Being The Other Woman: Who we are, what every woman should know and how to avoid us (11 page)

When I insisted that Tony had specifically said that the ring was new, he replied that he stopped buying her jewelry a long time ago because it didn’t get him anywhere. She never appreciated the gifts that he bought her, he said, and gifts only increased her expectations for what she felt she deserved. He implied that either Beth had gone to my friend’s office on purpose, trying to make sure the tale got back to me or (what he believed) that Tony just had the hots for me and was making up stories to disrupt our relationship. He had, in fact, told me to end that friendship before because my friend was vocal about his negative feelings concerning extra-marital affairs. Now he was putting his foot down. Thus my loyal friend Tony became a constant bone of contention between Blake and me. Blake said that my questioning him about the matter at all displayed my lack of trust and faith in our relationship. (Incidentally, I learned just a few months ago that Blake had in fact “biggie sized” the ring just days before Beth showed it to Tony’s co-worker.)

Blake and I were together so often that I began to get calls from friends when they spotted him out on the town with Beth, as if he were cheating on me! As I began to see his dishonesty, my confusion and distrust grew. Enraged, I threatened to end the relationship. Every time I made that threat, however, he suddenly saw all the things he found dissatisfying in his marriage. Every time, he returned to me with tears and promises, profound realizations, and the desire to move forward with our future.

This created a vicious cycle, as Beth became more determined to put effort into the marriage and be less hostile. She cooked three grand meals a day, she was always cheerful when she spoke to him and she tried extra hard to look nice. She went shopping and purchased many new clothes, she got a breast lift, and she even developed a sudden fondness for the spa. In competition with her, I also tried to look my best, I made the sex we had three times a day more exciting, and I gave him hour-long, full-body massages almost every day. Poor guy! He had things pretty friggin’ bad.

The three of us kept both the marriage and affair alive because Beth and I were always at war. Neither of us would throw in the towel because we both were afraid the other would not only win but gloat, besides.

One afternoon, when Blake and I had returned from a boat ride at the lake house, I was sitting in the boat at the dock while he went to his truck to retrieve his cell phone. I could see him engaged in what appeared to be a heated conversation. After waiting in the boat for more than thirty minutes, I went to the truck and climbed in, only to hear Blake assuring Beth that things were OK between them, that I was not at the house. Why, I asked him when he hung up, were we continuing this game if he was playing on both sides? Why not just let me go? He said that he didn’t know what to do. She was “a devastated mess” and all that he could do was lie to make her feel better. I grabbed my purse and started to get out of the truck, but he stopped me with “Why do you always push the snowball back up the hill?”

This back-and-forthing continued for the rest of the month. We had some wonderful times together but soon I suffered devastating blows when I learned that on the evenings when I could not join him, Beth and the kids were up at the lake house that she had previously never inconvenienced herself to go to. “I miss my kids,” he always said, accusing me of trying to keep him from them. I resented him using that excuse. I never encouraged him to neglect his children and often asked him why he didn’t bring them up to the lake to spend quality time with them.

The thing that made me angry was when he broke his promise to never spend an “overnight” with Beth again. Time and again, he broke this promise. “It’s her house, too,” he always said. “What can I do? I can’t keep her out of her house.” I was infuriated by his inability to bring about a legal conclusion to the marriage and split the assets and custody so that she could not force herself between us. Then he started telling me that she was using the children as a way to control him. My bitterness grew. As I saw it, he lacked the balls to demand his right to see his kids without her being present. But I was stuck. I wanted him to enjoy his children and I wanted them to spend regular time with him. I was hurt and jealous that his failure to formalize his divorce left me out of the experience and allowed her to interfere with our life.

We discussed the matter in depth one afternoon while driving out to the lake. Blake told me that after he finished “this whole divorce thing,” we would need to get away and be alone together for awhile so that he could deal with the loss and the changes. Getting away was the only way that he thought he could handle it. He wanted to take his motor home and go for a long trip. After boating that day, we returned to his truck to find it covered with sticky notes. Beth had apparently visited the truck while we out on the water. The notes were filled with demands. One of them, WE WILL CONFRONT HER TOGETHER, caught my immediate attention. I held it up to him. “If you ever—” I began, but he interrupted me. “No way,” he said. “There is no way that I could. Stop it! It’s NOT going to happen.”

Beth and I fought our war over Blake until something happened that I thought would end our relationship forever. He and I had been discussing plans to attend Sasha’s birthday party together in a few days. After dinner, he left me to visit his parents. I didn’t hear from him for the rest of the evening, which was highly unusual, and soon began to worry that something was wrong. When I still didn’t hear from him the next day, I became filled with anxiety. It occurred to me then that if anything ever happened to him, I would never know. I would never be notified, never be able to visit him in a hospital, and, God forbid, if he died, I would not be welcome at his funeral. I realized that the relationship that was the center of my existence would never be recognized or acknowledged in a time of grief or emergency.

I began to check every place that I could think of to find out how he was, even looking for signs of an accident along the highway. I drove forty five miles to his condo at the ski resort and then drove another one hundred miles from the condo to the lake. I was up all night, frantically calling his phone over and over, pulling over on the side of the road to vomit. My voicemails ranged from desperation to hostility—“If you are telling me to fuck off, then have the courtesy of calling me to do so. Don’t leave me to worry that something has happened to you.” I left in one voicemail that was a crying fit. I ended up on my mother’s doorstep in the wee hours, fearing the worst and seeking comfort. Later that day, my cell phone fried and I went into hyperventilation. I raced to buy a new phone behaving hysterically toward the poor kid behind the counter at the electronics store. Just about anything that could happen to toast my nerves, did. It was an unforgettable day in hell.

Eventually, I received a call from Blake. He had just escaped from his family. His voice filled with anxiety, he told me how his family had just performed an intervention on him. Using “tough love,” his parents and Beth had sequestered him in his childhood home and bombarded him with threats of ruin. Beth had taken his cell phone away from him and was clearing my voicemails in front of him while taunting him with evil laughter. “Ahhh, Blakey,” she said, “she’s worried about you,” or “Poor thing. She’s driving all over the state looking for you.” She played my messages to his family then deleted them, he said. It’s funny, I just now realized that when he told me that story, I always pictured him being tied to a chair.

His family told him that he had to make a choice that day and announce it to the family by a set deadline. Leaving Beth meant that he would be cut off from the family bank, which would ultimately destroy his livelihood. He would lose millions of dollars.

Summer solstice, when he and Beth had met years before, was approaching. Somehow, he secretly called me and assured me that he’d made his choice: he was going to spend his life with me and there was no better day to end his marriage than on the anniversary of the beginning of their relationship. Beth had shown a side of herself that he never knew existed, and it only gave further reinforcement for him to end the marriage. That same solstice evening was Sasha’s birthday party at a popular restaurant. Blake and I had already RSVP’d to attend, and he had assured me that only death would keep him. In my anxiety to see him after so much emotional trauma, I spent the day buying gifts and cards to give him when he arrived. My heart was aching. I missed him to my core. I was counting the minutes till I could hold him again. Every second felt like an hour. At the restaurant, I sat with my nerves on edge, the only empty seat in the room next to me, awaiting his arrival.

A friend who was not a part of the celebration but seated in the bar next to the restaurant, came to our table and whispered in my ear that Blake and Beth had come in. Instantly recalling the day of the sticky notes, I knew what this meant. I got up and went to head them off in the restaurant entry. Horror crossed his face as he saw rage fill my eyes. My joining them in the entry left us exposed to both the restaurant and the bar. Before everyone, Beth said, “Blake, you have something to tell her.” I challenged him to speak. Putting one arm around her shoulders, he said, “I’m sticking with Beth.” He spoke robotic and used hesitant body language to attempt to convey that he didn’t really mean what he was saying while trying to mouth something to me without sound.

My world spun as I searched for a way out of the room. I became dizzy and slipped, catching my self by the wall, aware that Beth was enjoying the brutality of this very public moment. I was able to stand up again, and as Blake flopped down on a chair, Beth and I began an exchange of heated words that lasted until my friends came to pull me away. They left together arm in arm and my friends spent the rest of the evening pouring drinks down my throat while dragging me to several night clubs until I was inebriated. I ran into a man who I had entertained dating years before I met Blake. He was a very handsome man whom Blake was always jealous of, and that night I went home with him like a drunken bar floozy.

I woke up sober and sickened with myself the next morning, crawling around his floor retrieving my cloths and trying not to wake him. Succeeding, I quietly crept out of the house. When I returned home, I found my e-mail inbox filled with excuses and statements from Blake that he was in pain and that the ordeal had only occurred because I had failed to “roll with things.” They had come to the restaurant “to talk it out together,” he claimed, but I forced the issue by greeting him with an angry look on my face. Blake said that he was not the one who chose to do the confrontation at Sasha’s birthday party; Beth had made some phone calls and was somehow able to gather information about where I would be that night. And that was the moment that I hated her for succeeding in humiliating me publicly.

A few days later, I learned that Blake and Beth left on a long vacation in his motor home. This was what he had told me we would do when he left her. I began to receive postcards from him wherever they stopped. He later said they were his way to show me that I was constantly in his thoughts, but to me they were just his way to rub the situation into my face. Bitter and mind screwed, I phoned one of my closest friends, Janet, who is the most selfless and nonjudgmental woman in the world. When she heard how I sounded, she immediately booked a flight for me to her home in Florida. That’s what saved me from a nervous breakdown.

I did not see Blake for two months. I was at Sasha’s company’s annual party, while I was mingling with business associates, I saw him out of the corner of my eye. He made a point to stand near a particular woman for most of the night and speak loudly to her on topics he and I had found a common interest in. This was too much for me! He was pursuing this girl and intentionally rubbing it in my face. He made sure he was in earshot of me while he spoke to her on the very same subjects that had drawn us together. He was using the same lines that he had used to lure me. I kept moving to another part of the room, and he kept following me. He would not let me be. I knew that he was attempting to break me down with jealousy, and I tried ever so hard to not allow the tactic to work. I couldn’t understand why it would please him to hurt me like that. Wasn’t I hurting enough?

After the woman left, he sat down beside me, the emotions I had kept bottled up exploded and I began to cry. “Do you want to just kick my ass?” he asked me. “Yes,” I said, and we agreed to go outside so we could talk privately. He egged me on to “just let it out” and hit him, and I finally pushed at his chest. He pushed me back, thinking that by adding “humor” to the situation, my pain would lessen. But now we looked even more foolish than before. It looked like he was abusing me to our peers who could see us through the window. This made me think, again, that we “got it” but no one else did. I still felt that he was the only one who understood me and I, him. But I was much too wounded to speak to him very often.

Eventually, I began to date for the sake of my pride, and in my attempt to move on, a new friend and I decided to spend the weekend at an out-of-town carnival event. As luck would have it, the hotel we chose was hosting a weekend seminar that Blake was attending. I saw him walk through a door. He stopped in his tracks, then went on, pretending not to have seen me. My heart stopped. I regained my composure and tried to pretend I was having a good time with my new companion for the rest of the evening, but as I lay in bed that night, my heart broke again and I began to wonder if Blake too was feeling the same things I was. The next morning my friend and I went for a walk to find a coffee shop. From the corner of my eye I saw a familiar little boy bouncing and running down a hill toward his mother. I glanced at his mother who stopped in her tracks, looking fear stricken. It was Beth, and she seemed to recognize me, too.