Love, Dad

Secretly, Connie blamed it all on Jamie, tracing it back to that Sunday night in March when he’d delivered his long-distance telephone harangue to Lissie in San Francisco. His violent reaction that night had bewildered her at first, his anger seeming out of all proportion to what had actually happened. But then she’d begun wondering, Oedipus and Frank Lipscombe aside, just what had really triggered his rage. Had it truly been the knowledge that Lissie had lied to him, that Lissie was no longer a virgin, that Lissie was living with a boy he didn’t know? She wondered.

She had read somewhere — or perhaps Frank had revealed this during one of his learned Rutledge-party discourses — that unusual or unexpected behavior, deviation from set routines or schedules, unexplained absences, long meditative silences and deep sighs, sudden outbursts of anger, excessive apologies or remorseful breast-beating, all added up to trouble right here in River City, sure indicators that the male or female partner in a marriage was philandering. Jamie had over the past several months, certainly — and perhaps longer before she’d detected it — exhibited all of these symptoms, plus what she might have termed a lingering absence, a perpetual removal from the circumstances of their life together. She was, she came to realize, living with an empty cipher these days, and she thought she knew why: Jamie was involved with another woman.

The abiding suspicion that there was certainly someone else, the accompanying anger and indecision led to a helpless sort of despair in which Connie asked herself the same questions over and again: What should I do once I know for certain? Call his hand? End the marriage? Turn the other cheek? Do I even want to stay married to a man who needs other women? Is Diana Blair the other woman? Diana, who had once confided, “The way I look at it, Connie, there are the Titters and the Twatters. The girls who press their, you know, breasts against their partner’s chest, and the ones who use the, well, lower parts of their anatomies to achieve this... uh... closeness that makes it easier to dance well together. It becomes a problem for me, since I’ve been... uh... unfortunately and... uh... overabundantly endowed... well, Jesus, you know how big my tits are” — and here she’d giggled — “which of course makes it almost impossible for me to dance without some sort of frontal contact” — and she’d giggled again. Could he have possibly taken up with Diana Blair, the U.S. Open?

Maybe I should call her, Connie thought, pick up the phone, lay it right on the line: “Diana, are you having an affair with my husband?” An affair! The nice little words we’ve invented to accommodate the most despicable human behavior. Maybe the kids are right, maybe our values do reek, maybe our system is rotten and rotting further, maybe they’ve got the right idea, go out there and live with someone, live with a dozen someones on a commune, forget about marriage, forget about nineteen years of marriage — oh, dear God, what should I do?

She could not call Diana, nor could she flatly accuse Jamie of infidelity simply on the grounds that he’d been behaving strangely for the past God knew how many months. Without evidence that he was actually “philandering” (another one of our nice little words; fucking around was more like it) she would risk placing herself in an impossibly weak position if she happened to be wrong, become the abject, sniveling wife, “I’m sorry, darling, I’m sorry — you rotten bastard!”