I Googled "counseling" and scrolled through pages of possibilities before finally settling on a female psychologist with a kind face. Later that week, I went to her office wanting to talk about fidelity and broken trust, but somehow we ended up talking about sex and guilt. I cried a lot.
Eight years earlier, when I was 20, I had served in Afghanistan as a machine-gunner in a security platoon that accompanied convoys, a six-month tour of grinding tedium interspersed with episodes of unpredictable violence and death. But that's not what drove me to the psychologist's office. I went because my marriage had fallen apart.
My wife had had an affair. As is often the case in marriage, the infidelity was more a symptom of our trouble than its cause. Their situation was typical; they met through work. One evening, before I knew what was happening, the three of us were at the same fund-raising event, and at one point, he and my wife ducked outside for a smoke and I was left alone.
Well, not entirely alone. His wife was there too, holding a newborn, looking uncomfortable. We didn't talk. Someone was making a speech about future goals, and I was eating dessert.
After the affair came to light, my wife and I separated. I missed the cat. When I wasn't feeling self-righteously angry, I missed my wife, too. In the evenings I listened to Springsteen, ordered pizza, watched hockey, slept poorly and spent the gray hours before dawn Googling my wife's name, the guy's name and "the pain of divorce."
One night the first link told me to pray to God, the second told me to prepare for "a new life with many beautiful women," and th e third led me to a body-hair-removal site. I decided to go for counseling.
A few months later, I was in the psychologist's reception room, paying for my fourth really good cry, when a woman carrying a child walked in. I didn't recognize her at first, and then I remembered her face from the fund-raiser.
"Are you the wife of the guy my wife is having an affair with?" I asked tactlessly.
The question is a stupid one. First off, it's stupid. Second, it assumes that this woman's identity, like mine, is wrapped up in fidelity and infidelity and everything in between. It assumes that her skin, like mine, feels like the tra nslucent noodle paper of a Thai wrap that holds in the lettuce and the shrimp, the peanut sauce and the pain.
"Yeah," she said. "But we're not together anymore. I'm Catherine."
The receptionist rushed out and returned with the psychologist.
"Is everything O.K.?" the psychologist asked as she walked in.
We looked at her, and that's when she understood what was going on. "Oh my God," she whispered, her worlds colliding.
In fairness, the chances of Catherine and me meeting in this fashion were extremely low. She and I had never spoken before. We both worked full time and lived on opposite ends of a large city. We both searched the Internet for counselors and somehow decided on the same psychologist and arranged to meet her on the same day in consecutive hours.
The receptionist was still shaking her head.
"Oh my God," the psychologist whispered again.
Catherine's baby murmured.
Later, Catherine and I went to a breezy cafe and talked about our estranged spouses, the circumstances that brought us here. Catherine's son bumped away on her knee. She asked if I'd like to hold him; I reached my hands out.
He smelled clean and abundant and wonderful, and he didn't care who I was or what started happening when or why it all began. For a time, my questions and fear and anger resolved into this child sitting on my lap.
Then he started to cry and Catherine took him back, cradling him in her forearm and pulling her jacket over her upper body and his.
Continue reading the main story< /a> I was attracted to her strength — maybe to her as well. I wondered if she was attracted to me, but the question was irrelevant. Neither of us knew what to do with love right then. I asked her if she wanted to get married again.
"At some point I think," she said. "How about you?"
"Probably sometime down the road," I said.
"I'm glad we met," she said.
By early winter, my final day as an inner-ci ty housing worker had arrived, and I was told to go buy a cake for my farewell party later that afternoon. I walked under the bright lights of the supermarket and stared at the walls of food.
When I returned from Afghanistan, I hated supermarkets. Like the soldier Jeremy Renner plays in "The Hurt Locker" who returns from war only to feel overwhelmed by too many choices and too much freedom, I felt paralyzed by possibilities. I wanted to go back to M.R.E.s and the cafeteria and decisions made for me. So I limited the possibilities and got married.
Now, unmarried again, I settled on a giant carrot cake. It had fist-size rosettes of pink and blue icing and weighed almost as much as Catherine's son. I paid for my food, grasped the overs ize cake in both hands and headed for the exit, where I somehow ended up a few feet away from my ex-wife's lover.
I hadn't seen him since the fund-raiser. He had been in my dreams, though. In one dream I was knocking at the door of my childhood home when he opened it and just stood there: handsome, shirtless, confident, everything I was not. I was crying when I awoke, alone in a new apartment and newly divorced.
He was in my dreams the same way the suicide bomber was in my dreams the year after I came back from Afghanistan; I couldn't always see him, but I felt his presence at the edges of consciousness, pushing me somewhere I didn't want to go, forcing me toward the inevitable conclusion. Dreams like the slow burn of a forest fir e, where the roots under the earth smolder and stretch in a hundred different directions.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the ways I wanted my ex-wife and her lover to feel that burn. I thought I hated them. Later on, some friends proclaimed that a giant carrot cake in his face in the supermarket line would have been a fitting conclusion to the story. But I didn't even consider the option. I just stood there with the cake in my hand, feeling ridiculous.
He looked tired. Maybe he had custody of his son right then. Maybe he had been up all night taking care of him.
"Do you want to go for a beer sometime and talk about it?" he asked.
"No, I don't want to go for a beer to talk about it," I said, which was petulant and true. "But I forgive you," I added, which was supercilious and false.
"O.K.," he said, still looking tired.
I couldn't summo n any real anger. He was just a young boy's tired father. He wasn't even unkind. I walked out holding the cake, feeling happy I hadn't burst into tears or tried to fight.
I should have left it there, but in one of the mood swings that seems characteristic of my postdivorce anxiety, I sent my ex a text saying how I couldn't believe she had left me for him. She didn't respond, and I wasn't proud of myself. We stopped texting; rather, I stopped sending stupid texts.
I slowly continued to heal.
In the months that followed, thinking of my ex-wife's lover as that sweet boy's father was somehow very helpful for me. I had held Catherine's bo y, felt the good weight of his body, and eventually I learned that it's hard to hate a person when that person was a part of bringing something good into the world.
Her boy is much bigger now, a beautiful child. I see his photos on Facebook and sometimes "like" them. Catherine and I haven't spoken in a while, and that's O.K. I don't know what has happened to my ex-wife and Catherine's ex-husband, and that's O.K., too. There's enough pain in the world and I don't wish it on them anymore.
Some days I wish I had taken up Catherine's ex on his offer of a beer that afternoon, been kinder to my ex-wife, opened myself up to those possibilities a bit more. I remain grateful for the opportunity of meeting Catherine, and I would like to meet her son again when he is older. A coffee shop, a supermarket line or a psychologist's waiting room all seem like good places for such a meeting.
I wouldn't explain the situation; that wouldn't be fair. I would probably just smile and mumble, "You helped me through a tough time when you were young." Then I would walk away, trusting in the possibilities.
