Four Friends (7 page)

“You son of a bitch,” she blustered at him. “Like it was my fault! Not wanting you enough!”

“Come on, don’t go there,” he said meanly. “You know as well as I do that for the past ten years, sex in our bed is rare at best. We’d have to get sex therapy to get up to once a month!”

“I know it’s real rare for you to make any effort!”

“How many no, thank yous do you think a husband can get before he figures out that’s not on the agenda?”

“Oh—so that’s your story now? That I said ‘no, thank you’ too often and damaged your frail little libido? That I drove you to the other woman?”

“Listen, the most love I feel in that house is when you hand me my list of chores and praise me like a puppy for doing as I was told. Aw, Jesus, we don’t need a therapist to help us say cruel things like this to each other! Christ!”

“Well, maybe if you’d fucking hold up your end, I wouldn’t be so tired at the end of the day!”

“See what I mean? Why don’t we just rent a cabin in the woods and fire insults and accusations at each other? It would be cheaper than a hundred bucks an hour! And it sure as hell isn’t helping put us back together! You want to know all the ways you were a less-than-perfect wife? Wanna tell me all the ways I failed as a husband? Because I’m sure the list is long and ugly for both of us!”

When they got home, they separated in silence, holding back the rage in front of the kids. Given they were teenagers, they were mostly oblivious. Jessie asked Gerri, “You mad about something?”

“Just worn out from a problem at work, honey,” she said. “Be patient with me.”

“It’s not, you know, that menopause thing?”

“No! It’s not that menopause thing!”

By the end of the week, a mere five days after the affair came to light, Gerri told Phil, “It’s time. I need to go to counseling alone, you need to find your own counselor, and we have to separate.”

“You’re giving up?”

“I don’t know. If I can stop hating you, maybe we can work it out. But right now, I’m just in too much pain.”

“Where do you expect me to go? Our finances can’t withstand another residence.”

“I don’t care. Stay in the city, come out for dinner, visit on weekends, whatever. But I can’t fight about it anymore. There’s just no explanation for what you did and I can’t get past the betrayal. You just have to give me some space and time.”

“If that’s what you want,” he said. “But I still love you.”

“Well, I don’t love you right now. I want to, but I can’t love a man who can do what you did without even knowing why. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.”

“Fine,” he said. “This weekend we’ll tell the kids.”

“I don’t agree with that,” she told him.

“We tell them what they’re old enough to understand. That’s what we do in this family. In fact, you wrote that rule. You’re the social worker.”

“I don’t think they’re old enough to understand,” she said.

“Yes, they are. They’re not old enough to sympathize and it’s not in their experience, but they’ll know what we’re talking about. They’ll know that what I did was wrong, that you being out of your mind angry is reasonable.”

She shook her head and a large tear escaped. “Why did you do this to us, Phil?” she asked in a desperate whisper.

“I can’t explain. I’ve had nightmares about this for over five years. If we’re not stronger than one indiscretion, then I completely misjudged us. I thought, given all we’ve had to handle, both personally and professionally, if it came to this, we’d find a way. We’ve seen families through murder that didn’t give up this fast.”

“One
two-year
indiscretion!”

“Do you have any idea how many times, during those two years, I put my arms around you and held you? How many times you told me not to get any ideas? God, Gerri, I remember when the kids were little and we were both exhausted from work, the house was collapsing, everyone was screaming they needed something, and we still snuck away from them, locked ourselves in the bathroom and—” He shook his head. “I don’t know when that stopped happening for us, but it stopped.”

“Why didn’t you say anything? Before it was too late?”

“I thought I had.” He looked down for a long moment, then looked up again. “Never mind. It wasn’t because of you. It was me. I should have found a way. But then, I didn’t know it was going to be too late...”

There was a very small part of her, remembering those days so long ago, that wanted to say,
It was me, too, let’s see if we can get it back.
But she said, “I’ll tell Jessie if you’ll tell the boys.”

He gave a nod. “Sunday,” he said. “Then I’ll go to the city.”

“You’re going to drop it on them and leave them with me?”

“No, of course not. We’ll tell them, separately. I’ll stay through the evening and when the house quiets down, I’ll head out. I’ll handle as much of this as I can, but it’s your decision for us to live apart and we don’t do that to our kids without them knowing the reasons.”

* * *

At five o’clock on Sunday, Phil knocked on Jed’s bedroom door and said, “Hey, bud, I have to talk to you about something. Can you come with me?”

“Where?” he asked, getting up from his reclining position on the bed.

“We have to go somewhere away from the house so I can talk to you in private. Just come on, you’ll have the details soon enough.”

They walked a couple of short blocks to the neighborhood park. Phil sat on the top of a picnic table, his feet on the bench, elbows on his knees, head down. Jed stood in front of him. “Come on, man,” Jed said impatiently. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Your mom and I are having some problems,” Phil said. He felt his eyes begin to water, his throat threaten to close. “Serious problems. Oh, Jesus, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Come
on,
Dad! You getting divorced or something?”

“I hope not,” Phil said, and watched his son deflate, as if all the air had just been sucked out of him. “It’s my fault. I want to tell you why, and I need your help with Matt. He needs to know the facts, but he’s kind of young to understand.”

“You’re shitting me,” Jed said in a panicked breath. “Oh, man, you’re shitting me.”

“Several years ago—over five—I broke the oath. I cheated. I don’t have an excuse—it was wrong. I never wanted to lose your mom, lose my family. I never wanted another woman, but I guess I was weaker than my hormones or something, because I cheated. Your mom just found out and she really wants to kill me right now. She’d like us to be able to work things out, but she’ll need some time to decide if she can forgive me.”

“What?” Jed asked, though he’d heard clearly. “What? You wouldn’t do that to Mom.”

“I hear ya, buddy. I never thought I’d be that stupid or that wrong, but I was. When she found out—and I still don’t know how, though I have a few ideas—it just hurt her so bad, she got us right into counseling. We’re going to keep going, but she’s too angry to live with me right now.” He reached out and put a strong hand on Jed’s shoulder. “Doesn’t mean I won’t be around. I promise I’ll be around plenty. I want to spend time with you guys, plus I have to hang close in case your mom wants to talk about it. Or yell at me about it some more,” he added with a lame smile.

“Why?” Jed asked.

“Why what, son?”

“Why can’t you work it out with you home? You guys fight all the time. You always work it out.”

“We don’t fight all the time,” he said. “We argue about little shit sometimes. This is different.”

“Well, did you say you’re sorry?”

“Of course,” Phil said. “I didn’t just say it, Jed. I mean it. I’ve never been so sorry about anything. But there’s all that trust—you count on it. You stake your lives on it, depend on it. And when the trust is broken, you can’t just say sorry. You know? You have to pay penance. You have to work hard to put the trust back in the relationship.”

“Oh, man, she isn’t going to give in easy,” Jed said, running a nervous hand through his short, spiky hair. “This is Mom we’re talking about.”

Phil wanted to laugh. At least smile. Boy, did they both know Gerri. She was brilliant, classy, strong and
stubborn.
There was that little male bonding thing going on with Jed and Phil was in a position to appreciate it more than his son knew. But he kept a straight face. “Here’s what I want you to know. This is very important. I want you to know I’m willing to do anything for her forgiveness. Anything. I’ll try to get her trust back, I swear. While we’re working on that—if I’m not around the house and you need me for something, need to talk to me, you call my cell phone anytime. It’ll be turned off for court, but I’ll answer any other time—day or night. With me, bud?”

“Yeah. Yeah. You going off with some other woman?” Jed asked.

“No. Absolutely not. I love your mother, I don’t even know where that woman is. I’ll do whatever I can, son. I’ll try my best to get our marriage back. Our family. Jed, I’m so sorry.”

“You mad at Mom for this? For saying she doesn’t want to live with you?”

“Nah. But I’ll be honest with you—this whole thing has caused us to say a lot of real nasty things to each other. We have things to get over. You’re going to have to be mature. Patient. Give us a chance to work it out. This wouldn’t be the best time to be the badass we both know you can be.”

“When was this? When did you say?”

“Over five years ago,” Phil said.

“Jesus. You haven’t done that since, have you?”

Phil just shook his head.

“Well, then, what the fuck? ”

“Listen, son, I didn’t take the other woman out for a soda. I was intimate with her. That’s the betrayal that sticks, that hurts. I’d love your mom to say, ‘Oh, well, I hope you learned your lesson,’ but it’s not going to be that easy. And it’s up to her. She’s the one who was wronged, so give her a break. You understand, Jed?”

He thought for a long moment. Then he said, “I understand life around our house is going to suck
big-
time.”

They talked awhile longer. Jed had questions that Phil answered a little differently than he had with his wife. He still couldn’t say why, but he did relent that the woman was pretty, nice, smelled good, made herself available. Jed was nineteen and had been with his girlfriend, Tracy, for about a year. They’d had many father-son talks about Jed’s responsibilities as a man. Phil knew the boy was sexually active and understood feelings of lust. He hoped he wouldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps and stray just because he was a little bored, a little needy or whatever the hell it was. “I thought I was a bigger man,” Phil said. “I hope to God you learn from this. You have a problem with your girl, your wife, your frickin’
hormones,
you better find a way to communicate that. Find a better way to deal with things than I did.”

“Man, you always seemed so perfect,” Jed said. “But when you fuck up, you fuck up big.”

* * *

If trying to tell her kids was horrible, preparing to tell Andy and Sonja was torture, and Gerri had no idea what she was going to say to her coworkers at CPS. She pinched the fat gathering below her waist and knew it was impossible to say she needed time to see her counselor twice a week for anorexia. On Monday morning when she was to meet her friends for their walk, Sonja was at her door five minutes early. Gerri came out with her coffee cup and led her to Andy’s. When Andy opened the door Gerri said, “Got the coffeepot on?”

“Sure.”

“I have to tell you both something. Let’s go inside. We’ll walk tomorrow.”

When they were seated at Andy’s sawdust-covered table, Gerri went through the chronology of events, from the encounter with Kelly in the elevator to the confrontation with Phil, the three disastrous counseling sessions and brutal arguments that followed. And then she described telling the kids he was sleeping elsewhere for the time being and why.

“Couldn’t you have come up with some story?” Andy asked, horrified.

“Believe me, I wanted to,” Gerri said. “Don’t tell him I said this, but Phil was right—they’re not preschoolers, they have to know why. My husband had an affair and I’m too angry to live with him right now.”

“How’d it go?” Andy asked.

“As bad as possible. Jed was silent and brooding, disillusioned, actually more angry with me than Phil, but Jessie fell apart. She sobbed almost uncontrollably. And Matt shrugged and asked something like, “How long will this take?” And then he asked if it was all right to go pitch a few balls with a couple of friends. Baseball season’s starting. At dinner, it was quiet as a tomb except for questions about their routine—rides, takeout orders for dinner, chores. Matt asked if there was going to be child support—they know about those problems from friends—moms who are suddenly unable to pay for school trips, that sort of thing. Then before the plates were cleared, Jessie lost it, threw a glass across the room and screamed at us both, asking how we could do this to her. She’s sixteen so it’s all about her. When the house was finally under control and quiet, Phil and I had another fight in the garage as he was leaving with his suitcase.”

“What did you fight about?” Sonja asked.

She laughed weakly. “Our routine. Child support.”

“What’s up with the routine? The child support?”

“He’s going to stay in the city. He’ll come out to Mill Valley as much as possible, when he’s not working till nine or ten. If he’s not around as much, can’t car pool, he also can’t be expected to drive all the way out here just to bring home dinner or help with homework. It’ll be a major adjustment. Before, if I was going to be late, he was on time and vice versa. And he said he’d take care of the bills, but I’ve been paying the bills for over twenty years—he just gets his cash out of the instant teller or my purse. Now he’s going to have his check payrolled to him rather than direct deposited and give
me
money. He needs money to pay for a place to stay. Oh, forget about it,” she said, waving her hand. “It’s just logistics. We don’t know who does what. We always used to know who does what.”

They’d also fought about him leaving, though she asked him to leave, so they fought about the fact that he made her make him. And she cried half the night again.