Emily put up a great disguise, emotionally. Her pain came out, however, when she got home and it was just Emily and her best friend, Jamie: tears, worry, panic. And this is where the selfishness of adultery (when children are involved) comes into play—the price the kids pay for the extramarital behavior that those involved often don’t think about. Children are often—if not always—the forgotten component of adultery. Sure, you can argue that George and Gail’s children were grown; but they were not yet adults, or emotionally adjusted enough to deal with the stressors of a marriage falling apart, an absent father (in more ways than one), and a mother trying to cope with a marriage falling apart before her eyes and no one there with whom to share the pain. The hurt Gail experienced was something she was forced, in a sense, to internalize.
“What if one day my mom wasn’t around to keep my balance,” Emily told Jamie one night after Emily felt she had figured out her dad. It was one of Emily’s biggest fears—that her mother would be gone. Not necessarily murdered, but taken away. “What happens if my mom is not here?”
“I recognized the role my mother played in my life,” Emily said.
As the affair became more obvious around the house—however unspoken—and Emily drifted through her final years of high school, she wondered what type of end was near. There was a period for Emily when she believed she was going to die, or be killed herself. That feeling likely stemmed from the quiet chaos building in the house; that subtle hint of everyone walking on glass, not speaking, that a storm was gathering. George and Gail were no more than roommates. Gail was losing weight. For a kid this sort of subtle dysfunction can be devastating—and Emily was feeling the effects of it burdening her.
“I don’t know what it is,” Emily told her mentor one night, a school counselor Emily looked up to and met with regularly, “but I feel that it’s coming.” She was referring to something dark, something final, something lethal. Emily had a sense of an end. “Something is going to happen,” she continued, “and I’ll be dead by the time I’m nineteen.”
That dark cloud had now consumed George’s daughter.
Emily said she witnessed “how my father was always more domineering and controlling over my mother—it’s part of the Latino culture. It’s very common in a lot of Latino families.” Emily talked about it with her mentor/ counselor, a Latina, who explained that she had counseled a lot of Latina women who had been abused—verbally and physically—and felt controlled by their husbands.
“Sometimes,” Emily observed, “they [Latina women] don’t realize there are other options for them. Most don’t have an education, financial independence, and many don’t have anywhere else to go. My mother gave up her career [as a speech therapist] to be a stay-at-home mom.”
Emily learned from the situation; she was not going to be dependent on any man for her future. She was determined to take care of herself. She might have felt death knocking on the Fulton door, but she was not going to allow that feeling to saddle her ambitions.
“It’s one of those hidden secrets,” she said, “that in the U.S. we are so concerned about the rights of other women and people around the world . . . what people fail to understand is that it’s a domestic issue, too, and we all need to be aware of it.”
28
HIS MARRIAGE to Gail, Donna wrote to George, was “not real anymore.” In two years, Donna explained, your kids will be grown and starting their own lives. What would George have left in Michigan after that? Donna wondered.
Gail?
It’s clear from this letter that George sent Donna mixed messages of devotion, giving strong indications that he was willing to walk out on his family, but under certain conditions only. It wasn’t going to be as easy as Donna had made it sound.
Truthfully, George was on the fence. Sure, running around Florida with Donna while he was in town was fun. Having sex and pillow talk about the future was exciting and daring and mysterious. But was it real? Was this what George Fulton wanted for his future? Was the guy actually in love?
Donna pleaded with her lover, once she got a sense he was playing both sides against each other. She laid everything out: Gail had not worked in a long time. The library, yes. But not at a full-time job where she could take care of herself. Donna warned George that he had better “position” himself in the right company—hers, of course—now, so he could provide for Gail after he left and “until she’s remarried.” Apparently, Donna had thought this thing through all the way to Gail’s future husband.
It was clear to Donna that George had not expressed what he wanted from her or her company. She promised George he could easily make 50K per year and that it would likely be enough money for him to take care of Gail until she could find another man. Donna said she “wished” George all the success he deserved, wanted to be a part of it, but she didn’t know exactly if he thought she ever would be. She wished they had met sooner in life so they “could have more time together.”
The tone of the letter focused on Donna “missing” George when he went back home. Donna told George—something she never considered would give him a considerable amount of power and control over her—that while he was back home and missing her, as she would him, all he had to do was pick up the phone and call. She would fly into Lake Orion for a day or two. You could tell me where, she wrote, meaning another city, so we could be “safe.” She would not expect George to spend the night with her at the hotel. He was free to leave after sex.
George could have both women in the same day if he wanted. This must have done tremendous amounts for his ego. Yet, George must have become worried about losing Donna, because he turned around not long after receiving this letter and sent Donna a card she referenced in a second long, tedious letter, full of schoolgirl grandeur she had been spewing on her married lover for the past few months.
29
DONNA WAS NOT a stupid woman. Some later said she could have turned CCHH into a multimillion-dollar corporation if she just allowed others to help her run it and, most important, kept her damn mouth shut. But Donna was about control, manipulation, revenge, and selfish pride. People didn’t cross Donna; she would get them back—maybe when they least expected. What many around the office realized after George came into the picture was that Donna had changed: her attitude, the way she acted, dressed, spoke. Everything was different—except her bipolar mood swings and angry approach to running her business.
“She started confiding in George about her business,” said a former employee. Donna leaned on George, asking him to help her make major decisions. At the time, the work colleague said, “I liked George a lot. We knew he was married, but we thought that he and his wife were separated.”
When George wasn’t around, Donna talked about him as though he was the “be all and end all,” not only for the business, but for life. In a short time she had become infatuated (obsessed!) with George. She had developed a dangerous and soon-to-be-lethal concoction of possessive love, a fanatical sexual desire, and a skewed outlet on life in general—all of this was based around what this man said and did.
“She loved him . . . said he was so wonderful and this perfect man,” said a coworker. “But she . . . became obsessed with him. We could never, ever understand, for example, what he saw in her. She wasn’t all that!”
This preoccupation Donna had with George became apparent as the 1997 holiday season wound down and she wondered where she and George stood. Near the end of the year, Donna wrote to George, explaining how she needed him to consider several of her ideas as “food for thought.” She mentioned how she had been “considering lots of options” because she was a firm believer in the notion that things happened for a reason. She thought their relationship was a “positive thing.” When they were together, she felt it was “very magical” and “right.” George could do no wrong in Donna’s eyes. Whatever he did (and she compulsively analyzed the guy’s behavior) was something she weighed considerably against the grain of his love for her.
The way he ate,
walked, looked at her.
All perfect.
As the letter continued, Donna said she needed to be honest. She felt he was not “very happy” in his life. Of course, this was a slap to Gail. She said Gail wasn’t treating George in the manner that he should be. She called George a “very gentle, wonderful man,” who deserved someone who could make him feel “important, needed, loved, wanted, respected.” The woman he had stayed married to for twenty-three years wasn’t giving him that.
It was the beginning of Donna pointing at Gail and saying two things: First, you do not deserve this man. Second, stay out of my way—he’s mine.
This letter was Donna’s innermost thoughts. She wanted George to think about their relationship in a different way while he was back at home. Figure what he had with her, what he had with Gail, and weigh the two.
Maybe make a damn choice.
During that break George had a lot of time to consider all that Donna offered: a home, job, bed partner, good money, a business maybe to acquire and co-own someday.
George sent Donna a card on January 6, 1998, addressing it to “my love.” He wished Donna a “happy belated New Year.” It was nice, he said, to hear her voice the other day. It had “seemed so long ago” that he was in Florida. (The last time George had been with Donna was a week prior.) He talked about a tape Donna had sent him. He had listened to it that morning as he took his daily walk around the neighborhood. There were lyrics that had moved him to tears. It had even made him think about those times with Donna and the “passion” he felt for her and their “lovemaking.”
He signed the brief letter: The One Who Loves You Very Much.
This short letter brought Donna to tears, she wrote in return. It was the first time Donna felt as though she had roped herself a bull. George wasn’t all hers—yet—but Donna knew this was the beginning. The more time they spent together, the deeper they felt about each other. She said she read his words “over and over.” She held the letter in her hands “so often and close to [her] chest.” She cried and cried “like a baby sometimes.” She went on about how she had not felt the feelings George was bringing up in so long that she had wondered if they existed anymore. She had been crying so much because she’d had no idea before then how George “really” felt about her. She suspected George was falling, but he had never articulated those feelings into words on a page—until now.
Then, near the end of the letter, Donna mentioned Gail, who was becoming the focal point of her anger. She was the one person standing in the way of her happiness. Donna said it “hurt” her to think George was “spoken for.” When she sat and thought about George “touching [Gail], kissing her,” having his arms around her, “making love to her, caressing her, smiling with her,” and “having fun” with Gail, it was enough to make Donna’s suffering the worst she had ever experienced. She said every time George reminded her of the fact that Gail and the kids had “claims” to him first, she felt nothing but “pain” and “fear.” She wrote: [There is a] heaviness in my chest, a lump in my throat.... I am just second.
Donna closed the letter saying she had “hope” that someday she would become first in George’s life: [That thought alone] has made me to feel a little more secure.
30
“HE TOOK HER away from all of us,” said a good friend of Gail’s from Texas. As Gail Fulton experienced real problems within her marriage (not the first time), she had no one—save for phone calls—to stand behind her and say, “You can get through this. We’ll help you. You do not need to put up with it.”
It did not surprise any of Gail’s friends that once she got settled in Michigan, Gail fell into a job at the local library. One of Gail’s outlets to get away from life’s problems was reading.
“I was jealous,” said a childhood friend, “that Gail had all of the—I mean every single one of them—Nancy Drew books. She adored those cozy mysteries. She read voraciously. She loved romances. Gothic-type stories. History. It more surprised me that she went to school for speech pathology. . . . She should have gone into library science.”
Gail was private to a point where she’d only unload real pain on her priest. When her friend from Texas called, it always went: “Gail, how are you?”
“Fine. . . .”
“Really, how are things going?”
“Fine. . . . Fine.”
Gail’s favorite topic was her children. Her friend didn’t mind, but she could always tell when something was eating Gail up inside.
“It was a strange thing,” said that same childhood friend. “When I was going through problems with my first husband and he asked me for a divorce, it was Gail’s father who got on the phone and told me exactly, step by step, how to not lose custody of my children, to keep myself safe.... They (Gail and her parents) took care of me. They called me every fifteen minutes at times to make sure I was okay.”
Now here it was, an opportunity for that friend to return the favor. Gail’s father was passed on, and she didn’t want to talk about divorce or child custody issues. She wanted to think—wanted to believe—that her marriage was salvageable. By 1998, she and George had been married for nearly twenty-five years. She didn’t want to give up.
According to a close friend, George had always been “dedicated to his mother. He was the star child. He was always the responsible one. He would always send his mother money. You look at him then and you think, ‘Wow, this guy’s good to his mom . . . brothers and sisters.’”
What a catch!
There was one time, shortly after being married, when George and Gail were stationed in Germany. An incident occurred there. Gail called a friend to explain, but again, Gail was mysterious about what was going on, whitewashing the situation.
“There was an inventory and it didn’t match up,” Gail said. George was responsible for the military building. “We have to pay it all back.”
Afterward, according to what Gail told her friend, the military took money out of George’s paycheck to recoup the loss. This saddled an already-struggling young family even further. Gail could stretch a dollar, but not as far as this situation seemed to be headed for.
“Yeah, George was so naïve,” Gail said. “He didn’t know that he should have gotten an inventory before he took over command of the building. Now all these things are missing. It wasn’t him, no way. But now we have to pay it all back.”
Soon after this, George was stationed in Panama. Gail went down to live with him, but then she returned home, without warning, not long after.
When her friend saw Gail that first day back in town, she could not believe her eyes. “She was so painfully thin and she had these incredible headaches.”
Gail’s friend wondered what was going on.
“Oh, nothing,” Gail said, brushing it off. “It’s just this and that. . . .”
Gail’s hair was falling out. She had black circles under her eyes, on top of bags. Her cheekbones were drawn in and pointed. She looked skeletal and depressed, curling into herself.
“She knew what was going on with George . . . ,” said that same friend, “and she internalized it.”
And eventually just let it go.
Forgive, forget, pray.
31
ON JANUARY 21, 1998, George sent Donna a card that had to make her year, even though it was only twenty-one days old. She must have known she had indeed roped herself a cowboy and had him now tied to the stable, there to do what she wanted with him.
Dearest Donna, he began. On the inside cover was the drawing of a caveman holding a club, a bubble caption reading, Who, me? The card inscription read: Now, there are still men, not a lot has changed. George had written a cute little message in parentheses by the bubble caption, George (OTJ??). This was a recurring joke: George of the Jungle. The idea was that George had been so manly, so aggressive and savage in bed, keen on doing “wild” things underneath the sheets, Donna referred to him as “G.O.T.J.”
George sent the card to say how thoughtful it was Donna had se
nt him all the “recent heartfelt e-mails.” He appreciated it. On the way over to a client’s office, George explained, he listened to the Celine Dion tape and thought how great it was that Donna had gone to the trouble of sending it to Michigan: You are going to spoil me!
Donna responded by sending George a card, pointing out, You have made my life complete, and other wishy-washy things new lovers say while, blinded by lust, in a euphoric state of courtship.
George’s response: I’m just waiting for my chance to snuggle up close to you. . . . Inside, a male mouse was pictured with open arms, heading at a female mouse. George said how “fortunate and blessed” he felt to have Donna. His writing was scribbled and hard to read at times, but the gist of it all explained how “trapped” he felt at home without being able to hold his true love in his arms and make love to her at will: It feels like we have lived a lifetime.... I will always be there for you, Donna. . . .
This sort of horny, “Dearest Donna,” you rock my world, I cannot live without you, you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread, went on all month; Donna and George were exchanging card after card, letter after letter, e-mail after e-mail, fax after fax. Little of it had to do with work.
George wrote the same sentiments—almost word for word—in each card, and Donna lapped it up as if Shakespeare was the man’s muse. At times George would e-mail Donna sexually charged jokes he had heard.
Part of the fascination and obsession between them was augmented by their distance. The fact that they couldn’t be together all the time seemed to inspire the desire they shared for the next scheduled rendezvous. There was always a buildup to the next tryst—always a boiling period where they anticipated it, and allowed time to be a catalyst to what they presumed to be genuine love.
As February came, George said he enjoyed “opening up” and being able “for the first time” to share his “innermost thoughts and feelings” with someone he loved.
Kiss of the She-Devil Page 13