What was Frank’s explanation?
“I’d already checked into my room when the boss called,” he said when he came on the line. “It just seemed easier to stay there.”
I didn’t buy it.
On top of his one night a week in New York, Frank began to go out without me one night a week in Philadelphia. He called it a “boys’ night out.” He went to a health club and played basketball, or so he said. I suspected otherwise. Sometimes he came home at midnight. Sometimes as late as two a.m. Sometimes we had sex when he got into bed, sometimes we didn’t. Certainly, we had less than we used to. I resented his going out another night a week to have fun without me. I was bored and miserable and jealous.
“I want to go out with you,” I complained.
“Who’s going to stay with the kids? We can’t afford a baby sitter.”
“So why can’t you stay home with me?”
“I’ll tell you what,” he countered. “You take a night out a week, too, and I’ll stay with the kids. How would that be?”
“What on earth would I do by myself?”
“Whatever you want.”
“What I want is to be with you.”
“Somebody has to stay with the kids,” he repeated. “We can’t afford a baby sitter.”
Married women didn’t go out at night without their husbands in those days. It didn’t occur to us. We had no real social lives apart from our husbands. I had two old friends, Susan and Janet. Janet had three small children, Susan two. Our social life consisted of one of them coming over for the afternoon with her kids, or me going over there with mine—it all depended on whose husband didn’t need the car that day. The kids would play together in the basement playroom and we’d stand in the kitchen drinking coffee and making tuna salad. Sometimes we went to the playground.
But Frank kept egging me to go out without him, so one night I did. I left him with the kids, took the car, and drove around the suburbs of Philadelphia for an hour. Then I went to see a movie by myself. I had a terrible time. I didn’t want to be out alone. I wanted to be with my husband. I wanted him to pay more attention to me, listen to my frustrations and problems. I wanted him to love me. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to be with me anymore, why whatever fun he was having he chose to have without me. The only possible explanation was that he had found another woman. I believed I’d failed him as a wife.
Looking back, I now realize that Frank was staying away from home because it was so unpleasant there. Nancy made it so; her presence caused an unusual and intolerable amount of tension. But neither Frank nor I knew that at the time. If just one doctor had said to us, “Nancy is a disturbed child and you are putting up with a very difficult situation that will put a strain on your marriage,” we would have understood what was happening to us. But nobody told us that. The doctors insisted that Nancy was a normal child. As a result, Frank and I had no choice but to believe that our problems came from each other. And we did have problems. Both of us felt stifled, trapped, depressed. Both of us felt the pain of failed expectations. Life was not working out the way we’d hoped. But we suffered in separate spheres.
“I’m going to go out and play some ball,” he said one night at dinner.
“Why don’t you want to be with me? What am I doing wrong?”
“You’re not doing anything wrong—except bugging me.”
“Frank, are you seeing another woman?”
“No!”
“Why won’t you admit it?”
He pushed his plate away. “How can you keep accusing me like this?”
“Because I think you’re with someone else.”
“Deb, I love you. I just need to get out.”
“Where do you really go?”
“Stop keeping such close tabs on me!”
“I have the right.”
“Goddamnit, you’re smothering me!”
He stormed out. I sat down and wrote him a letter. I apologized for getting on his nerves. I said I was sorry I wasn’t a good enough wife and I’d try to be better. I said if there was anything I could do to improve, I’d do it—all he had to do was tell me. I said I loved him. By the time I finished writing the letter it was thirty pages long.
He wasn’t home when I got into bed. I left the letter on his pillow. I pretended I was asleep when he got home at two a.m. He sat on the edge of the bed, read by the light on the nightstand. I buried my nose in my pillow and fought back the tears.
He got undressed, turned out the light, and climbed into bed. I stirred as if I’d been asleep.
“I didn’t realize you were so upset,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”
He made love to me and promised he’d spend more time at home. He did skip his boys’ night out—for one week. Then he started up again.
I desperately wished I had someone to talk to about what was happening between Frank and me. But I didn’t discuss personal things with anyone then, not my mother, not Janet or Susan. I particularly longed to tell Janet and Susan what was happening—in the hope that they would have some insight, some advice—in the hope that they would say he probably wasn’t having an affair. But I couldn’t bring myself to air the matter. It just wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
So I kept it shut. When David was old enough for nursery school, I began substitute teaching a couple of days a week. A mother’s helper stayed with David in the afternoons. It was, on the one hand, nice to be doing something and bringing home that extra eighteen dollars for a day’s work. On the other hand, teaching just seemed like an extension of my at-home confinement. Usually I taught at Nancy and Susan’s elementary school. I drove them to school with me, waited for them after school in the parking lot to drive them home. I was spending seven days and seven nights a week with children, either my own or other people’s.
When Frank and I did go out socially, it was over to Janet’s or Susan’s for dinner, kids in tow. We seldom had enough money to get a competent baby sitter and also go out for a nice meal or to a show.
So it was a special occasion when a couple we knew through Frank’s business invited us out to dinner one Saturday night to a very nice French restaurant in the country. I felt very good about being able to get dressed up and go out with Frank. I put on a blue and white knit dress my mother had bought for me. I never really had many chances to wear it.
It was a balmy summer evening and the restaurant was lovely, with strolling musicians and an open-air garden dining area. As we were going to our table our friends spotted another couple they knew at a table with three other couples. They stopped to say hi and introduced us. He was in his early forties, with blond hair and a deep tan. She was very loud. They were both expensively dressed. Our friends had mentioned the man before. After all, none of us knew too many millionaires.
After the man had introduced us to the other people at the table, he turned to me and said, “What’s that between your eyes?”
He was referring to a birthmark I had there.
“My third eye,” I replied, straightfaced. It was my standard reply.
He laughed. His wife did not.
Then we went on to our table with our friends and had a nice dinner.
On Monday morning the man phoned and said he wanted to take me to lunch.
“You’re very pretty,” he said, “and I’d like to get to know you better.”
I was absolutely staggered. I hadn’t been approached by a man in over ten years. I was also flattered that someone so sophisticated and worldly would want to spend time with me. Especially since Frank didn’t.
“What do you say?” he asked. “We’ll eat. Talk. Maybe go for a drive?”
It sounded fantastic. It also sounded very wrong. If you were married you didn’t go out to lunch with a man. It was dishonest and clandestine. He would want more than lunch, eventually, and I’d been raised to believe that infidelity was the very worst thing that could happen in a marriage. Nice women didn’t sleep around. They didn’t even think about it.
/> “I’d like to,” I said. “But I really can’t.”
“Not even just for lunch?”
“I … I’d have to get a baby sitter for my little boy, and if I’m not working, well, I don’t have money to pay her.”
“I’d be happy to pay.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t do that.”
“Please, the money isn’t important. I don’t mind.”
“Well … I don’t know.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you think it over. I’ll call you in a week. Would that be okay?”
I swallowed. No harm in a phone call. “Okay,” I said.
I spent the next week thinking it over long and hard. It sounded so nice, the idea of going out to lunch and talking to someone. I never got to go anyplace. I deserved to get out and have some fun. Frank did—and with women, I was certain. So why not me, with a man. A polite, cultivated man who saw something in me. It didn’t necessarily have to lead to anything else. He hadn’t said anything about sex. Just lunch, maybe a drive. That’s all he’d said.
Looking back at myself then, I suspect I wasn’t the most sexually naive twenty-seven-year-old woman in the world, but I must have been pretty damned close to it. I hadn’t dated since I was sixteen, before Frank and I started going together. And when I was sixteen, a lunch date was a lunch date. You didn’t finish eating, pay the check, and say “Let’s fuck.” You had lunch. Period. I realized that if I continued to see this man he would probably have sex in mind, but who said I had to continue to see him? Lunch. Once.
I needed to be paid attention to. My husband, I was certain, was seeing other women. I felt inadequate. My self-image was low. I had no escape valve, no one to talk to. I was vulnerable.
When he called a week later, I said yes.
Looking back on this experience fills me with such incredible sadness that I wish I could erase it from my memory. But I cannot. It happened, and it happened as a consequence of Nancy.
I didn’t sleep at all the night before my lunch date. I just lay there staring at the ceiling, asking myself why I was doing this. The answer: because Frank was doing it. I was doing it out of anger. I was retaliating.
I didn’t get dressed up. The neighbors would have noticed. The baby sitter would have noticed. I told her I was going shopping. It was the first time I had ever made myself unavailable. If something had happened that afternoon to one of the children, no one would have known where to find me.
I drove to the restaurant we’d agreed to meet at. It was in the Bucks County suburbs. It was a pretty well known place—the upstairs had been formed out of an old airplane—but no one I knew, myself included, had ever been there. Our date was for twelve thirty. I got there at twelve twenty and his silver Mercedes was already in the parking lot. I sat in my car for a few minutes, terrified. My hands were cold. Finally I went in.
He was sitting at a small table in the cocktail lounge. He smiled when he saw me, got up, pulled my chair out for me, and sat back down only when he was sure I was comfortable.
“We’ll have a drink,” he suggested.
“Fine,” I gasped.
“We’ll talk.”
“Fine.”
“We’ll have lunch.”
“Fine.”
I ordered a Cutty Sark and water. I don’t remember what he had. I wasn’t used to drinking at twelve thirty and the cocktail relaxed me almost immediately. I began to notice details, like that he had monogrammed shirt cuffs and manicured fingernails. He was the most elegant, well-mannered man I’d ever met. I found him attractive, but not in a sexual way. He was just about old enough to be my father.
We talked. He told me about his trips to Europe, his art collection, his yacht. He asked me what I did with my time. I told him. I mentioned that I was thinking about going back to school. He was interested in my views on politics and literature. I was glad to air them. I was well informed—I made a point of reading the news magazines and the Sunday New York Times every week—but never had much of a chance to discuss my opinions. Nobody was interested in them.
I ordered a second drink.
Our discussion was stimulating. I held my own. I realized, after a while, that I was enjoying myself. It was nice to be having some fun. I’m not cheating on my husband, I thought. I’m having an intelligent conversation. What was the harm in that? There were no sexual overtones—at least none that I picked up on.
I ordered the least expensive thing on the menu, out of habit.
After lunch we went out to the parking lot. His car glistened in the sunshine.
“It’s such a beautiful day,” he said. “Do you have time to take a drive?”
I had time. He opened the door, I got in, and he closed it for me. Frank hadn’t done that since our earliest dates. The inside of the Mercedes was incredibly luxurious. I soaked in the smell of the leather upholstery, ran my fingers over the polished hardwood dash. I settled back, feeling every bit like a fairy princess.
We drove through the countryside, not speaking much. After a while I realized I was seeing the same road markers and farmhouses again and again. We weren’t going anywhere, except around in circles. I assumed he was lost.
“Are we going to go around and around like this all day?” I teased.
He didn’t answer me, just swallowed uncomfortably.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“What I really want to do is make love to you,” he said quietly. He turned off the road. There was a motel there. He’d been circling it. He pulled over to the shoulder, stopped the car, and waited for my decision.
I didn’t say yes.
But I didn’t say no, either.
I could have said no. He would have politely returned me to my car and my husband. I could have stopped it, but I didn’t. I was swept away by the afternoon, by the man’s elegance. I was already in the wrong by meeting him for lunch. Taking that first step meant that taking the next one was much easier than you’d expect. And I was sexually curious. Frank had other partners, I believed. I might as well find out what he got out of it. I had no sexual experience beyond Frank. He was the only man I’d ever slept with.
I knew it was wrong. I did it anyway. It was an escape, a delicious escape from Nancy. For an entire hour I’d not thought of her once, not played referee, not walked on eggs awaiting her blow-ups, not felt she was my existence. For the very first time I was doing something that took my mind away from her. I deserved this. Now I understood why Frank was doing it. This was for me.
He pulled into the parking lot of the motel. I waited in the car while he got a room, my face red and hot from shame. He came out, got in the car, pulled up in front of our room.
I went in ahead of him. It was a blandly furnished room with a Gideon’s Bible on the nightstand. I wondered if Susan and Janet could ever imagine me in this place with this man. I certainly couldn’t. This was somebody else, not me.
I felt embarrassed getting undressed in front of a stranger. He seemed embarrassed, too. We left the lights off and we got into the bed.
He was very gentle. I kept my eyes shut tight the entire time. It was not a moving experience; I heard no bells. Nor was it wildly passionate and adventuresome. I wasn’t particularly sexually adept or informed. But it was not unpleasant. Mostly, I wished he was Frank, that it was my Frank making love to me. That was what I really wanted—to be with Frank, to have him care about me the way this man seemed to.
We were there about forty-five minutes. Then I said I had to get home. We dressed and got back in the car, and he drove me back to the restaurant with the airplane on top of it. We didn’t talk. I felt very down, very crummy. I felt as if I’d lost my virginity.
“I’ll call you again,” he said.
“I … I’ll have to think about it,” I said.
We did not kiss.
I drove home, worried that Frank would be back from work already. He wasn’t—it was still only three o’clock. I felt very dirty and guilty when I went in the house. I was su
re the baby sitter would know where I had been, what I had done. She didn’t. I took a long shower.
When Frank came home I immediately wanted to shout “Do you know what I did? I slept with another man!” I wanted him to say “You bad girl! Don’t you ever do that again! I love you!”
I wanted him to notice, to care.
That night he wanted me in bed. I thought somehow he’d be able to tell I’d been with someone else. He couldn’t. I felt very uncomfortable, very awkward. He didn’t notice that either.
The man called me a few days later and asked to see me again. I didn’t want to see him. I put him off. Then I got mad at Frank for going out two nights in a row. We quarreled. Like he had before, Frank challenged me to take my own regular night out.
I took him up on it.
I began to see the man about one evening a month. He took me to nice restaurants and to bed while Frank stayed home with the children. Before I left, I always pored over the movie page in the newspaper so I’d be able to tell Frank where I’d been in case he asked. I checked the reviews so I’d be able to tell Frank how it was, in case he asked. He never asked. All he ever said to me when I came in was “Did you have a nice time?”
I was having a nice time. I enjoyed the food, the conversation, the attention. I enjoyed having a piece of my life that was mine alone. The sex? I considered it a price to be paid for the companionship. Never once did we go to bed without me wishing he was Frank. I liked him as a good friend. But I was not in love with him.
It was a bittersweet experience. Obviously I enjoyed it or I would have stopped it. It was a comfortable relationship, with no pressure coming from either of us to make it more than what it was. He wasn’t looking to leave his wife, nor I Frank. But I hated the dishonesty, the secrecy. The image of a woman who cheats on her husband was not the image I had of myself. I felt shabby. At the end of each evening I would drive home, glancing at his headlights in my rearview mirror (he always followed to make sure I got home safely, turning off just before we got to my neighborhood) and telling myself that this was the last time, that this relationship was not the answer to my problems.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 8