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Excerpt

FINDING OUT; an excerpt from VOW by Wendy Plump

From a friend. From the cell phone. From a neighbor. From e-mails left on the computer. From hotel receipts. From a homemade sex video tragically left out in the open. From the bank account. From the dog sitter. From the nanny. Especially if it is the nanny. From the spouse. From the lover. From an offhand comment on the playground. From the monthly expenses that don’t jive with anything you did or received or gave. From the cashier at the lumber yard. From some weird supermarket encounter. From your mother, whose antennae has been tuned to this frequency much longer than you realize. From the accumulation of doubt. From walking in on them in the office. From walking in on them in the bedroom. From walking in on them.

So many ways to find out. So many ways.

Four months before I found out my husband was having an affair a school in the North Caucasus in Russia was stormed by Chechnyan separatists and over three days 1,100 hostages were taken, including 800 schoolchildren. It ended badly; even, I imagine, for those who got away with their lives.

The Beslan Hostage Crisis still pierces my awareness many years later because of the small, stubborn role it played in the unveiling of my husband’s last affair. The events were unrelated and on two different sides of the world, but they are conjoined in my memory of them. Details fall into the crevices between life-altering knowledge and your reaction to it. These details take on their own significance by filling up the space between, adding buffer and firewall and salt indeed to the whole mess of finding out.

A friend came over one morning in early January 2005 because she thought it was time to tell me about Jim. My two sons were at elementary school. It had been snowing hard for two days, almost cancelling school and a party the previous weekend during which our friends hotly debated the merits of marriage. I recall announcing to the dinner table with stupid conviction, “Even if I thought it was the best idea, I would never get a divorce.” I have always been a fool in the court of conspicuous declaration. I remember once telling someone in eighth grade that I would never smoke pot, never have sex before marriage, never sneak out of my bedroom window in pursuit of a guy. I was a holy horror of sanctimony. Within five years I had done all of those things.

I wish I had my wits about me more back then, and now. Things happened that I was oblivious to even as they were happening to me or because of me, including the folly of my own behavior. I knew nothing solid about myself as a young woman, right up to and possibly including yesterday.

When my friend came through the front door that morning in January -- letting herself in without knocking because that is how we operate -- I came out of my bedroom and looked down at her from the top of the staircase. She was agitated, out of sorts, as if she were holding herself upright against a heavy blast of wind. This was not hindsight. It was an instant telegraphing of something critical, something disturbing. Are you okay? was my first question. And her reply, pressed into my very veins: It’s not me. It’s you.

Here’s where the Chechnyans came into it. I thought she was there to tell me that my sons’ elementary school had been stormed by insurgents. This was partly ridiculous and partly terror, the wild but typical response of an anxious parent. You are always in reconnaissance mode once your babies are on the ground. My oldest son was born one month after Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. That horror and its attendant crowd of loss jumpstarted my mother-fear. The worst of the world’s events are blazed into my psyche more so than before I was a parent because tragedy echoes through my concern for my sons. That January morning it took my friend several minutes to calm me down by repeating over and over, It’s not the boys. It’s not the boys. It’s not the boys.

Until finally and no doubt partly out of exasperation she blurted out: It’s Jim. He’s having an affair.

This news fell into place with an almost audible click. Like a bullet revolving in its cylinder and lining up with the chamber. The violent image fits because it was a kind of violence that I lived with later on. But right then, right in that moment, what I most remember thinking is, “This makes sense.” It wasn’t shock. It was relief that I felt. There were no Chechnyans at my sons’ elementary school where seconds before I had visualized them storming art class. That was not the case. What else was there to worry about?

There had been so many holes in our marriage over the preceding years. Late night movies that Jim attended apparently on his own. Claims that he had been driving around smoking a cigar -- “Just thinking” -- until late into the night. Evenings when I would find him alone outside staring into the fields behind our house. I felt such a deep disconnect from him, a hum of disturbance not far below the surface of domestic routine. When I heard the news of his affair the disconnect was blown away. The news explained a lot. Everything, really.

People are incredulous when I say that I did not suspect anything before this discovery. They think I must have been aware that Jim was having an affair, as if suspicion were linked to some primal instinct we all have. I have no idea what imperative suspicion would serve Neanderthals such that it would repeat upwards through the species to find its expression in us. Would it make you more accomplished in sacking cave people? It seems unlikely that Piltdown Man had the neural complexity to doubt. Doubt is a scourge of incipient sophistication. Life would be pleasanter without it.

In any case this was not even remotely true. Despite a history of affairs on both our sides by that late point – my own affairs were earlier in the marriage and Jim’s affairs were later -- it hadn’t occurred to me that Jim was fooling around. One time I looked for his movie ticket stubs and duly found them. Once I wondered why he never let me borrow his cell phone. Once I asked him where he had been until 2 a.m. the night before. I always got answers that did not exactly satisfy, but that worked.

They worked because the explanations you most want to hear are also the easiest to deliver. They require so little evidence. One sentence will suffice, something short and offered up by your spouse with a surfeit of confidence. After which you can go on with the laundry or the homework or the purchase of cleaning products. There is a lot to do in a family. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. “There are no politics to infidelity. It’s not genetic. It’s not gender-specific. It’s not even predictable.” (69) Do you agree with Wendy that infidelity is unpredictable, or might there be ways to trace the paths of betrayal in marriages? Explain your answer.

2. Consider the early days of Bill and Wendy’s relationship, when they met and fell in love in college. Were there any early warning signs of their future lies and betrayals? Do Wendy’s memories of their early romance seem tainted by their divorce, or is she clear-eyed about her and Bill’s past?

3. Compare Wendy’s first two affairs, with Tommy and Steven. What did Wendy learn from each of these brief relationships? Why did Steven have a longer-lasting impact on her life than Tommy did?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Wendy Plump's web site Author is available for call-ins. Contact her here.

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