After my bedside declaration re: The Text Message, my husband, D, had suddenly found the momentum to join us in the downstairs area and was now quite awake. He looked defensive and slightly befuddled. I'd only let him come as far as the bottom of the stairs; our little one was safely around the corner, playing with crayons.
"What the hell is going on between you two? Why is she writing to you like this?" I tried to demand. It was a hesitant balance of indignity and fearful pain. I had met Sally about a month before this. In fact, she'd given me a lovely tour of her lovely home, a home that my husband was working on for her. It was his first paying job in over two years. She had two kids and a husband and an exotic dance studio in her backyard. I'd thought she was "safe" because really, who on earth would want a married, mother-of-two, over-40 bellydancer? Who, praytell, who?
"It's just flirting," he threw back.
"Flirting? This is not flirting. This is cheating." When I said that word out loud, I couldn't believe how false and true it felt at the same time.
"It's not cheating!" D proclaimed. He actually sounded indignant. Priceless. "It's just flirting and it doesn't mean anything."
Inside my adrenalinized head, I could hear that little sing-songy voice starting to hum, "Oh, yes. it does. Oh, yes, it does. It means everything." I turned it off, one of many times that I would have such an interaction with that little voice.
Then I turned it back on again, and looked him in the eye. "Are you sleeping with her?" Each of those words hurt, almost physically, to say out loud.
He looked at me, only slightly less defensively than before. "No, I'm not sleeping with her."
"Have you had any physical interaction with her that could be in any way considered inappropriate?"
He actually started to look panicked. "No," he said, this time more quietly. The indignation was starting to wear, on both of us.
"How much of this texting have you been doing?" I said, more quietly too, now, as I saw out of the corner of my eye that our little one (too little, thank all that is holy, to really comprehend what was happening) had started to notice this particular exchange.
Sidebar. Our marriage had been unhappy for a long, long time. Looking back, I'm not sure it was ever what I would classify as a "happy marriage." The relationship was stressful. It was exhausting simply to navigate through a day within it. In fact, a mere few weeks before this, the Day of the Text Message, I had written in my journal:
"Why do I sometimes wish that SOMETHING, anything, would happen so we can finally break up? That you would cheat on me, or make enough money to get your own place, something like that." [And close Sidebar.]
I waited for him to respond. "I don't know," he said. "We chat a lot, and you know, Facebook and stuff."
"Wait - isn't Sally married?" I asked.
"Sure." At least now he has a shred of decency enough to be sheepish. "But they're really unhappy." Noticing the rapidly darkening expression on my face, he quickly added, "But that doesn't matter because nothing is going on. I swear."
I sighed, finding myself in a moment of objective clarity, realizing what I've just received from dear old married, mother-of-two, bellydancer Sally: a big old blessing, wrapped in a tremendous pile of shit.
And then I thought of my parents, who were, at that moment, somewhere over Texas. What the hell was I going to tell them when they arrived in Seattle, to a daughter's marriage having turned into something completely different while they were at 35,000 feet?
I was going to have to tell them the truth, finally. Oh dear.
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