The One Who Got Away (18 page)

So I said: ‘Lyric wanted me to get out of my marriage. She was a volatile person. She could explode with very little warning, which is why I had to tell her what she wanted to hear.'

Bette said: ‘Loren, how do you feel, hearing that your husband told his mistress that he didn't love you?'

Well, I'll never forget how Loren looked at that moment. She was curled into her chair with her feet tucked under her bottom, almost like a small child. Her face was streaked with mascara and her nose had started to run.

I said: ‘Can we please stop? Look at my wife. She's in agony.'

‘Well, I'm sure she is, but who's to blame for that?' said Bette, and then she sent us home with what amounted to an order to talk about the affair for a further twenty minutes after the girls had gone to bed, and not just that night but every single Thursday night for the next eight weeks.

I was aghast. As I understood it, as soon as the girls were reliably asleep, I would have to take a seat in our sitting room while Loren would sit opposite and assail me with questions about the affair.

‘She can ask anything she wants,' Bette said, ‘and you, David, will answer. Anything she wants to know. Specifically. About the affair. But only at that precise time of day and only for twenty minutes. After that, Loren, you must let up. You are not permitted to harangue David for hours on end. You get twenty minutes and then you stop. I expect you BOTH to stick to these rules.'

I tried to object. ‘I don't see what good can come of this. It's like rubbing salt into a raw wound.'

Loren swung around and cried at me, ‘I knew you would do this,' meaning that I would try to get out of therapy, so I agreed to go ahead.

Loren had already told Bette that questions about my affair swirled around in her head all day. Where did we meet? What did we do? Did we talk about Loren? What had I told Lyric about my sex life with my wife? How many people in Bienveneda knew about the affair?

Bette's theory was that Loren would keep obsessing until she had answers to these questions. I didn't necessarily accept that, but if the Busonne Method was going to save my marriage, I was determined to give it a go. And at first, it wasn't too bad. Talking about the affair in a tentative, almost
curious way did seem to give Loren some relief. She would cry and sometimes she would attack me, but the twenty-minute limit on question time meant that I was soon off the hook.

By the third week, Loren had exhausted most of the more basic questions and had begun demanding intimate details of what had gone on. Would I kiss Lyric before sex and if so, what kind of kiss? Would I kiss Lyric on the neck? Would I kiss Lyric on the breasts? Did we have oral sex? If so, was I performing oral sex on Lyric or the other way around? My role was to answer these questions and that was extremely difficult because, whatever I said, Loren would sob or fly into a rage. Week after week this went on and I began to doubt the wisdom of it.

I asked Bette: ‘How does hearing the intimate details of my sexual encounters with another woman help Loren heal?'

She said: ‘What's your alternative? That you and Lyric keep your secrets to yourselves?'

So we carried on, with Loren asking questions in a more or less obsessive way. She was particularly interested in those occasions where Lyric had ‘invaded her space', by which she meant those times Lyric had come to our home, or ridden in our car. It's no exaggeration to say that Loren craved
explicit
detail about these encounters.

We had three main cars: my Porsche, which I call Middy, for Mid-Life Crisis; Loren's SUV, which the girls called the Lady Bug; and the BMW sedan that we used as a family car, which we called Beep. In one of our very early sessions with Bette, I had confessed to having had a sexual encounter with Lyric in Beep. Later that night, during what I called the ‘mandatory reporting', Loren demanded details of that encounter, so I told her. I had been at a lunchtime function with Lyric at the
Bienveneda Golf Club. For some reason, I was driving Beep. Lyric jumped in the passenger seat to get a lift back to the office. At some point, I felt her hand massaging me. This was near the beginning of the relationship when I was still sex-starved, so I allowed her to unzip my trousers. Loren insisted on knowing what happened next and I had no choice other than to tell her that Lyric had performed oral sex on me while I was driving.

I relayed this episode to Loren in the starkest, plainest detail possible. She got up from the sofa, went into the garage and attacked Beep with a golf club. I remember thinking: ‘This is very Tiger Woods; everyone in the street is going to know what's going on.' Also, because we were under considerable financial pressure, I couldn't get the car repaired. Unbeknown to Loren, I had by then allowed the insurance premiums on all the cars to lapse, so I had to park the car towards the back of our garage and place a cover over it so that visitors and the twins couldn't see the damage.

Another time, Loren asked if I had ever had sex with Lyric in our family home. I had been dreading the question, because Lyric visited our house twice. Our homes were actually quite close together, separated mainly by the Lemon Grove, and there had been a few occasions when I'd slipped out after Loren fell asleep, and cut through the Lemon Grove to get to Lyric's apartment. But that wasn't good enough for Lyric. She wanted to visit me in my home. My reaction, when I first heard that, was no way. Never. But I had gotten reckless, and Lyric was complaining quite a lot about feeling like a second-class citizen in our relationship.

I decided to wait for a day when I knew Loren had no staff on, and when she had plenty of appointments: committee-work
, banking, manicure, and so on. My idea was to sneak Lyric into the house in something like a two-hour window. It was dangerous but doable. We drove from the office. I didn't tell her where we were going. She was amazed when I pulled into the garage. I had turned off the security cameras so there would be no evidence that she was ever there. I showed Lyric inside.

Lyric remarked how huge the place was. I suppose it was. She looked at the photographs on the mantelpiece. Pictures of Loren and our girls. She went into the master bedroom and sat on the corner of the bed and used my tie to pull me towards the bed, and although I hadn't planned on having sex with her, we ended up having sex on the bed.

When I told Loren this, she kicked me in the shins. The next day, all of our sheets – I mean, every sheet in the house, except the
Frozen
sheets from the girls' beds – were out on the lawn.

The second time I took Lyric home was obviously more serious. She stayed overnight. Loren had long been planning to take the girls to Disneyland. She went with our nanny and I took advantage of that trip to make good on a promise to Lyric to spend a night in my bed.

I don't know what I expected, but Lyric brought fresh food to my house. She was an excellent cook. I had been complaining – in a joking way – about Loren's shortage of skills in that regard, and Lyric was probably showing off. She made a lemon-and-chilli pasta. She brought wine. I'm not entirely naïve. Lyric was auditioning for the role of wife. She told me to relax and kick off my shoes. At some point, she called me into the kitchen. She was wearing only an apron and heels. I know what I was meant to feel: aroused. I felt guilty having sex in the kitchen, with the girls' purple lunchboxes on the bench.

Anyway, Lyric stayed the night, which was scary because she had long, dark hair and Loren's hair was blonde. I was terrified of Loren finding a dark hair on the pillow. Lyric also seemed in no hurry to leave. Come morning, she made breakfast and brought it to me on a tray.

I was dreading having to tell Loren these details, and I was right to be wary because as soon as I finished telling her, she went into the kitchen and emptied all of the cutlery into the trash.

From that day forward, Loren became obsessed by the idea that I had been ‘test-driving' Lyric for the role of Second Wife. Which was ludicrous, by the way, and the next time I saw Bette, I again raised my objections, saying: ‘How can this be good for Loren's mental health? To go over the details of this affair in excruciating detail, night after night?'

Bette was adamant that we continue. ‘Lies are no good for your marriage. Marriage thrives on honesty.'

It wasn't the lies, it was the
detail
that upset Loren. Why did she need to hear all the details? Why wasn't it enough to say there was foreplay? But Loren supported the Busonne Method. She would cry out: ‘But what does that even mean – foreplay? That could mean anything. I want to know, David. I want to know everything that
she
knows.'

Meaning she wanted to know everything that Lyric knew.

But there was more to the Busonne Method than honesty. I also had to accept strict monitoring of my movements, and I had to endure arbitrary checks of my iPhone and iPad that reduced me to schoolboy status – let me see your Facebook updates – which meant meekly handing my devices to an angry Loren night after night.

Flick, flick, flick
.

Loren had a unique way of using her thumb to scroll through my messages. She would question me about this message, or that message. She also had Find My iPhone installed so she could keep track of my movements during the day.

She would say: ‘What was this trip for? Why did you go here, at that time?' These were
nightly
questions: ‘What about this missed call? What about this anonymous number? Anything you need to tell me?'

I am a grown man and occasionally took umbrage. ‘Please, Loren, I implore you. Let go of the leash. I've made you a promise. I will not break it. I'm now faithful.'

Loren shot back: ‘You cannot be trusted.'

Bette was completely on her side.

I said: ‘Please, Loren, trust cannot be rebuilt when one partner is constantly checking up on the other.'

She said: ‘Well then, you should leave. Leave, and watch us both go broke. Leave and watch the girls leave their friends at Grammar. Leave, and watch the realtor come and hammer a For Sale sign in our front lawn.'

And then,
slam.
She would slam down the phone, or slam the door.

So it was rough going, and then, after five or six sessions of Busonne Method, Bette told me that I had to initiate sex with Loren. No, I'm not kidding. She ordered me to have sex with my wife.

‘You need to resume sexual relations. Energetic relations. Passionate sex,' she said.

Privately, I thought, is there something about this old pervert who just wants the details?

I said: ‘I would be delighted, but shouldn't we ask Loren?' Who was in fact sitting there.

Bette folded her reading glasses and stood up as if dismissing us. ‘No talking tonight,' she said. ‘Only sex.'

I've never been ordered to have sex before. But did we give it a go? Sure we did. Was it awkward? Of course it was.

We started on the sofa. I put my hand on Loren's knee. She started to cry. I tried to comfort her, saying: ‘This won't work if you cry.' I wiped her tears with the side of my thumb. She sat up straighter and we tried again. It was difficult. She said something like: ‘You're not even aroused,' and I joked with her: ‘I'm not as young as when we first met.' Which was a mistake. Because then she started with: ‘I'm sure you had no trouble with your mistress.'

I put my finger against her lips. No talk. Just sex. They were our instructions. We tried again. Loren went to kiss my face – a quick peck on the cheek – and I turned quickly and she hit my lips. She laughed. So that was good. Laughing was better than crying. We were getting into the groove.

Loren said: ‘This feels ridiculous,' but Bette's instructions were for Passionate Sex, so off we went.

I undressed my wife. From what I could tell, Loren had been shopping. She had new lingerie. I complimented her, and she laughed about how silly she had felt in the change room at Victoria's Secret because everyone else had been a teenager. I told her she looked great and eventually, we got things done. And afterwards, Loren said: ‘That was a disaster,' and then we both looked up, and holy hell, there was Peyton!

‘Honey!' said Loren. ‘How long have you been there?'

Peyton was standing with her thumb in her mouth. She had a giant teddy under one arm. I grabbed a sofa cushion. My boxer shorts were still on the floor. Loren gathered up the
throw and wrapped it around herself, saying, ‘What are you doing out of bed?'

Peyton looked so sleepy. I'm quite sure she hadn't been there all that long, but it was one of those
whoops
moments that you have as parents.

Peyton said: ‘I heard a noise … like
pigs
,' and I couldn't help myself. I burst out laughing.

Loren smothered her own smile, saying, ‘Well, there are no pigs here,' and off she went to tuck Peyton back into bed, turning halfway down the hall to wink at me, making me think,
Okay, wow, that worked. We've turned a corner.

* * *

They hadn't turned a corner. Less than a week after David and Loren resumed their sex life, Loren ran into Lyric, outside the Bienveneda Gym.

‘I'd been dreading a confrontation between them,' David told me during our interview, ‘and when it happened, it was every bit as bad as I'd feared.

‘Lyric worked out at Bienveneda Gym at least four times a week. Loren generally didn't go to the gym. It was Bette's big idea that she start going to classes, exercise being a part of the Busonne Method. Loren had said something like: “He [meaning me] finds me revolting.” I'd said: “I do not find you revolting.” Bette had butted in with: “But you do think Loren is out of shape, don't you?” I'd shrugged and said: “Sure, but aren't we all?” Bette had made some kind of mark on her clipboard and said: “I have a new prescription for you, Loren. Physical exercise. You are to start a gym class. Tomorrow. Not for David. For you.”