XIII. Confession

XIII. Confession

Toward the end of February of the new year, Tina paid me a surprise visit at Bear Creek.  I got a  message about 8:00 in the morning telling me my wife would be there right after school. I had no idea what she was doing up in Alaska--I thought maybe she had got a last-minute invitation to a conference or something-- but I was delighted anyway, and couldn't wait to see her.   I was anxious to meet face-to-face, and go deeper into the problems we were having, and hear more about the problems she was having.  Of course, I was hungry for the sex. 

She arrived in a rental car, uncharacteristically on time.  She looked great; she was wearing a green patterned, gauze-like blouse, accented by a classy green scarf, and her best black suit pants.  This attire seemed to confirm in my mind the idea that she had been involved in some professional writer function.  How wrong I was.  It takes about six minutes to drive from the school to my house, and in those six minutes she confessed that she had been having an affair with Dan Tucker, that she had just spent a week in Eagle, that she had gone there to end her affair with him, attend some famous dog race, and then go back  to San Jose; but once back at the airport, she couldn't get on the plane without coming to see me first, to tell me the truth, and give me the opportunity to throw her out if that was what I was going to do.  

I could see she was hanging by a thread, her guilt and mental exhaustion were so great she could barely hold it together to give me this confession; so I was put in the weird position of having to be understanding and forgiving to her when I was the deeply offended one.  I told her I wasn't surprised, that I had known it already, but that was not exactly true.  As I have mentioned, I had a  deeply rooted suspicion that this was  going on, but it was like one of these things you know is true, but you know is going to happen, but that you don't want to happen, are in denial about it happening, and when it finally happens you feel surprised even though you saw it coming from a long way away.  As she sat there behind the driver's wheel blurting out her confession, it was as though I hung on her lips and was hearing her words a split second before she actually said them.  The webwork of fate  was thick in the air like a spider's masterpiece; the threads and counter threads were strung between us and around us like a cray cat's cradle, and I looked at her as through the wrong end of the telescope; she was small  like a distant memory of herself, she was frail, and her tiny tears glistened like morning stars about to be eclipsed by the sun, or evening stars just coming onto the horizon.                   

I don't know how I would have reacted if this had happened nine months earlier, but since I had just spent the last several weeks in a process of intensive emotional restructuring, I was able to absorb most of my feelings of anger and hurt into behaviors of compassion and understanding.  This was not hard to do because she was a pathetic, quivering mess.  She started immediately into hysterical fits of weeping, cries that seemed to split her soul apart, shattering her body, crumbling her insides like ground glass.  

The first thing she wanted to do was have sex, a kind of ceremony of restitution, to tell me she chose me, and that she was sorry.  I'm afraid I failed her again at this moment, because I couldn't do it.  Yes, I was horny as hell, I desired her wildly, madly; but, when it came to actually doing it, I was repelled at the thought of having my penis somewhere where another man's had been, and I couldn't do it. I couldn't stand the thought of having my lips where  the subtle residue of another man's saliva might still cling.  But worst of all I kept imagining her in his embrace, looking at him with open eyes, taking him in, loving him, and not loving me. 

This was not really a problem for her anyway, because she kept taking off on these wild fits of grief,screaming, "I'm never going to be happy.  I'm never going to be happy.   I wish I were dead.  I wish I were dead."   At first I thought these were screams of guilt, or the unreasoning desperation of depression which has no  rational focus but itself--but I soon realized that she was grieving for him, goddamned Dan Tucker. She was weeping in my arms, her husband of 25 years, pining after the  love of a fur trapper who had not cared enough about her to keep her, whom she had given the chance to keep her and who had said, "No."  She told him that she was coming to end her relationship with him, but in her secret self she hoped he would fight for her, and make her stay. It broke her heart that he didn't.  It had worked like this:

She had known from the beginning it was never going to last.  She couldn't understand the attraction ion the first place—who was this narrow-minded, limited, uneducated mountain man? The personification of a dream she had had when she was in high school, but which she thought she had grown out of? 

When she was a senior in high school she had listened to hillbilly music, worn patched jeans, and visited her sister in Colorado, as a way of rejecting the big city life that she knew had corrupted so many of her purest sensibilities; she had fantasized about ending up with some sensitive, guitar playing, bandana-ed country boy, who stamped and picked out John Prine songs on his rickety porch, the Rockies in the background, his beat-up Chevy pickup with the mongrel dog and the gun rack in the back, parked in his dirt driveway.  She imagined baking pies for a pack of mangey young-uns, a small simple voice under a big sky.

 Twenty-five years ago she had given up this vision for me, the other half of the equation: the tortured, genius artist striving to splash his name across that big sky with neon sequins flashing in the black night, a noble, nay heroic, large minded man.  But when she ran across  big-bearded Dan Tucker squatting in squalor in a one room hut in Eagle, there was a flicker of recognition, the return of a forgotten memory: "This is what I gave up for that asshole, this is what I used to want. Here he is.  So alone, and so in need of me. How can I turn away?  How can I deny this part, the smaller part, of my destiny?"  

One thing that has always pissed me off is becoming a statistic.  I had a good friend in L.A., a millionaire now,  who used to say that he expected things that happen to most people to happen to him.  I've never felt that way;  I've always thought of myself as one-of-a-kind, and, when something that happens all the time to every body else happens to me, I get annoyed at how my self-image is compromised by cold reality. My point is this: it is well understood that people in the manic state of a bipolar episode have affairs, and it is well understood that people who have affairs often revert to some arrested adolescent self-image that was never brought to full flower.  Furthermore,  it is well known that spies often end up alienating their spouses and losing them in divorce. It is just such piss-off for me to have to admit that  Tina and I are textbook examples of one of the really fucked things that typically happen to people.