​“You have to tell me the truth,” I said, “all of it. We don’t have a chance unless you tell me everything.” What started then was a slow dance with confession, a dance we never finished. Valerie told me that she went to Ed’s apartment every now and then to smoke pot, that he was always up for sharing his drugs. And I refused to believe her. I’d read the texts and their subtext, and marijuana wasn’t the point of her long, pre-dawn walk across town.

“How could you have sex with Ed?” I asked again. “He’s a f**king loser.” Even as I said this, I knew how pathetic it sounded. And how completely clueless I was and had been. But I didn’t know much more than that. I looked around our living room, the framed pictures on the mantel, half of my family, half of Valerie’s. Valerie could see my panic, could register how close I was to ending our marriage right then and there, that learning about Ed was a curtain drawn back: I’d been walking around the house of our life like a shut-in; I’d almost forgotten there was an outside to all this, all this strange isolation. Over the course of a single morning, I’d come to see how weirdly alone I’d been for the past year. Still, it took another two hours of my insistence that she tell me everything for her to admit that she had, in fact, slept with Ed, though not the night before. She’d had sex with him once, months ago, she said, and she’d known what a terrible and inexcusable mistake it had been. Nothing else had ever happened, she swore it. I felt in that moment as if a bandage the size of my entire body had been ripped off me. Though I’d been thinking about it all day, imagining her f**king Ed, it still overwhelmed me to hear her say it. I remember bending over, hands on my knees; I nearly retched right there in front of her, my breath accelerating to the point that I thought I might hyperventilate. We were on the back deck, and I could see the pattern of swirls in the wood beneath my feet, the spots I’d missed when I’d refinished it a few weeks before. I think I could see through the wood, through the dirt beneath it, could see straight through the earth to something molten and boiling. I suppose, somehow, I was looking inside myself. I’d never been so surprised by a feeling in my life. And I think it scared Valerie to see me that way. So why did she confess? She must have known she was starting to erode my doubt, that at the very least I wanted to believe her. But I think now she realized she was stuck, that I knew enough to never completely trust her again, and that unless she could walk me back a few miles, back to some place where I might begin again to think she was capable of telling the truth, there was still a chance I’d end it all. And she was right: by admitting to one indiscretion and putting it safely in the past, months ago, and then dissolving into tears, by begging me not to kick her out, not to end the marriage, she convinced me almost immediately to forgive her (I even said an hour or so later: “I forgive you”), to imagine we might be able to get through this awful reality, that this was an isolated event. And that was what I believed, what we started doing.

As soon as she saw that she had an opening, that I really didn’t want to end the marriage (and there was nothing I wanted less than to end my marriage to Valerie), she began to fix all that had gone wrong over the past year. I made demands and she capitulated. She wouldn’t go out anymore, she would find her happiness at home, she would invite friends over instead of meeting them at bars, she would get back to focusing on the family, to weekend activities involving all of us. She lit another cigarette, asked me to sit down beside her. I hadn’t stopped walking the deck since she’d confessed; back and forth in front of her I paced, again a caged panther; I’m sure I thought of Rilke’s poem, of what it might feel like to suddenly have absolute knowledge rush into my body, a body contained by the circumstances of its life and unable to do anything with the knowledge. I said no. I wouldn’t sit. I couldn’t: to sit still would allow the shaking to begin again. She admitted she had checked out on me, on the kids, that she was drinking too much and letting herself believe it was all OK, her need for male attention, for the thrill of nightlife, that it was all a part of her issues with Low Self-Esteem, which was the working title of her memoir-in-progress. And she started planning our new life. Within minutes she was reciting a list of things we’d be doing as a family, a list of changes she’d be making, that we’d be making. She ran inside the house to find a pad of paper and a pen, was back in an instant, the screen door slamming behind her as she sat down again at the picnic table and began to write out our plans for a new life, our survival guide. She brushed her bangs back out of her eyes and looked

at me, though she seemed to be looking through me, imagining what daily changes would save us. And I believed her. And I knew then I wouldn’t ask her to leave, even as I heard Joseph’s voice in my head (What the hell are you doing? Kick her out!), even if I also knew that what we probably needed most was time apart, time to think about what all this meant. But I didn’t want time apart from Valerie. I’d had enough of that the last year. And what she was telling me then, at that moment, the air still singed by her confession, was that all of that was about to change. And that she was coming home. I should have known. Believing a liar is like giving money to the guy on the corner wearing the sombrero: he’ll still be there tomorrow, and he’ll ask again. And again. And again. Until eventually you’re out of spare change. Out of every possible belief. Even then, before I knew much of anything, I couldn’t keep the list of names out of my head, the men and women—no, boys and girls—she’d talked about right there on our back porch, those nights after the kids were in bed when we smoked and drank and talked and talked and talked. And what we talked about was her life, her various writing projects, her classes, but mostly her students, their funny or pathetic stories, their lives, which she seemed to know so well. But there was a shorter list beginning with Ed, a roster of young men she’d admitted to hanging out with outside of class, sharing beers with one, Dave, while she waited for her daughter (my stepdaughter) to finish her karate class, meeting another, Brian, for coffee to talk about his latest botched love affair… I knew all about them. I’d known all about Ed. 

And yet without fully admitting it to myself that afternoon while she wept and begged and confessed to one infidelity, that first day of my new life with Valerie, when our relationship moved from the recognizable realm of marriage to cuckoldry, I lost my trust, the thing I’d given to Valerie fearlessly a few years before, certain that it was in good hands. Do all cuckolds start out fearless and end up foolish? Perhaps. What is certain is that we end up at the wrong end of the telescope, looking back at the life we thought we were leading and seeing a new landscape, wide and weirdly proportioned, and suddenly filled at the edges with men we always knew were there but never really noticed: the fat, the pathetic, and the stupid, all ten feet tall now and growing larger by the second. The cuckold knows betrayal as a form of revision: here is the life you thought you were living; now here is what really happened. For months, even years, he will have moments of pure recognition; he will meet a stranger’s eyes on the street, eyes that widen then quickly look away, and he’ll turn and stare, remembering the one time he met the man behind the eyes, and realizing suddenly, yes: he is another one. Or passing a bar he’ll remember her late- night phone call, her voice saying she was there, that all was well, the laughter in the background. It is like living twice. And who, really, wants to live twice? Everyone. Everyone but the cuckold. One thing is for sure. She is never worth the trust. She will never be. All the emotions, all the feelings and tears will never repeat itself. Living together is easy, having to trust her for a split second is what a cuckold never does twice. 

It is not a weak man that trusts his woman. The strongest of men find the courage to trust their own but they appear hardcore. A man’s trust for his woman comes but once. Do you ever feel a man trusts you more than his past experiences with you? No, he doesn’t. Each day you smile at him after stabbing his trust, all he sees is infidelity; he sees the worst in him for having to be with you. He keeps watch over his shoulders because he can’t trust you. A man’s trust never comes so easily; it only goes off easily. Valerie soon left me for fear of dying out of guilt. She was miserable as I didn’t Care about her anymore. Funny thing is, I love her. I loved her and I just had to write this to let the world know that I may have been the husband to an adulteress, I still love my late wife who died out of the solitude and guilt deserving of a cheat.. She left me with a note before she died where she wrote, ‘I regret what I did to you, I hope you find a place in your heart to forgive me. I guess I realised I shouldn’t have but there’s nothing worse than having a man who gives you the space to be wild, losing your senses and then making you drown each day in your regrets’

End.