I remember the sparkle.
The shimmery pink diaphanous tablecloths, the candlelight that danced up and down the towering crystal vases filled with satiny white gladiolus and more than a dozen place settings of good silver that created a dazzling perimeter around the dining room.
“Wow, sixty’s not so bad,” I thought, grinning, as I drank in the scene of the most elegant birthday party given in my honor—ever. The hosts were my childhood friend and his husband, and they were standing alongside my husband of nearly 30 years, champagne flutes raised and ready to toast as I walked in.
Months later, my husband’s laptop was in the capable hands of a forensic computer analyst who dug through years of code and keyboard clicks like an archeologist. When she handed me her report that unraveled everything I thought I knew about my marriage, she offered this advice: “I think you need a lawyer.”
My unknowing began a few nights before when, unable to fall asleep next to my husband's steady snore, I walked through the darkened house and down the steps to his office. He'd been quick to anger and aloof toward me since my birthday, but when I'd ask him what was wrong, he clammed up or changed the subject. I'm not a snooper and had never looked in his wallet or his briefcase or his phone. But out of answers, as a last resort, I decided to take a peek into his online world.
I flipped open his laptop and as the bright blue screen greeted me, I typed his password and started to search. What I saw made my heart pound so hard I felt a flush creep up my neck until my cheeks burned. The clock's amplified TICK. TICK. TICK. was punctuated by a cloying silence. The Linda who came down those stairs in her favorite pjs was replaced by an apparition who just witnessed a thing that could never be undone.
If you had asked me seconds before if there was any chance that my tidy life as a wife, mother and GG to her grandbabies was about to disappear, I’d have said, “Are you crazy? What’s not to love about my world.” My husband and I were empty nesters having launched three kids who now had spouses and houses of their own. We’d built our forever home, the one where we spent holidays around the dining room table set with the delicate china that had belonged to my husband’s grandmother, its glaze of muted green vines and soft pink flowers gleaming as tiny spotlights cast a burnished glow from the ceiling above.
But that ol’ hindsight is indeed 20/20, and I remembered something odd that happened weeks before as I lounged on the sofa watching summer reruns.
“Where the hell are your pants?” I asked my husband as he walked in from the garage. “You didn’t go to dinner in those wrinkled shorts, did you?” He’d been at a country club golf tourney where a nice dinner followed the game. The dress code required a change into slacks and a dress shirt for the dining room.
“You’ll never believe it! Someone stole my pants from the locker,” he said as he continued past me to the kitchen for a bottled water.
For someone who just lost his pants, his shoulders looked very relaxed, and his voice sounded almost giddy. “Who would steal a pair of used, 36 long khakis at a country club?” I asked.
His mood became a bit less congenial. “Well, call the club tomorrow if you don’t believe me!” he shot back over his shoulder as he headed to our bedroom. “Oooooh, somebody’s touchy about the pants bandit!” I shot back.
What I thought was a meaningless exchange eventually became one in a long line of other insignificant moments that strung together like those plastic snap beads I wore around my neck as a little kid, all pearly and sweet. They would pop off and roll in every direction when my little girl hands yanked a little too hard on the strand. And when I yanked this time as a grown woman, it would undo a marriage that turned out to be nothing more than an illusion.
I hired a young, whip-smart attorney and filed for divorce, and I sold that beautiful forever home to a woman with the taste of a Clydesdale (my god, could the woman add any more gazing balls to the front lawn when she moved in?). After the Christmas ornaments my husband and I had collected were snatched up by eager buyers at my estate sale and the last of our furniture was hauled off to reside in happier homes, the moving van was loaded with my clothes, a few pieces of framed artwork, my car and hundreds of photos I kept because “he” wasn’t in them.
Where the heck were hubby’s disappearing pants anyway? I never did find out, but my therapist Paul and I discussed a myriad of possibilities. Paul has heard the tales of marital indiscretions by the boatload, all resulting in losses of some form or another. The day I told him I was finalizing the divorce, he applauded my bravery. “Many women your age and in your social position would stay married out of fear and live in the misery of what they can’t control.”
But not this contrarian. The moving van and I left the only home I'd ever known, Kansas City, and landed 1,700 miles across the country in Palm Springs, CA, a town that boasts 350 sun-dappled days a year and where the well-dressed men are usually gay. I started my single, heterosexual life over surrounded by the safe embrace of the bulky, bronzed San Jacinto Mountains where day by day, I began to feel my muscles release their grip on my shoulder blades. I wrote lifestyle articles for glossy magazines, and I blogged about Linda-notonfacebook’s adventures as a newly single woman. I exhaled deeply on my yoga mat to the welcome relief of savasana.
And I methodically removed the titles of wife and Mrs. from every legal document in my possession until about a year later, I was ready to take another leap.
I joined match.com.
What could go wrong?