Elysia nodded slowly. “You know, when Jake cheated on me, I didn’t want to leave him. Because I loved him, and finding out he…did that didn’t immediately destroy that love. But I couldn’t get past what he did, either. He didn’t ask me to. Heblamedme. That made it easier to leave.”
Will wasn’t blaming her. Maybe that was why she was starting to feel like this was worse. He was talking to her. Sharing with her. He was doing all the things you were supposed to want people you loved to do. But she hated what he was sharing. She didn’t know how to get around that.
“I… I take your point,” she said. “But like, what am I supposed to do? Do I do it? And then what? Is this how you end up at suburban sex parties? Am I destined for a life of upside-down pineapples?”
Shekneweveryone in her suburb. The idea of having a sex party with any of them was…ugh.
“I think swinging and open relationships are different,” Whitney pointed out.
Sam made a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a whine and put her face in her hands. “I think I do know that. I don’t… I have to askhim. I have to ask him what all he means. I’m…” She looked up. “I actually like to think I’m more open-minded than any of us were raised to be. I read so many long-form articles, because writing about life is what I do. I like reading about other peoples’ lives. I read articles about…polyamory and think, ‘Good for them. Sounds like a lot of work, but good for them.’ But I’ve never, ever thought about what I would do in those situations, because I wasso sureabout what my situation was.”
Whitney lifted a shoulder. “Have you considered that…it might be fun? I mean, if he gets to have sex with other people, so do you. Everything he said about his life applies to you. You’ve only been with him. Don’t you think it might be fun to…play around a little bit?”
She looked around the room and tried to imagine…any of that. There was a perfectly handsome, age-appropriate man sitting by the door. She could talk to him, find out if he wanted to go out…
She could get rejected.
It would be like being a teenager all over again, wondering if Willliked herliked her. But she’d be doing it at forty.
“I don’t… It doesn’t sound fun to me. Does it really sound fun to you?”
Whitney shrugged. “I don’t know. A lot of things sound more fun in theory than in practice. But I haven’t been with anyone other than Mark in fifteen years, so on some level…”
“Dating is terrible,” said Elysia. “Especiallywhen you don’t want to do it.”
“Why does it have to bedating, though?” Whitney asked. “Why can’t it just be sex? If you still have the husband, you don’t need…”
“This isnota hypothetical,” Sam said. “This is my life.”
Whitney looked immediately contrite. “I know. I’m sorry. I just… You have two choices, right? You tell him no, or you try to give him what he wants. You’ve clearly never thought about this before, so I’m just trying to get you to think about it.”
She looked at her cake. “No. I’ve never thought about it. I’ve never thought about being with anyone else.” She said it firmly, decisively.
She decided it was time to take another bite of cake. This time it tasted better, and she thought maybe the sugar would serve as a decent Band-Aid for this endless horror.
“Did you just want me to be outraged? Because I can do that too,” said Whitney.
She shook her head. “No, that isn’t what I want. That’s what I’d want if I wanted to divorce him, and I don’t. I just want to go back to before he said this. I don’t want to think about all these changes. I thought we were only into good changes, exciting changes. Yeah, it’s bittersweet to have the kids move out, to have Ethan not even come back for the summer. But I was all about it being a season of us.Forus.”
“We don’t have to be fair,” Whitney pointed out. “We can do pistols at dawn. Pitchforks at midnight. Whatever you need, you know that’s what we’ll give you.”
She put her knuckles against her temples. “I do. I do know that. It’s just… I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what to ask for, and I was going on and on and around and around in my own head and I was sick of myself, so I need to come here and say some of it out loud. But I don’t know. And I’m so resentful that I have to choose anything.”
“You know, this is the problem,” Elysia said. “Honest or not, if your husband wants to make a life change, you have to react. You don’t want to, which I get. I wanted to just…ignore that my husband had an affair, because I didn’t want to get divorced. I didn’t ask for things to change.”
“That’s how I feel.”
“You have to figure out what you want and put him in the position of having to respond to that. I think he needs to really tell you, like on a granular level, why he feels this way and what he wants from it.” Her eyes got glossy then. “If I could have made Jake do one thing, it would have been to tell me when it started. I don’t mean the first time he actually slept with another woman, I mean the first moment he knew he wasn’t satisfied. What triggered it. What broke between the two of us that it seemed…reasonable to lie to me about where he was, what he was doing. I want the story, the whole story.”
Sam nodded. “Yes. Yes, because this is what I can’t get past. I thought he and I wanted the same things and felt the same way. I thought we were the same kind of happy and…were we ever? Has he always been living in some quiet suburban desperation?”
“Until you know all that, I don’t know how you’re supposed to have any idea what you want,” Elysia said.
“After he gives you all that,” Whitney said, “pistols, pitchforks, a good lawyer or…upside-down pineapples. We’ll help with any and all.”
She looked down at her wedding ring. It seemed wildly unfamiliar right then. “Okay. He had a house showing this morning at…” She looked at her phone. “Well, now. Maybe I can go home and sit in the quiet and prepare. Or try the setting-all-his-shit-on-fire-on-the-lawn thing. That doesn’t sound unappealing.” She laughed. “Seriously though, he wants an open marriage, I want him to get rid of his excessive collection of T-shirts he’s owned since high school. Like since we’re putting cards on the table.” That made her want to laugh. Helplessly. All the little things she’d sat on in the name of harmony for years.
And her husband had come out withlet’s see other people.
