‘story of us’…after we got married, like I’m telling it to a friend…”

“Do we really need to do this?”

“Let’s just try. I want you to remember all of the things that led to this point, and I want you to tell me if you think I’m being irrational, and then I want you to fill in your side.”

He didn’t protest further, so I began. It was absolutely strange to relive the tale and to speak in the third person about my husband to my husband. He said nothing as I went through the chain of events and my
feelings surrounding them. But I watched his face fall and his eyes redden. I could see that the stress of coordinating his two relationships and the lying and the covering up of all the lies was getting to him. I could tell that it
hurt him to be painted in a less-than-flattering light, because people always responded so positively to him. I thought I could see that he was thinking about coming clean and was trying to identify the pros and cons on the spot, and I almost felt empathy for him. But this conversation was my last resort. If
we were to move on, I needed
him
to tell me the truth about what happened and about how he felt. After I finished, he stayed silent.

“Well…?”

“Jen, I’m sorry.”

I gave him some room, but no more came. “There’s nothing else? Nothing you want to add?”

“No…I don’t know what to say…just, I’m sorry.”

That wasn’t good enough, so soon after New Year’s I arranged
to move in with a friend for a little while, if only to gain some control back, and perspective. I called him from work one day and told him of my sadness and then of my plans. All he said was, “Wow, you don’t know how to handle
relationships at all,” and hung up. I put my head down in my cubicle and closed my eyes.
I just want to know the truth,
I thought.
That’s all I want, the fucking truth.

I sat up straight and banged my fist on my desk. It occurred
to me that there was one other person in this triangle who could give me what I wanted. I miraculously remembered the company that hired her, dialed information, got the main number, and called.

“May I speak to Charlotte Jones?”

“Hold please,” said the receptionist, and I held my breath.

“This is Charlotte.”

“Charlotte, it’s Jen, Leo’s wife. Listen, I need you to know that I am not mad at you at all; I just need to know the truth. Please,
woman-to-woman, you’re the only who can help me. Can we meet up?”

“No problem,” she said. “How about tonight?”

“Yes! How about six?”

“That works. By the way, Leo is an asshole, and he doesn’t
deserve you.”

“OK! See you later!” Then I replayed the last line she said. At that point I knew I would get the truth, and I was
giddy
. I went to Cathryn’s first and drank a shot of whiskey. She made me promise to call her
immediately after the conversation.

I arrived at the bar a few minutes early and ordered a beer. My stomach was churning. Charlotte walked in and approached me nervously.
She showed up!
I thought, and my inner child clapped. “Want to grab a booth?” I asked, trying to sound friendly and nonconfrontational but coming off awkward.

The next two hours were a blur of confession from her side that revealed several nuggets, including him buying us the exact same Christmas
presents.

“What the fuck?” I said, laughing. “Did he just go into all the stores and say, ‘I’ll take two of everything?’”

“I know, what an IDIOT!” she laughed back. It was like I was
hanging with a friend. We also went through timelines. When I was in London, my dad and Leo had planned a trip to Canton, Ohio, to visit the Football Hall of Fame. Charlotte had spent the night with Leo, in our bed, and departed only
thirty minutes before my dad was set to arrive. In that concentrated period of time, all of my hunches were validated, and I believed every word she said because not once did she make herself out to be the victim. Almost straight away she said, “I knew he was married, but I went for it.”

Her saying that meant I didn’t need to treat her as a hostile witness, and me proving that I was not mad at her afforded her the chance to let her guard down. She was in love with him, she confessed, but he
lied constantly to her too, so she knew in her heart he was wrong for her. Like many unfaithful men before him, he had promised to leave me several times, and finally she stopped believing him.

After a bit, we had said everything that needed saying. We
asked for the bill and started gathering our things together when she looked at me and said, “You know what would be hilarious?”

“What?”

“If we went to your house and confronted him together.”

I considered this the best idea ever conceived. Without giving myself a chance to challenge it, I said, “Oh, we can make that happen.” We practically ran out to my car and headed over to the house. We parked and
went in through the front door, not knowing if he’d be home or not, but having a better chance to make a big entrance from that vantage point than from the garage. He was home, rumbling around in the kitchen.

We entered and I said, “Honey, you’re never going to believe
who I ran into.” Then Charlotte and I made our way through the family room and turned right into the kitchen where he was at the refrigerator stuffing a leftover piece of chicken into his mouth. He saw us and froze.

“You motherfucker,” I started, fully confident and ready to make him pay for all those months of making me feel crazy. “You told her you LOVED her, you asshole?!? You bought us both the same Christmas gifts?!? We don’t even
like
kiwi body wash! Neither one of us, you dumbass!”

He looked at her. “Charlotte, I never told you I loved you.”

She immediately retorted, “Really? I heard the ‘love,’ I heard the ‘you,’ and I heard the ‘I.’” It was like we were a comedy team.

“Good one,” I said.

He looked at me. “What do you want me to do?”

For a moment, I went internal.
That’s it? No ‘I’m sorry’? No begging for me to forgive him?
I almost broke down but then quickly
pulled myself back into the present. “I want you to pack a bag and get the fuck out of here.”

“OK.” He promptly went off to the bedroom. One of my cats came around the corner and rubbed against Charlotte’s leg.

“Hi, Callie,” said Charlotte and reached down to pet her.

My face dropped. “Of course you know my cat’s name…You’ve stayed here.” Charlotte started to cry.

Because
I
had just pulled myself together, I expected
her to do the same. I got real close and said, “Charlotte, I know this is hard, but you need to get it together.” I pointed toward the bedroom. “His wife and his girlfriend are in his house confronting him…TOGETHER. This is a MOMENT,
DAMMIT!”

She stood at attention and sucked in her tears. He had to go through us to get to the garage and his truck. We stared him down as he made his exit, and then it was over. In less than ten minutes, the confrontation was
over, and we were left feeling like deflating balloons.

I turned to her. “I guess I’ll take you back.” We giggled nervously until we got to her car. “Wow, that really happened,” I said.

“Yeah, whose idea was
that
?” And then we hugged, naturally and spontaneously, and she exited the vehicle.

When I got home, I called Cathryn. “The eagle has landed.”

“On my way.”

And thank God, because the calls started flooding in from Leo’s mother, Sophia, who tried different defense arguments to get her son—who had obviously called her—back into my good graces. I put her on speaker so Cathryn could listen in.

“Jennifer,” she said in her heavy Italian accent, “if I found out that Leo’s father did this, I would laugh for tree days. Do you hear me, TREE DAYS!”

“Why?”

“Because who’s a gonna cook for him? Who’s a gonna clean?
Definitely not some girl he play a kissy face with…and after tree days…he come back.”

“OK, thanks, I’m going to go now.”

But she kept calling. Her final defense was that boys will
be boys and we just have to forgive them. This enraged me, so I yelled into the phone, “Sophia, they FUCKED IN OUR BED! HOW DO YOU FORGIVE THAT?”

“Oh, Jennifer, oh, don’t say, oh…language!”

I hung up the phone, and it rang again immediately. It was
Leo. I picked up so that only I could hear him.

“What do you want?”

“Jen, we need to talk. You don’t know the whole story.”

“Fuck you. You’ve had plenty of chances to talk.”

“Jen,” he said, “you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re too immature. I’m coming home so we can work this out and you don’t make the wrong decision.” And then he hung up.

I looked at Cathryn and said, “He’s on his way over. Let’s get the hell out of here!” We scrambled around quickly, me grabbing the first shoes I could find, my purse, and some clothes to sleep in. Her car was parked in the lot of the shopping center next to our house, and we ran toward it as
fast as we could. I was wearing a bright blue sweater, a black skirt, and black stockings. She turned to look back at me and make sure I was keeping up, went directly to the white pumps that rounded out my ensemble, and said, “You look like
Minnie Mouse!” I slept on her couch and lay awake the entire night, replaying past events in my head like a movie.

The next morning I went back to the house, opened the garage door, and saw that his truck wasn’t there.
Phew, he’s gone.
I opened the
door wearily to enter the house, and as soon as I did, he came bounding around the corner looking like he hadn’t slept much either.

I dropped my stuff and tried to move past him quickly, but
he grabbed me and mashed me into a possessive hug. I struggled to get out, but he moved me to the couch and threw me down so that I was half sitting and half lying. He then burrowed his face into my chest and sobbed. My stomach lurched.

“Please don’t go! PLEASE. PLEASE. I love you. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do this to you again, please.”

I started sobbing too. “You’re NOT sorry! You’re only sorry you got caught. LET ME GO!”

“Never! I will never let you go—you’re my wife!” And
then he kissed me. He kissed me like I imagined you kiss someone who you thought you didn’t want but now did. It had been so long since we kissed like that, I volleyed back with the same intensity and lost control of everything.
Including my bowels.

I literally shit my pants.

I pushed him off of me and ran to the bathroom and locked the door, horrified. He ran after me and pounded on it. “Let me in!!”

“Leave me alone!”

I took off my clothes and immediately got in the shower to wash off the filth and then wrapped my hair and myself in some towels. I waited a beat and then unlocked the door only to sense him shuffling on the other
side, so I relocked it. We waited it out—him on the floor in the hallway and me in the bathroom, both of us too exhausted to conduct a conversation through the door. I fell asleep, and finally, he left the house. I had cried a
lot up until that day, but after that I wouldn’t cry again for five years.

I temporarily moved to a friend’s. Leo tried to woo me back, but his attempts felt half-assed. Still, there was a part of me that just could not walk away without thinking about that moment on the couch, without thinking about the fact that everything was finally out in the open, and wondering if maybe something could be salvaged. It’s hard letting go of your first love, especially when you’re legally tied to him. So after nearly a month away, I
returned. And nearly a month after returning, I knew my marriage was over. It became clear that his avoidance of the topic was chronic. And it became clear that I needed to talk about it constantly to ever move on from it. We were in
limbo. So again, I turned to the only person I felt could help me process.

I called Charlotte—who had cut off all communication with Leo—and asked her to tell me again the things he said to her and the
things they did together so that I could remember and tap into that hurt. We handled these conversations completely unemotionally, and she took my calls all the time or returned them when I left messages. She was the only person—outside of myself—who allowed me to explore the affair and work through the impact it had on me. I finished each call with Charlotte feeling better. I don’t think I ever asked her once how she was doing.

I had come to several conclusions. Both of us contributed to
the downfall in communication; he wasn’t alone in that. Before all was revealed, Leo had gotten himself into a pickle. I understood that once he was there, there was no easy way to tell me. Here I was
needing
the truth
and thinking that the real crime—besides the affair—was withholding it from me. But I hadn’t put myself in his place. Would
I
have been able to tell the truth if the shoe were on the other foot? I honestly can’t answer that, but I’d like to think I wouldn’t let my spouse flail and struggle. I’d
like to think I would have been less passive than Leo, who was waiting for a path to present itself, rather than choosing one. During the times when he was more engaged in Charlotte, he’d hurt me and pushed our boundaries. I believe he
did this in the hopes that I’d become fed up and leave. Then he could just continue on with Charlotte, introducing her to his family and friends as someone he just started seeing at the appropriate time. When he thought about
what was at stake, including losing his relationship with my family and some friends and tarnishing his reputation, I believe he gave Charlotte the cold shoulder, hoping she’d break it off with him so he could resign himself to a life of mildly satisfying mediocrity (breaking that up with short-term future
dalliances, only this time much more discrete). It’s OK to discover your marriage isn’t what you wanted, I concluded. But it was not OK for me to stay married to someone who was afraid to take the reins in his own life.