19 Molly

It was around this same time that I met and fell in love with Molly, who had, like my wife Leigh, married her high school sweetheart when she became pregnant. The same age as I and the mother of two children the same ages as mine, Molly was studying English while her husband, a trucker, was on the road. Molly and I seemed to exist in parallel universes, and our relationship of a year and a half was the first and the longest of my eleven affairs over the next eleven years. I loved Molly and, had I known how, I would have divorced my wife Leigh and married her, but at that time I was still so immature and stupid and selfish and vain that I had no idea how even to begin to extricate myself from a predicament so complex. Late one night our senior year when Molly and I had fallen asleep in her bed we were jolted awake by a driver repeatedly honking the horn of a car right outside her tiny apartment in married student housing. Sleepy, confused, we lay in bed and just listened for more than several seconds trying to make sense of the situation.

Molly finally solved the riddle and sat up in bed.

"It's your wife!" she exclaimed.

No.

I dressed, hurried outside, and lied.

I lied.

When our first child had been born in mid-January of 1962, Leigh had changed from girl to woman, wife, and mother overnight, it seemed, while I had remained an irresponsible and silly boy. I often tell my students that I remained sixteen years old for sixteen years. Leigh chose to believe the fiction I invented, whatever it was, or to pretend that she did.

What choice did she have really?

Though as husband and father I was worthless, in 1965 it would have appeared almost impossible to survive, let alone succeed, as a divorced mother of two small children. Leigh loved me, and I learned to love her, and thanks almost entirely to Leigh we were loving companions and loving parents for fourteen years despite my multiple infidelities and the almost totally separate and secret social and intellectual life I led outside our home. This college pattern set in my junior and senior years at Iowa State defined our marriage.