“How long have you been writing for?” I asked him during a break.
“In true geek style, I’ve been writing about aliens since I was seven. My first book was published when I was fifteen.” He spoke so modestly of what was a huge achievement.
“That’s incredible!” I smiled at him. “I think I was still playing with Barbies.”
“Barbeques?” he asked puzzled.
“No, the doll!” I laughed. “I might be Australian, but we don’t let children play with open flames.”
“Oh, yeah, right.” He laughed as well. “Lucky I don’t have any plans for fatherhood just yet!”
“It’s been a while since I’ve had small children too. Hopefully I don’t let this one barbeque.” I pointed at my slightly protruding stomach.
“You’re pregnant?” he asked, seemingly taken aback.
“That or I had a very large breakfast. Speaking of which, I’m hungry now we’re talking about food. Are they going to feed us at some point, or are they trying to starve us so we give a better show, like the lions in the coliseum?” I looked around the room.
“I’ve only seen tea and coffee so far. I have a muesli bar, if you want to share?” he offered.
“Thanks, I’ve actually got some healthy snacks in my bag that I packed in a fit of virtue this morning. I was hoping they’d give us something gooey and wicked, which is what I actually feel like.” I gave a sad face. “Guess I’ll just have to be healthy.”
“If only you’d catered. I’ve seen the front of some of your books, and I’ve started salivating on the spot.”
“That’s sweet of you. By the time it gets into a cookbook, I’m usually so sick of tasting the recipes that they are the last thing I want to eat.” I made a face. “The exception is chocolate, of course. I can always eat the chocolate things!” I sighed. “I so admire what you do though; the time and imagination it must take to write a book is incredible. I’m going to rush home and download you onto my Kindle!” I promised.
We smiled at each other. Something about him made me warm to him immediately.
“Let’s keep in touch,” he blurted out. “Are you on Facebook?”
“And on Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other social media outlet my PR people think I should be on!” I rolled my eyes.
“I hear you! My blog alone accounts for a ridiculous amount of time. I know it’s necessary, but…” He shrugged.
I think most people felt the same way; the effort required to keep up with all of it took time away from getting actual work done and seeing real people. Still, it was useful and an easy way to keep in contact with people you just met without giving away too many details.
“Go to my private one which is under my maiden name—Winters. I’ll look out for your friend request. I think we might be back on,” I said, nodding to the organizer who had entered the room and was ushering us back onto the stage. My sons liked reading science fiction and fantasy, so they might have heard of him and be amazed that we were “friends.” It was pretty hard to impress them, as they thought their parents incredibly uncool, but I liked to live in hope that one day I wouldn’t be so frightfully embarrassing to them as I was now.
When I spoke to them on the phone from boarding school later in the week, it turned out they did know who he was, but I was still uncool.
Chapter Twenty-Two
THE EMAIL, WHEN IT CAME, was devastating in its innocuousness. A simple request from Facebook from Daniel Waterstreet together with the message: “I really liked you when we met at the festival. I thought you should know and, given your pregnancy, you may not. Look at Adam Mitchell in my friends. Daniel Waterstreet.”
Curious, I friended him and went to look in his friend’s page. I found Adam Mitchell and clicked on him. He was a slim, good-looking man in what appeared to be his late twenties. He didn’t look familiar at all, and his information didn’t give me much. I clicked on photos of him but had no idea why Daniel Waterstreet wanted me to look at him.
I flicked through the photos until I found the one that stopped my heart. The cup of tea fell from my suddenly-numb fingers, spilling all over my pants and the floor, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen to see or care what it ruined. There was Jack, smiling happily into the camera, his arms around Adam. It could have been innocent, and yet it clearly wasn’t. Their body language told the story of their intimacy. In the next shot, they were kissing—not deeply but this was no platonic friendship. There were so many pictures, the dates going back years.
My body seemed to shrink down into itself, collapsing until all that was left was a cold, hard ball. I concentrated on just breathing in and out. I’m not sure how long I stayed frozen in place, staring at the computer sightlessly. I should have felt relieved, the burden of guilt was no longer mine to bear alone, but all I felt was a lacerating betrayal, as if this were somehow worse than what I had done. He was gay! It fit in so many ways, yet I still couldn’t believe it.
What I felt was beyond devastation. It was further down that dark spectrum that suppresses the ability to function or think rationally. I could only feel the deep hole I had fallen into as it closed over my head. Metallic shards of hurt pierced my vital organs, impaling me, and I was powerless for the moment to rationalize my way out of it. It wasn’t another woman: it was a man, or more likely, men.
Jack had been living a second life, one that his respectable English family would not have been able to handle, and I was his cover. How could I have been so stupid to have not known? Clearly other people out there did. I had sat next to Daniel Waterstreet all day at the writers’ festival, chatting happily, completely oblivious. He had known and looked on me pityingly, and I’d had no idea. How many other people out there knew? Feeling sorry for me or, worse, believing me to be complicit in his deceit?
My life was a fraud, and I had put myself out there, selling it. I was a fraud too for peddling something that at its very foundation was a lie. So many people had bought into it, this lifestyle I flaunted in my books and kitchen supplies. I had given up so much for Jack, for this? What a bad trade I had made. Jack could have said something at so many points along the way, but instead he clung to this dead marriage to cover his tracks. No wonder he wanted to stay married. Bastard. At that moment, I truly hated him.
“You lying arsehole!” I screeched at him when he came through the door. My rage, which had been building for hours as I waited for him, peaked as he closed the door calmly.
“What is wrong with you? Calm down,” he said, his face showing his revulsion at my palpable emotion. Grabbing the nearest object, which happened to be a vase of flowers, I hurled it at his head. He ducked, and it crashed into the wall, sending shards flying and water cascading into a pool on the parquet floor. He stared at me, shocked and wary.
“What’s this about?” he asked carefully.
“You fucking your fucking boyfriend, dickhead! Adam Mitchell? Ring any bells?” The vile language barely expressed the incandescence of the fury fueling my every action. I wanted to hurt him so badly. My hands were gripped into fists in an effort not to physically attack him again.
“Oh.” He put down his briefcase and hung his coat on the rack. “Who told you?” he asked calmly.
I ignored his question; it was completely beside the point as the bleak devastation overtook me. A part of me had been hoping he would deny it and be able to explain the misunderstanding. That small hope was snuffed out, taking a surprising amount of wind from my sails.
“Everything you’ve put me through, trying to make it work again, and it was all a lie. There was no chance, ever, that we could make it work.” The pain-filled bitterness in my soul showed in my voice.
“I’m sorry, no,” he said brutally. Finally, all hope was gone. The sick feeling of having hurt someone I loved so badly was turned around. He had cast the first stone, not me, in this savage execution of our marriage. My brief affair was a pebble in comparison to the boulder of his. The guilt-lifting made me feel almost giddy. It ta
sted of freedom and, for the first time in a long time, truth.
“There was only so far you’d go, pissing off your family. Marrying me was the extent of it. Admitting that you fancy men would have been too much.” It seemed bleakly funny, really. I’d been torturing myself for what I did to a marriage that was built on a big fat lie. “You’re gay!”
A giggle bubbled up, out of my control, and suddenly I was howling with laughter, sitting on the floor, unable to move, with tears streaming down my cheeks. I laughed so I wouldn’t cry, and even though my stomach hurt, still I couldn’t stop. I laughed at the bitterness and humiliation, along with the irony of the way it had all worked out, until there was nothing left. No tears, no anger. I was just an empty shell. At some point, Jack had left, but I was senseless of when or where he had gone. He could have gone out the door or be somewhere in the house. I simply didn’t know or care.
My uncontrolled laughter subsided into hiccups, and when even these had gone, I finally eased up stiffly from the floor. I felt cold all over, even in my bones. I went and took a long hot shower, deciding not to think about anything. I was tired of trying to work out what I was going to do. I had no answers, or the energy to even think through the implications. I was in my dressing gown, drying my hair with a towel, when Jack appeared at the doorway to our room. He stood uncertainly, not coming any closer.
“You must hate me. I understand that.”
“What I don’t understand is why you put me through that. Did it make you feel better to make me suffer?” I asked accusingly.
“Yes, it did. I know I shouldn’t feel it, but I felt betrayed.”
“What about your betrayal of me? You’re such a hypocrite,” I spat.
“I got so good at blocking off that side of my life that I just didn’t think about it,” he admitted.
“So, you’ve been living this double life for how long?” I demanded.
“Do we really need to do this?”
“Yes. How long has…this…been going on?”
“I met Adam about ten years ago. We’ve been on and off since then, mostly on.”
“Ten years.” That sent another knife-like stab through my heart, just when I thought it could feel nothing more. My stomach churned with bile when I realized the significance of that time frame. While I was barely functioning, going through the worst period of my life, he was “hooking up” with his boyfriend?
“What about before that?”
“Nothing really.”
“What does that mean?”
He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair.
“I sometimes…did some things with…people…at school and before we were married, but I swear I was faithful to you until Adam.”
I swallowed hard, trying to get my head around that. I thought back to all of Jack’s school friends I had met, seeing if I could remember any strange reactions or looks. The only one that stood out was Andrew Plimpton. I think I just worked out why he stopped talking to me after that weekend.
“Well, no need to hide it any more. You’re free to do what you want openly now,” I said bitterly.
“That’s not what I want. I still want to stay married,” he said, an edge of panic in his voice.
“You’re not serious!” I looked at him disbelievingly. “Why on earth would we stay married now?”
“I don’t know that I am gay definitely. I like men, but I like women too. I’ve never…had sex with a man. It’s never gone that far. I never cheated on you.”
“How far exactly have you gone?” Morbid curiosity bloomed.
“Do we have to talk about this?” He squirmed.
“Yes. I need to know what it is we’re talking about. And it does make a difference to me.”
“Just touching and…oral,” he finally managed with difficulty.
I didn’t know how I felt about that. Should the fact that he hadn’t had full sex mean that he’d done less than me and it wasn’t as bad? Wasn’t oral sex cheating anyway? Jack obviously didn’t think so. I shook my head, trying to figure it out. It was all so overwhelming, this information, and I hadn’t had time to process it. I rubbed my aching eyes with my hand. It still felt surreal to be having this conversation at all with my husband.
“But you were intimate with him. For ten years. That’s a relationship. Do you love him?”
“I don’t know…Maybe.” He sighed heavily. “I don’t think there’s a label for it. We are friends but more than that too.”
“I think that’s being unfaithful. If you are emotionally intimate with someone else and it involves sexual touching, then it’s definitely cheating. And you were doing it for ten years!”
“Yes, but it never went as far as yours. Plus, you’re pregnant, and a child is going to last a lot longer than that!”
I opened my mouth to respond but didn’t get a chance.
“I agree that I’ve been dishonest, but I don’t think it matters who was worse.” He held up a hand. “I think we should just try to forget what’s happened and start again from here. We’re good parents,” he continued. “If we just take the sex part out it, what we have is fine. You don’t have to have the baby on your own. We hardly ever had sex anyway, so nothing much would change. We’re no longer in our twenties; it’s not like we’re at it like rabbits anymore, and how often do you want sex with a new baby?”
He had a point, but this was too weird.
“How would it work? Would you still be seeing your boyfriend, and we’d just be living together as friends?” Just the thought of him with someone else caused a stab of pain, even though I had no right to feel that way.
“No.” His lips twisted in weary amusement. “I have no desire to ‘come out’ so to speak. I can only imagine what Mother would say.”
“You want to stay married and raise a child that isn’t yours just because you don’t want to tell your mother you’re gay?” Edwina may be a demon disguised as a baby boomer, but still. “You’re nearly forty, for God’s sake. Why do you still care what your mother thinks?”
“Because she still controls the money. She’s threatened to cut off not only me but the boys as well if we get divorced. You know how she is about appearances.” Yes, I did. “We need her to keep paying the school fees. I’ve looked at it, and there is no way we can afford it on our own and run the house, given that I’m not sure if I’m even going to have a job from one day to the next. Everyone around me is being laid off, and no one knows how long the credit crunch is going to last. Most of what we got for the house went on the mortgage, and if we paid the boys’ school fees, it would severely deplete our remaining capital, as well as the cost of a second household.”
He paused, letting the reality of the situation sink in. The boys liked their school and friends, and to rip them out of it and have their parents split was a lot to ask of them. They would be able to deal with it, but no one wants their children to have to bear that if they can find a way around it. My income added a significant amount, but it was not regular or enough to cover all the school fees as well as living expenses, and it had the potential to evaporate completely if I was no longer “happily” married to Jack.
“I know it’s not ideal, but our marriage could still work. I do still love you…in my own way,” he said quietly. I stared at him, not sure what to make of that. If only he hadn’t added those last few words, it would have been temptingly easy to say yes.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said.
He nodded and left, closing the door behind him with a soft click.
I was faced by an impossible choice. I could stay with Jack, who despite everything I think I still loved; otherwise this wouldn’t hurt so much. But he would never love me the way I wanted, and it would break my heart every day to live in a pretend marriage, even though it would be easier in so many other ways. Or I could leave and try to manage it all and a baby on my own.
I didn’t know if Edwina would actually follow through with her threat to stop helping pay the school fees i
f we disgraced her by divorcing. It was possible that she might, locked as she was in a time-warp where divorce was still a dirty word, rather than an unfortunate and painful event that was almost as common as marriage itself. Telling her that the reason we were breaking up was because Jack was gay and I had taken a lover was unlikely to help. I’m sure I’d still be blamed for not being a good enough wife to keep him interested in women.
Chapter Twenty-Three
OUR NEXT SESSION with the counselor came two days later.
“Shall we look at the infidelity? Affairs involve sex, but it’s not usually the real reason one has an affair. Do you know why you did it?” Faye asked, turning to me.
“Well, Jack and I hadn’t been…intimate regularly for years. I guess we’d do it once every three or four months? So, I guess part of it was the sex.”
“Yes, she’s all about the sex,” Jack said, rolling his eyes.
I took a calming breath before I exploded at him.
“What are your needs?” she asked me.
“I like sex,” I said unapologetically. “Not all the time, but ideally once every few days. Jack used to want it, but then he stopped, and suddenly I was the one begging.”
“Jack, what is happening for you?”
“Ah…um…” Jack was so uncomfortable, it was excruciating to watch, but I was fascinated to hear what he was going to say. “I enjoy sex, but I just don’t want it that often. I’m stressed at work and tired, and we both have busy social lives, sometimes together, sometimes on our own. Sometimes it feels like the planets have to be aligned for it to happen. It’s not that I’m avoiding it or don’t want it, but it just feels like too much effort, and I’d rather go to sleep.”
“Kate, how do you feel when you hear your partner saying that?”
“It makes me feel unattractive and unloved. How are you supposed to feel when your husband would rather sleep than have sex with you? It’s also a lie. He’s been fooling around with men.”
Saint Kate of the Cupcake: The Dangers of Lust and Baking Page 19