Defensive

A friend just called me neurotic, and while she didn’t mean to insult me (she was, rather, trying to cajole me out of my particular present state of neurosis) I’m torn between agreeing wholeheartedly with her, and attempting a point-by-point refutation. Specifics are not necessary: let’s just say that I, known in the past for having a skin so thick it’s almost impenetrable, with an anthracite heart buried somewhere within, have suddenly become uncharacteristically…fragile.

I used to be bewildered by my disinclination to cry. I worried about it, wondering what it would take to reduce me to tears. “You don’t even CARE,” more than one boyfriend accused, mid-argument, as I sat there dry-eyed. It wasn’t true–I did care, but for some reason I never disintegrated. I’d choke up, but that was as far as I got.

Even as an emotionally volatile teenager, I was not the type to fling myself on my bed and sob. Once in a great while something would set me crying for a moment or two, which was a massive (if short lived) relief. I wept, years later, when my mother was seriously injured, and I cried, helplessly, when I was in labor with both my children–but crying when you’re giving birth is like crying because you’ve skinned your knee. It hurt a lot, so I cried. Somehow that didn’t seem to count.

When my ex-husband first confronted me with evidence of what was, to him, unforgivable perfidy, he cried. I did not. For one thing, I did not consider a brief but intense crush (with a couple of thrilling kisses thrown in) quite the marital crisis that he did. We had been married for thirteen years by that point–I assumed he, too, might have had an extramarital infatuation along the way, and even a stolen kiss would not have been a dealbreaker for me. I would have been curious. I might even have been jealous. But I would not, after so many years together, have considered a brief attraction to another woman totally beyond the pale.

In his defense, he heard about the dalliance in an unnerving way; several months after it had flared up and flamed out (my co-dallier left his email open on his home computer, whether by accident or design I’ll never know), his justifiably angry wife contacted my ex-husband. She told him she thought her husband and I had had an affair. (We had not. And the kisses were never disclosed. Sum total of accusation: a few racy emails.) However, I knew the kisses had happened, even if my husband did not, and I also knew that I was, in heart if not in deed, completely guilty of the betrayal I was accused of. I knew that the crush, if allowed to flourish, would certainly have led to more than kissing. And I’m pretty sure my ex-husband knew, too.

The whole thing spun quickly out of control. There were weeks, then months of accusation and refutation, during which my ex-husband alternately wept and raged, and I pleaded and cajoled and begged to be forgiven. In retrospect, my overreaction was as much to blame as his. I could probably have shut the whole thing down if I’d kept some perspective–this was not an affair we were talking about! It was a brief infatuation with a person I swore never to speak to or communicate with again! But I felt guilty, so I acted guilty, which escalated the whole thing. My ex-husband would be placated for a while, then suddenly explode in anger and resentment again. Anything–a song on the radio about infidelity (and do you know how many songs on the radio are about infidelity?), a movie, the mere mention or sight of anything to do with my co-dallier (and we live, remember, in a very small town), too much to drink, too little to drink, a chance comment by anyone at all–could lead to hours of confrontation: accusation, denial, apology, détente. I lost so much weight I looked horrible, developed a nervous twitch, and commenced drinking gin at four thirty every afternoon. Finally, six months later, my ex-husband had what can only really be termed a nervous collapse. Unable to stop crying, he admitted he had gone completely off his rocker, and came home from an emergency shrink visit with an armload of anti-depressants, chagrined and silent.

I keep coming back to this as the moment the marriage really failed, though it’s pointless to pinpoint something so nuanced as the demise of a fifteen year marriage. I think I knew, that day, that whatever had or hadn’t happened with the guy I’d lusted after wasn’t precisely the issue any more; that something was dreadfully, dreadfully wrong, and that the man I was married to was no longer the person I’d fallen in love with.

I did not cry, even then. Writing this, I’m glad I’m pseudonymous–I picture all you nice readers and commenters storming off into cyberspace, slamming virtual doors. I feel a little bit better when I remember that you don’t know me, can’t really judge me. In fact, were we to meet accidentally someday, you would notice nothing out of the ordinary. Except, perhaps, the merest whiff of brimstone as I passed.

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