Confessions

In the dim light of the restaurant with flickering candles casting shadows on his face and soft but jazzy piano music in the background, I listened to my soon to be ex-husband confess - how he had met her, where they had spent time, how sorry he was. I was not surprised to discover that I was angry at the deception and betrayal and how easily he had lied, more so that I had never noticed - but I was blindsided by the fact that I didn't feel hurt when this should have been, all my senses told me, a mortal wound. I was silent as he shared the details of the affair, only half hearing the words. I was, I came to understand, searching for some shattered emotion of jealousy or rage or pain beyond bearing but all I found was unheated anger and a mild sense of relief. My world didn't come crashing down around me, the sky didn't fall, I don't think I even cried until much later. I did watch his face and his eyes, idly wondering how much of what he was telling me was actually true and how much was for effect - after ten years of marriage I did know that he could play a part and play it well - but I was also beginning to realize that he had lost his audience and that the theater was almost empty. It was time to go.

After that it was a blur of lawyers and paperwork and division of property - all very civil and amicable and proper.
I was sad to leave a house I loved, undone by the loss of friends but mostly torn and shredded to pieces by having to leave all but one cat behind. At the last moment, I came very near to changing my mind - the thought of never seeing my beloved animals again came perilously close to derailing my decision. I had always known that should some disaster befall us and I were forced to choose between saving husband or cats that it would be no contest, in hindsight, a fact that perhaps did little to reinforce the marriage. But I did go - apprehensive, uncertain, awed by my decision and most of all free - I did go.

The boy I had married with hair down to his waist and a liking for ragged jeans and leather vests, the boy who made his living hawking an underground Boston paper on the city streets, the boy who had dropped out of college and wanted to make a difference, had begun to transform into the man he finally became, a man who would've crushed the boy he had been and ground him to dust.

And it had begun on a routine weekday night in a small restaurant with candle light and piano music. What strange and mystifying turns our lives take, how little we choose to know about those we have cared for when feelings turn cold. During the following three day road trip I spent most of my time pondering beginnings and endings, trying to sort out how people become estranged and are driven or drift apart. I never found any answers but I did begin to wonder why he had chosen to confess, why when silence would've been simpler and less effort, he had opted for brutal honesty. He could've gotten away with it and I would never have been the wiser - a need to be forgiven seemed unlikely, a troubled conscience would've been rationalized away, fear of exposure wasn't realistic. I didn't like thinking that it had been about manipulation or some hidden agenda or perverse need to come clean and win approval or admiration so I put it out of my mind and just drove. If ever the truth were to fight its way through, I decided, I would deal with it then. Meanwhile I imagined a door, heavy with age and in need of a fresh coat of paint, silently swinging shut, it's lock falling cleanly into place, securely trapping the past on the other side.

The black cat - if I were to admit it, independent, feisty, a troublemaker, bad tempered and very high maintenance but always the one I had loved the best and the most intensely - slept peacefully in my lap. That night in a rundown Mississippi motel room, I held him against me and cried myself to sleep, not for the man or the marriage or the life I had left, but for the three other cats.

On some level, I think we all choose what we hear and see, what we acknowledge and what we don't, what hurts us and what doesn't. Cats - wise secretive and mindful of human frailty - keep their confessions to themselves. Once again, we could learn something from them.