When our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue. He was a little younger, three or four years, had three boys, all younger than our two kids, but was in some sense in the same position as my wife – they both had partners who made good money, which meant they didn’t have to do much and got bored and restless and maybe even depressed. Zach’s wife was head of oncology at Westchester County. I saw Zach touch Amy’s hand under the foldout table at the Purim food bank drive, under the paper cloth. He was short, about five-eight, broad shouldered and dark. He wore linen shirts open at the chest; his chest hair had started going gray. On Sundays, he played guitar for the kids at Temple Beth and taught them Jewish songs, like “Spin Spin Sevivon” – very pro-Israel, in a tree-planting, happy-clappy way. He was the kind of guy who danced with all the old ladies and little pigtailed girls at a bar mitzvah, so he could also put his arm around the pretty mothers and nobody would complain. Even before I saw them holding hands I didn’t like him.
My parents are Catholic but my dad thought religion was just a big fancy dress party, and he hated fancy dress. Maybe this is why I never got involved in the synagogue, which meant Amy had a whole social network where she had an identity and I didn’t.
She told me about Zach after I already knew and after it was already over. Amy had highly developed guilt feelings, which were so strong she couldn’t help being mad at whoever she felt guilty toward. Which was often me. She said she wanted to make me mad, too; she just wanted some kind of reaction, that’s all she was looking for, but that’s not really my style. If there’s something you can do to fix something, I try to do it. But in this case, I wasn’t sure what. She said, you don’t feel anything about anything. I said, everything I do I do for you and the kids. Nothing else matters to me.
So what do you want to do? I asked her. Do you want a divorce?
But she didn’t want that. At least, not until the kids had left home – the home and the kids were all she had to show for the last twelve years of her life. The thing with Zach didn’t mean anything. It was more like a kind of self-harm. (She knew that I knew that when she was a teenager she used to cut herself on the thigh.) A bid for attention. But Amy’s a person who tells stories about her motives and actions, which are very persuasive, to her as well, so it’s sometimes hard to talk about or even work out what’s really going on.
You fall in love with somebody when you’re twenty-six, and you see them in all kinds of different lights and according to their potential, but after years and years of marriage and shared parenting and all the other shared decisions you have to make just to get through the days, you accumulate a lot of data about that person that after a while just seems … more or less accurate. If you continue to have illusions, that’s your fault. So if you stay married it’s because you’ve accepted that this is what they’re like, and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you. It’s like being a Knicks fan.
But I also made a deal with myself. When Miriam goes to college, you can leave, too. Maybe this was just another one of those illusions, but it helped me get through the first few months after Amy told me about Zach, and for the sake of the kids we had to pretend that everything was fine. When in fact what we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.
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