Читать книгу A House Interrupted - Maurita Corcoron - Страница 5

August 3, 1997

…This is not fun. My life is on hold while B. reckons with his demons. I am filled with self-doubt and guilt about him going away. Have been through so much this week with B. being away in Kansas. Trying to keep up with his absence to everyone is very hard so I try and avoid everyone and don’t answer the phone. Haven’t even told my parents and siblings. I am really hopeful and pray that Ben is seeing how incredibly destructive he has been to himself and us. The kids are fine but I know they miss him. Ella came home from camp yesterday. She grew taller. She seemed depressed when she came back to the house. I think it is because B. is away—she denies it. I have been having good runs since B. has been gone.

One of the first nights that Ben called me from rehab, he asked me to read a book called Out Of the Shadows, by Dr. Patrick Carnes. I read it and was absolutely shocked. It was a book about sex addiction. I had never heard about such a thing. I couldn’t imagine why he wanted me to read about something so dark and sick. I called my brother David.

My younger brother lives in New York City, and he has for quite a while. He is a documentary filmmaker and college recruiter for a major university, and he happens to be gay. I vaguely remember the day he came out to me, telling me he was more attracted to men than women, that he was pretty sure he was gay. I can remember having my suspicions but dismissing them because of his popularity with girls in high school. He even dated girls in college. Girls loved him. When someone finally comes out and admits something like that, it is a bit like dropping a bomb.

For my sisters and me, it wasn’t a bomb at all, just a firecracker. It almost felt like we had known all along. For our father, however, it was an atom bomb.

David came down from New York to tell my parents that he was gay. This must have been the summer of 1986. After pretending and giving excuses for such a long time as to why he didn’t have a serious girlfriend to bring to family functions, he finally was in a relationship that he really valued. David was simply tired of living a lie to those who mattered the most to him.

The bomb, then the fallout and concussion of the announcement to our parents, rattled the house. My father was old fashioned and religious. He was not the type to quote a particular Bible verse to a specific situation, but he knew what he believed to be right and wrong. Faced with the thought that his only son was, in his mind, no longer a man, Dad absolutely exploded.

“It’s disgusting. It’s a sin!” he bellowed from all around the house. His tirade lasted nearly half an hour—this full-throated appraisal of sinning and homosexuality, and most important to him, the “death” of his son. David suddenly no longer existed to my father.

In a rage, he ripped pictures of David from the walls, stomped around the house hollering about not having a son, about men having sex with other men. My mother had no idea what to do, so she and my brother sat at the kitchen table in stunned silence.

It was absolutely awful.

My mother, who usually deferred to my father in moments of decision or strife, said nothing. When he continued removing photos from the walls of the house, David had had enough, and he walked out the front door.

Their relationship never rebounded. My brother had been the apple of our father ‘s eye, the sole heir to carry on the family bloodline. After that night, the only thing my father could see was an abomination and a sinner.

My father kept good on his promise of disowning David. We would talk about David when we were all together but nothing more than information of the week and quick updates. As soon as my father entered the room and realized the topic of conversation, he would try and silence us, as if information about my brother, his only son, physically hurt his ears.

I called my brother the night before Ben was scheduled to contact me, after I read Out of the Shadows. I picked my brother and not my sisters because I remembered once David telling me he had some friends in recovery, and I thought he might have heard of this addiction.

“Why do you think he wanted me to read about that? Have you ever heard of such an addiction?” I asked David.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” he said.

“Listen to this,” I told him. Then I read David excerpts I had marked with a yellow highlighter. “There are three levels of sexual addiction divided by behaviors, legal consequences, and victims.”

I continued reading. “Level one is masturbation, compulsive relationships, pornography, prostitution, strip clubs, and anonymous sex with women, men and both men and women.”

“Level two deals with exhibitionism, voyeurism, indecent phone calls, and indecent liberties, whatever that means. There is no way he is doing anything in level three.”

“It’s probably just level one, the masturbation thing,” David said. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Call me after you talk to him and let me know what is going on.”

I immediately felt better when he said that. “I guess I’ll find out tomorrow night when I talk to Ben,” I told him.

After I hung up with David, I thought back and the only thing I could connect to Ben in the realm of sexual deviance were a few occasions of masturbation. OK. I think I can deal with that. Immediately, I could recall instances of him and his friends making jokes and references to masturbation. But what did I know? I’d even caught Ben a few times in the middle of “pleasuring himself,” as he liked to call it, and even then I’d thought it simply embarrassing and nothing else. I certainly did not view it as a “dangerous addictive behavior.”

About a week and a half into his treatment program, my husband called me around 10:30 at night. Our kids were in the living room a few yards away from my closed bedroom door, watching a movie. At that time, Ella was tall and thin at twelve, Henry was ten, Harper was nine and still wearing her gymnastics leotard from practice that night, and little Olivia was just six.

I can still remember looking at the phone as it rang the first long and full ring. It looked like a foreign object, and the noise it was making was an intrusion. I wanted to pick it up, and I didn’t want to pick it up. After the second ring, I reached for the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” Ben said on the other end. He sounded tense and got straight to the point.

“Hi, honey,” I said, trying to keep my voice level and normal. “How’s your week going?”

“I am doing all right. Did you read the book I asked you to read? The Carnes book?”

“I did read it,” I said. “So, what level are you?” I had meant it to be a light, almost comical question, as a way to ease the tension.

“The first,” he said.

A wave of relief flowed over my shoulders and back. A chronic masturbator, while a little off-putting and gross, is still manageable. That’s not so bad, I thought.

“I figured,” I told him, then asked, “Well? What part of level one are we talking about?”

“At one time or another, almost all of it.”

This was not a good list to be on. This was the prostitution, pornography, anonymous sex list.

“Almost all of it?” I asked. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I doubled over at my waist.

“Yeah, almost all of it,” he said. He went on to tell me that he had also abused drugs and alcohol, but the sexual addiction was full blown, the true addiction in his life. He said that he had been a sex addict way before we ever married—that this disease had started in his early teens. His disease had flourished during our fourteen year marriage. He then said I needed to get tested for sexually-communicable diseases, most importantly HIV. My beloved husband had been having anonymous, faceless, unprotected sex even while I was pregnant with our children.

I dropped the phone.

I fell to my knees.

For a few moments, I had the sensation of falling down a deep, dark hole. I believe now that I fell into hell on earth. I think I went into shock. My breath got shorter and shorter, and I began to hyperventilate. With every quick exhale, I quietly, almost in a whisper, repeated the words, “God, what am I going to do?”

Still on the floor, I rocked slightly back and forth. I could hear Ben weeping on the phone from where the receiver lay next to me. He kept saying, as if he were answering me, “I don’t know, I just don’t know.” I reached for the phone, a white Slim line, and I hung up the receiver.

I realized that night, that the one person who I should have been able to count on—to guard my heart, my very life—didn’t exist and never had for my entire married life. I had an overwhelming feeling of being utterly alone on this Earth.

As soon as I caught my breath enough to cry, I wept deep, long sobs that came from within my soul. I was physically sick with disbelief over his behavior. My life was a total, complete lie.

The kids were in the living room waiting for me to say good night and put them to bed. They may very well have saved my sanity that night.

I pulled myself together and opened my bedroom door. Thankfully, the only light on was from the TV, so the kids couldn’t see my red and swollen eyes. I asked if any of them wanted to sleep with me that night. That wasn’t a common occurrence, but I needed the reassurance of my children, pure and real, next to me. Two of the kids, including Harper, jumped at the chance and got into our bed. The other two slept peacefully in their own rooms, not knowing what had just happened between their parents.

I kept the TV on all night. I must have dozed off and on that night. The phone rang around 2 a.m. The caller was Sally, one of Ben’s therapists from Menninger. She said Ben had called her and told her what he had disclosed to me over the phone. Everyone at Menninger had asked him not to do that over the phone. She said she was sorry he had. They wanted him to wait until I was there with him.

“How are you feeling?” Sally asked.

“How do you think I am feeling?” I said, my voice was flat and emotionless.

She started to give me some pat therapy jargon—bullshit—and I cut her off.

“I can’t go into this right now,” I said. “I have two small children sleeping beside me.”

She suggested I call Menninger first thing in the morning to plan an immediate trip to Kansas, so I could meet with Ben and his doctor. Then Ben’s therapist said something I’ll never forget, something I now say to other people in crisis.

“We certainly understand if you don’t want to deal with this and just decide to divorce Ben immediately,” she said. “A lot of people do that. However, if at all possible, I would encourage you not to make such a major, life-changing decision when you are in the midst of such severe emotional distress. If at all possible, Maurita, come out here, learn about your husband’s addiction, take the time to work through some of your extreme emotions before you decide what to do with your marriage.”

It was one of the most important things anyone had every said to me in my life. It made sense.

This next journal entry is what I wrote after my husband’s disclosure. It reflects the first few days of me trying to wrap my brain around what I had just found out about Ben and his double life.

August 8, 1997

…Had a good day today blocking everything out until about 5 p.m. What I found out about B’s behavior before and during our entire relationship and marriage is just too much to take in at once. After finding out two nights earlier about all his sick fucking fucks—all the hundreds of lies and manipulations—my whole married life to this point has been a fraud and a hideous joke. I just can’t take it all in at once, because it is too much for me to bear. I hate him. I want him to feel what it is like to give so much of yourself to someone and have it mean nothing. I am going out on Tuesday to meet with his main therapist Sally (what a weird voice she has) and some guy named Dr. Richard Irons to learn more about his “fucking disease.” I am filled with fear, rage, and hopelessness. I have to accept the fact that I allowed a stupid, selfish pig of a male (he does not deserve to be called a man) walk all over me and humiliate me in public and private. He didn’t protect my beautiful kids or me. I will now call them “my kids” because the selfish pig doesn’t deserve them. I hate him.

I flew out to Kansas a few days later. Since my husband’s disclosure, I had the feeling of living in a continuous nightmare, except I was walking around and functioning like a regular human being. I felt like a freak, a fraud, someone who was no longer of this earth. Every moment of my life became drenched with indecision and self-doubt.

At the rental car counter in Topeka, for example, the attendant asked me an innocent, benign question.

“Is this business or pleasure?” he asked.

I thought to myself, How could I possibly answer what this trip is for, what this means for my life, my children’s lives? Nothing about my life felt normal anymore and wouldn’t for years to come.

During the drive to the hotel where Ben was staying, my heart was pounding. He was allowed to live off the grounds of the treatment center after it was determined he was clean and sober and not a danger to himself. I honestly didn’t know how I would react to seeing him for the first time.

Suddenly, I found myself caught in a horrible, dark thunder and lightning storm. The storm grew so dangerous so quickly that I had to pull off the interstate under a bridge and sit out the torrential downpour. I leaned over and rested my forehead on the steering wheel and cried my eyes out.

Grief and fear of the unknown became my new, constant companions.

I eventually arrived at his motel and went up to his room and knocked on the door. The rain was down to a drizzle as he opened the door. We just looked at each other for a moment and then we hugged each other. I cried and he wept. We didn’t really talk much that first night—we were like strangers and very careful with what we said to each other.

The next day I met with Ben’s treatment team. He had a main physician, Dr. Richard Irons, plus a couple of different therapists who specialized in different areas of treatment. I’d been told to wear long pants and shirts with long sleeves that did not reveal much skin. They wanted Ben to be in a zero stimulation environment.

We sat down in Dr. Irons’ office along with his primary therapist, Sally. Ben was sitting beside me—a big gap between us, drinking a cup of coffee and staring down at the floor. Dr. Irons and Sally sat directly in front of me.

Before going to Menninger I had already decided that if he had not raped anyone or touched a child in an inappropriate way, I would at least stay with him until he completed any suggested in-patient treatment. Now, here I sat listening to an introductory course on sex addiction and how it relates to men in general and Ben specifically.

Ben buried his face in his hands. Every once and a while, I looked over at him and his face was gray with anguish at what was being said. The truth about how he had been living his life was finally out in the light of day.

At Sally and Dr. Iron’s urging, I asked Ben a couple of questions.

“Ben,” I said slowly, “have you ever raped anyone?”

“No,” he said quietly.

“Have you ever molested anyone?”

“No.”

“Have you ever inappropriately touched a child?” Then, I

asked, “Our children?”

The gravity of that question hit my husband hard. He looked over at me, horrified, that I would even think to ask that and said, “No, absolutely not.”

After a few moments , I looked at Dr. Irons.

“OK, Dr. Irons, I will stay and hear what he has to say.”

“Thank you, Maurita,” Dr. Irons said.

Because of Ben’s fear of my reaction and extreme shame in telling me about his double life, he could barely look me in the eye. It was Dr. Irons who summarized the bulk of Ben’s sexual behavior and told it to me in a professional yet “matter of fact” way. Because of Dr. Iron’s demeanor, I was strangely calm as we began the session. Still, there was no softening the meaning behind the words.

“Ben has had, over the course of your relationship and marriage, over a hundred extramarital sexual encounters,” explained Dr. Irons. “Some men in their addiction have to take on higher levels of risk to receive the desired feelings of reward. They build up a tolerance, if you will. Ben was always after the next high, the next thrill. The thrill of taboo sex, like prostitutes and strippers, was a tremendous high for him. Both of you will need to undergo HIV tests every three months to permanently rule out infection.”

I was horrified. I immediately thought I had AIDS. It would eventually take me almost ten months to get tested, I was so afraid. I thought people would say, “Why is Ben’s wife coming in for blood work? He must have cheated on her.” I was mortified. My mouth was too dry to verbalize it right then, but I think my face went a shade lighter as Dr. Irons continued to speak.

I thought, What about the kids? Do we have to get the kids tested, too?

Dr. Irons continued to divulge some of the scattered and sordid details of Ben’s sexual compulsions. Ben’s conscious exploits manifested during his time in Grenada at medical school. There seemed to be a forever steady infusion of tourists going to the islands who enjoyed several drinks along with anonymous vacation sex.

He said the sex was never personal. Ben did not even know these young women’s names. Oh, great. Is that supposed to make me feel better? I thought.

Quick, faceless, nameless sexual release was the drug of choice for Ben, but he used other drugs like alcohol, marijuana, and ecstasy to fuel his sexual acting out.

I listened as best I could, but my thoughts were scattered and fragmented. Who did I really marry and where did this behavior come from?

Dr. Irons ended our discussion with more grim news. “Statistically your marriage has a 98 percent chance of failure due to the length of time and scope of Ben’s addictive behavior. There is also a 95 percent chance of Ben having a sexual relapse in the first five years of his recovery.”

I slumped in my chair at this final blow. I could no longer hear the words of Dr. Irons. I was numb, shocked, and totally overwhelmed by the information and picture that was being painted before me.

“Did you ever think I would find out about any of this?” I asked Ben.

“No.”

“Did you ever think you’d get caught?”

“No,” he said. “I thought I was in complete control of it all. I thought I was too good at hiding it. Getting caught didn’t even occur to me.”

I looked at him, not knowing what to say. What a moron, I thought to myself.