Wendy Plump - Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs)

Copyright 2013 by Wendy Plump

Authors note: some of the names, locations, and details of events in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of persons involved.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Plump, Wendy.
Vow : a memoir of marriage (and other affairs) / Wendy Plump.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-60819-823-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Marriage. 2. Adultery. 3. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.
HQ734.P7348 2013
306.736dc23
2012025660

eISBN: 978-1-6081-9892-4

First U.S. edition 2013
Electronic edition published in February 2013

www.bloomsbury.com

FOR THE HENS

Hunger allows no choice
W. H. AUDEN, SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

From a friend. From the cell phone. From a neighbor. From e-mails left on the computer. From hotel receipts. From a homemade sex video tragically left out in the open. From the bank account. From the dog sitter. From the nanny. Especially if it is the nanny. From the spouse. From the lover. From an offhand comment on the playground. From the monthly expenses that dont jibe with anything you did or received or gave. From the cashier at the lumberyard. From some weird supermarket encounter. From your mother, whose antennae have been tuned to this frequency much longer than you realize. From the accumulation of doubt. From walking in on them in the office. From walking in on them in the bedroom. From walking in on them.

So many ways to find out. So many ways.

Four months before I found out my husband was having an affair, a school in the North Caucasus in Russia was stormed by Chechnyan separatists, and over three days eleven hundred hostages were taken, including eight hundred schoolchildren. It ended badlyeven, I imagine, for those who got away with their lives.

The Beslan hostage crisis still pierces my awareness many years later because of the small, stubborn role it played in the unveiling of my husbands last affair. The events were unrelated and on two different sides of the world, but they are conjoined in my memory of them. Details fall into the crevices between life-altering knowledge and your reaction to it. These details take on their own significance by filling up the space between, adding buffer and firewall and salt indeed to the whole mess of finding out.

A friend came over one morning in early January 2005 because she thought it was time to tell me about Bill. My two sons were at elementary school. It had been snowing hard for two days, almost canceling school and a party the previous weekend during which our friends hotly debated the merits of marriage. I recall announcing to the dinner table with stupid conviction, Even if I thought it was the best idea, I would never get a divorce. I have always been a fool in the court of conspicuous declaration. I remember once telling someone in eighth grade that I would never smoke pot, never have sex before marriage, never sneak out of my bedroom window in pursuit of a guy. I was a holy horror of sanctimony. Within five years I had done all of those things.

I wish I had had my wits about me more back then, and now. Things happened that I was oblivious to even as they were happening to me or because of me, including the folly of my own behavior. I knew nothing solid about myself as a young woman, right up to and possibly including yesterday.

When my friend came through the front door that morning in Januaryletting herself in without knocking because that is how we operateI came out of my bedroom and looked down at her from the top of the staircase. She was agitated, out of sorts, as if she were holding herself upright against a heavy blast of wind. This was not hindsight. It was an instant telegraphing of something critical, something disturbing. Are you okay? was my first question. And her reply, pressed into my very veins: Its not me. Its you.

Heres where the Chechnyans came into it. I thought she was there to tell me that my sons elementary school had been stormed by insurgents. This was partly ridiculous and partly terror, the wild but typical response of an overanxious parent. You are always in reconnaissance mode once your babies are on the ground. My oldest son was born one month after Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. That horror and its attendant crowd of loss jump-started my mother-fear. The worst of the worlds events are seared into my psyche more so than before I was a parent because tragedy echoes through my concern for my sons. That January morning, it took my friend several minutes to calm me down by repeating over and over, Its not the boys. Its not the boys. Its not the boys.

Until finally, and no doubt partly out of exasperation, she blurted out: Its Bill. Hes having an affair.

This news fell into place with an almost audible click. Like a bullet revolving in its cylinder and lining up with the chamber. The violent image fits because it was a kind of violence that I lived with later on. But right then, right in that moment, what I most remember thinking is, This makes sense. It wasnt shock. It was relief that I felt. There were no Chechnyans at my sons elementary school, where seconds before I had visualized them storming art class. That was not the case. What else was there to worry about?

There had been so many holes in our marriage over the preceding years. Late night movies that Bill attended apparently on his own. Claims that he had been driving around smoking a cigarJust thinkinguntil late into the night. Evenings when I would find him alone outside, staring into the fields behind our house. I felt such a deep disconnect from him, a hum of disturbance not far below the surface of domestic routine. When I heard the news of his affair, the disconnect was blown away. The news explained a lot. Everything, really.

People are incredulous when I say that I did not suspect anything before this discovery. They think I must have been aware that Bill was having an affair, as if suspicion were linked to some primal instinct we all have. I have no idea what imperative suspicion would serve Neanderthals such that it would repeat upward through the species to find its expression in us. Would it make you more accomplished in sacking cavepeople? It seems unlikely that Java Man had the neural complexity to doubt. Doubt is a scourge of incipient sophistication. Life would be pleasanter without it.

In any case, this was not even remotely true. Despite a history of affairs on both our sides by that late pointmy own affairs were earlier in the marriage, and Bills affairs were laterit hadnt occurred to me that Bill was fooling around. One time I looked for his movie ticket stubs and duly found them. Once I wondered why he never let me borrow his cell phone. Once I asked him where he had been until two A.M. the night before. I always got answers that did not exactly satisfy, but that worked.

They worked because the explanations you most want to hear are also the easiest to deliver. They require so little evidence. One sentence will suffice, something short and offered up by your spouse with a surfeit of confidence. After which you can go on with the laundry or the homework or the purchase of cleaning products. There is a lot to do in a family.

The acceptance of a lame alibi is part of the larger web of complicity I share with my husband. I am aware of not having suspected. But I am also aware that I would not have wanted to suspect. At its worst, suspicion will eat you alive. At its least, it is a bore. It interferes with life itself. Each time I felt the edge of suspicion crowding me, I would ask, and he would answer. And I would exhale and take the answer in hand and go about my day. I did not suspect any more than that because that would have been inconvenient to all the things I wanted to do. Continuing my marriage being one of them.