The Truth About My Wife’s Three Men

A couple of years ago I discovered something about my wife that I could never forget, and it wasn’t she who told me at first. It was Camila, her cousin, in one of those conversations that seem innocent until the first piece falls and drags the others down with it.

My wife had gone through a very dark financial period before we met. I learned it little by little, in fragments, in late-night hours when she would sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the floor as if she were looking for a way out of something. At some point she told me that she had done “things” to survive. That she had taken money from three older men. That there had only been three encounters. That after that she had promised herself she would never give herself over again out of necessity.

That was her version. The version I believed because I wanted to believe it.

The one Camila told me was different.

And when one piece doesn’t fit, the rest start moving on their own.

***

The conversation with Camila took place one long afternoon in her apartment in Cartagena, while my wife had gone out to buy something at the corner. Camila had always been the accomplice cousin, the one who knew how to keep secrets and the one who knew how to tell them depending on how much she’d had to drink. That afternoon she’d had two glasses of wine and her tongue was loose.

—There’s something your wife is never going to tell you —she said, looking at me with a crooked smile I couldn’t tell was mockery or pity—. And I don’t know if I’m the one who should say it.

—If you started it, finish it —I asked her.

Camila set her glass on the table, looked toward the door to make sure my wife wasn’t coming back, and started at the beginning.

One night, about five years earlier, my wife had gone to stay at Camila’s house. Camila’s parents had gone to a party and the two cousins were going to spend the night alone, as they had many other times. Around nine, Camila heard the engine of a car stopping in front of the house. She leaned out the second-floor window and saw my wife inside a dark sedan, talking to a man whose silhouette could barely be made out.

—They were kissing —Camila told me, as if she were describing something unimportant—. Not for long. But they were kissing.

My wife got out of the car ten minutes later. Camila described her with a precision that hurt me: a very short white miniskirt, a white spaghetti-strap top, high platform heels. When she leaned in through the driver’s window to say goodbye, the skirt rode up so far that half her ass was visible. Camila remembered it because it had shocked her. Her cousin never dressed like that.

—She came into the house reeking of whiskey —Camila went on—. She was dizzy, but happy. Too happy not to be about to tell something.

The two cousins sat in the kitchen. Camila put water on to boil for an herbal tea. My wife, still in her white miniskirt, climbed up onto the counter and began to talk.

***

—Cuz, if I told you how I spent today —my wife said, according to Camila, in a slow voice and with her eyes half-closed.

—Then tell me, cousin. Where are you coming from so happy?

—You have to swear nobody will ever know this. Nobody in the family. And much less some future boyfriend.

—I swear.

My wife then confessed something Camila had not expected. She said she was tired of waiting for Prince Charming. That only toads kept showing up. That an acquaintance from work had made a comment she couldn’t get out of her head: “We sleep with them for free when we could be getting something out of what we have.” And that, out of necessity and wounded pride, she had decided to start taking advantage of what she had.

—And what do you have in abundance, cousin? —Camila asked her, half joking.

—I have what they want —my wife answered, without laughing.

She explained to Camila the method that acquaintance had taught her. Get them horny. Drain money out of them little by little. Invent a new need every time. Dress provocatively all the time. Don’t hand over your whole body right away: give a little at a time, one caress, one kiss, one button.

—A woman who gives herself away too fast loses her value —she told Camila, repeating almost word for word what that acquaintance had explained to her—. One who makes herself desired gets paid.

***

The first one, the one who had brought her that night, was the one she liked best. She had met him at a bar in the red-light district, and from the first outing the game had begun. First dinner at an expensive restaurant. Then letting him grope her under the table, his hand between her legs while they pretended to keep talking. Then asking him for money “to help her mother.” Then, in the car, letting him pull her blouse down to her waist, touch her breasts desperately, shove his hand into her soaked panties. And so, week after week, for a whole month, without giving him anything definitive yet, while he kept leaving bigger and bigger bills in the console.

—And today I let him put it in me from behind —my wife told Camila that night, with the naturalness of someone describing a supermarket purchase—. He gave me a very good sum. I know it’ll sound like I’m a prostitute, but from my point of view it’s an exchange. I give and he gives. Each of us offers what we have.

Camila, she told me, didn’t know what to answer. She served the herbal tea and let her keep talking.

My wife, now fully comfortable, kept swinging her legs on the counter as if she could still feel the man pressed between them. Camila told me she saw her run her tongue over her lips, slow, satisfied, with that look of someone who still had heat in her body. Her blouse had ridden up a little and the edge of her bra was showing; the thin straps looked as if they might snap if someone pulled hard. It was an image hard to forget because there was no guilt in it, only excited calculation, pure hunger for money and pleasure.

—And the other two? —Camila finally asked.

My wife then spoke of an older gentleman, a friend of some cousins of hers, Andrés and Sebastián. A handsome man, well dressed, with a dark Mercedes and a house facing the sea, but, according to her, very egocentric. With him she took it slow. Dinners, kisses, an occasional caress over the fabric of her thigh. Nothing more. She said with him she could wait, because he paid well just for company and because he took her to places where she looked good on his arm.

—I met the third one at a work training session —my wife said—. He’s not handsome. He’s married, has three kids, and is going bald. But he’s the most generous of the three. I’ve already let him touch me everywhere. He’s stuck his fingers in me until I trembled, he’s sucked my tits through my clothes, he’s made me kneel down in the car to suck him until he gets hard as a rock. He’s got a big one, and at the end of the month he’s taking me to Medellín to buy me clothes. Of course, I’ll pay him back with my body.

Camila told me my wife said it without guilt, without shame, with the smile of someone who has just discovered a trick. The smile lasted until the herbal tea went cold. Then she fell silent for a while and, almost asleep on the counter, asked her please never to talk about the subject again.

And they never talked about it again.

***

Camila told me that only once, that afternoon in Cartagena, and she never wanted to repeat it. When I asked if she was sure about the exact words, she told me yes. That when someone confesses something like that to you, you don’t forget it.

The hardest part wasn’t finding out. The hardest part was realizing that the story my wife had given me years later fit with Camila’s without much effort. Three men. Older. And yet my wife had told me that “there had only been three encounters.” Camila had described three long, planned relationships, with clear methods, with trips to another city, with money, clothes, whole nights.

Three were not encounters. They were arrangements.

That night, after we got back to the hotel where we were staying, my wife lay down beside me and asked if something was wrong.

—Nothing —I lied.

I touched her back with my open hand. She settled against my chest as she had done a thousand times before. I felt her hair on my face, that smell I knew better than my own, and for a moment I wanted to forget everything Camila had told me. I wanted to believe it was the version of a drunk, exaggerated, jealous cousin. I wanted to believe my wife had only lived through three encounters and that afterward she had closed that door forever.

I wanted to. I couldn’t.

***

In the days that followed I started counting backward. The outings “with friends” over the last few months. The calls she cut off abruptly when she saw me walk into the room. The gifts that showed up at home under the pretense of an office raffle. A new bag from a brand neither of us could afford. An imported perfume that appeared one morning on the vanity without explanation.

I started to see the pattern. Or worse still: I started looking for it.

I thought about confronting her. I thought about it for weeks. Every night I imagined the exact phrase: “Your cousin told me.” I rehearsed it in front of the mirror, in the bathroom, while shaving.

And each time the phrase stuck to the roof of my mouth.

Because I knew that, the moment those words left my mouth, everything would be over. Not just the marriage: that version of her I had built would be over, the woman who had gone with me to a new country to start over, the one who had told me that with me, for the first time, she had learned to receive without charging.

That version was true too, in some sense. Or at least I had decided it was.

***

One night, in bed, while she read and I pretended to read, I asked her an offhand question. I tossed it out as if it meant nothing, without looking up from the book.

—When you were in financial trouble, before me, did you ever regret anything?

She looked up. It took her a little longer than it should have to answer.

—Some things —she said—. Others, no.

—The three? —I asked, without looking at her.

—How I justified it, yes. Having done it, no.

That was the only thing she told me. I didn’t ask anything else. I didn’t dare. I turned off my light. She kept reading for a few more minutes, with the little lamp on and her back straight. When she turned it off, she didn’t come closer to me as she always did.

That night we slept on our own sides.

And yet, before I fell asleep, I felt her hand searching for mine beneath the sheets. She squeezed my fingers twice. She said nothing. Neither did I. But in that tiny gesture I understood that she knew exactly what I had been thinking all those days.

***

Two years have passed since that afternoon in Cartagena. We’re still together. I have not mentioned Camila’s name or the name of the three men she described to me again. My wife has not spoken of her past again either. It’s as if the two of us had signed a silent agreement: what is known is not named; what is not named does not destroy.

Sometimes, when I see my wife getting ready to go out, I look at the length of her skirt and wonder, for a second, if this is the version of herself she once offered others as well. Then I force myself to look away. I learned that there are confessions one hears and should never hear again. I learned that truth, when it arrives unannounced, leaves a taste that won’t wash out even after years.

But I also learned something more uncomfortable. I learned that, in bed, after that nighttime conversation in which neither of us dared say everything, my wife kissed me differently. She sought me out with an urgency she hadn’t had before. As if she knew that I knew. As if, for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t charging me anything and that, for her, was the greatest luxury she had ever allowed herself in life.

That, at least, is the version I decided to keep.