I would end up going through his things three months after we'd gotten married and moved in together, but for a different reason. One Sunday morning I woke before him and crept into the kitchen to make him bacon and eggs. He'd been awake long after I'd gone to sleep. I noticed a few beer bottles on the mini stand I'd purchased for his laptop. The raised screen was the first indication that something was different since he always shut it when he was finished. I went over to close it and saw that he'd left an instant message conversation on the screen. The last thing he'd said to "Hollywood Girl" was "love ya." At the sight of the words my heart started pounding. "It's probably just one of his sisters," I reasoned with myself. He was constantly discovering another sibling of his, offspring of his father who was known for sleeping around before he'd been put in prison. I scrolled to the beginning of the conversation and began reading. There was no rationalizing anymore, it was clear he was having an affair.
He was the only person I'd ever trusted. In the four years we'd maintained a long-distance relationship I never suspected him of cheating. He would feed me stories of his faithfulness, saying he was the only one of his friends who didn't sleep around as their girlfriends waited back home. When he disappeared one weekend and called me on Monday to say he'd been to Amsterdam I was hurt, but believed him when he said he had remained faithful while his friends went off to strip clubs and brothels. In the time he was gone, I hardly even talked to other men, determined not to be like "all the other" military wives who couldn't handle the time apart and looked for comfort in someone else.
I remember that morning like a dream, as if I am floating outside of my body, looking down on everything that followed the realization that he had broken my trust. I pulled myself up from the living room floor, my legs felt as if they were made of lead. It was like in reoccurring nightmares when I desperately needed to run, but my feet were frozen to floor. I stumbled down the hallway and into the bedroom. He woke up as soon as I approached the bed and knew something was wrong. I literally collapsed in tears on the ground. He followed me, asking "What's wrong." "Who were you talking to last night," I asked. He lied. "You want to fuck her," I said screaming and clawing at the rug beneath me. "I waited for you," I said again and again. In shock, he couldn't put the pieces together. "What are you talking about?" he asked. I told him he'd left his conversation up on the computer and I'd read it. He begged me to calm down. "Stop screaming," he said, "someone's going to call the MPs."
In an attempt to calm me down he told me the truth about who she was. He'd met her in seventh grade, he said. She moved away, but they had kept in contact. It had never been a physical relationship he claimed. I asked why he would do it, "Because I could," he said.
I had moved miles away from my family, my friends, my job, left everything behind to be with him. I was reasonably devastated to find out that he had lied to me for years. "I only started talking to her again recently," he said. He told me they would talk while I was making him dinner as if that was going to make me feel better.
I spent the entire day in bed crying. The annual book sale that I had been looking forward to for weeks was the following day and I no longer cared to go. He begged me to go, to snap out of my funk, to "be happy." We went, but I wasn't happy. I could barely meet his gaze over the rows of books.
When he went to work the following morning I came home determined to find her on myspace-- it was back before facebook was popular. I found her immediately. Her profile was filled with pictures of her in scantily clad outfits with drinks in her hands or her infant son who was named after my husband. I sent her a threatening message. She wrote back immediately. We went back and forth for an hour. Although she said the child was not his I never believed her. They looked too much alike, they had the same name. I hated myself for empathizing with her, for seeing her as a person and not a monster after our conversation and I hated myself for staying with my remorseless husband. Maybe if I wasn't living so far from home, or if he weren't in the military, or if I had had more self-respect it would have been easier to walk away. When one of my closest friends called me the day after the myspace conversation I couldn't even bring myself to tell her. I lied and said things were going really well.
I went digging through the box closest to the door in his spare room. I found letters from family and friends, but none from her. I stopped looking because, really, if she had sent him letters I didn't want to see them.
I hadn't been able to find a job in the three months since we'd moved to Georgia so I had the entire day to sit at home and sulk. Sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon I saw a school bus dropping children off outside and decided I was going to go back to school to become an English teacher. I had little desire to teach, but needed to find a way to support myself.
We stayed together five years after I found out about that first affair. I tried to regain trust in him, but he continued to break it over the years. I blamed myself for not being able to forgive and let go. For somehow not being a good enough wife to lead him to do the things he did.
When we moved in together in Massachusetts I showed him the photo album I'd bought almost eight years before and never even taken out of the plastic and cardboard. He pulled out a pile of pictures for me to add in, but I had lost the desire to scrapbook about something we both wanted to forget. He celebrated the end of his eight year contract alone last summer after he moved out. There's no need for me to hold onto this gift that will never be given.
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