Leaving Salt Lake City

by Matthew Timion

  She called back later that evening and the first thing she asked was "What did you do?"

  "What do you mean?" I replied.

  "You know what you did. What did you do?"

  I really had no answer, because I didn't know what she was referring to. I wasn’t really great with confrontation, and she was clearly upset. She proceeded to tell me the horrible things I'd done to her cousins. She accused me of making passes at them by taking a shower in the house while her cousins babysat our son.

  “I have been on the phone ALL DAY with our friends Matt. FOURTEEN PEOPLE have told me that things you do creep them out. They all told me things you have done, and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them warrants a divorce." She yelled; I couldn’t get a word in. It didn't matter since I would have had no idea what to say to her.

  I was spinning. I didn't know what to do. I wasn't much of a drinker, but I felt I needed something to calm me down. I went into the cupboard and found a bottle of Everclear that someone had left from the farewell party the night before. There was about one shot left. I had never had Everclear before, but it turns out a shot of Everclear is just like a shot of rubbing alcohol. I started coughing and gagging.

  "What's wrong?" she asked me angrily.

  "I feel like I'm sick," I replied. The combination of her accusations and that shot of death was enough for me to want to just cry.

  "Well, you should! You're a freaking child molester!"

  Her cousins were all teenagers, with Isabelle, the oldest, being nineteen.

  Jessica kept threatening divorce, taking Manny and getting as far away from me as possible. She repeatedly asked, “What did you do?" My responses of “nothing” were never enough. She wanted answers, and I didn't have the answers to give. She told me she had talked to Vince and he had told her a number of things I had said to him in the past about her cousins, and other women.

  What Vince and I discussed over the years was strictly “guy talk,” and nothing more. What did we talk about all those years back? We discussed women, previous girlfriends, ex-wives, which women were attractive, and other things normally reserved for the locker room. Jessica’s cousin Isabelle, who by then had started modeling professionally, did come up on an occasion or two. Vince talked about having sex with a married woman, a former Mormon in an open marriage. It was the only time I had ever just talked about guy stuff with someone in years. I had followed his lead. In some ways Vince was teaching me how to just be one of the guys.

  Apparently though, I was doing it wrong. The things I said to Vince was enough to make him concerned for Jessica, and to make him believe I was cheating on her with multiple women. I knew Jessica’s accusations and Vince’s corroborations were things that would never happen. I had this blind faith in her for so long. Why didn’t she have the same in me?

  Somehow Jessica had access to chat logs from before she and I were even married, and she recited them to me verbatim. It felt as though I was being held accountable for things I said or did before I found out about her cheating on me. I saw the double standard, but chose not to mention it. Clearly she was upset and pointing this out wouldn’t fix anything. I wanted it fixed.

  "You had better think about what you've done, and be prepared to tell me everything when I get home."

  Of course the phone call was much longer than that, and truthfully I have blocked most of it out of my memory. It was around two in the morning, and I was so anxious that I was shaking. Back then, still smoking, I needed a cigarette badly to calm down. All I had were cloves, and since my son was asleep I couldn't just up and leave him alone in the house. I was stuck with cloves. I figured it was better than nothing.

  I was sitting on the porch, shaking, smoking cloves, and frantic. Sure, some things I had done were probably not entirely appropriate. I had told one of Jessica’s friends that she was "hot," I had referred to her cousin Isabelle as "Jessica's hot cousin," and there were certainly times when the idea of cheating had crossed my mind. I had never done it though. At that moment I was being accused of being not only a habitual cheater, but also a pedophile. my entire life was falling apart around me. Jessica was threatening to take our son and leave me. I didn't know what to do.

  So I did what any mature adult would do in this situation. I called my mother. The phone rang and rang. There was no answer. I called back again, and again. She finally answered. For the next hour we talked. We discussed what had happened and what I was being accused of. She talked me down enough to consider going to sleep. I laid in bed for a few hours before being able to sleep.

  I laid in bed, my mind racing. Where did all of this come from? How would I be able to fix it? I didn’t

  do anything to warrant what was happening. I didn’t even attempt to do what she accused me of. The life I had was being pulled away from me. Just one week after making our family complete, our family was being torn apart.

  | NINTEEN |

  My New Roommate

  Summer 2007

  I woke up anxious, unaware of what was going on. Every part of my body was on edge. I imagine what I was feeling was similar to someone stuck in a boat about to go off a waterfall. It is all going to be over, and there is nothing you can do about it. Except in my situation my new week-old family was going over the edge. Instead of accepting our fate I was frantic. Something had to be done.

  I called the therapist we had been working with at Manny’s preschool. I explained the phone call, the accusations, and the threats of divorce. The only reasonable explanation in my mind was that Jessica had some mental break or just went completely nuts. I was hoping I could describe the behavior and the therapist would recognize it, and readily diagnose Jessica’s disorder over the phone. “Ah Yes, Matt, what you are describing sounds like a standard case of CIA-induced psychosis. We have the perfect treatment for that." Unfortunately nothing like that was ever said. Instead the therapist told us to come in soon and we could all discuss what was happening together.

  One more day until she was to come home. No phone call. I wouldn’t even know what to say to her if she called.

  Her plane was scheduled to come home on Saturday afternoon. She came barging through the door late Saturday morning. After she hugged Manny, gave him a stuffed animal, and talked with him for a bit, we sat down to talk.

  “Are you going to tell me about your girlfriends in Utah?" She jumped right in.

  “My girlfriends?”

  “Yes, I know you have a number of girlfriends. And I know you have been seeing your ex-girlfriend in California.”

  “What? When could I have possibly done that?”

  “You flew down to California a day before me a few months ago.”

  “Jessica, I was with my MOM. We were looking at cars.”

  “Whatever." She didn’t believe me, even though a phone call could have easily confirmed my story.

  She wouldn’t let up. She claimed to know things that even I didn’t know. She pulled the you know what you did card, followed up with the you might as well just tell me card. Why couldn’t she just ask me specific questions? I starting grasping at straws to try to figure out what she was talking about.

  “And what did you do to my cousins? Did you fuck them?”

  “What!?" I was so confused by her accusations that a single word response was all I could muster.

  “Teenage girls do not remove you from Myspace for no good reason. Are you having sex with them? You fucking child molester.”

  “No." It didn’t seem like an adequate answer, but “no” was the truth.

  “I think you’re sleeping with Nadia." The accusations kept coming. Nadia, the friend who stayed to help me clean up the farewell party the night before, lived forty five minutes away.

  “When would I sleep with Nadia? What are you even talking about?”

  “You’re both home all day. You would figure out a way to do it.”

  She clearly thought my sex life was something out of a romance novel, or a porn film.

  Jumping from subject to s
ubject, she started quoting things I had said to Vince, years prior, during our online chat “guy talk” sessions. How had she accessed that information? Did she hack into my computer? Does Vince hate me so much that he fed this information to her? Why was it even relevant to us? All of the conversations she quoted verbatim happened before we were married. They all occurred before our relationship was solid. They happened before we had a child together, a family.

  I did not have the answers she wanted.

  “Well Matt, you need to think about it then." As if thinking about it would produce the confirmation she so desperately sought.

  “Okay,” not knowing what I was supposed to think about. Not knowing how I could invent a transgression I had never committed.

  “My entire family is creeped out by you. None of them want you around their kids.”

  I didn’t understand what she was saying. I understood the words, but not the emotion or rationale behind them.

  “I think that maybe you do things and think they are okay when they are not.”

  “Maybe you are right.” I would have been willing to say anything at this point to make it my fault and put us in a place where we could work on the marriage again.

  “That’s a problem for me,” she said quickly, “I cannot be married to someone so oblivious to what they are doing.”

  We had no resolution that day. Things only continued to get worse. I started seeing her accusations as ridiculous and as a result of this my willingness to participate in her accusatory conversations diminished greatly. I was secretly hoping there would be a therapeutic breakthrough that would explain her behavior. Perhaps she would wake up the next day and realize she was bi-polar. I was starting to place my bets on unlikely scenarios to save our marriage. The only thing that made sense to me was her being just completely crazy. I knew I didn’t do what she accused me of, and I knew she loved me, so complete lunacy was the only viable explanation.

  “I cannot sleep in the same bed as you Matt, I’m sleeping on the couch.”

  She slept on the couch that night. The timing for all of this was horrible. We had a family reunion planned that would be at our house two weeks later. We later decided her family could not know about the status of our relationship. After all, we were working through our problems, which implied to me an eventual resolution. If her family knew what was going on it would make everyone uncomfortable. She would pretend to be happily married to me while her entire family was in town.

  While putting on the “happily married” act for her family Jessica told a story about her recent trip to Oregon.

  “I just loved it there. We rented a car and did donuts on the beach. I could really see myself living there one day.”

  Her language said it all. She spoke in the singular and not the plural. She was no longer planning a future, or a life, with me. She was planning it for herself. When dealing with someone that would never communicate what she was really thinking or feeling, I had to read into everything she said in order to determine her intentions.

  What I assumed from her speech was correct. As soon as her family left she retired into her bedroom in the basement. That room was going to be her room from then on. The basement needed to be set up as an apartment. Of course I was the one who paid for the entire conversion.

  “For the time being Matt we need our own space to try to figure things out.”

  “What does that mean about us?" I wanted specifics.

  “I think it means we will be allowed to go out and date other people, and sometimes we can even date each other. Maybe we’ll fall back in love and it will work everything out.”

  We sat on the front porch smoking a cigarette together. I was confused. Fall back in love? When did we fall out of love?

  She told me, “When we get us figured out, I still really want to have sex with a girl.”

  Talk about a mixed message. She just told me that she wanted to work on us, but also that she had every intention of having sex with a woman. I took it as a good sign. At least she was thinking ahead.

  With Jessica moved into the basement, I closed the door and locked it. We decided that since I work at home I would be watching Manny during the week and that she would watch him during the weekend. Manny stood in the kitchen, trying to open the door into the basement, crying. He held his forehead, which was something he had always done since he was three years old. This behavior only occurred when he was upset. I had always assumed Manny was hit in the head as a baby and this was his default behavior when in pain. I had to pull him away from the door. He went back.

  “I want to see Mom,” he cried.

  “I am sorry honey, let’s go watch Spongebob." My heart broke, but the sooner he could get used to this situation the better. How could this have happened?

  | TWENTY |

  Don’t Let Them Know

  Summer 2007

  One of our friends was visiting from out of state. She visited once a year or so and always stayed at our house.

  Jessica and I were still trying to figure out our relationship. She went to bed in her space in the basement. I went to sleep in the room upstairs. The only time we slept together was when her family was in town. We were putting on a show so they would not be burdened by our marital problems.

  Our friend arrived and we all joked and laughed like normal. My beautiful wife, who I normally would be afraid to talk to about anything, was warm and friendly. She looked into my soul when she spoke to me, just like she used to do. I didn’t feel defensive.

  Perhaps her family visiting and our friend from out of town visiting was what we needed. Maybe she realized life with me was better than living in separate places and beating our heads against the wall trying to fix the marriage.

  Fix. The. Marriage. That is all I thought about all of the time. No matter how hard I tried I could never find the right words or deeds to fix it. I became skilled at always making it worse.

  And there was Jessica with her big brown eyes smiling at me.

  “We should go to Wendover and party like rock stars!” Those words came out of her mouth. An impromptu road trip. Yes! Spontaneity just like we used to have.

  “I think that’s a great idea,” I replied.

  “I know you would Matt. I love you." Did she just say she loved me?

  The plans for the road trip didn’t make sense. There wasn’t enough time and we didn’t have a babysitter for Manny. We never went.

  The three of us shared wine and laughed. Jessica sat next to me on the couch and grabbed my thigh.

  We went to bed that night. Our visitor stayed in Jessica’s room in the basement. I was fully prepared for Jessica to sleep on the couch away from me. She came into our room. Took off her pants. She looked amazing. She got into bed with me without a word.

  “I love you,” I told her.

  “I love you too,” she said. I pulled her closer. She was a little drunk from the wine. I was too.

  I started kissing her and pulled off her underwear.

  “Matt, don’t have sex with me without a condom. I don’t want to get fucking pregnant." I was okay with that. She was opening up to me. She was showing me she still wanted me. I was still desired by her. We had a chance.

  The next morning Jessica and our friend got in her car.

  “We’re going to go look at houses, can you watch Manny?”

  “Sure.”

  Jessica had been talking about buying an investment property for weeks. At first I was convinced she was looking for a place for herself until she reassured me that no, an investment property would be a great investment for both of us.

  I sat at home with Manny waiting for them to come back. My thoughts fell to the night before hoping it wasn’t just the wine talking.

  That night our out-of-town guest and Jessica went out to a friend’s house down the street. This was the same house where the gay pornography was viewed a year before. The occasion for this gathering was a “girl’s night." Clearly, being a man, I wasn’t invited. I had baby
sitting duty. The only thing I heard about from that event was a drunken Jessica proclaiming to the group of women, “I don’t know why everyone thinks I slept with Vince! I have never slept with Vince!”

  But I didn’t know she had said that at the time. Jessica was convinced everyone was talking about her behind her back. She was certain they all suspected something about her. That was her way of setting the record straight.

  She came home that night tipsy and crawled into bed with me again. It felt great to have my wife next to me.

  “Wear a condom Matt,” she had to remind me.

  Our friend left for her home out of state and Jessica went straight back down to her basement hideaway. I didn’t understand how she could have been so close, so longing, so intimate just the night before and then retreat back to her private apartment.

  I tried talking to her about my confusion but remembered how talking never worked with her. She wanted action, not words. I had to prove I was capable of being the man she wanted me to be.

  As if all of this was not enough, Vince was planning to visit Utah to pick up his daughters. This guy was oddly becoming a much bigger part of our lives, and I knew that Jessica was talking with him regularly about our relationship. I was reminded that Vince was was her friend and that I had no right to be upset with her sharing information about us. Before Vince came into town I extended an olive branch and told him he could stay upstairs with me if he wanted. He declined. He was going to stay with Jessica instead. Strictly as friends, I was told.

  We met with Manny’s therapist, who had turned into our own little private marriage counselor. Jessica started the conversation saying, “I felt like when we had three kids in the house that I really had four!” She didn’t talk about me being a child molester. She didn’t talk about my apparent numerous girlfriends.

  She was upset because I was acting like a kid and might have been needy. This was extremely eye-opening to me. Jessica had nicknamed her previous boyfriend “The ManChild” because of his perceived neediness. I sat back and listened.