Leaving Salt Lake City

by Matthew Timion

  “I told you, Matt talking about this isn’t going to fix anything, it’s only going to make it worse.”

  This was the typical pattern for a while. Some weeks she would go to the therapist, other weeks she would not. I finally hit a breaking point at our next session. It had been weeks since our friend came from out of town when Jessica had shown genuine sexual interest. I had been living off of fumes of love since then.

  “I think you want a divorce and are just afraid to say it,” I started the session.

  “Yes. Matt, you’re right.”

  The therapist was relieved that a resolution was finally reached.

  There wasn’t much more to be said. We came home, and she apologized over and over again for waiting so long to just come out with it.

  “It’s just not what I want any more.”

  She then admitted that the fourteen friends she kept mentioning (the ones who apparently all had horrible things to say about my actions) was highly exaggerated. In other words, it was all made up.

  After driving home, our first task was filling out the divorce paperwork online. We finished within an hour. We agreed that I would keep the house and that custody would be 50/50. Just like that, it was done. A relationship, a family, was thrown away based on false accusations. She put no effort into trying to fix it. I started wondering if this was her plan all along. I took off my wedding ring and sat in the empty first floor of the house while Jessica took Manny downstairs. He was oblivious that his family had only lasted a few months.

  | TWENTY ONE |

  A New Life

  Summer 2007

  We were meeting with Manny’s therapist again, and I was still surprised Jessica kept showing up. Manny had been living with us for a grand total of eight months. During that time Jessica had played little to no role in Manny’s emotional development. Now that she wanted out of the relationship, she suddenly cared about Manny. If anything good came from our separation, I thought, it would be her finally stepping up and being a part of all of Manny’s emotional well-being.

  “How are you two doing?" Susan asked us.

  “We are doing great,” Jessica responded. She was happy finality had been reached and that she was “free” from our marriage.

  “And how about you?" Susan turned to me. She was no longer talking to a couple, but rather two individuals.

  “Things are going great for me too." It was a simple, honest, and painful answer.

  Despite our situation, Jessica had persisted in telling me that certainly, there was a chance we could end up together again. Maybe divorce was the best thing for this relationship? Our friend, the flamboyant gay man who married us, told me, “I have seen perfectly wonderful relationships ruined by marriage." Maybe that was the problem. Maybe we were better off just dating with all of the mystery and unknown surrounding us. I was still trying to make things work, trying to find a solution to a problem without an answer.

  Friends of ours started calling me and told me that the only reason they stayed friends with Jessica for so long was because of me. My friend Archie recently told me, “Matt, you’re a difficult person to get used to. They might have started being your friends for Jessica, but they stayed for you." It’s true, I like to build long meaningful friendships. Jessica liked to collect people and then dispose of them once they have served their purpose. My friends told me they had wanted to drop Jessica as a friend years before. What our friends told me was extremely meaningful.

  I had to know if any of Jessica’s original accusations were about me true. She did say that fourteen people had told her horrible things about me. Were people telling her things about me? Finding out who my real friends were was extremely important No one believed anyone in our circle of friends would have talked to Jessica about me in the manner she claimed. None of them liked her that much. They all repeated that they have never had a problem with me. They always had had a problem with her.

  I had to do something to move on and remove the pain that was inside of me. Still not knowing which way was up, being bombarded with information from my friends, and trying to fix the marriage, I embraced Jessica’s idea that being apart might fix us. I accepted that maybe the only way back to each other was to be with other people. I created a profile on a popular dating website.

  The same day I created the profile Jessica came home and started yelling.

  “Can you imagine how embarrassing it is for me to answer to my co-workers about your dating profile?”

  “You wanted the divorce Jessica. I’m trying to move on.”

  “It’s only been a few days!”

  “I’m sorry, it’s what you wanted.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted, but after suffering through months of rejection, I wanted to feel something, anything. Maybe the girl of my dreams would show up and make everything better. As far as I was concerned, however, the girl of my dreams lived in my basement, apparently not sleeping with Vince.

  Her disgust with me trying to jump back into the dating was a double standard. As soon as she moved into the basement, she would spend a few evenings a week out until six in the morning. Normally her story was that someone had too much to drink and she had to drive them home. I had to assume she was already sleeping with people, but she was upset that I was looking for someone new. Her reaction to my dating was most likely caused by the embarrassment she experienced when her co-workers saw my dating profile.

  Jessica’s dating started to become something she would tell me about more and more frequently. I was unsure if Jessica did this out of spite or to just explore her options, but she started bragging to me about a girl she was dating. I remember thinking that maybe once she got her long desired female sexual experience out of her system, our relationship would become okay again. I thought maybe she would come back to me, sexually fulfilled, ready to be a family again.

  “She’s a co-worker. She has an expensive car, buys me stuff, and treats me right.”

  “Okay." How else was I supposed to respond?

  “She’s really wonderful.”

  A week later Jessica’s short lived lesbian phase was over. She had had her same sex experiment, something which most people try out in their early twenties. The woman who was certain I was gay and tried to get gay men to have sex with me had become the very thing she was certain I was. The irony didn't escape me.

  Our house was becoming my house. Jessica was only a tenant. If things were going to work out with us it was going to happen on its own. No amount of forcing was going to reunite us. I began redecorating, which is something I also did when I divorced my first wife. There is something therapeutic about making my space “mine” again. The first thing I did was add a dishwasher to the kitchen. Jessica had always insisted that we didn’t need one. I hated washing dishes. I needed one. Our friend was over to help me with the install. He observed Jessica moving her belongings into the basement. “Wow Matt, she’s really serious about this living apart thing, isn’t she?" Yes, she was very serious.

  It was July of 2007 and Vince was coming to visit. I had already suspected enough about the two of them, and after her unsolicited declaration of innocence during girls night I could not, in good conscious, stay in that house while Jessica and Vince were in the basement. I packed up Manny and left for California to visit my mother. I needed a break. I was beat down. I transported my dirty laundry eight hundred miles to wash it because Jessica had control over the washer and dryer in the basement. There was no way I was going to wash my clothes with him around me.

  The trip away was worthwhile. I cleared my head and started thinking of starting a new life with Manny in Nevada where my brother lived. House prices were cheap there. We could start over without Jessica. She was psycho, and it took every ounce of strength to ignore it. I knew that all of the anger I felt had to have been fueled by the divorce, not something she had done. My feelings were not based on fact. We were just not right for each other. It was as simple as that. I kept telling myself this over and over again, needi
ng to believe it. It was the only way we could both be on good terms for Manny’s sake.

  Upon returning home, Jessica needed to talk to me. It seemed important enough for her to come upstairs and ask me to sit down.

  “My ex-husband charged up a bunch of debt on a joint account. I need to pay it off or else I’ll lose my security clearance.”

  “What about your dad? He’s rich." I remembered that he was filthy rich with high reaching connections.

  “He won’t help. I already asked. He told me that I got myself into this mess and I should get myself out. I wouldn’t be coming to you if I had not asked everyone else.”

  Her father was right, and I did not want to enable her. I refused to allow her to know someone would always come to her rescue, as I had done many times before. I declined.

  “I’m sorry Jessica, but you chose a life without me. I cannot help.”

  Through tears she plead, “I understand, but what about helping your son’s mother?”

  She had me. I still loved her. I took out a second mortgage on the house and paid her her half of the equity in order to pay the collection agents. Her security clearance, and employment, would be secure once again.

  She could continue on as a spy, a mother, and a short-lived lesbian because I came to her rescue, again.

  | TWENTY TWO |

  Moving on

  Fall 2007

  Soon after Vince left I was informed by Jessica that they were officially a couple, and she was in love. “I didn’t see it coming, Matt. It just kind of happened when he was here this weekend." Good for them. I needed to move on. She clearly already had.

  Since I had weekends free, I started going on real dates with people for the first time in my life. I had dated before Jessica, but it was dating in the same sense that running a marathon is a leisurely stroll. I had always dated in order to find my future wife and marry her. After the divorce, however, I was dating just to date, or sometimes just to have sex.

  I learned a very important lesson from that experience. I learned that having sex with people, even attractive people, is not difficult. All that you need to do is recognize that women want sex too. The notion that men are sex hungry and women are prudes likely ends potentially great evenings every single day. Another key component was to not express a desire for a relationship. We always read that the “bad boy” gets the girl. From my experience this overused cliche was true. My emotional unavailability from the divorce was somehow working out in my favor.

  Shifting from having the family I had always wanted to divorced in such a short time ensured I wasn’t even close to being emotionally available and wouldn’t be for a very long time. At least this attitude provided what I perceived to be positive side effects.

  Even though Jessica only had to care for Manny two days a week she still needed my help. She wanted to go out on the weekends and party. One weekend the popular band Muse came to Provo, Utah, approximately 45 minutes away. She and her cousin drove down and enjoyed the show late into the night. I always waited up for her to make sure she came home safely. She came home the next morning and resumed her parental role.

  Recalling the concert, Jessica told me she stuck out like a sore thumb. Since Provo was the home of the Mormon Church’s university the percentage of Mormons there was rather high. It was something like 110%. According to her, she was the only tattooed girl at the event, and all of the members of the band loved her. The members of the band invited her and her cousin backstage.

  I was repeatedly reminded of how great she was, as she would almost daily tell me the lead singer of Muse kept calling her, inviting her down to Las Vegas for the weekend whenever Muse was in town.

  “He wants to fuck me. Matt." She said it proudly and very matter of fact.

  “So are you going to go to Las Vegas?”

  “No way. I don’t want to be just another slut to him and get a disease.”

  Even rockstars wanted Jessica. It was no wonder she wanted out of the marriage. She was way out of my league.

  When our divorce became public knowledge in the ex-Mormon community, the majority of the community continued to rally behind me. I suddenly had friends to hang out with and a lot more time to do it. Most of the community more or less cut Jessica out of their lives, which she blamed me for constantly.

  “I lost all of my friends because of you Matt! What you told people made them ditch me. You fucked up and cheated on ME, and I get punished for it.”

  Unfortunately she was only getting a taste of her own medicine. She had forced friendships to end many times over the years and often times just “cut people off” if they had too much drama in their lives. It seemed like Karma had a way of balancing everything out.

  I was enjoying my newfound freedom as best as I possibly could. Repairing the marriage was still my ultimate goal, but with the announcement of her new love and rock stars fawning over her, but a renewed relationship didn’t appear to be an option. I started to wonder if perhaps Jessica and Vince’s relationship started long before we separated. Despite the curious timing of their relationship, I was told time and time again by Jessica that my fear was only a fear and nothing more.

  “We never even considered this while you and I were together Matt.” Not that it really mattered anymore anyway.

  “Did you guys talk much back then?”

  “Sure, sometimes we would email each other, but we would usually be talking about something silly, like cheese.”

  When Jessica visited South Carolina for her “work trip” back in May, she met with a number of our friends for lunch. One of them, a psychiatrist, told me later, “the sexual tension between those two was obviously very strong." I confronted Jessica with this information.

  “Why would I have lunch with a psychiatrist, trained in human behavior, if I was sleeping with Vince? That would be the stupidest thing I could do.”

  Jessica was right. If she was trying to hide her hidden affair, why would she do something so obviously careless? She would either be the worst cheater ever or her story made perfect sense. Vince and Jessica’s relationship was new, it had to be. It might have spawned from our divorce, but it had nothing to do with the cause of the divorce.

  In October of 2007 Jessica took Manny to North Carolina for Halloween with Vince and his two daughters. It seemed like Manny really loved Vince’s daughters and from what I could tell Vince was a positive male role model, despite his online harassment.

  When they returned from North Carolina I picked up Jessica and Manny from the airport and told her that she might be surprised by something when she got home. While she was away for Halloween, I had purchased another car. I was still running a website dedicated to obtaining higher gas mileage and I found the holy grail of fuel efficient cars online: a Honda Civic VX. She saw my teal green civic parked in front of the house and said, “What? Did a girl move in?”

  “No, I bought another car. I’ve been looking for this one for years.”

  “Uhm” she paused, “it’s green. I don’t know what kind of pussy you expect to get in that car, but you ain’t gettin’ any.”

  I now had four cars. I had my project car from the year before (1989 Honda Civic) which had sat untouched for quite some time. There was my new 1992 Honda Civic VX that was really a purchase to own the ultimate cheap/fuel efficient car. I still had my “family” car, the 2007 Honda Fit. In my driveway sat my prized possession, a 1971 Honda n600. The n600 had also not been touched in a long time, mainly because it wasn’t safe enough to drive around in with a child. Hell, it wasn’t safe enough to drive around parked in a driveway.

  I clearly had a problem with how many cars I owned, and apparently none of them would get me any pussy. Classy.

  My sex life was of little concern to Jessica, especially after what she told me upon returning from her trip visiting Vince. Jessica came home from that trip and told me that after months of being pressured by Vince to move to North Carolina, she had decided she wanted to do it. She needed to get on with he
r life, away from Mormon oppression. I could understand why. Mormonism had always been a dark shadow over former Mormons in Utah. She also was insistent on relocating Manny with her.

  I was furious. No way this would happen. Her simple request turned into a yelling match.

  “If you don’t agree to this, Matt, I will take you to court for custody and move.”

  “Be prepared to answer for a lot of other things." I was trying to sound like I would have control in this situation, but the truth is I don’t know what was going to happen.

  “What other things?" She was getting more and more upset.

  “Your other job.”

  “You cannot mention that in court. I will go to jail!” She looked panicked with her jaw clenched.

  “Too bad,” I responded. I had enough.

  “Fine, I’ll see you in court then." She stormed through the house, retreating to her underground lair.

  Like all fights, emotions started to settle down and the next day we were able to talk again. I had considered her offer and I realized that what was best for me wasn’t really what was best for my son. I agreed to let him go, knowing that the school systems in North Carolina had to be better than the school systems in Utah, which at the time ranked second to last in the country in test scores. It might have been the best for me too. I had a life to lead. Manny would be cared for by two loving parents, and I would be able to move out there eventually and be with my son. This also made financial sense, as my job had been affected by the economy and I was cut to half of my salary. I went from a dual income home to a half income home in less than six months. How could I support a child? I could barely support myself

  Jessica taking Manny to North Carolina had two conditions: 1) She didn’t deploy for the military. Considering Manny’s background, him bouncing around the country to stay with me every time the military needed her overseas wasn’t acceptable. He needed stability. 2) She didn’t move in with someone. Her plan was to move in with Vince initially but to find her own place soon afterwards. She agreed on my terms for Manny to move and said my terms were reasonable.