by Jen Waite
I just don’t understand how this happened. How does Marco have a girlfriend and I am with our three-month-old baby alone in Maine? How did he change into a completely different person overnight? How is he still doing it? How has he not apologized? Suddenly, I realize that I am actually still waiting for a genuine, heartfelt apology. “I’m so sorry that I started fucking someone else right when you gave birth and betrayed you and lied to you and treated you like my enemy and destroyed you so completely that there is nothing left.” Is that what I expect?
He is never going to feel remorse or guilt. He still thinks he is the victim in this situation.
I remember all the research I have done on psychopathy. That the psychopath’s personality was never real, that the psychopath never felt love or genuine intimacy. The psychopath sees all other people as mere objects, not human beings. Objects that immediately lose their value if they are no longer feeding the psychopath’s ego. I was a toaster, I remind myself. A toaster that no longer worked and therefore no longer had any use to Marco. Me wanting Marco to fall on his knees and express remorse for what he has done is like a broken toaster demanding a heartfelt apology as it is carted away to the dump. “You used me up and then threw me away like I was nothing. How could you just replace me right away? How could you?” I imagine its whinnying, metallic cries.
By the time I am pushing Louisa up the rocky driveway, I am breathing normally. I play with Lulu and nurse her and tell her that eventually, soon, I will be better. I look at the clock and somehow it is 5:00 P.M. I sigh with relief and start Lulu’s tubby. As I nurse her, her eyes flicker shut, and I think, I made it. I am going to make it.
BEFORE
LOUISA was almost two weeks old, and the two of us had just spent more than a week in Maine with my parents. Those ten days were the height of Louisa’s colic, and she vacillated between soft fussing and enraged screaming the entire time. My parents and I took turns walking her around and around and around the kitchen, bouncing and shushing, pausing near the refrigerator in the hopes that the white noise would finally lull her to sleep. Much of the time I was not soothing Louisa, I spent on my phone, Googling “newborn screams nonstop” and texting Marco things like “I think we made a terrible mistake” and “I can’t do this.” I told my parents I shouldn’t have come to Maine.
“I need to be near Marco,” I said through tears on the third day home. “I can’t do this.”
“Jen, I know it’s so, so hard, but he wouldn’t even be able to help you right now. He said he would barely be home while his boss is on vacation.”
I knew that if I was in New York, I would be alone in the apartment with Louisa most of the time and her screaming wouldn’t magically stop, but I felt with every cell of my body that if I could just be near Marco, I would be less anxious. Those ten days seemed like an eternity. When I finally got back to New York, after a six-hour drive—throughout which Louisa slept almost the entire way, thank God—I collapsed into Marco’s arms and let out all the air in my lungs from the past ten days.
“My babies,” he said, breathing me in, kissing my forehead and lips, and then kneeling down to the car seat and kissing a sleeping, angelic Louisa, and I thought, Of course she decides to sleep for six hours straight today.
Marco was late for work and rushing out the door, but just being with him for a few moments made the past couple of weeks suddenly seem less horrible. I watched him scramble around, buttoning up his shirt and tightening his belt, and I thought, It will be OK. We can get through this together. Before he left, he paused in front of the door and said, “Oh crap, babe, I kinda sorta broke the bed a couple nights ago.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him, exasperated. “Where am I going to sleep tonight?”
“It will hold for a while, but one of the legs of the bed frame snapped so the bed kind of slopes to one side. I sat on the end of the bed really hard a few nights ago,” he said sheepishly.
“Jesus, fatso!” I said.
“Hey! I just have a large badonkadonk,” he said, slipping on his tie and grabbing his suit jacket. “Oh, and I also took all the bedsheets to the laundromat. I wanted to make the bed with new sheets before you got home, but I’ve just been running around and now I have to leave. . . .”
“Marco. Seriously? I have to make the bed after a six-hour drive? You do know I just gave birth, right?”
“Baby, I’m sorry, I really didn’t have time. But I love you so much? And you’re the most amazing wife ever in the world?”
“You’re really, really lucky that I’ve missed you so much for the past ten days,” I said as he leaned in to kiss me one more time from the doorway.
“I missed you, too. I missed you guys so much, you have no idea.”
After Marco left for work, I climbed up on a kitchen chair, straining to reach bedsheets and a fresh duvet cover from the top of the closet. The area in between my legs was still sore and swollen from the second-degree tear I got pushing out Louisa, and I was lightheaded from the six-hour drive and the overload of hormones still coursing through my body. It took me forty minutes to make the bed and fit the comforter into the duvet cover. I cried when I finally finished and laid down. The bed sank so far to one side that I almost rolled off. My dad ended up coming over that night and wedging a suitcase under the frame to temporarily keep the bed level. After he left, I tiptoed back into the bedroom and laid down silently, listening for Louisa’s soft snores from her crib at the foot of the bed. I knew she would be up to nurse in a couple of hours, and I shut my eyes tightly, willing myself to sleep. My eyes flicked open to a text message from Marco lighting up my phone: “I’m so happy you guys are home.”
I closed my eyes again and felt my body relax. Louisa’s snores lulled me to sleep.
AFTER
MY parents arrived home from Paris yesterday. Today my mom had the idea to check our Seamless, GrubHub, and iTunes accounts the Sunday that Marco had off while Louisa and I were in Maine.
“I bet you anything he ordered a bunch of food and movies and she was there the entire day,” my mom says. “And that’s when they broke the bed.”
We are trying to piece together exactly what happened during the months of December and January. I have been in the dark for so long, and there have been so many lies, that I am digging and digging for whatever truth I can find through my amateur detective work. Marco still messages me on a regular basis that “there was never any physical relationship with that person.” If Marco will never, ever own up, then I want just one concrete piece of evidence so that there is no longer even the tiniest bit of me that wonders.
“There’s a ton of Seamless and GrubHub orders, but they’re not just on his day off. Look, we left for Maine on January first, right? That was a Thursday. He was working nonstop, the entire time we were gone. But look at Friday and Saturday nights. And then again the next week. He ordered food to our apartment a bunch of nights around eight P.M. That doesn’t make any sense. He was working those nights. He was working the entire time we were in Maine,” I say again. My mind bangs together these two contrasting pieces of information and then fizzles. I can’t make sense of the online food orders. “Maybe he went into work really, really late?” Even to my own ears the words sound hollow and false.
My mom puts on her reading glasses and peers at my phone.
“Jen,” she says matter-of-factly, “he wasn’t working while we were in Maine. That’s why the phone calls started on January eleventh. Marco and Viktorija were together the entire time we were in Maine right after Louisa was born.”
I have the familiar feeling of my brain being covered in sludge as I try to make an argument for why this can’t be true. The thought passes through my head quickly, But he was furious he didn’t get any days off when Louisa was born. There’s no way he took time off while we were in Maine, but it evaporates before it makes its way to my mouth. And then my mom says what I’ve already pieced together
somewhere deep in the cavernous walls of my foggy brain.
“He took paternity days while you and Lulu were in Maine. He spent them with Croella at your apartment.”
—
WHILE Louisa naps, I go to the websites about sociopaths again. I click on a sublink that reads “Sociopaths: A Lack of Conscience.” I read that sociopaths have absolutely no conscience. Whenever they seemingly do something that falls in line with societal standards of “good” or “moral” it is only because it benefits them in some way. While they are smart enough to understand that society deems certain things (cheating, lying, murder, rape) as “bad,” they do not actually feel that there is anything wrong with these things. Most sociopaths don’t murder or rape because they understand that there would be very large, and bothersome, consequences if they got caught, not because their conscience or inner moral compass is conflicted about such acts. In fact, they have no inner moral compass. The only voice that directs their actions is the voice that says, “This feeds my ego and feels good,” or “This is advantageous to me.” The concept of right and wrong is beneath them. They believe they are superior to most people, and so the rules that apply to everyone else do not apply to them. For every time my brain screams, You will never understand. Stop trying, another voice booms, You must make sense of what happened to you.
It is not the cheating that fills my mind almost every waking minute now; it is the abrupt change in personality from adoring husband to heartless stranger. I have always, on some level, understood relationships that crumble and end in cheating and bitterness. “To be honest, I saw that coming,” I would say to my friends when the news hit about another long-term couple going through a horrific breakup. Or, “I’m not super surprised,” I told my mom, about the neighbors embattled in a bitter divorce, who had had a habit of getting overly tipsy and slamming each other with passive-aggressive one-liners at the neighborhood holiday parties. But my marriage? My husband? My Marco?
I look back at the sublink titles. “Cognitive Dissonance: When Your Heart and Brain Can’t Get on the Same Page.” I click. Anyone involved in a relationship with a psychopath goes through a long period of something called cognitive dissonance. It is a period of time during which you are trying to merge two realities: that the person you thought was your best friend and the love of your life is actually nothing but an illusion; his sole objective was to build you up so that he could destroy you in the worst way possible. Even a “low-functioning” sociopath like Marco, who may not be aware of his own personality disorder, makes his way through life with the instinctive mission to conquer and destroy. Many targets cling to denial for months as they stubbornly refuse to believe that the person they were madly in love with a few months earlier, the person who seemingly worshipped them, is now cold and dismissive. Even while encountering more and more lies and evidence of infidelity, they try to reclaim and relive the blissful period they had at the beginning of the relationship. An internal battle wages between the heart and brain as contradictory realities clash against one another. I was idealized for five years. My reality was solid for five years and then torn to shreds overnight.
“Well, fuck, no wonder,” I mutter to myself as I read that cognitive dissonance often presents itself in panic attacks as your mind alternates between trying to digest and suppress these conflicting realities. Under the thread about cognitive dissonance, I see a thread titled, “Gaslighting—One of the P’s Favorite Tools.”
“What the hell is gaslighting?” I ask, clicking on the link. Gaslighting is a psychological tool that psychopaths use to mess with their victims’ hold on reality during the devalue phase. It’s a form of mental manipulation that eventually causes the target to question her own sanity and to mistrust her perception of reality. The most common example is a P denying something he said or did. The P is so adamant and incredulous in his denial that his partner second-guesses herself and then finally decides that she must be confused, misremembering, going insane. I think back to the day Marco tagged and then untagged me in the sunglasses picture. How easily I decided to let it go; how easily I let myself be convinced that I was probably confused—maybe Marco never tagged the picture, maybe I was going insane from sleep deprivation. And then of course there is the outright denial, first of any kind of relationship, then of a physical relationship with Croella, for months. Even now, as I find myself playing detective, doubting that I’ll ever know the truth is still driving me slightly crazy.
“Christ almighty, does he have a fucking sociopath handbook?” I ask out loud to my computer. Before I realize what I’m doing, I have Googled the name of the apartment broker. I find his work e-mail. I type furiously and then hit send. He will never respond. There is no way he will ever respond.
Twenty minutes later my phone rings. I look down at the area code, and I know it is the broker. Holy fuck. I clumsily answer my phone.
“Hello?” I say through a short spurt of breath.
“Jen?” His voice sounds far away and mumbled. “I got your e-mail. Usually I wouldn’t stick my nose in something like this, but I felt considering the circumstances, I had to call you.”
I can barely hear him. I stick my finger in my other ear and close my eyes.
“I showed your husband and a blonde, Eastern European girl two apartments in Manhattan.” His voice comes through crystal clear, and I realize he has taken me off speakerphone at the same time that I realize what he has just said. “Sometime in early January. They were holding hands and kissing. There was another listing agent there who can verify. I’m . . .” He clears his throat awkwardly. “I’m very sorry to tell you this.”
“Thank you,” I say gratefully. “Thank you so much.”
I hang up and run downstairs and tell my mom. She hugs me tightly. I’m crying and laughing incredulously.
“Finally, Jenny,” she says. “We finally know.”
—
“YOU need to try to keep the thirty-thousand-foot view,” my mom tells me as I peer down at Croella’s Instagram profile for the thirtieth time today. “Don’t get lost down in all the details. Think about the big picture. Think about what he’s already done. Seeing new pictures isn’t going to change the fundamental horrific things he’s already done.”
I know she’s right. Nothing I could find out at this point could be worse. And really, why would it matter anyway? So I try to take my mom’s advice and look down from above the clouds, but I find myself falling to the ground a hundred times a day. Is he with her now? I wonder. Does he call her “babe” or “baby”? Is he the one who took her new profile picture at Central Park? I know these things don’t matter. They don’t change the outcome of what has already happened. I am a single mom living with my parents, and my life has been put in a snow globe and shaken so hard that the glass has cracked. Yet, I think about him constantly. I am obsessed with finding more and more proof that they are in some kind of sick relationship. Of course I know that they have been “together” for months, but Marco texts dozens of times a day adamantly denying that he is still involved with Croella. He says he is working on his “recovery” and finding “old Marco.” He tells me he’s made progress as to why he did what he did. (But what did you do, Marco? Can you actually say it yet?) He tells me that he wants his wife back; he wants his life back and everything that he had. When I ask him to remove her as a Facebook friend and unfollow her on Instagram, out of respect for me and Louisa, he becomes angry and aggressive or is completely silent. I know it is immature and pointless to make these requests. If he had any respect for me and Louisa he wouldn’t have broken our bed with another woman. But I need to call his bluff. I want him to know that I am no longer falling for his act. It is a silly game to play considering the gravity of what he has done. I know that the very fact that I am playing means that he is still winning. But I don’t know how to let him go completely. This fucked-up thing is better than nothing. The dynamic that we used to have has been so completely d
estroyed that I am left clinging to texts that switch between being outright cruel and sappy and lovey. Sometimes they come in literally one right after another. I went from trusting and loving this person, from feeling adored and protected, to licking bitter morsels that he is throwing at me off the ground whenever he senses that I am starting to break free. Now I understand why sociopaths are dubbed “human heroin.” I have been shooting pure, unadulterated psychopathic love into my bloodstream for five years. I am coming down from a drug I didn’t even know I was on, and the withdrawal has knocked me on my fucking ass.
—
“I DON’T know if you’ll be required to report me to the authorities if I tell you this,” I say to Lisa with a nervous laugh at our next session, “but I still know Marco’s social media passwords because he’s an idiot. I check his profiles quite a bit. I know I shouldn’t,” I say quickly, “but it’s become kind of an OCD thing.”
Lisa laughs. “First of all, the only time I am required to report you to the authorities is if you make a statement that I feel indicates that you are seriously contemplating hurting yourself or someone else. You’re still married to Marco, correct?” she asks.
I nod. “Yes.”
“Then I’m pretty sure it’s not a crime. Let me ask you something, though. When you log in, do you get kind of a rush of nervous adrenaline followed by almost like a comedown?”
“Yes,” I say, nodding emphatically. “Yes, that’s exactly what it feels like.”
“OK, so that sounds like obsessive-compulsive behavior, and it’s pretty common when wading through the aftermath of a trauma. It’s a coping mechanism. In fact, I would even say it’s a necessary stage. The thing we need to be careful of, though, is that eventually you replace that obsessive-compulsive behavior with something healthier. There’s a fine line between this being a phase of your recovery and you becoming addicted to this ‘keeping tabs’ type of behavior. For now, though, we don’t need to worry about that. You’re still early on in beginning to process this trauma.”