C is for Cookie

Steph's jaw had slackend as she struggled to take it all in.

"Where on earth did you find this person, Dave?"

"I picked her up in a strip club. I got a lap dance and everything."

"YOU..."

"Relax. She's one of Jessica's psychology professors."

"Psychology and Sociology, actually. Two doctorates. I also teach pole dancing at the fitness center as an elective." She winked and slid out of the booth. "As much fun as this has been, I really should leave you to it. I wouldn't be an impartial referee. Besides, I've got papers to grade." She leaned into my side of the booth and decisively kissed me on the lips. "You still owe me a dinner date. Soon. I'll see you at home later?"

"Count on it," I said, as Stephanie stammered and fumed. Cookie turned and sauntered away, with only a very slight swagger in her hips. I made a note to commend her for her restraint.

"Come on, David. We're going home," Steph declared.

"Stephanie. Wife. Or Whatever the hell you are now. I'm going to be EXTREMELY civil. I can't even believe I'm doing this, but I'll invite you to sit down and have dinner here with me. I haven't ordered yet. We can even have that 'calm, rational conversation' you said you wanted. Afterwards, you'll go your way and I'll go mine. But I am finished with you ordering me around or telling me how things are going to be. Done. Finito. Zu Ende. Final Curtain. If you don't like it, you can just turn around and leave now. Your call."

Steph begrudgingly slid into the spot across from me that Cookie had just vacated. Liz chose that moment to appear with the drinks and the bread. "So. I'll give you guys a few more minutes, since you've just arrived," she said and diplomatically vanished. Stephanie barely noticed the exchange and ignored the wine.

"I really hate her." She was pouting.

"I get that. What's not to hate? She's beautiful, brilliant, accomplished, and interesting. She finds me attractive, and she genuinely cares about me. You should be concerned even if I haven't had sex with her yet."

"If that's true, it's almost worse. You're having an emotional affair. Don't you know that's just as bad?"

Shit, is that what I was doing? That hadn't occurred to me.

"Why would you say that?"

"Oh COME ON. What's with saying 'I Love You' like that?"

"She says that to everybody. She said it to the waitress."

"Bullshit."

"Ask her. Her name's Liz."

"I will. And what's with that 'see you at home later' business?"

"I'm staying with her for a few days. I didn't want to be in the house when you got back."

"You're staying at her HOUSE? In her BED?"

"That's none of your business. Seriously, Steph. You are such a hypocrite. You told me you're in love with another man and have been sleeping with him for years."

"I never said that."

"The hell you didn't."

"I never said it was a man. And I said it's been going on for 'a while.'"

"Come on. You're not fooling anyone. You've been fucking Lee Davenport behind my back for about two years, and playing me for a fool the whole time."

"How could you possibly... I never said... you never knew..."

"Jesus. I'm not blind. I'm not insensitive. And I'm not stupid."

"I never thought you were stupid."

"And that's part of the problem. If you didn't think I was stupid, how could you think that you'd keep me fooled for so long?"

"But you didn't know. Everything was fine."

"I didn't LET myself know. I wasn't willing to admit it. So instead, I spent those years beating myself up for being a bad husband because I was suspicious of you. And you watched me do it. Fuck. You encouraged it, you were perfectly happy to see me twisting in the wind like that. God, with no end in sight, either. You said your affair made our marriage better because it made you happy. No, Stephanie. No, it did not. I have been quietly miserable and punishing myself for a long while. You've been taking advantage of me, and taking me for granted, and abusing my trust. That is not a good marriage by any standard."

"I know you're upset, okay? I admit wrongdoing."

"And yet, you insist that's MY problem. Never mind that I'm APPROPRIATELY upset, and you are STILL 'wrong-doing' and don't intend to stop. Why should I be the one who has to deal with it?"

"Okay. So, yes, the situation could have been handled better. The important thing is that we keep our wits about us like mature adults and not do anything rash. That stunt with the locks and the storage thing was unnecessary."

"My god. Can you even hear yourself? I'm not the one who's immature. You're the one who's being selfish, and you can't even see it! You're far too accustomed to looking down your nose at teenagers. Well, you don't get to treat me like one of those brats in your high school. You're being inconsiderate. And manipulative. And Cruel. Yes, Cruel."

"You don't need to say that."

"What part of that isn't true? Why do you insist on making me the problem? You're the one whose behavior is unacceptable, not mine. You wrote in that damn letter all about how great a husband I am. But you, you have been a lousy goddamn wife."

"Okay. Well. I guess I would have to accept that." She went back to pouting. "This isn't the way I hoped this conversation would go."

"I bet. This isn't the way I hoped our marriage would go."

"Me either." She seemed more despondent and less angry.

"Hey guys," said Liz, who'd snuck silently back to the table. "I don't mean to intrude. I get that this is an important conversation, and I won't disturb you. I don't suppose you've decided on anything to eat?"

"I'm not hungry," said Stephanie.

"I am. I came here for a steak. I'll have the petite filet, on the rare side of medium rare, with a baked potato, loaded up the way you do it. Stephanie here will have the veal ossobuco ravioli appetizer as her entree. And two salads, blue cheese on the side."

"I said I lost my appetite."

"I've been married to you for twenty years, and I know better. The food will come, you'll smell it and won't be able to watch me eat without stealing half of it. Besides, you love the veal ravioli here. By the time it comes, you'll thank me. If you still don't eat it, you can take it to go."

She shrugged, conceding the point. "Okay."

"Very good," said Liz, and scooted away like the table was on fire.

"One thing I've learned," I said, "is that this process is draining. I'm not hungry, except when I am, and then I'm famished. It works that way with everything. I'm not tired, but I fall asleep without meaning to. I don't feel like doing anything, but when I do, I'm hyper focused. I'm a fucking mess, and honestly... it's been kind of a relief. At least now I know I'm not crazy. At least now I know what's real and what isn't."

"I haven't had it easy either," she said. "Do you think I feel good about any of this? No. No, I do not. I didn't enjoy lying to you, or keeping secrets from you. I wanted to share what was going on, some of the most important feelings I've ever had in my life, but I couldn't. There wasn't anybody I could tell. Not you, not the kids, not my friends, not my family. I've been alone."

Damn it, she really did look unhappy.

"Don't expect sympathy, Steph. The reason you couldn't tell anybody was because it was WRONG. You've been behaving shamefully, and you know it, even if you refuse to feel a shred of shame about it. God. Your parents really did a number on you. You're convinced that shame is an awful emotion, that it's useless and regressive and it holds you back. None of that is true. Shame can be a good thing. It keeps us from being shitty. It makes you feel bad to do bad things. Do you know what they call people who don't feel shame? Sociopaths. Those are the people who don't feel shame."

"You mean empathy. Sociopaths don't feel empathy. Not shame. You've got that part wrong."

"Ah. Well, I'm not feeling a whole hell of a lot of that from you, either."

"I have plenty of empathy. I know this has to be hard for you. I told you that."

"You turned purple when you saw me sitting here with Cookie. If you'd ever given one moment of thought to how it would feel if I'd done this to you, you could never have done it. Seriously. Imagine if I'd fallen in love with someone else and kept it secret. If I said you were crazy whenever you got suspicious and I made fun of you for being jealous, when I knew you were right. How would that feel? That shock, that anger, that disgust... you didn't experience any of that until two minutes ago. You didn't even want to imagine it. It was just a meaningless abstraction."

She couldn't look at me. I kept it up.

"What would you think if Michael married a girl who behaved like this? If your daughter-in-law decided to cheat on him and fall in love with another man while trying to keep him in the dark about it? You'd kill the girl with a pickle fork. Don't even think about what you'd do to Jessica's husband if he had another secret wife, gaslighted her about it for years, and then finally demanded that she should just get over herself and go along with it, and be a sister-wife. God. They'd never find his remains."

She was still silent.

"Let's talk about your boyfriend. Sorry. Your Other Co-Equal Spouse. Fuck. If you really loved him, shouldn't you want something better for him than a sordid affair with a married woman that might threaten both their careers? Doesn't he deserve a love of his own, a wife of his own? Not just some dirty secret, some... some time-sharing arrangement? You're fucking that up for him. You've turned him into a filthy homewrecker."

There were tears on her face now, goddamnit. Fuck her husband, i guess. Fuck her kids, too. She only got upset over her shitstain boyfriend.

"The only person you give a damn about is you, Stephanie. The only thing you care about is what you want. You haven't given an ounce of thought to whoever else you might hurt. I guess that's part of the whole point: 'To hell with the rest of the world, this romance, this love, it's worth sacrificing everything!' Is that about right? Because that's what you've done."

"You don't have to say it like that."

"Why shouldn't I?"

"You're just being mean."

"Look in the mirror and say that again."

Liz chose that moment to bring over the salads.

"Thanks, Liz," I said. "Oh, and hey. I love you."

She stopped to smile. "I love you, too." Then turned on her heel and left. I guess we did have a secret handshake after all.

"What the hell," said Stephanie.

"It's just words. I think Liz is a nice person. I love her. I'm not going to sleep with her, or start an affair. But I can express my appreciation for her."

"You can't just say 'I love you' like that."

"She doesn't seem to have a problem with it."

"I... I see that, but I don't get it."

"Why not? There's all kinds of love. I can love anybody I want. I can love everybody in the world if I feel like it. Except your boyfriend. Fuck that guy. But everybody else, yeah, why not?"

"Do you still love me?"

"Sure I do."

"You do?"

"Of course."

"Then why are you talking to me like this?"

"Because I'm no longer committed to you. Because you're no longer committed to me. You trashed that commitment. It wasn't a mistake. You did it on purpose, you've been doing it for a long time, you're still at it, and you're not going to stop. I deserve better than that in a relationship. You even said so in your letter."

"I... guess I did, didn't I? And yes, for what it's worth, I meant it. I just never thought you'd... you'd be so... I don't know what I thought." She let out her breath and sagged a little. "I hoped you might be more open minded."

"Me being open-minded is not the issue."

"Then what is?"

"God. Steph. If it was just sex, that would just be one thing. If you'd talked to me, if it was a decision we'd made together, if you wanted to be swingers or something, or if you wanted to experiment, maybe we could have made a deal. With mutual understandings and agreements in place, there might have been some room for something. Maybe not. Probably not. But if only I'd have had some kind of buy-in or some kind of say about it, well, that would at least mean I still mattered to you. That this marriage still mattered to you. I don't know. But we'll never know, will we? Because that's not what you did. You said 'To hell with stupid old Dave, never mind how he feels, I'm doing it.' I was only in the way. Being married was an obstacle you chose to ignore."

"Of course you matter! That's why I couldn't tell you!"

"You shoved me aside. Then you played me for a fool for two goddamn years. You strung me along, you lied to me and manipulated me and watched me squirm. I was not your husband, your partner, your first and most trusted ally in this crazy thing called life. I was a sucker. You figured I didn't deserve to know the truth about what was going on in my own marriage. That's what killed it."

"I was hoping that after all this time, after so long together, you might find it in your heart to forgive me."

"Yeah, what's the old saying; 'It's easier to get forgiveness than permission,' right? That still doesn't make it okay. It's still wrong for you to do. It's still wrong for you to presume it would be okay in the end. Getting forgiveness doesn't fix the problem."

"I know that. But I did what I did, and I can't undo it. Now, you can either find your way to forgiveness, which would be healthy, or you can hold it against me for the rest of your life, which would only hurt you."

"And thank you VERY much for saddling me with THAT." I huffed out a huge breath. "The damnedest thing is that you're right. Eventually, I will forgive you. But our marriage is still over. When I finally get through all this, after enough time, however many other women it takes, and enough therapy, I will end up forgiving you for my own piece of mind. But it won't be soon, it won't be for your sake, and it won't save the marriage. It'll be on my schedule, on my terms, and not because you demand it. You're not entitled to that. When it happens, and I'm thinking years, I doubt I'll even be speaking to you anymore. You'll never even know. It won't be any of your business by then anyway."

"It doesn't have to be over between us. I thought we had it pretty good. We've had a good marriage, haven't we? You were happy."

"You mean, as long as what I didn't know wouldn't hurt me."

"Yes, exactly."

"I hope you realize someday just how awful that is. God. What if I had cancer, and I didn't know? Does cancer not hurt me if I don't feel it? Of course it does. It could be killing me, wasting me away even though I don't feel sick. Or if I do, I can just brush it off for a while. That's what you did to our marriage. You gave it cancer. Telling me would have given us a fighting chance. Denying it just let the damage get worse and worse until it became terminal."

She didn't know what to say, so she said nothing. Liz chose that lull in our conversation to arrive with our food. It looked great and smelled even better.

"This looks wonderful, Liz. Thank you."

"You're more than welcome. Do you need anything else?"

"Yes, I do," said Stephanie. "That woman that was here before me. Did she say 'I Love You'?"

"Um. Yes. And I said it, too."

"So... you're girlfriends? Or, um. Lovers? Or something?"

Liz just stood there and allowed one eyebrow to raise slightly, allowing Stephanie to dig herself deeper into the awkward hole she'd created.

"I'm sorry, I don't mean to pry. I just. I mean. I want to know what's going on with my husband."

Liz glanced towards me and I gave her a half nod.

"That was Cookie Deathridge, and she is nobody's girlfriend," she began. "If you're worried about her stealing your husband, don't. She says 'I Love You' to her friends, and she's sincere. Love isn't, like, a romantic thing for her. It's just... connection. Okay?"

"So... it doesn't mean anything?"

"No, of course it means something! It means, like, everything. But it doesn't have to mean you're in a relationship. Okay, so, for a lot of people, when they say 'I love you,' they think it means 'I want to spend the rest of my life with you and only you, we'll get married and have kids and buy a house' and all that. Saying it out loud is like a Big Step, right? But really, it doesn't have to mean that at all. Love is just a feeling. Feelings just happen. It's like, okay, on the one hand you've got Love, but on the other hand, there's the decisions you make about how you're gonna live your life. It's like, you don't have to be a slave to random emotions."

She was looking at Steph with her eyebrows raised, as if she'd asked a question and was looking for affirmation. Steph looked back at her dumbstruck, as if she'd spent her entire life climbing in and out of windows, and someone had just shown her how to use a door.

Jesus, is that what happened? In Stephanie's world, was it really so simple? Just an equation? Cause and Effect? 'Powerful Feelings' automatically means 'You Have To Fuck'? Goddamn it. GODDAMN IT. Steph, you idiot. No wonder you fell into an affair so easily. No wonder you thought you could manipulate me into accepting it. Shit. This explains so, so much.

"So, a couple of years back," Liz continued. "My boyfriend... my fiance, at the time, actually, was cheating on me. We'd been together almost seven years. Getting married would have been just a formality. He was my soulmate. We had two kids together and everything. Well, some other bitch scooped him up. He abandoned us and moved to Calgary. I was, like, in a really dark place for a long time. Cookie kinda adopted me. Helped me put my life back together. Gave me some perspective. I later learned that's just how she is. So, yeah, she was my friend, and more, when I needed one, and she helped me more than I can even say. I love her. She loves me. It's just like that."

Steph didn't seem to have much to say to that. I thanked Liz and off she went. Steph picked listlessly at her plate.

"I don't want a divorce," she said. "I still love you, more than anything. This isn't how I wanted things to go. I thought you loved me. Enough to try, anyway. Don't you love me enough to even try?"

"Stephanie. I do love you. Never doubt that. That doesn't mean you get to take me for granted and treat me like shit. You don't get to use that love to extort me."

"I never treated you like shit. I always loved you. There's no extortion. I just want things to go back to the way they were. We've got a good life together. I don't want to change that."

"So, I'm supposed to just pretend you're not off fucking your 'other husband.' That you don't love another man. That he's not more important to you than I am."

"NO! God, can't you understand? It's been tearing me apart all this time. I wish I could have told you from the beginning, but I knew you wouldn't accept it. I never wanted to make a fool of you. I thought I was doing the right thing by not telling you. It never changed the way I felt about you. I still love you as much as ever. And he is NOT more important to me than you are."

"I think he must be. Taking up with him was worth risking your marriage. But it was NOT worth missing out on him to protect what we had. Therefore, he was more important. He still is. You haven't even offered to try to give him up."

She was staring at her ravioli. It took her a few moments to speak.

"It wouldn't mean anything if I did, Dave. I would be lying. I couldn't do it. Even if I tried, for real, you wouldn't believe me or trust me."

"Finally. Some truth."

"I didn't think I was risking our relationship. I didn't. I thought we would be strong enough to withstand the change. We had the twins, after all. You can't pretend that Michael and Jessica haven't changed our marriage. Everything shifted all around when we became a family with children. It wasn't always easy, but it was more than worth it, wasn't it? In the end, despite the sleepless nights, the heartaches, the fears, the obstacles to our sex life, all the extra work and all the expenses, having a family made our marriage better. That was the best thing we ever did. You can't deny it. I thought it would be like that."