WOULD YOUR MARRIAGE SURVIVE INFIDELITY? by Linda Lee Greene

Let me say at the outset that my one and only marriage did not survive infidelity. But my divorce occurred many years ago, and I was a different person then. Given similar circumstances, would I pursue the same course of action now?

                To set the stage for this treatise, I grew up internalizing the American sitcom “Father Knows Best,” in which the wife and mother Margaret Anderson (glamorous actress Jane Wyatt) vacuumed the floors, if she ever did vacuum the floors, while her elegant neck was perpetually encircled by a string of perfect pearls and her slender movie-star silhouette was adorned in haute couture dresses. Her greatest tragedy was likely to be a bad perm day at the beauty parlor, and her adoring and loyal husband Jim’s (actor Robert Young) last nerve was apt to be jangled by a cloudburst on his golf day. “Adultery” was a word absent from their lexicon, and even its causes didn’t exist. Of course, my own parents resembled Margaret and Jim Anderson not even a smidgen, and neither did their “hum-drum” marriage. But I, we of my generation, wanted to believe the TV version to be the “real” thing, and all of us were convinced it was our true and only destiny.

                If you are familiar with the TV series “Mad Men,” you’ll get the picture of the vast differences in male and female relationships that beset my generation by the time we approached marriageable age. Drugs, sex, and rock n roll were cultural tsunamis that rearranged our world, and with the changes came rampant bed hopping, even by married individuals. In my experience, married men more than married women indulged in the sport then, and I was one among the majority who abstained. As with my girlfriends and female members of my family, in my heart of hearts, I remained a version of Margaret Anderson and my husband of Jim Anderson. Boy, was I wrong about him! And boy, was I wrong about me! I just bet, though, that if Margaret and Jim Anderson had been swamped by the swirling, dirty, drowning cultural waters of the 1960s and 1970s, they very well might have been swept into the divorce court, too.  

                It took me several years after my divorce to realize, or actually, to admit, that the infidelity was a symptom rather than its cause. And of course, the fact that it was the “accepted” rationale for breaking up our family blinded me to the truth, as well. I had all the evidence against the continuation of my marriage I needed, so why bother to dig any deeper than the specter of the “other women?” Among the “real” culprits were our unrealistic Margaret and Jim Anderson expectations of married life, as were secrets we hid from each other. Everyday proximity was another. “Familiarity breeds contempt” really is true. Is there anyone whom you hate more than your spouse at times, or maybe all the time to a degree—disdain, dislike, disrespect, disapproval, scorn—all the possible synonyms for hatred of him or her stuffed away somewhere in the sub-basement of your consciousness?  

                Nowadays, we have many more opportunities to be better informed about what it takes to forge and maintain a complimentary marriage, to learn new adaptations, and to stop and contemplate Hemingway’s avowal: “The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places.” But I think he should have enlarged his statement with the actuality that many are left cripplingly or fatally weakened at the broken places. What are your thoughts on this subject? And more to the point, would your marriage survive infidelity?             

Linda Lee Greene’s latest novel “Cradle of the Serpent” explores the causes and consequences of infidelity in the long-term marriage of archaeologists Lily and Jacob Light. Hover your mouse here goo.gl/i3UkAV  to find it on Amazon. Look for her on Facebook and on Twitter @LLGreeneAuthor.   

CRADLE OF THE SERPENT, the new novel by best-selling author Linda Lee Greene

A fire glow in the clear and silent night sky points to the rim of the star-wound where I was born, and in my mind’s eye I transform into an archaeologist whose job it is to unearth the secrets of the early Indian civilization, the “Fort Ancient” American Indians, the bits and pieces of their lives contained within the great mound of the serpent lying there in the cradle of the debris of that long ago meteor strike. With the delicate tools of the trade in hand, I imagine myself beginning to dig. Will I find her? I wonder. Will I find that other woman, that Indian woman whom, like me, was born on the rim of this star-wound? Among arrow heads and shards of pottery, I imagine I find a small bone: a section of one of her fingers, then remnants of her jawbone lying beside a rock that reveals itself to be a pillow for her head. A group of four small and nearly matching stones fairly tumble into my hand when my trowel scrapes away a knot of finger roots of a tree. Each of the stones is punctured with a little hole at its center, the jewelry for her necklace, I realize. Yes, four stones: the sacred number of those early people—the number four symbolizing the four directions of the world—the four seasons. I declare kinship with that Indian woman, and in that new sisterhood, I feel buoyant and lifted, taken above and beyond this material world as our joined spirits float on the silver mist blanketing the panorama before me....

The above excerpt of the final pages of my novel GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS (http://goo.gl/imUwKO), published in 2012, and re-released in 2015, laid the groundwork for my current novel CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV),  a story whose protagonist is a contemporary North American archaeologist named Lily Light. Her work centers on the mounds of the Ohio Valley, with special emphasis on the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, USA. It is an endeavor that sets my archaeologist on a remarkable journey through time to the prehistoric period of the American Indian architects of the mysterious serpent effigy, and specifically to White Flower, the young woman to whom I refer in the earlier novel. To this indigenous culture, the mound is not only a critical component of everyday life, but also a link to the stars, which they believe to be their pathway to immortality. 

CRADLE OF THE SERPENT is written in the voices of Lily Light and her psychotherapist Michael Neeson. A patient of Michael’s, Lily’s therapy is based on her estrangement from her husband Jacob, also an archaeologist at work on a project in Arizona. Early in Lily’s therapy, Jacob is injured in a violent shooting at the edge of the Navajo Reservation there, and is left permanently paralyzed from his shoulders down. Lily also learns that a woman murdered at the scene of the crime was Jacob’s mistress.

During several of Lily’s therapy sessions with Michael, Lily experiences dreamstates or time-travels in which she takes on the bearing of White Flower, and through the process, finds her way to the other side of her shattered life wrought by Jacob’s infidelity and its numerous catastrophic consequences.

I wrote the initial version of GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS when it was still generally accepted that the Great Serpent Mound was constructed by the Fort Ancient people. The current analysis, based on radiocarbon dating conducted in 2011 and made public in 2014, is that the mound was built by indigenous people of the Adena civilization about 1,400 years earlier than previously thought, making it as old as Aristotle of Greece.