It happened so quietly during the summer of 2019, my single act of infidelity. I tried to explain this quietness to Ray, my husband. He did not appreciate my efforts.
Ray could only see this extramarital move as evidence that I was fundamentally corrupt. My friends and family were less judgmental but infuriating in their own way, always asking the same hackneyed questions: Why had I stepped outside the marriage? Which of my needs were not being met? My friend Shannon wanted me to talk about the desire for steamy sex. My sister Judith suspected that I craved a deeper emotional connection. My brother Thomas wondered if Ray had done something that warranted punishment.
Let me state here for the record: there was no pressing need to sleep with Everette. I love my husband.
I had always thought that Ray would be the one to have an affair. He is funny, handsome, athletic, and can flash a flirty smile that makes you feel validated in some fundamental way. Women are drawn to him. In the early years of our marriage, I confess, I sometimes went through the pockets of his trousers after business trips to see if I could find anything incriminating.
For my part, I've indulged two or three secret crushes over the years, always taking comfort in the knowledge that nothing would happen outside of my own head. For instance, Myles—a close colleague and collaborator—got stuck in my imagination for a while. I work at a mid-sized communications/marketing firm in Lansing, Michigan. Though technically I'm Myles' supervisor, he and I essentially co-direct most major projects. I tend to oversee concept and writing, while he does visual content. But most ideas flow jointly from the two of us. We often finish each other's sentences. When I have a half-formed idea, he plays accoucheur. I love that fluid exchange of energy, and it results in good work.
Myles is a little younger than I am and hired in about five years after me—a spunky graphic designer straight from Campbell Ewald in Detroit. The shop I work at in Lansing is about two steps down for him. He'd relocated to the area because his wife had taken an executive position at a large insurance company headquartered here. By rights, he is too good for us.
Ray quickly detected that Myles and I work closely together and that I find the relationship invigorating. He often refers to Myles as my "work spouse." When we're under a deadline, Myles occasionally calls me at home, and one time, noticing that I was about to bring the conversation to a close, Ray hollered, in a poor imitation of my voice, "I love you!" Myles pretended not to hear.
Ray and Myles have met only once. Ray made a rare visit to my workplace downtown, and I introduced the two of them as we passed Myles' office. They shook hands energetically, and then Ray pointed to a poster on Myles' wall—a framed print of Ivan Albright's Flesh, which depicts a sad, aging woman in a strapless dress. She's painted in Albright's particular brand of grotesque, with the bumpy, purplish skin of a ripening corpse. The original hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, a favorite destination for Ray and me. Apparently, he's always had a thing for Albright's work. Fueled by the revelation of this mutual interest, the two men—my work spouse and my real spouse—seemed to form an instant bond. My brain contains an image of them standing like brothers, arms resting on each other's shoulders. That never happened, of course, but that's how I think of their encounter.
After my infidelity, Ray insisted our marriage was over. I apologized. I cried. I implored him to see a couple's therapist with me. It took some begging, but eventually he consented. "I'll go," he said, "but you should know I've already been in contact with a divorce lawyer."
My friend Shannon and her husband had been seeing a therapist named Alex for nearly a year. "He's five-foot-four, weighs three hundred pounds, and exudes love for the world," she said. Her eyes lit up as she recited Alex's labels for various therapeutic strategies. Most of them began with radical: radical acceptance, radical vulnerability, radical reciprocity. She was smitten by this blossoming of radicalism.
I was relieved when Alex said he had space in his schedule to take us on as clients. But our early sessions were miserable. We were stuck in a loop that went something like this:
Alex: "What would it take for you to trust Elle again?" (My legal name is actually Leona, but I've always hated it. When we were dating, Ray suggested I use another name for lion, eventually landing on Ariella, which got shortened to Elle. Weirdly, when my husband addresses me, I think of it as Elle. When everyone else addresses me I think of it as the letter L, as if they are just calling me by my first initial. I like the feeling that Ray has a special name for me that only I can detect. But during the angry period after my infidelity, it felt like his use of my nickname was somehow vindictive, and I toyed with the idea of asking him to call me Leona.)
Ray: "I find it difficult to imagine why I would ever want to trust Elle again."
Alex: "Then why are you here?"
Ray: "Good question. Not sure."
Me: "You're here because you know that you love me. And deep down, you know we are bigger than this."
Ray: "Is that what I know, Elle? Thank you for enlightening me."
Alex [in a wounded tone, as if Ray's jab had been intended for him]: "I think Elle was trying to be helpful, Ray. In fact, I think she is naming something important. Elle can have insights even though she's hurt you, and if we're going to make progress, you have to be open to those insights."
But Ray wasn't open to them. And we didn't make progress. It was unfair, but I started to get frustrated with Alex. He was clearly dedicated to helping us, but I wasn't seeing any of the radicalism that Shannon had bragged about. Then one session, when things were especially bleak and all three of us were angry and demoralized, Alex introduced the idea of radical transparency. I may have let out a sigh of relief.
Alex explained that radical transparency is a method for rebuilding trust. The betrayer agrees to provide access to more or less anything their spouse wants to know. Ray would have access to my Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and cell phone. He could check any of these things at any time without my permission. He could also ask me any question about the affair itself, and I would have to answer honestly.
"This is not my favorite approach," Alex said with a sad note of defeat as if Ray and I had teamed up to reveal his incompetence. "In my experience, radical transparency often backfires. Instead of building trust, it fosters suspicion. The betrayed spouse becomes obsessed. They go down a rabbit hole. Soon, every text message feels like a clue to some form of infidelity." Alex paused and looked at each of us in turn. "I can tell that the two of you love each other. And I know you can regain the affection and intimacy you've lost. You have years of happiness in front of you, if only you'll allow yourselves to accept that gift. But it doesn't matter that I know it. Somehow, you two have to discover this for yourself. And the things we've tried so far haven't worked."
For the first time in these sessions, I saw a glitter of interest in Ray's eyes. "Radical exposure," he mumbled, as if repeating the name of a particularly succulent entrée that he was eyeing on the menu of a fancy restaurant.
"No," Alex said, his tone uncharacteristically sharp. "Radical transparency. Exposure implies that there is secret sin to reveal. It focuses on blame. Transparency implies there is nothing to hide. It focuses on trust. It's an important distinction."
Ray performed a hands-up gesture, a mock mea culpa. Then the room grew silent, with both Alex and Ray waiting to see if I would agree to this approach. My heart was pounding, and my mind raced to process what it would mean for me to give this kind of access to Ray. I'm a social media junkie, with dozens of interactions every week. Could all those exchanges—the dirty jokes, the tall tales, the spilled secrets—withstand the scrutiny of an angry husband?
But I was desperate. "Okay," I said.
I think that I had envisioned a window where I would have time to reflect back across the massive amount of social media content I had generated over the years—a couple hours to delete the most damning material before giving Ray my passwords. But Ray was way ahead of me, had already gamed out his next six moves. The second we got home he insisted that I hand over everything.
"Really?" I said. "That's how you're going play this?"
"I'm sorry?" he said.
"This is an act of vulnerability that I am agreeing to because I love you. And you're treating it like a prize that you've won at a fair."
"I see," he said. "I think what you're saying is that I should trust you. I should trust that you won't go through your accounts and delete the incriminating evidence. I should trust that you won't purge your text messages of anything that smacks of inappropriate emotional or physical intimacy. I should trust that you won't warn all your friends and lovers that you're being watched. And guess what? I don't trust you."
Ray is a prosecutor for Ingham County, and he is adept at gathering evidence. Once he gained access to my accounts, he told me that he had archived everything using various methods that I only partly understood—screen captures, batch exports, blah blah blah. He told me he synced my cell with the cloud so that all text messages were available to him online. Ray spent nights on the computer in the den, scouring the data he'd amassed.
Because of his technical wizardry, he didn't really need to see my cell phone. But he did ask for it on the rare occasions that we were together when a text came in. The first time this happened, we were on the way to Clarkston, a northern suburb of Detroit where Judith's daughter Adelina lives with her husband Nathaniel and toddler Jackson. It's a testament to how much Ray loves Adelina and her family that he was willing to be stuck alone in a car with me for eighty miles. He blasted NPR on the car radio—an episode of This American Life—so that we didn't have to talk.
Just as we were getting off the expressway, an incoming text chimed on my iPhone. Without taking his eyes off the road, Ray extended his right hand in my direction and turned up his palm. It took me a moment to realize that he was asking for my cell. Having to hand over my phone in real time had an especially delicious sense of violation. That he could force me to do so without uttering a word was enraging.
In junior high, in the mid-eighties, I had gone to a party at the home of a boy who was in my friend group. His parents made a point of "chaperoning" from the first floor, which meant most of the partiers retired to the massive rec room in the basement, with its foosball and ping pong and over-sized leather couches. A small den was connected to the rec room, and a number of kids occupied that space with the door closed. Periodically, someone would exit, usually giggling in a knowing way, and through the half-open door, I could see that the room was lit by a TV's blue flickering light. After a while, my curiosity got the best of me, and the next time someone left, I slipped into the room. It was a tight space, crowded with seventh-grade boys and girls and massive bowls of Fritos. It smelled strongly of pubescent B.O.
The TV screen showed a couple in a red Corvette, dressed as if they had spent the night at a fancy event—perhaps the opera or a charity gala. Arriving at what was apparently their mansion, they exited the car and went inside. The man shut the massive front door and then turned to the woman. "On your knees," he said, in a polite, almost quiet voice. The woman instantly obeyed. Without any further prompting, she unzipped the fly of the man's dress pants and got to work. I'd heard terms like "blow job" and "giving head." But at thirteen, I was completely unprepared for the deep-throating that followed.
In the ensuing weeks, when I replayed this scene in my mind, what most disturbed me—what still bothers me a little—was not the violence of the act but how gently the man issued the command and how fervently the woman complied. All it took was the whisper of three monosyllabic words. And that is exactly how I felt the first time my husband extended his palm. I hated Ray for having this level of control over me.
Per our agreement, I handed over the phone. Ray waited until we arrived at Adelina's place—an aging farmhouse on a dirt road. He entered the passcode to my phone and read the text. Without looking at me, he said, "Margaux wants to know if she can borrow your hot glue gun." Our daughter Margaux lives on the other side of town from us. She'd recently been doing a lot of crafting.
Adelina and Jackson came out to greet us. Upon exiting the car, Ray instantly transformed into an affable uncle—smiling furiously and snatching up Jackson into a bear hug. The two proceeded to run around the yard like crazed animals. This was their routine—a burst of frenetic movements that conveyed an otherworldly excitement. They kicked random balls that were strewn throughout the yard, circled a massive oak tree, jumped on and off the play structure. Jackson giggled the whole time. When they'd finished, Ray gave Adelina a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
Clarkston was Nathaniel's hometown, and moving there was supposed to provide a support network. But things had grown tense between Nathaniel and his family. Ray placed himself at the service of the young couple, available to install a new washing machine, cut down a tree, or give legal advice as the situation may demand. This was typical of Ray. He was helpful and patient. He coached soccer for six-year-olds without ever raising his voice. He's a good person.
Inside the house, Nathaniel was setting out some cheese and Triscuits. Ray shook his hand and asked how the sump pump was doing. They had installed a new unit on our last visit. After he had put in the requisite amount of time with the adults, Ray joined Jackson in the family room, where they began work building a massive city out of wooden blocks. By the end of the evening, its roads were populated with Matchbox cars, and train tracks looped through neighborhoods and skyscrapers.
On the way home, Ray switched the radio to an oldies station. The silence between us was just a hint less awkward in the waning light, and I leaned my head against the passenger side window, exhausted. Apparently, I drifted off to sleep a few miles into the trip. Ray's voice startled me as we approached our neighborhood.
"Why'd you do it?" he said. He sounded weary, defeated—but not angry. I felt like an opportunity was opening up, a chance for real communication.
"Ray, I know this is difficult to understand," I replied. "But I don't have a good answer for you. It was a mistake. It happened very quickly, one time. And I immediately stopped interacting with him after that. I am lucky to be married to you, and it was a thoughtless thing to do. Please don't read this as a sign that there is something missing in our relationship."
Ray was so dissatisfied with this answer that he didn't even respond. He pulled into our driveway, shut off the engine, and walked into the house without looking at me. I sat in the car for several minutes, crying softly into a wad of Kleenex.
I can feel you trying to anticipate my story... What was the allure of Everette? Was he young and athletic, reminiscent of some football player that I had a crush on in high school? Was he a bad boy, giving off the enticing scent of violence and transgression? Was he some Manhattan artist with long, paint-flecked hair and a crazed look in his eyes?
What if I told you that Everette was a slightly plump, balding man, an inch shorter than me, with a fluffy red beard and red cheeks? He was always smiling. I would even describe him as jolly.
I first met Everette when he wandered into our shop seeking help on his pet project: a multi-use communal space that could host bands, poetry slams, community meetings... anything that might contribute to a "vibrant local culture."
From the start, what struck me about Everette was that he was much smarter than he looked. He had a fast, direct way of talking and seemed to pull eclectically from academic papers, Stanford design-speak, and the occasional Bob Dylan song.
"I'm hoping to design a third-space experience that blurs the boundaries between the recreational and political. A coffeehouse. A secular church. A place of surprise and wonder."
Everette owned a software company that had landed several Fortune 500 clients. His undergraduate degree had been in actuarial science, and he'd gotten rich by using machine learning to perfect algorithms that produced very precise predictions of risk. He was locally famous.
We were skeptical, thinking this was just another rich white guy who wanted to feel good about his profits. But Everette was a little different—a hair more genuine, a touch more thoughtful. He talked about "robust models of deliberation" that called for enlisting the participation of neighborhood residents. "We need to recruit the perspectives of all stakeholders—beauticians, pastors, the guy who owns the liquor store on the corner of Michigan and Hosmer. We have to get people talking across their differences." This was a favorite phrase of his: talking across differences.
Some of my colleagues mocked Everette: "He always sounds like he's giving a TED Talk." I don't think that's fair. His eyes twinkled as he spoke, lending a slightly ironic tone to his words. He sought a vocabulary that matched his vision, but he didn't take himself too seriously.
The place Everette imagined would double as a kind of jobs-training site, providing a chance to learn how to manage a cultural facility, how to run sound systems, install art shows, publicize events. "We'll hire people with light resumes. They'll leave with new skills."
Everette had already purchased a building, a beautiful 1920s structure that had once been a lodge for some kind of fraternal organization—the Royal Order of Buffaloes or some such. Like many large buildings in the area, it had been too expensive to keep up, so Everette was able to purchase it for a song.
I earned Everette's trust by translating his ideas into language that my staff would understand. I knew just enough about where he was coming from to fake it—a little Richard Florida, a few bullet points lifted from the websites of "idea incubators" or "innovation centers." In the end, my team oversaw almost all the work, including the rehab of the building, even though that kind of thing was way outside our wheelhouse.
At Everette's insistence, we ran charettes where stakeholders could share ideas for the new space—ideas which my team dutifully recorded on chart paper stuck to the wall. Lubricated by donuts, coffee, and La Croix, local residents confessed that they felt isolated in their homes. They barely knew their next-door neighbors. They were starved for conversation. They were bored.
Everette doubled the budget for the project. We assembled a team of architects, interior designers, artisans. Because conversation was a top priority, we hired a Chicago-based firm to do a full acoustic study of the space and design custom features to manage noise—sound-absorbing plaster, dampening baffles, acoustic panels installed at algorithmically determined angles.
One challenge was that Everette, a recovering alcoholic, did not want to serve beer or wine. Alcohol had been the draw for virtually everything that was vaguely in this idea-space around town. Craft beer was a chief attractor. But Everette was convinced that Lansing needed more dry places, safe places, places for "exciting conversation" that was unclouded by booze. Places where teenage kids, single women, and recovering addicts could all hang out together without fear.
We named the center Our House—a risky move because it assumed that residents in surrounding neighborhoods would see themselves in the Our. We scheduled opening night for late May, when the weather was warming up—a true extravaganza. Everette had found a "teaching magician" who performed classic tricks and then explained how they were done. Three separate bands—indie pop, hip hop, and classic rock—were distributed throughout the labyrinthine spaces of the old lodge. There were break dancers, a sketch comedy troop, finger foods from every restaurant within a mile radius. About four hundred people showed up, including the mayor and the guy who owned the liquor store on the corner of Hosmer and Michigan (who was actually a husband-and-wife team in their mid-sixties).
Everette found me about halfway through the event, a pink can of La Croix in his right hand.
"You did it," he said. The sound modulation worked like magic. Everette was able to speak in a normal indoor voice, despite all the chaos around us.
"We did it."
"You took the phantoms flying around in my brain and made them real, functional, exciting."
"Glad you're pleased."
"Pleased? I'm stunned. But now the real work begins. Who comes? Will locals hang out here? Or will this place fill up with gawking college kids and imports from Okemos?"
Everette and I both lived in Okemos, an affluent suburb of Lansing. We were not the target audience for this project, and if we weren't careful, we would join the gentrifiers. Maybe we already had. We'd spoken endlessly about the communication work needed to forge strong connections to the diverse neighborhoods surrounding Our House. QR codes on light posts. Door hangers. Free summer concerts in the parking lot. Everette even proposed that we keep the doors unlocked twenty-four hours a day, like a church. "Radical trust," he said. (What would Everette think of Alex?)
I would occasionally give my friend Shannon updates about the sessions Ray and I were having with Alex. When I told her we were practicing radical transparency, her eyes lit up. "Do tell," she said. I informed her that Alex was reluctant to suggest this approach and that part of me regretted agreeing to the arrangement.
"Maybe you should think of it as a kink."
"What does that mean?"
"Like in BDSM. It's a classic dom-sub relationship. Ray asks you to perform acts of submission. But instead of commanding you to lick some body part or fetish object, he's asking for something that's more intimate in a way—for you to reveal hidden aspects of your life. It's kind of a turn on."
I kept this advice in mind as Ray continued to assert the privileges granted him by the protocols of what in his mind was radical exposure. One evening, he announced that we needed to have The Conversation. Seeing my blank look, he informed me that he needed to know all the details related to the act itself—the positions, the sensations, the size of Everette's penis. Ray delighted in forcing me to delineate the contours of my betrayal.
"Did you enjoy it?" he asked.
"It was lovely," I answered, using the flat, bitter tone of one compelled to incriminate herself.
"Did you come?"
"Twice," I said.
This was the one thing I lied about. Everette had not brought me to orgasm. Or, I think it would be more accurate to say, I did not bring myself to orgasm with him. It had not been one of my goals. Lying to Ray like that was cruel. I regretted it immediately—and I still don't fully understand why I did it.
But I began to feel less guilty over the ensuing days as Ray pelted me with venialities that he had extracted from my social media accounts. He dug up a Facebook message to an old boyfriend: You had a great ass. He found a text thread in which a friend had confessed that she was going through a dark time in her marriage and was finding solace—perhaps too much solace—in a male coworker. I had responded with a general expression of support. Ray saw it as encouraging her to have an affair. One Saturday afternoon, as I was opening a can of quinoa soup in the kitchen, Ray popped in with his laptop computer. "I want to read you something," he said and proceeded to show me a text I had sent Myles months earlier: Good chemistry today at Capital Café. Loved hearing your thoughts. We need more sessions like this.
"Okay," I said. "What about it?"
"Capital Café? Chemistry? Love?"
"You're asking me about a throwaway message I sent months ago. My guess is that it was from the time when Myles and I were working on the Lansing History Museum project. We'd gotten stuck, so we decided to get coffee. A bit of a walk. A change of venue. Some caffeine. Guess what? It worked. We had a great brainstorming session. We moved the project forward. That's it." Then, looking him in the eye, I added: "It's clear you've prepared your case, Ray. You are ready to convince the jury that I'm a bad spouse. The only problem is that there is no jury. And if you continue to think about this as a trial, we're never going to make it through. There are complexities here that require us to go beyond the rules of evidence."
"Oh yes," he said, "I'm quite familiar with your ability to obfuscate any issue under the sun by invoking a vast cloud of complexities." Ray often jokes that he can't match my verbal skills—"I'm not a professional communicator like you." But he's secretly proud of his large vocabulary, and Latinate words like obfuscatory, obtuse, and obdurate will often make appearances when he wants to sound like the Michigan Law alum that he is.
As it happened, Everette lived alone in a neighborhood close to my own. Frank Lloyd Wright had built a handful of his Usonian homes here in the 40s, and Everette had managed to snatch one of these up when it came on the market a few years back. These are famous homes—instantly recognizable as Wright's work—but they are relatively modest. Everette could have afforded something much bigger and flashier.
I've never been a runner, but I love taking long walks, sometimes two hours at a stretch, trancing-out to podcasts or audio books. That summer after Our House was complete, I began routing my walks past Everette's place. On one pass, he happened to be out in the yard, pruning a Japanese maple, and he called out to me as I walked by. I'd hoped this might happen, not least because I really wanted to see the inside of his home. Sure enough, after we chatted for a bit, Everette gestured to his front door. "Want the nickel tour?"
He walked me through his immaculately kept, Mid-Century Modern specimen, with its built-in furniture and floor-to-ceiling windows. Our journey was accompanied by Everette's flat commentary: "Wright's design manipulated proportionality, natural light, and an open floorplan to generate the illusion of space." Everette presented his home without pride or even much interest. It was like getting a tour from a bored museum docent.
I kept the same route on my walks that summer, always hoping I would run into Everette. He'd been experimenting with "mocktails"—strange concoctions made with licorice root, liquid smoke, vinegar ("to enforce sipping"), horseradish ("to mimic the heat of alcohol"), and the like. He was always trying a new recipe so always had a reason to invite me in. In truth, most of those drinks were horrid affairs, and I would sometimes have a hard time finishing them.
For reasons only partially clear to me, I have never been plagued by insecurities about my physical appearance. It's not because I'm exceptionally beautiful. I think my mother had grown up with a kind of self-loathing, and she was determined to make sure Judith and I didn't suffer from that affliction. Thinking back, I can recall moments when she dropped little assessments of my looks. "Your green eyes are glowing today." "That dress shows off your graceful neck." And once, when I was about sixteen and had put on a new pair of jeans: "Cute ass, Leona!" She adopted just the right touch, and her affirmations never withered into a mother's gratuitous reassurances. I believed her pronouncements then, and I believe them now. I have absorbed the latest advice about nutrition and exercise, have adopted the same yoga-and-cardio routines as other professional women of my caste, have dutifully applied a moisturizing cream with sunscreen every morning, rain or shine, for years. At fifty-three, I think I look pretty good.
When I was with Everette, I felt something different about myself that I can't fully explain. Not desired, because Everette seemed to want absolutely nothing from me. He never invited me for dinner. He never touched me—not even a friendly hug. He never suggested that we get coffee. He never flirted. The extent of our relationship was simply that if he saw me walk by, he would say hello, and I knew I could always go inside his house by simply asking about his latest mocktail. I typically stayed less than an hour, chatting and laughing and gazing out the massive windows that overlooked a half-acre of hills and trees. (Everette: "Wright started with the natural landscape and then designed homes that appear to grow out of it.")
One day I made a point of having a double shot of Jack Daniels before walking over. It was late on a warm June night, nearly nine o'clock. The windows faced east, so looked out into the house's own shadow, making it seem later than it actually was. As luck would have it, Everette was spinning Prince's "1999" on his vintage Silvertone turntable, and I used the excuse of friendly dancing to bring our bodies close. Everette played along: "Dance with me, Ariella." Not sixty seconds in, I kissed him lightly on the lips, surprised at how easily this escalation unfolded.
I have no idea how Everette knew the name Ariella.
Just as I was surprised by the quick wit that issued from his jolly face, I was startled by the surety of the way his hands moved on me. I could feel his intelligence in his fingertips. He let me take the lead, but he matched me move-for-move. I pulled him into the dance, and he clasped my upper arms. I kissed him on the lips, and his right hand slipped around me and under my t-shirt, to the damp skin of my lower back. I placed my thumb on his bottom lip, and he sucked it into his mouth. The progression of movements was so effortless, and our bodies responded so easily to each other, that the whole affair had a storybook quality, something not quite real.
My clothes seemed to melt away. Naked and completely unhurried, I walked over to the massive windows. The shadows were deepening, and the near part of the backyard glowed faintly from the interior lights of Everette's living room. I raised my hands above my head and placed them on the glass. Everette came up from behind.
Later, I recited an edited version of this experience to Shannon. I tried to talk to her about the music, the light, the windows... the effortless quality of our movements.
"The whole thing was beautifully mild," I said.
"Mild? That sounds boring. Did you orgasm?"
"It wasn't boring. It was... peaceful."
"I'll take that as a no. That's depressing." I ended the conversation there, feeling more alone than ever.
What I didn't know, leaning against Everett's oversized windows, was that outside in the twilight one of his neighbors was patrolling the woods with a pair of binoculars. The house adjacent to Everette's back yard was owned by one of Ray's father's friends—an avid bird watcher in his late seventies. While Everette and I were doing our thing, he was tracking a barred owl perched in one of the trees in the yard. His binoculars captured a bit more than he bargained for, and as a loyal friend of the family, he felt honor-bound to report the news. Damn Frank Lloyd Wright and his floor-to-ceiling windows.
Had I been a little quicker on my feet, I could have probably lied my way out of it, accusing the old man of being senile or simply mistaken. But when Ray confronted me, I was caught so completely off guard that he read the truth on my face immediately. Ever since I was little, I have always needed my sins to be exposed quickly. One time I stole a silver dollar from a friend who had shown me her secret hiding place. Rather than simply dropping it into my piggy bank—where it would have blended into a collection gathered over the years from various aunts and uncles—I showed it to my mother as soon as I got home. "Look what I found on the sidewalk," I said. But silver dollars don't just suddenly appear on sidewalks, and mothers know when their children are lying.
In the evenings, Ray continued to hide out in the den, often with a microwaved burrito or a tuna sandwich. In a way, I felt kind of sorry for him because the vast majority of my social-media content was profoundly boring: endless fountains of text devoted to the logistics of birthday parties, updates about sick aunts, plans for family gatherings in Fort Wayne, where I grew up.
Late one night while I was watching a rerun of Gilmore Girls on the couch, Ray emerged from the den and announced that he wanted to talk to me. I could tell from the look on his face that something was different this time.
"I just read the Gmail exchange you had with Adelina back in 2015," he started, and then paused, shaking his head; he seemed confused about exactly what he wanted to tell me.
In 2015, Adelina was twenty-one and finishing up at Northwestern. She and I had always been close, and she had reached out to me because she was pregnant and needed to make some decisions. She had already told her mother, who had begged her to come back to Fort Wayne so the two of them could work out a plan. But Adelina chose to think through the various facets of her situation with me rather than with Judith.
I tried to get Adelina to call me, feeling Gmail was an awkward vehicle for such complicated matters. But Adelina has difficulty expressing herself in conversation. She opted for long, beautifully written emails in which she explored her circumstances from every angle—her assessment of long-term plans with Nathaniel (who she'd only been seeing for a few months), the "watermark" of an Episcopalian upbringing, her research into abortion clinics, her fears about graduation and the transition to the work world. I wanted to be a good aunt and a wise friend, and I remember crafting very careful responses. The whole ordeal was so delicate, I hadn't shared many of the details with Ray. I was too afraid he would slip up and say something to my sister, and Adelina would feel betrayed.
Now, Ray looked at me with an expression that I hadn't seen in months—earnest and a little sad. "I don't even know where to begin," he said. "You handled that situation with so much insight and compassion... A trained therapist couldn't have done what you did there."
I could feel my eyes tear up, which he must have noticed. He hugged me tightly, the first time we'd touched in months.
I could never quite think of it as a kink, but radical exposure—the peculiar nakedness it entails—did have a transformative effect. A wife can see herself through her husband's eyes. Knowing that Ray had scrutinized me with the rigor and suspicion of a prosecutor changed my own sense of how I must look to him. And there was something weirdly comforting about this. Even now, as I write this account, I have a strange sense that Ray is a kind of expert on me, an authority on Elle, the way an English professor might be an authority on Shakespeare. He sometimes intervenes in my life with a kind of deft boldness, like a surgeon who knows exactly where to cut.
Recently, at a Fourth of July gathering in Fort Wayne, I got in a shouting match with my brother Thomas about something that happened when we were both in our late twenties. Fueled by sunburn, anger, and alcohol, we began to recite the lists of the things we knew would hurt each other most—the cheap shots, the embarrassing information we had access to by virtue of growing up together. This was a familiar routine.
Ray stepped into the fray quickly: "The two of you need to stop," he said, holding each of our gazes in turn. "You've agreed not to do this. You have a pact. Step away. Sleep it off." This intervention worked. Thomas and I went to neutral corners, and the next day we were good.
It was the word pact that stuck out. Thomas and I had a particularly acidic fight a few years back, so bad that initially I vowed to cut him out of my life. But a few weeks later, Thomas reached out with a conciliatory text. Through a series of tentative exchanges, we worked out an agreement about how to avoid these sibling hurt fests. "It's a pact," Thomas had texted, adding a handshake emoji.
In the weeks after finding the exchange with Adelina, Ray became a little friendlier, saying good morning to me, asking me polite questions about work. Through some clever machinations, Alex got Ray to confess that he "still cared" about me. (Alex once told Shannon that the trick to being a good therapist is creating a space for patients to admit they're wrong.) A few weeks later, Ray moved back into our bedroom, though we still didn't touch beyond incidental contact. I liked the return of his heat next to me. I even liked his snoring. It had annoyed me over the years, but now it felt soothing.
Early one morning, while we were both lying half asleep in bed, my phone buzzed with a text alert—a long message from Myles, it turned out. The previous afternoon, Myles and I had a long heart-to-heart about his girlfriend, an unusually personal conversation about how their plans to get married had recently gotten derailed.
Ray's voice startled me: "Hey."
The room was only beginning to lighten with the first moments of sunrise, so I hadn't noticed that Ray was extending an upward-turned palm. It had been a long time since he'd performed that gesture; it took me a moment to figure out what it meant. When recognition set in, I was instantly furious. I thought we were long past this stage, and it felt wrong to let Ray see something so personal from Myles. I considered protesting, but in the end I dutifully handed Ray my phone, per our agreement. I stared at the ceiling while he read the message. After a moment, Ray spoke in a tone that conveyed genuine concern.
"It sounds like Myles could use some of your wisdom," he said. "You think he'll be able to work things out?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "They are really struggling."
"You need to work your magic," he said. He pulled close to me and brought his arm across my stomach. I placed my hand on top of his, and he kissed me on my forehead.
The truth of the matter is that, out of the hundreds of texts and social media posts I have ever sent, there is only one that would have been a deal breaker. A few days after my single moment with Everette, when the severity of my crime began to fully sink in, I knew that I should end all contact with him. I composed a short paragraph to break things off. It went something like this:
Everette... I have truly treasured our time together. Since beginning work on Our House all those months back, I have found myself looking forward to seeing you, to your distinctive way of talking, your unique way of being in the world. I will always remember the feel of your fingers on me that day in your living room. And I keep "1999" on my favorite playlists, a secret reminder of the moment we shared together. I have to say goodbye now. I have no regrets, and I hope you don't either.
I've had this experience a few times over the years: when I hit SEND on a message, it suddenly takes on a new meaning. It's as if I can't fully appreciate the import of my words until I have a clear mental picture of their arrival at the eyes of another person. In this case, when I reread my message in that post-send moment, I was horrified by the sense of its power. It wasn't their effect on Everette that I feared, but the impact they would have on Ray, should they ever come before his eyes. That particular configuration of marks on a screen would annihilate my marriage instantaneously. I deleted the text immediately from both my iPhone and, with a newfound criminal savvy, from the message app on my laptop computer as well. But sometimes when Ray shot me one of his accusatory looks, I was afraid he could somehow read the message verbatim, as if it were inscribed on my face... or my heart.
I began compiling a list of evidence that indicated Ray was making his way back to me. He started to eat his burritos next to me at the kitchen table. One Sunday evening, he offered to make us "breakfast for dinner"—a weekend ritual he had often performed while Margaux was growing up. In true Michigan style, we had a night of freezing rain the first week of April; Ray scraped the ice off my car before he headed into work the next morning.
He still occasionally asked for my phone, but the gesture had become a joke. He would read the texts out loud using a lascivious voice, then add filthy commentary. One day at breakfast, the phone vibrated, and Ray grabbed it. "Myles is hoping to touch base about the Michigan Ave. project this morning." He thumbed wildly on the screen of my iPhone, pretending to compose a response. "Dear Myles... I am excited to touch base with you this morning. In fact, there are a number of things I would like to touch... " Then he spanked me playfully on the ass.
Not too long after that, Ray and I were watching TV in the family room, sitting close to each other on the couch. His phone started to move across the surface of the coffee table in front of us, propelled by the buzz of a text coming in. He grabbed it and pulled it toward his face to read the message. On a whim, I reached out to Ray and turned up my palm. He looked at me for a moment, then placed his phone in my hand.
"Let's see what we have here," I joked. As it happened, the message was from the mother of one of the kids on the soccer team Ray coached. "Oh my," I said. "This is an urgent text from Trisha. The hotel for the tournament this weekend is fully booked. I am wondering if..." Here I trailed off. I'd used up the preview of the text that was visible from the lockscreen.
"It's your birthday," Ray said.
"Trisha is wondering if it's your birthday?"
"No," Ray said. "The passcode to my phone is your birthday. Month and day. It's always been that, since my first iPhone. I'm an open book."
I entered the passcode and pulled up the full text. But instead of reading it, I made up a long X-rated story about what would happen in the alternative hotel Trisha had picked out for the team. Ray pulled me close to him and started to kiss me, a real kiss this time. I wasn't going to let this opportunity pass. I stood up and took off my clothes. I knew how to undress gracefully when the situation called for it, how even taking off your wool socks can be sexy if you do it right. In Ray's response to this—how he openly gazed at me, how his hands reached almost involuntarily for my hips—I thought I could sense an apology. An apology to himself and to me. An apology for doubting our marriage, for abusing the privileges of radical transparency, for resisting the comforts of forgiveness far too long. There was a hesitancy about the way he touched my cheeks, my shoulder blades, my ass... as if he were only now realizing how lucky he was to be married to me.
