The self-described “most insane love story ever told.”
Author Harrison Scott-Key is known for his humor writing, but the subject of his latest book may not seem like such a laugh riot — especially if you’ve been the victim of infidelity. Yes, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told examines the horror that confronted him when Key discovered that his wife had been unfaithful with a family friend, and intended to end their marriage. But it’s also a laugh-out-loud funny analysis of his fears, jealousies, and his own role in the collapse. Anyone who’s been married will appreciate his candor and frustration, and may even learn a thing or two about how to stay keep a relationship intact themselves. Here, in an excerpt from the book, Key makes a startling discovery.
When you hear the most shocking news of your life, what do you do? Do you weep? Laugh? Go for a drive? A run? A gun? What I did was stare across the room at a beach ball, a toy left on the floor, ever so slightly deflated, with a pinprick hole never to be repaired. Its days of play were over. So were ours.
“So, it’s Chad,” I said, staring at the ball.
Lauren sat on the couch, quiet, having said her piece, setting a lighted match to every good thing in my life, and waited for me to react. Would I explode, threaten her with legal vengeance, take the wooden Louisville Slugger from my office and pay Chad a visit? They hadn’t been our neighbors in years, though he lived but minutes away.
I stood and took the deflated beach ball in my hands. I think better on my feet, with something to hold. Reality now felt as weird and useless as this ball, filled with expended breath, so easily destroyed.
“When did this start?” I said.
“A long time ago.”
She did not look like my wife anymore. She spoke like an indifferent alien droid who did not necessarily wish to destroy life on earth but had been programmed to do so.
“I need to know when all this started,” I said.
Here’s what I did know: During those many years as a neighbor, Chad worked from home much of the time. Lauren worked from home, too, as primary caregiver to daughters. On hundreds of afternoons, I’d return from work to find them both in the yard, he with a water hose and a beer, she with a juice box. Lauren must have found it refreshing to chat with someone who did not wish to discuss the state of contemporary nonfiction. I had nothing to fear from this man. I’m not the jealous type. I am, however, an idiot. I’d gotten some things wrong about Chad, about Lauren, maybe even about me. I needed facts, which I extracted from Lauren with a pair of reductionist tongs during that first hateful night of this new tribulation.
FACT NO. 1
On many of those weekday afternoons when I was off doing foolish, irresponsible things, such as working to provide for my family, Chad entered my home in secret and helped my wife with chores.
“He would take out the trash,” she said.
“Why in God’s name would you let another man into our home?”
FACT NO. 2
In those days, as I would soon learn, but had been too ignorant to see, my wife was incredibly sad and lonely. Her heart had become a slaughterhouse of death and pain, having experienced deep psychological wounds in childhood and beyond: poverty, homelessness, the tragic and untimely death of her mother, abandonment by the one man who should’ve loved her more fiercely than any other — her father, Jeff — the ordained minister who, when Lauren was in high school, ran off with a Christian Scientist and became a whole other person, an excommunicated car salesman who listened to Plácido Domingo and hung paintings of naked women in his bathroom. Had his desertion years before planted the seed of abandonment in her? Perhaps Lauren was not in possession of the tools to express her pain.
FACT NO. 3
If only there were someone she could talk to.
FACT NO. 4
Cue the sound of a leaf blower.
FACT NO. 5
Oldest story on the planet.
FACT NO. 6
“But when did the affair start?”
“We were just friends for a long time.” “When did you become more than friends?” “It just happened.”
FACT NO. 7
After three years as neighbors, they got close. There was flirting. There were feelings.
FACT NO. 8
Everybody has feelings. I have feelings all the time. Rage feelings. Crowbar feelings.
FACT NO. 9
At some point, she hardly remembered when, she’d written Chad an email, declaring her feelings and suggesting that perhaps the feelings were not good to have and that perhaps they should not talk so much in the driveway anymore, owing to the feelings, which, once confessed, could hardly be unfelt, especially when the one expressing those feelings lets you in her house when the babies are napping.
FACT NO. 10
All this time, we’re married. We’re raising a family. We’re having lots of decent sex, during which I am thinking about sex and she is thinking about a man in cargo shorts. Later, I chat about gravel with this man. Sundays after church, Lauren and the girls often went outside to play and throw the ball with Chad while I locked myself away in an office, to wrestle with my past, come to terms with my own traumas and make them as hilarious as possible. I wrote funny stories about my family. I published these stories. People read them. They commented about how funny my wife was, our hilarious marriage, how it was all so “real.”
FACT NO. 11
“But when did the affair start?” I asked again and again the night she confessed.
She wouldn’t say. She couldn’t. Didn’t hardly know how.
FACT NO. 12
They pined in secret for years, he for her, she for him, but nothing happened, she said. Only if pining in secret is nothing.
FACT NO. 13
After seven years as neighbors, Chad got a job in North Carolina and his family moved away, and not long after, we moved to a better neighborhood, and I was happy to be gone from that neighborhood for reasons I could not then fully explain.
FACT NO. 14
Chad and his family moved back to Savannah three years later because, I assumed, he missed living near the ocean. I did not realize the thing he missed was my wife.
I wanted every plot point, every line of dialogue. It was time for revision. The story I’d been telling myself about my life was bogus. The wise and tenderhearted mother, the fiercely funny wife, all of it was an elaborate fairy tale. It’s weird to stare at a woman you’ve been staring at for years and see something new, hidden there all along, waiting for you to see it, if you would only look. But the woman in front of me had few answers to give.
“It’s late,” she said. It was a school night. We both had to work the next day.
I wanted to believe her, but did not believe her. I wanted to know everything, and yet, with all these facts in my hands, I knew nothing. If this ever happens to you, be prepared not to know things. You will never feel as ignorant as you do after you know. Questions only lead to more questions. The answers will never satisfy, though you need them, desperately. You need answers like a beach ball needs air.
Excerpted from How To Stay Married by Harrison Scott Key. Copyright © by Harrison Scott Key. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Avid Reader Press.
