393: Infidelity

Ira Glass

This spring, sometime after South Carolina governor Mark Sanford publicly confessed that his soulmate was a woman in Argentina who was not his wife, which was just after the Elizabeth Edwards book tour where she talked about the child that her husband allegedly had with a woman who was not her, which was, of course, right on the heels of Jon and Kate splitting up after reports that he had an affair, which was all before Nevada senator John Ensign admitted paying $96,000 in cash to his former mistress and her husband, after her husband found out about their relationship, a writer named Jessica Pressler noticed something going on in the weddings pages of the New York Times, what the paper calls their Vows section.

She saw that there were couples getting married who cheerfully told the newspaper, in the little write up that they do there, as part of their "meet cute" story, that the way they got together was that one of them cheated on a spouse or longtime partner.

Ira Glass

Jessica Pressler wrote up her discovery on the New York magazine blog, "Daily Intel." She noted that there was a kind of code language in all these wedding articles.

Ira Glass

Take, for instance, the married women who, according to a romantic write up on the Vows page of the New York Times, flew to Paris to see another man and stayed with him in a hotel in the Latin quarter for two weeks where they quote "reveled in their Vie Boheme" before she flew back to the US and moved out of the home in New Jersey that she shared with her husband.

Ira Glass

As for the cheated on ex-partner, when the story appears in the newspaper on the wedding pages, it's almost as if the newspaper is siding with the cheating couple. The ex-partner is just collateral damage on the way to their wedding.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our radio program, we go where the newspaper marriage columns fear to tread. We hear from all parties to the affair, the cheated on, as well as the cheaters, and their different takes on what happened. And, no surprise, they are very different from one another's. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show: "Infidelity." Stay with us.

Ira Glass

"Let me kiss your stiff upper lip." We begin with this story from England, which, if you've read any 19th century literature, seems to be an island that is filled entirely with people who are full of submerged and often misplaced passions for other people. Here's Ruby Wright.

Ira Glass

Ruby Wright. She does a music show called Ruby's Chicky Boil-Ups. It airs every other Sunday on radionowhere.org. Her website is rubywright-- that's W-R-I-G-H-T-- dot com.

Coming up, what to say to your parents about the rich, married guy who set you up in an apartment when you're 22 years old. And what to say to yourself. And other dilemmas of cheaters and the cheated on. In a minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show: "Infidelity." Recently, when CNN did a story about Elizabeth Edwards, it was interesting to read the comments on CNN's website. There were nearly 300 comments, a lot of them just vicious. Calling her crazy, calling her delusional, calling her an idiot, to stay with her husband, John Edwards. But a few women wrote in to say, it all seemed more complicated than that.

One posted this: "I am in this situation right now. It's a difficult call to make." My mom was a psychologist, and she specialized in couples where somebody had cheated. She treated hundreds of these couples, and she did studies looking at hundreds more. She wrote a book about her findings. There is solid research, a variety of researchers have shown, that in one out of two couples, one or both partners will cheat during the lifetime of a relationship. That's 50% percent of all relationships.

Most affairs are never detected. And one of the surprising things that my mom found out in her research was that tons of people will have affairs even though they're happy in their marriage. You don't have to be unhappy to have an affair. 56% of the men and 34% of the women in one of my mom's studies said they cheated though their marriage was happy. And she said lots of couples came in to see where that was the situation.

Where not only the cheated on partner, but the cheater seemed genuinely surprised that this had happened in their marriage. Which brings us to our next story. About the cheaters lurking inside any relationship. We're at Act 2 of our show, Act 2, "The Italian Job." This story comes from James Braly, who told it at the storytelling series, The Moth, in front of a live audience.

James Braly

I am sitting on my suitcase in the main train station in Rome next to my girlfriend, Susan, who's sitting on hers. And we're rifling through our Let's Go: Europe, trying to agree on the next destination of our vacation. Susan grew up in Germany, so she'll go basically anyplace. As long as it's sunny. But I need to go to the right place. And I have a pathological terror of going to the wrong place.

So, whenever Susan suggests someplace in particular, I suggest someplace else. Because I can see something wrong with every place. And this is a gift I bring to every area of my life, notably my relationship with Susan. We've been together for about seven years since college, and every time she brings up the subject of commitment-- maybe it's a good time to get married-- I say, I think I need a little more time just to make sure that what we're doing is right.

So, as a result, all of the lights on the arrivals and departures board are blinking. And the man on the public address system keeps saying departione over and over and over again. And Susan is up on her feet, screaming at me, "Make up your mind before all the trains pull out."

While I am kind of hypnotized by the hem of this flower print dress, it's about 10 feet away, fluttering in the breeze each time a train pulls in or out of the station. Which, at this point, is frequently. Which is hanging off what may be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, who is standing next to her beautiful friend. When Susan says, "Are you looking at those women?" And I say, "Where?"

And she says, "Right there, in the flower print dresses." And I say, "You mean them?" And she says, "Yes. They look interesting, don't they? Like maybe they're going someplace interesting we might want to go. You know what? I think I'll ask them." And before I can tell her what a bad idea that is, she's over there talking to them in French. And they're pointing at me, and a few minutes later she's introducing them to me.

Isabel is the beautiful one and her sister is a gloriously beautiful woman named Franz, who has a face off of one of those French go to war, buy war bonds posters that makes you want to invade. So I'm just staring at her as Susan says, "Guess what, James? They're going to Positano." Which is one of the numerous fishing villages we debated going to. "What do you say we all travel together?"

And two minutes later Franz and I are on the same vacation. Sitting on a train to Naples, and then on a hydrofoil to Positano, and then checking into the same hotel, into adjacent rooms where we're going to change into our swimsuits and meet on the beach. Now, I haven't been in a swimsuit for years, since the last time I was on the beach. And I'm looking in the mirror in the hotel and things have changed since then.

A little Italian bakery opened up around the corner from my office. And I'd been going there every workday, having apricot bear claws. And now I have two apricot bear claws hanging off the sides of my waist, bubbling up over my swimsuit. And it's one thing to decay in front of your girlfriend, there is a kind of mutual decay contract, where you are all going to atrophy at more or less the same rate.

But I don't have that deal with Franz. And there's no way she's seeing my bear claws. So when we meet on the beach, the girls are in French bikinis. And I'm in my shorts and my button down shirt from the train ride, like I forgot to undress half myself. And after a couple hours of them swimming, Franz comes over to me and says, "Do you not swim?" And I say, "Indoors. I burn easily." And she hands me her bottle of sunblock. And I start to shake my head sadly, and point to one of the ingredients, and I say, "I'm allergic."

There are six more days to go. So, the next morning, after an all nighter with Let's Go: Europe, I have a comprehensive understanding of all the cultural high points within a 30-mile radius of the city of Positano. None of which include the beach. There is Mount Vesuvius and the Grottoes of Capri and the Hanging Gardens at Ravenna. And we can go to a beach anywhere, but there's only so many places you can see this kind of culture. That's the position I'm taking.

Ira Glass

James Braly. He's touring the country with a one-man show called Life in a Marital Institution, which he's also turning into a book. His website, jamesbraly-- that's B-R-A-L-Y-- dot com. Thanks, as always, to The Moth, which features personal stories told live in front of an audience. For more Moth stories, check out The Moth's great free weekly podcasts at themoth.org. And The Moth has started its own radio show, The Moth Radio Hour, which we welcome onto the scene, now on public radio stations around the country.

[MUSIC -- "MAPS" BY YEAH YEAH YEAHS]

Ira Glass

Act 3, "How did I get here?" So James Braly gave us the thoughts of somebody in a moment before infidelity occurs. Dani Shapiro has this story about the confusing mess it can be during the affair.

Dani Shapiro

Here, in no particular order, are some things Lenny told me. That he and his wife didn't sleep in the same bed. That they haven't had a real marriage in years. That she was undergoing electroshock treatment in a clinic outside Philadelphia. That he had cancer and had to fly to Houston three days a week for chemotherapy. That his youngest daughter, age three, had a rare form of childhood leukemia. That he could not get a divorce for all of the above reasons. That he was heartbroken that he could not leave his wife and marry me.

For a long time I believed him, with every bone in my body I trusted that Lenny Klein was telling me the truth. When we talked about it, his jaw would tighten and his big brown eyes would fill with tears. His voice would quaver with pent-up, complex feelings that I couldn't possibly begin to understand. Poor Lenny. I marveled that so many bad things could happen to one person. And I vowed to take care of him. I exhorted myself to be a real woman, one who could step up to the plate and be good to her man in his moment of crisis.

Years later, I hold Lenny's lies up to the light and examine my own reasons for believing what, in retrospect, seems preposterous. I reread my old journals and noticed the way my girlish handwriting deteriorated into a scrawl as I wrote, "I have to be there for Lenny, he needs me, and he's going through so much. I don't know if I can handle it, but I have to be strong." I try to remember that Lenny was a trial lawyer, that he built an international reputation based on his own pathology. That he lied with an almost evangelical conviction. He prided himself on being able to convince anyone of anything.

The lies had small beginnings. Lenny called me from a business trip and told me he was at Montreal airport, waiting to catch a flight to Calgary. I checked with the airline and found out that the flight would take approximately five hours, so when Lenny called an hour later to say he had landed in Calgary, I very calmly asked him where he really was. "Calgary," he said. "No, Lenny. Really." He stuck to his story. In the time that I knew him, he never, ever changed his story midstream.

I hung up on him and called his family's house in Westchester. When the maid answered the phone, I asked to speak with Mr. Klein. And when he picked up the extension, and I heard his rough, craggy, "Hello," I screamed so hard into his ear that he dropped the receiver. He raced into the city, he let himself into my apartment and found me curled up in bed. He scooped me up and held me to his chest. His wife wasn't home, he told me. She was having shock treatment. And someone had to take care of his daughter.

He hadn't wanted to tell me because he wanted to spare me, to protect me from the horror of his life. Surely I understood. "Shush, sweetheart," he murmured into the top of my head as I wept, my face beet red like a little girl's. "So many people need me," he said. "But I love you best of all."

Two years have passed, and something has gone wrong, terribly wrong with my life. I don't, in fact, think of my life as my life, but rather as a series of random events that have no logical connection. I'm no longer a student. I dropped out of Sarah Lawrence after my junior year, supposedly to pursue acting. And I'm actually doing a pretty good imitation of an actress. But I'm doing an even better imitation of a mistress.

Lenny's been busy buying me things. I don't particularly want these things, but they seem to be what Lenny is offering in lieu of himself. So quite suddenly, overnight really, I find myself driving a black Mercedes convertible. And just in case I might be mistaken for anything other than a kept woman, I wear a mink coat, a Cartier watch, a Bulgari necklace with an ancient coin at its center. The Mercedes is a step down from the first car Lenny gave me, when we had been going out for a month. A leased Ferrari. I don't know how to drive a stick shift, so the Ferrari was a bit of a problem. What I must have looked like, a 20-year-old blonde, dressed like Ivana Trump, stalled in traffic, grinding gears, trying to find the point on the clutch to hold that ridiculous car in place.

Lenny rented an apartment on a pretty little street in Greenwich Village. A furnished triplex with a garden, a fireplace, and a bedroom with a four-poster bed. He called it "our house," as if he didn't have another home with a whole family in it an hour north of the city. He kept half a dozen suits in the bedroom closet, and a brand new silk robe hung behind the bathroom door. There was an entire floor we didn't use, a large airy children's nursery.

My parents knew that something was up. They knew I was going out with somebody, but they had no idea who. I was drifting away from them, and they were letting me go. One night I invited them over for dinner. I pushed all traces of Lenny out of sight, but, of course, there were clues. A glossy brochure for Italian yachts. A humidor in the center of the coffee table.

I cooked up a storm and the place was filled with homey smells. Garlic, basil, coriander. It was winter, and the snow was piled up on the sills. Spotlights in the backyard shone on the landscaped garden, the redwood table, the Adirondack chairs. I had my father's favorite music, Dvorak's Symphony for the New World, playing on the stereo system.

My parents rang the doorbell. They looked so solid standing on my front stoop, their cold, red noses poking out from above their mufflers. If nothing else, they looked like they belonged together. They were elegant and rangy, similarly proportioned. Unlike Lenny and me. Lenny as thick as a linebacker, and I had become so delicate, the wind could have picked me up and blown me away.

My mother strode into the brownstone as if it wasn't the weirdest thing in the world to be visiting her daughter in a lavish apartment with no name on the outside buzzer. My father trailed behind her wearily, as if setting foot on another planet. My mother entered the living room, flung her arms wide, and did an impromptu dance to Dvorak. "Tra-la-la-la," she trilled. My father and I hung back and watched, our faces crumpled into awkward smiles. It didn't occur to me that she was frightened. That this was a lot for her to take in, her college dropout daughter living in the lap of luxury.

All I could see was her outsized self, twirling around my living room in her fur coat and boots. I wanted a drink.

I poured two glasses of chardonnay for my parents and a large vodka for myself. I figured that if the vodka was in a water glass they wouldn't know the difference, especially if I drank it like it was water. My drinking had taken on a new urgency in the past few months. It was no longer a question of desire, but of need. I could not get through an evening like this without the armor of booze. I handed them their wine and directed them to the couch.

On the coffee table, I had put out a plate crudites and a bowl of olives. "Quite a place," my mother said brightly, her gaze darting around the room at the white brick fireplace with its wrought iron tools, the glass wall overlooking the garden, the soaring ceiling. My father stared at the fringe of the rug, glassy eyed. He needed to be as numbed as I did to get through this night. "Thanks," I murmured, as if she was paying me a compliment.

I checked on dinner, using the opportunity to gulp some wine from the open bottle in the fridge. Vodka and white wine was a combination I knew worked for me. If I stuck with the formula, things shouldn't be too bad in the morning. Especially if I wasn't eating, and I couldn't see myself eating. The music had stopped by the time we all sat at the dining room table, but I didn't notice then. If I had I would certainly have changed the tape, filled the air with something other than the tinny, lonely sound of our three forks scraping against plates.

I pushed my chicken from one side of my plate to the other. My stomach clenched and growled in protest. It seemed that my parents and I, after 22 years in each other's company, had run out of things to say. I already knew their views on the political situation in Israel, and we couldn't discuss my school work, I was no longer in school. My father pressed a corner of his napkin to his lips and murmured something about the food being delicious. My mother agreed.

"My wonderful daughter," she said, shaking her head. "You've turned into such a little homemaker." I looked at my parents across the table. Is that what they really thought? How could they just sit there? Some small piece of me wanted my father to fling me over his shoulder and carry me kicking and screaming to the car he had parked outside. I secretly wished that they would drive me home, deposit me in my childhood bedroom, and feed me chicken soup and Saltines. I wanted to start my life over again, but I didn't know how.

In the face of the most tangible proof that Lenny had been lying to me all these years, I remained with him. "My little girl is dying," he would say whenever I noticed the discrepancies in his stories. Or "My children's mother is having electroshock therapy." When I couldn't take my own confusion anymore-- Was Lenny lying to me? Was I going crazy?-- I decided to hire a detective to get to the bottom of it.

By this time, my parents knew all about me and Lenny in theory, but it wasn't something we could talk about. When I think back to my younger self rifling through the New York City yellow pages in search of a private investigator, I feel like I'm watching a movie about someone else. A girl so clueless she really didn't know that her desire to hire a detective was all the answer she needed. I chose a detective agency based on nothing more than its good address, in the East 60s, a neighborhood filled with private schools and shrinks.

"This isn't what you think," I told the detective. "I'm in a relationship with a married man, and I want you to find out if my boyfriend is cheating on me with his wife." At this, his eyebrows shot up. "Come again?" "He claims his wife is in a mental hospital. He told me he hasn't been with her in years." "And you think he might be lying?" said the investigator. Did I see the laughter behind his eyes or is my memory supplying it now? Because I simply cannot imagine a middle-aged man listening to an earnest, over-dressed 22-year-old girl tell them that she thinks her boyfriend might still be sleeping with his wife. "Yes," I said.

Days later, I got the proof about Lenny's lies. In tears, I called my mother. "Oh, darling. I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do?" "I don't think so." A pause. "Do you want to me to call his wife?"

My mother and Mrs. Klein had met each other at a few school functions back when none of this could have struck anyone as a remote possibility. "Yes," I said. "Call her." "I'll do it right now," my mother said.

I sat by the phone and watched the minutes tick by. I pictured Lenny's wife answering the phone with a chirpy hello, and my mother's slow, steady explanation of why she was calling. I had set in motion a chain of events which was now unstoppable. More than 20 minutes passed before my mother called me back. "Well, I did it," she said. "You talked to her?" The world felt unreal, hallucinatory.

"Yes. She called me a liar. She told me she has a happy marriage to a man who travels a lot. That he's on his way to California. And I said, 'No, he's on his way to see my daughter.'" My mother sounded proud of herself, immersed in the drama of the moment. "How did she seem?" I asked. "What do you mean?" "Lenny's wife, was she angry?" "No," my mother said slowly. "She just didn't believe me, Dani."

I spent the rest of that day in a state of awful excitement. Something was going to happen. And when Lenny showed up that evening at the apartment we were still sharing in the West Village, I was ready. He put his bags down and gave me a hug. The phone rang. My mother had given Mrs. Klein the number at the apartment and suggested she find out for herself what her husband was up to. Lenny picked up the phone on the kitchen well. "Hello?"

I watched him. And for the first and only time in the years I knew him, he looked genuinely surprised. He didn't say a word. He just listened for a few minutes, then hung up the phone. "That was my wife," he said. I was silent. "How did she get this number?" I shrugged. "I have to go." "I'd imagine," I said faintly.

When Lenny slammed out of the apartment, I was certain I would never see him again. I knew the truth now. It was staring me in the face in the concrete form of flight lists and photos. And he knew that I knew. And besides, the whistle was blown. What could he possibly tell his wife? This was it, I told myself. Absolutely, positively the end.

It wasn't the end. Lenny still called 10, 12 times a day. He left messages on my answering machine. "Hello?" His voice filled my bedroom. "Fox, are you there?" Sometimes he didn't say a word. He would stay on the line for as long as five minutes, just breathing. Eventually he did get to me again. And for the next year that we were together, three days here, four days there, my life became unrecognizable to me. I idly wondered what it would take to get me to leave him.

I wondered about this over bottles of chilled white wine, or heavy glasses half-filled with scotch. I was still wondering about it when I went to stay for a while at a health spa in California. The phone rang in my room one day. There had been a car crash on a snowy highway. My mother had 80 broken bones. My father was in a coma. They were lying in hospital 3,000 miles away. And suddenly, in ways I could not have imagined seconds earlier, nothing else mattered. As I packed my bags, I remembered my mother twirling, dancing to Dvorak, through the doors of Lenny's brownstone. And the glassy look in my father's eyes.

I prayed that my father wouldn't die disappointed in me, and I knew then what I had to do.

Ira Glass

Dani Shapiro. That story is in her memoir, Slow Motion. She has another book, Devotion, coming out in February.

Ira Glass

Act 4, "The Man Who Knew What I Was About to Say." So, in this second half of our program, we've had the moment before a possible affair, we've had what it's like during the affair, and now we turn to the aftermath of an affair. At least the very immediate aftermath. This story is by writer Etgar Keret, and read for us by actor Matt Malloy.

Matt Malloy

The man who knew what I about to say sat next to me on the plane, a stupid smile plastered across his face. That's what's so nerve wracking about him. Smart, he wasn't. Or sensitive either. But still, he knew those lines and managed to say them. All the lines I meant to say, three seconds before me. "Do you sell Guerlain Mystique?" he asked the flight attendant, a minute before I could. And she gave him an orthodontic smile and said, "There's just one last bottle left." "My wife goes crazy for that perfume," he said. "She's positively addicted. If I come back from a trip without a bottle of Mystique from the duty free, she says I don't love her anymore. If I dare come into the house without at least one of these, I'm in deep [BLEEP]."

That was supposed to be my line, but the man who knew what I was about to say stole it from me, without missing a beat. As soon as the wheels touched the ground, he switched on his mobile, a second before I did, and called his wife. "I just landed," he told her. "I'm sorry. I know it was supposed to be yesterday, flight was canceled. You don't believe me? Check it out yourself. Call Eric. I know you don't. I can give his number right now."

I also have a travel agent call Eric. He'd lie for me, too.

When the plane reached the gate he was still talking on his mobile, giving all the answers I would have given, without a trace of emotion. Like a parrot in a world where time flows backwards, repeating whatever is about to be said instead of what's been said already. His answers were the best ones, under the circumstances. His circumstances weren't too hot, not too hot at all. Mine weren't either. Nobody was answering my call.

But just listening to the man who knew what I was about to say made me stop trying. Just listening to him, I could tell that this was a hole that even if I dug my way out of, it would be to a different reality. She'd never forgive me. She'd never trust me. Ever. All my coming trips would be hell on earth, and the time in between would be even worse. He went on talking and talking and talking. All those sentences that I'd thought up and hasn't said yet. It just kept flowing.

He stepped it up, changing the intonation, like a drowning man struggling desperately to stay afloat. People began getting off. He got up, still talking, scooped up his laptop in the other hand and headed for the exit. I could see him forgetting it behind, the bag he had put in the overhead compartment. I could see him forgetting it. I didn't say anything. I just stayed put.

Gradually everyone walked out, till the only ones still there were an overweight religious woman with a million children and me. I got up and opened the overhead compartment above me, as if nothing. I took out the duty free bag like it had always been mine. Inside were the receipt and the bottle of Guerlain Mystique. My wife goes crazy for that perfume. She's positively addicted. If I come back from a trip without a bottle of Mystique from the duty free, she says I don't love her anymore.

Ira Glass

Matt Malloy, reading a story by Etgar Keret, who is the author of several books of very, very short stories, most recently The Girl on the Fridge.

Our program is produced daily by Nancy Updike and our senior producer Julie Snyder with Alex Blumberg, James Pupta, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, and Augusa Shipp. Production help from Erin Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. Special thanks today to The Moth and to Paul Tough.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ for our program by our boss Torey Malatia. I'm a happily married man, so does it mean anything when he swims over to me at the company retreat and says things like, "The water makes me feel so free." I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

PRI, Public Radio International.