12. CSI: My Marriage

For a day and a half I stewed on this. I pretty much thought of nothing else that wouldn't keep me and Little One alive and fed. What would it mean, I thought, if the last few months of my relationship with D had been one, big fat lie?

Maybe he wasn't out "playing pool" every night. [Insert your own sexual-innuendo-laden euphemism here.]

Maybe that hairband on the sink and the pair of not-my-size underwear that I found in my laundry a few days after coming back from Florida really were NOT mine. (I know, I know. But at the time I found them, I thought, they could be, since my organizational skills are inconsistent at best.)

For that day and a half, I played out every single scenario in my head where I had suddenly gone from partner-in-divorce to Fool. Complete, utter Fool, I thought. How could you be so dumb?

It was at this point that I started taking a half a milligram of Xanax every evening. My doctor had prescribed them to me right after D had been arrested. (I promise, I'll get to that story soon.) The Xanax helped me stay focused and calm, and unlike the anti-depressants I had been on after having Little One, these didn't make me feel all fuzzy and complacent.

No, I was not complacent, not at all. But if you'd asked D what I was like these few days, to him, he'd tell you, I was completely, utterly "normal." Not a word was said by me about the emailer. I never once tipped my hand as to the potential knowledge I had, because I knew that this knowledge could change the course of things.

I forwarded the anonymous email to my lawyer, whose response was, "It's not something you can use in the divorce, legally speaking, even if it turns out that it's true. State laws don't allow for that. However, whoever sent that email to you is a real jerk."

I hadn't yet really contemplated the motivation of someone to send me that email. And after two days of not hearing back, I was starting to think that my brilliant "ping maneuver" had failed.

I was wrong. The anonymous emailer responded, upping the ante, and forcing my forced nonchalance right out the proverbial window.

From: yourhubbyhavingaffair [husbandishavinganaffair@gmail.com]

Sent: Wednesday, November 18 1:17 AM

To: Penelope


Subject: RE: this is difficult to say



Glad you knew. He's also been carrying on a very public relationship w/her on Facebook. He is don jeremy, she is sally lee. 

Wish u the best.

Crap. Remember that can of worms, the one I was worried that I might be opening? Here it was. And not only was it here, it was mine to investigate if I were so inclined.

I was going to be nothing if not polite, in the hopes that I could find out, definitively, who this emailer was.

From: Penelope

Sent: Wednesday, November 18,  8:27 AM

To: husbandishavinganaffair@gmail.com

Subject: Re: this is difficult to say

Thank you. I really appreciate this. I do wish I knew who you were, but appreciate the lengths you went to stay anonymous. If ever you'd like to assuage my curiosity I am all ears.

Thanks again.

Penelope

I knew that Sally Lee was Sally's bellydancer account, but this "Don Jeremy" account that my husband seemed to have set up was completely new to me. Dumb ass.

But before I could seriously contemplate going in and looking to see what I would find,  I got another anonymous email:

From: yourhubbyhavingaffair
To: Penelope
Sent: Wed Nov 18 21:51:06 

Subject: RE: this is difficult to say

I had it wrong. Her name is Sally Smith. Hope this info helps you.

A-ha, I thought. This is someone who wants me to investigate her personal page. This is someone who wants me to find the right Facebook page to view, so I can actually see this interaction. This, therefore, must be personal to this person, too.

I knew I had a major decision to make here. I narrowed it down to one of two choices:
a) Take the easier path, which would be to not look at the Facebook page, to stop emailing this person, and to forget about everything. I would just make for the divorce finish line as quickly as possible.
b) Take an anti-nausea medication and dive right in to Facebook, gathering evidence of D's amazingly dumb duplicity and figuring out a way to turn it to my advantage.

I went with B. Minus the anti-nausea medication, which I really should have followed through on.

I went into Facebook, and I typed in Sally Smith. Her profile came up first in the list of people, because we had a "mutual friend" - my husband, under his real-name Facebook account.

I took a deep breath, and clicked on her profile page. It was completely available to me. Someone has "Friends of Friends" as their setting, I thought. That's not very smart if they're trying to cover things up.

It didn't take long to find a comment on the page by "Don Jeremy." Thanks to the power of Facebook, and its "Older Posts" function, I was able to find all the proof I need that D and Sally had indeed been intimately involved since early, early September. Probably right around the date that D and I had agreed we wouldn't see anyone until he moved out, because we were both dedicated to keeping our relationship the focus, for our sakes and especially for Little One's.

Well, he'd wasted no time in throwing that relationship under the bus.

I clicked on "Don Jeremy"'s name. Want to know the best part? While I couldn't see the profile for Don Jeremy - at least he'd been smart enough to adjust his settings to Friends Only - do you know what his profile picture was?

A picture of himself, sitting and playing guitar at age 10.

Yes, really.

In a session the following day, my therapist summed it up nicely. "What an asshole," he said under his breath, shaking his head.

So now I knew. I knew that I'd been lied to for months, been made to feel bad for all kinds of things in the relationship, been asked repeatedly for alimony, all while D was NOT looking for a job. Had been yelled at, threatened, and just all-around pretty much mistreated. Given that this was D, you'd think I wouldn't have been surprised, but I was. This was a new low. Even for him.

And during this time, Ms. Sally - I'm sorry, Mrs. Sally, the middle-aged bellydancer with two children and a husband - had apparently been baking D lots of homemade pies, letting him paint her toenails, and enjoying long nights of very intimate behaviors with him. I can't really describe how painful it was to read those comments between them, because it is quite simply still too raw for me to eloquently discuss. While the forensics side of my brain appreciated the evidence, and took screen shots of everything, the rest of me was pretty devastated to discover that this woman had indeed been intimately involved in our lives - as a family, as a couple - since, well, before the marriage officially ended.

And D had lied. Oh, how he had lied.

I wrote back to Mr. Anonymous, because I know suspected I knew who it was. Ever polite, that's me.

From: Penelope
To: 'husbandishavinganaffair@gmail.com'

Sent: Wed Nov 18 22:25:54 

Subject: Re: this is difficult to say

Thanks. Legally speaking, not a whole lot of help. But certainly good to have my decision reinforced!

Please know how much you have ultimately helped me and that I am grateful for you telling me these details.

I knew what I was going to do. I was going to come down on D. Hard. I just had to figure out how.