I layered on a thick foundation of denial until Murtuza found out. On a cool autumn evening, I returned home from Fresh Food Mart, lugging two heavy totes. When I saw his pained expression, I dropped the groceries, my fingers refusing to pretend that things were normal. Oranges rolled across the floor and I scrambled to collect them, glad for the small diversion of runaway citrus.
I’d left my computer on, my account open. Normally he wouldn’t have used my laptop, but he’d forgotten his at his office and needed to order a book online. That’s what he told me, anyway. I hope it was nothing more than that. I heard somewhere that eighty percent of betrayed spouses know when something is amiss and ambivalently search for evidence to the contrary. I don’t like to think about Murtuza being a part of that statistical majority.
A part of me was self-righteous and indignant about the breach of privacy (“What were you doing snooping around on my Facebook account, anyway?”), but that fell flat when he looked at me beseechingly. “Why?” he asked, tears streaming down his cheeks. I wanted to dry his tears before they dripped off his chin onto the floor.
I sputtered a denial, “Nothing happened!”
He picked up my laptop and read aloud the latest message I’d sent to Ian. I went silent, and Murtuza continued reading, his voice growing louder, my indiscreet sentences to Ian booming and echoing off the kitchen tiles. I still said nothing, couldn’t form words, imagined Murtuza leaving me, our marriage ending over something so stupid. I felt like a failure, to both my husband and daughter.
He stomped down to the basement, and I crept upstairs to check on three-year-old Zee, who was fast asleep despite all the yelling. I watched her breathe and wept for the end of my good life. Then I headed to the kitchen, unfriended Ian, and turned off the laptop. I considered padding down the stairs to talk to Murtuza, but I knew it would be pointless. His questions and thoughts and feelings would swarm around me like angry wasps and I’d be unable to do anything but bat them away.
Murtuza slept on the basement pullout for three days. Each time he emerged to look after Zee or make himself a snack, I attempted impromptu explanations, wishing I was more articulate, had rehearsed a few repentant lines. I’ve never been good at communicating my feelings when overwhelmed. He moved back to our bedroom but wouldn’t talk to or touch me for another three days, despite my pleas and cajoling. Then, at last, on the seventh day, he threatened to end the marriage unless we saw a professional. He quoted facts and figures about infidelity and the importance of seeking immediate help. It was probably Murtuza who told me the statistic about cheated-on partners looking for clues.
Dr. Stanley met us together for the first session, during which Murtuza did most of the talking. I scanned the spacious office, which was mostly outfitted with Ikea furniture. Between nodding at Murtuza’s statements of why we were there, I mentally listed: Malm, Hemnes, Ektorp, Flöng, some of the items that fill our home. For years after we bought our bed, we referred to it as our Brimnes, our private joke. When had we stopped doing that?
During the following week’s one-on-one session that she called an “assessment,” Dr. Stanley wore her steel-grey hair in a single braid down her back, instead of loose, as she’d done during the couples’ session. She recommended that I break off contact with Ian, and I pouted and told her I’d already completed that act of contrition. She might have misinterpreted my stiff embarrassment as lack of guilt because she leaned forward in her seat and spoke loudly, perhaps thinking that her increased volume would help me comprehend the gravity of my situation. She insisted that I commit to owning the cheating, and I imagined it was like an expensive, later regretted, purchase. I understood what she was getting at but couldn’t help protesting, “But I didn’t even kiss him! I didn’t get to do anything! Nothing actually happened between us during those two months of messaging each other!” I was like a snot-nosed kid who’d been caught before tasting a shoplifted candy bar.
“Do you wish you had?” She puckered her lips and nodded, perhaps in an effort to look sympathetic. Had she ever cheated on the bald guy in the portrait on her desk? Maybe she understood my longing?
“Yes and no. I never wanted to hurt Murtuza.” I didn’t meet her gaze and instead focused on the hypnotic blue lines winding their way through her area rug. I wondered what its Ikea name might be. Then my hour was up.
Murtuza had his own individual session that week. I asked him how it went and he said, “Fine. You?” I said my session went fine, too.
A week later, Dr. Stanley began our session with a monologue mostly addressed to my side of the room. She suggested that I was seeking something lost, something left behind that wasn’t literally Ian, but a part of myself that I’d once expressed with Ian. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but my eyes welled up in response.
Murtuza took my hand, and his own eyes moistened, his black lashes made even prettier by his tears. I hated myself for hurting this man with pretty eyelashes. I hated myself for almost sabotaging my marriage to this man with pretty eyelashes.
“Shari, you were younger when you and he … first met. You were childless, free. Now you have no time for yourself. You go to work, deal with teenagers all day, then come home and take care of a toddler, and after that you have to spend your evenings marking horrible essays. You don’t see your friends like I do, even though I suggest it.” He turned to Dr. Stanley and repeated, “I suggest it all the time. She never listens.”
Then he exhaled, and as though remembering that he was trying to be patient, turned back to me. “You don’t get away to conferences like I do. Maybe that’s the part you’ve lost. Time for yourself.”
The therapist nodded, crossed one slender pantsuited leg over the other. “You’re on the right track, Murtuza. Sharifa, how do you feel about what Murtuza has just said?” My thoughts swirled too quickly in my head; it was too much for me to be on the spot like that. I nodded in agreement so that Murtuza wouldn’t think I was being obstructive.
The next evening, Murtuza brought home a wall calendar and we began marking off slots with a green dry-erase pen. I signed up for a weekly hot yoga class. I had drinks with friends a couple of times a month. We instituted a Friday date night and asked my parents to babysit. I did feel better, I had to admit; the stresses of work and mommying a three-year-old mellowed.
A few months later, during our final session, Murtuza referred to the affair as my “tipple with infidelity,” like it had been a delicate sip of sherry instead of the three hundred and forty-one messages he’d read over two desolate hours. I still don’t know if he was being sarcastic, the way he is sometimes. I hope he was attempting gentleness, the beginning of forgiveness.
I wasn’t tempted to chat with Ian anymore, but every so often I did miss our nightly correspondence, those messages tinged with innuendo, with the “what are you wearing?” and “I loved kissing you” and the “do you remember when we …” The little bit of cyber-naughty.
When I blocked him the night Murtuza discovered us, I didn’t know that what I’d yearn for most was just that, the small exciting moment at the end of my day.
After ten minutes of teeth-brushing, flossing, and changing into my least boring nightie — the black cotton knee-length with the lace neckline, definitely not bought at Forever 21 — we are in bed.