24 hours, 5 years, 10 months Ch. 03

"Marie, the beer here is good if you order the crafts. In the years I've been in Milwaukee, I finally lost my taste for guzzling the cold tasteless beers of my youth. I'd rather have one great one than a couple of them."

"It took you a while to get there Jim, I remember telling you that it's about having a small amount of the best things, then having a lot of anything." Suddenly her face recognized what she just said. "That was my problem in Cincinnati, wasn't it? I didn't listen to my own advice, did I?"

We were both quiet for a few minutes. It was Saturday afternoon, only 3 days after we were tossed back together after 5 years of not ever seeing one another or even know that we both moved to Milwaukee. Neither of us had closure. Over the years, we both tried to come to terms with what happened and move on. From the little time we spoke to each other at dinner and from what Bill told me, I knew that she tried hard to save her marriage. I hope she heard from me that I didn't ever want to hurt her and that there were better ways of handling bad things.

I looked at her. Gail Marie Sculotto is now G. Marie Wilson. She hasn't changed her name since her divorce. It's a pain to legally change names, especially again. But I think it was also a way to drop the past behind. Now she has two pasts to leave behind.

"I'm going to be honest with you Marie, I had a real rough night on Wednesday. Bill stayed with me until midnight. I was..."

"You too? Terry didn't get home at all. We ended up, well I ended up talking and crying and whatever till one in the morning when we collapsed. Thank god her house is on the way to work and we got up early enough. She ran into her house, kissed Bill good morning, changed into a clean nurse uniform and ran into work with me."

"Marie, there are so many things to talk about, so many areas to ...I don't know where or how to start. One thing I will tell you is that I will be honest, not mean or nasty honest, but honest in what I say. I realize that I still have a lot of anger in me and I'll keep it in check." She looked a bit worried. She was slapped by her husband in public. I wonder how many times in happened in private.

"Please don't worry about me being physical or loud or threatening. When I came home and saw you in bed with him, I could have done something physical to both of you then. I didn't then and I'm not going to start anything different, except to get things out in a very appropriate manner.

"Jim?" She was looking directly into my eyes with a very pained expression. I'm sure mine were the same. "I don't know either but how about this? Can we talk about what happened afterword, what we did with our lives after that day? Then we can go back to the start? To when we were engaged? I know it'll be hanging over our heads the entire time we talk. But to be honest with you, I've thought about this for years. I know this is going to sound very stupid, but can you trust me on this one?"

"There's been a lot of water under the bridge, and some over it too. Neither of us looks like we're going to bolt. If I read you right, you're here, just like me. Some closure? Some understanding? Something to fill the void?" She nodded yes. "Who wants to start?"

"It was my idea and I'd be a bit more prepared, so how about me?" I nodded and she continued.

"My father came home from seeing you and let me have it for lying again. This time it was lying to him. He gave me a week to get the hell out of the house and he spent that week somewhere else. I never saw him, I never saw him or talked with him or my mother for 6 months. For that week, it was just me and mom.

"My mom told me that day that I had 24 hours to cry. Then I needed to get my act together. That was all the time I had. There would be none to waste. After that day, I needed to create a new life, away from home.

"I won't get into the details, emotional or physical. I quickly realized that I had thrown you under the bus, and you returned the favor. My listening and believing Tammy destroyed you and then me. She actually called me a couple of days later. Her husband had left her and she needed a roommate to meet rent.

"By that time, I had started researching nursing schools away from southern Ohio and found this one in Milwaukee that would take my credits and admit me, but it was going to require another semester. The school also cost more. I had an Aunt and Uncle in Milwaukee that even after hearing what I had done, welcomed me for a couple of months until I could get back on my feet. After three months, I finally found a couple of girls from the nursing program to share an apartment with.

"That's where I met Terry. She was dating Bill. I didn't fill them much on my past, but they accepted me. I was still pretty fragile and making my way in life. I can thank god for the student counseling services at the school.

"After graduation. Terry and Bill were getting married. I was invited to the bachelorette party. I'll cut to the chase. We went to a male stripper club and things were getting raunchy pretty quick. Some of the girls were pretty wasted and started doing oral on the strippers, no condoms. When I saw Terry start to reach for the stripper's cock, I pulled her away, lying to her that she needed anther drink first.

"You would have been proud of me. I laced into her, I got in her face. I know Bill, not only would he not approve, he could do something like you did to me. That's when I quickly told her what I did and what happened to me.

"Then right between the eyes at her bachelorette party I asked her, yes or no, would this be worth throwing away her entire future for? She had a couple of drinks in her, but this sobered her up.

"She and I left together about 5 minutes later. About 6 months after their wedding, Bill pulled me on the side. Terry told him what nearly happened and what I did. He was thanking me for that. Ever since then, the three of us have always had each others backs. Terry told me yesterday that Bill was supporting you. I don't know what was said, but that he was there. I wanted you to know that up front. I don't lie anymore, I can't stand it when it happens to me. That was part of my life before and part of my marriage."

During this time, Marie was looking at me then the floor and then back at me several times. My eyes had been riveted to hers. I saw how she felt about things from the look on her face, from her inflections, the ways her eyes were averted at some of the difficult parts of her life.

She stopped for a moment and straightened her posture to prepare for this next painful part.

"Marie, do you want a break? We have as much time as we need. Neither of us are going anywhere but here."

"No Jim, I've practiced this over the past 5 years and I have to say it. Never thought I would. I always thought that even if I did find you, you'd turn me away. When you showed up on Wednesday and you treated me with respect and thoughtfulness..." at this she began to cry. I pulled out a spare clean bandana and passed it to her. I had brought two for me to use on the way home when I would be alone.

She took a couple of minutes to gather herself. I told her that I would get us some water and another beer and some bar food. It was chilly outside this day and I left my coat with my keys on top in front of her. I didn't know if she noticed.

The lines were long and it was about 10 minutes until I got back. She thanked me, but said she needed to use the facilities and said she'd be right back. She left her coat, keys and her phone in plain sight for me to see. I looked at the phone and thought about that day 5 years ago. When she returned, I was still staring at the phone.

We both took a healthy drink of water and munched on the food. We talked about the tastiness and all the bad things in bar food. We needed a break and this was a good one.

When we finished eating, she started talking again. "Now about my marriage. That was a disaster, but not at first. At first, I think we loved and cared for each other. He was warm and supportive and did all the right things. Looking back at it in my therapy, I really couldn't come up with any red flags at all until after 5 months went by."

She chuckled a little and then continued. "I was introduced to Mark by Terry and Bill. He was a friend of Bill's from high school. When he started to be less nice after 6 months, I thought it was the 6 month rule." I looked at her with a question in my face.

"The 6 month rule?"

"Oh yea. Works for both men and women, but it usually hit guys hardest. At least that's what Bill and a couple of other guys have told me. After 6 months of being married, your partner doesn't have to treat you as good as before. The honeymoon is over. Living together, it doesn't work that way. It's the marriage that makes the difference, not even living together for a couple of years.

Marriage is different. You move to real life, not courting. They don't love you less, but they don't have to go the extra step. My married girl friends have said that's when they stopped swallowing. The number of blow jobs starts to rapidly diminish too." She chuckled at this one, I groaned. It was true for me too but it started at 3 months.

"Well anyway, he changed. Not a little bit, but a lot. By the time we were married 9 months, he was into verbal tirades. By a year, he slapped me. Apologized for it afterwards and didn't do it again until we were out and that's when Terry and Bill saw it.

"I won't bore you with the interventions we had. His parents, our friends, the counseling. If it wasn't for a LCSW I went to, Genevieve..."

"Gene Hallon?" Marie nodded yes with a surprised look on her face. "Is she still off of Van Buren? I remember she wanted to move her office."

"You know her too?"

"She was helpful in getting me to the point where I could get on with my life. She helped when I showed up in town and then during and after my divorce. Pretty nice lady. You used her too I take it?"

Marie looked at me with something in her eyes. Like a memory or a thought. She physically shook her head to clear it. Marie's determination to finish took back over.

"Well, the short of it. He kept this under control most of his life. But being married didn't allow him enough alone time to continue to keep it under wraps. He needs meds. In our sessions I found out that he tried a series of them. Side effects are awful sometimes. The couple that actually worked for him took away his sex drive. He said in one of our final sessions that he'd rather be fucking and crazy then not fucking at all." She quietly laughed a very sad laugh to herself. "He bolted after that and we filed soon afterward.

"I also used Gene to work out things in my life from this marriage and our near marriage, my fucking around. One of the things I realized was that I've been punishing myself for what I did to you. When I started getting verbally abused, then hit the first time, I thought it was a righteous punishment for me. I wasn't going to do anything about it if it happened again. Only because he did it in front of Bill and Theresa and they pulled me out of there, was I forced to realize what I was doing.

"I haven't been in the dating scene for over a year, and these two good friends of mine tried to fix me up with somebody that they approved of. They even took extra care this time."

She paused a minute and her face now showed real pain. "I have to talk about cheating on you and thinking nothing of it." She screwed up her face with the pain we both knew was coming. "When I said that it was just sex and it meant nothing, I was telling you my truth. It was not the truth for reality, not for the world, not for you, just my twisted truth in the land of pretend.

"I could try to blame this all on Tammy. She was cheating on Jeff for a couple of months. No one would know, it doesn't hurt anybody, all that bullshit. It was exciting for her, and then for me to listen to it.

"I was able to talk with my Dad's mother Rosa a couple of years before she died. She was a very pious woman and a good listener. We talked about what I had done. For some reason she started telling me that she stopped listening to Rush on the radio. This was out of left field and I started wondering if she was starting to lose it. She heard the concern in my voice and asked for a couple of minutes to be patient.

"One day my father, who tends to be not political at all, was over at her apartment when Rush came on. While she was saying the rosary and listening to Rush, he asked her a question. Is this someone that does what Jesus would do and be? Then he stated to actually repeat what Rush was saying and implying. This was not her faith that she was listening to. Her faith kept her going over 5 years after my grandfather died. She said that after hearing so clearly from her son's mouth repeating all the messages Rush was saying, she never listened to Rush again.

[For those of you who would like to get upset about this political/religious issue, this situation actually happened as reported by a friend of mine. Some minor liberties were taken, but the core of what is here is what happened. Get upset about the reality, not about its use in explaining human nature in this story.]

"She told me that it's easy to listen to people and do things that make us feel good, and never question anything about it. My grandmother said that she was addicted to the 'He's got them now' to never hear his whole message. She said that the same thing happened to me.

"I liked the excitement, the thrill of what I was hearing, I never looked at the entire message. I didn't see you, I only saw me. Thank god you didn't marry me. I am so sorry that I have caused so much grief in your life." At that, she started crying again.

I was an afterthought to her, to Gail. I wasn't important enough to be considered as anything. Trust took a back seat to sexual thrills. That's not a marriage. But Marie thinks differently, she's not Gail, just looks like her. It's hard, and not hard to see that the people that we were 5 years ago are not the same people we are today. At least I hope that this is true.

I realized that Marie has been looking directly at my eyes, attempting to see my response to what she said. I understood and smiled, then I chuckled then I began to laugh. I saw Marie getting upset and hurt. She didn't understand. "Marie, before anything more happens, remember, we've both gone to Gene. One of her biggest things in therapy was to get us to completely own what and why we did something.

"When I was getting up to leave at the start of dinner on Wednesday, you immediately let me know what you did. You owned it in front of me, in front of them. You just did it now. You're not pretending, you're real. I haven't gotten the chance to own what I did yet..."

"Yes you have, you said.."

"Not the way I need to. You have. I believe you, I trust what you are saying. I'm laughing because we both learned this from Gene." I stopped a few seconds, "we're on the same page right now, we've connected, we're there. Do you understand that? After 5 years, one dinner and hanging in this back booth in this bar that is starting to get a bit noisy, we're there."

We both stopped talking to understand what I just said. I understood that she wasn't finished. There was no way to be finished at this stage. But she gave it her shot, she gave it from her inner soul. There is always so much more to do and say and ask questions. But I got enough for now. She looked at me and we both understood, and we communicated in silence.

"I guess that it's my turn, isn't it." She nodded and leaned forward on the chair. It was my turn to be honest and put myself on the table like she had. I also had been thinking about it over these years. Not as hard as she did, but still, never the less. It was in the background.

"I got to work that day and the new copiers weren't ready and the client wasn't ready for them either. I fixed one of them and decided to come home for lunch. Driving past our block, I saw two cars in the driveway. Yours and an SUV. I tried to talk myself out of thinking you'd be unfaithful, but knew I had to know." Marie started to cry, she was holding her face in her hands. I stopped talking and waited. I've waited for five years now. I needed to see her face when I told her what she did to me. She used the bandana that I gave her to wipe her eyes. Then she looked back up to me and motioned for me to continue.

"I parked at the back of the shopping center. When I got to the back door, I saw clothes. Your clothes and his clothes over the first floor. I got into the house and to be honest with you, my baseball bat where we hung our coats came into view. Neither of you would have been able to stop me." Her eyes were wide, she never thought that her having 'only sex' could ever lead to injury or even murder.

"I had my phone primed to take pictures. It was all over for us when I saw those clothes. That's when I grabbed the marbles in the vase. If anybody was going to run after me, I was going to make sure they'd be sprawled on the floor or down the stairs. I found your phone, then his. Got them primed for recording you two.

"Just hearing you two go at it was enough to make me sick. Having to watch 10 minutes of it to send out to everybody, I put up with it. You took our future away from me, and I knew that I was going to take both of yours away too."

At this point Marie began to sob and I had to stop. I wasn't stopping to punish her for what she had done, although that ended up being a part of it. I stopped because I needed to tell her, to her face, for her to hear, for me to get it all out. She needed to understand it from my side, to hear it from me. Pain was part of it, not to inflict, but to share for the first time with her. It wasn't to give pain her, it was to share the pain with her. I think we both knew this. I listened to what she had gone through and understood what I had done too. I took a sip of my beer. Unfortunately, all I tasted was bitterness. The bad taste in my mouth overcame everything.

After a few minutes, I began again. "I captured enough video to explain why the wedding was over and went back downstairs. Pulled out the emails that had long email address lists, work emails, family ones and face book too. Set up your phone the same way too. Then I sent them all out, dialed a sex chat line for him and silenced his phone as well as possible. Yours I kept, after all, I owned it.

"Then I went into the basement and waited for you two to leave. Called people up and moved all your stuff onto the driveway. I had some friends go through all your communications.

"You learned all of this from Tammy, didn't you?" She weakly nodded to me. "I had somebody go through all your stuff and when Jeff came to pick up your things, we told him and gave him some of those pictures she sent of her and her lover to you. He thought it was happening, hoped it wasn't.

"I had said goodbye to your father earlier that day. I was shutting down but I was smart enough to keep good people around me. I didn't do anything stupid. Stupid is defined as something to go to jail for. I realized that I was going to leave town, leave this whole fucking mess behind me. I knew from my job that I could transfer out. Barry's wife was a realtor and I knew I could get rid of my house real quick, the market was hot and the school system wasn't so bad.

I paused and took another gulp of the beer. It still tasted bitter to me. I knew I had to continue talking about the important things now.

"You have no idea how much your betrayal hurt. How could it be just sex? How could my being, my love, my hopes and dreams for both of us be so worthless to you? Maybe there are people out there who don't think twice about sleeping around. They're in their own world. That's not my world. I've been on my own since I was 18 when my last parent died. I wanted to make a new life, a life with somebody who would have my back, and I'd have theirs.