Men, Women & Children (26 page)

Dawn logged onto the hosting account for the website and took it down. She assumed her daughter would become aware of this transgression very quickly and decided that she would tell her the truth when asked. She would tell her daughter that the reality show had rejected her, and she would tell her daughter that her mother loved her and that she wanted better things for her in life than the things she herself ended up with.

chapter

twenty-one

R
achel Truby left work a few hours early on Friday, having already told her husband that she was spending the night and the following morning with her sister. She was, instead, spending the night and the following morning at a hotel with Secretluvur. As she drove, she realized that she’d forgotten to check the message from Secretluvur that contained the exact hotel where she was to meet him in a neighboring town. Rachel went home, packed a few things, and, for the first time since beginning her life of regular infidelity, logged into her account on AshleyMadison.com from the family desktop computer. She wrote down the name and address of the hotel on a Post-it note, put it in her pocket, and then went to shut her computer down. She noticed, however, that an update had been downloaded and was ready to be installed, which required a restart. She clicked the button authorizing the update to be installed and happily left her house, without realizing she had to click one more button in order for the computer to automatically restart itself after the installation was complete.

D
on Truby came home from work that evening with the intention of scheduling another rendezvous with Angelique Ice, as he had done a few times before when his wife decided to spend the night at her sister’s house. Don had meant to do this on his work computer, but now he noted that he was finally comfortable enough with the process to use the computer that he shared with his wife for this purpose.

He walked into their bedroom, sat down in the computer chair, ran his finger over the touchpad, and brought the screen out of its black energy-saving state to see his wife’s Ashley Madison account become visible on the screen behind a pop-up window that asked if the user would like to automatically restart the computer upon installation of an update. It took Don Truby almost a minute to fully process exactly what it was that he was staring at. Initially he assumed it was a pop-up ad or some other result of adware, and he was a second away from closing the window when he realized that he was looking at an in-box that was full of messages from a user named Secretluvur. It took him a few moments of reading these messages before the possibility that this account belonged to his wife entered his mind, but eventually he understood exactly what he was looking at: a document of his wife’s infidelity, with at least one man, that had been occurring for the better part of a month.

Don’s initial emotional reaction was, he suspected, the common one: He was sad and outraged. He wanted to confront her, to demand some kind of explanation, possibly a divorce. He wanted to know why she would be more interested in having sex with a stranger she’d met online than she was in having sex with her own husband. All of these things formed Don’s initial reaction.

His second reaction, however, was almost the opposite. As he sat in the chair, staring at a picture of Secretluvur and at the address of the hotel his wife was heading to—the hotel where she would have sex with this man—Don’s original purpose for coming into the room came back to him. He logged off his wife’s account and logged on to the Erotic Review on the computer he shared with his wife in order to communicate with Angelique Ice. The hypocrisy of his anger seemed absurd to him.

He realized in that moment that he had a decision to make. In the weeks since he had been cheating on Rachel with a prostitute, he was certainly happier, and it seemed to Don that his relationship with his wife had improved as a result of his happiness. With the new information that his wife’s happiness had nothing to do with his own, but rather with her own experimentations in unfaithfulness, Don understood that they were more alike than he thought. He liked seeing his wife happy. He assumed she enjoyed seeing him happy. If their happiness could only come as a result of each of them having sex with other people, then Don decided he would have to deal with that. And, beyond their mutual happiness, Don never wanted to have to tell his wife the truth about his visits with Angelique Ice, which he thought would only be fair to divulge if he confronted her about her own secret life.

He logged back on to his wife’s account and decided it would be best to install the update, as she had no doubt had planned to do. He saw no need to give her any reason to feel anxiety or suspect that he knew anything about her infidelity.

Don liked Angelique Ice, and although he knew he would purchase her services again in the future, he began to think about looking for something different that night. A new girl, a second girl, would signify to Don that, from that night forward, his sexuality would have nothing to do with his own wife. Despite this sentiment, Don found himself in the mood for a prostitute who looked more like Rachel than Angelique Ice did.

He entered his search criteria and found a prostitute named Summer Sweet who looked enough like a younger version of Rachel that Don was persuaded to make an appointment with her for later that night after his son’s football game. He hoped that having sex with her would remind him of having sex with his wife one last time, and then he would try never to think about his wife in a sexual capacity again. She would be the mother of his child, the warm body on the other side of the bed, and the person with whom he had occasional conversations about the minutiae of his life, and that is all she would be.

K
ent Mooney received an e-mail notice at work from the Spector Pro software he installed on his son’s computer that contained the username and password to his son’s Battle.net account. This was what Tim used to log in to his
World of Warcraft
account. Kent decided he would eat lunch at home and log in to his son’s account in order to experience firsthand exactly what it was that his son found so alluring about the game.

He made himself a sandwich and sat down at his son’s computer, looking around his son’s room as he waited for the machine to boot up. He realized he hadn’t been very attentive to his son in the months since his ex-wife, Lydia, had moved to California. He had lost touch with his son, and he considered logging in to his son’s
World of Warcraft
account as much an attempt to understand his son as it was an attempt to police his online activity. Some part of him thought that, if he could form a basic understanding of the things that were important in his son’s life, then maybe they could repair their relationship on some small level, and maybe that repair would lead to Tim coming back to his former self just enough to give his father a glimmer of the way things used to be—just enough for Tim to want to play football again.

The computer finished booting up and Kent clicked on the
World of Warcraft
icon. Although he knew little about video games, he knew enough about computers in general to handle the process easily. He typed in the username and password supplied to him by the Spector Pro software and was taken to a screen that contained all of Tim’s characters on the Shattered Hand server. Kent chose the character that was already selected, the last character Tim had played, his main character, Firehands, and entered the world. After a brief load screen, Kent was in control of Firehands, who stood in the center of a floating city called Dalaran. Other characters ran past him in all directions. It was a far more complex experience than Kent had expected. The city itself was too large and complicated for Kent to navigate properly. Beyond that, he didn’t even know how to make the avatar move. He used the mouse to swivel the character’s point of view but found that clicking on things only highlighted or targeted them.

After a few seconds of trying to discover how to move, Kent became aware of some green text scrolling up the left side of the screen. From a character named Selkis, Kent saw a message that read, “Yo nigger, your mom married to that homo in Cali yet? When’s the wedding again?” From a character named Kenrogers, Kent saw a message that read, “Why would that homo buy the cow when he’s getting the milk for free?” From a character named Mzo, Kent saw a message that read, “Is he a homo or a nigger? I thought he was a nigger?” From a character named Baratheon, Kent saw a message that read, “He’s both.”

Kent was stunned. The language used by the people his son played this game with was wildly offensive, but beyond that, they were clearly talking about his ex-wife, and beyond that, they seemed to know that she was getting married—information that Kent himself didn’t have. All of which meant that Tim also had this information, and that he was more comfortable telling people he had never met than he was telling his own father.

Kent tried to respond but had too much difficulty writing a message in anything other than general chat. After reading a conversation among Tim’s guildmates about how they all wanted to have various kinds of sex with his ex-wife before her wedding night, Kent shut the
World of Warcraft
program down and uninstalled it from his son’s computer. He logged on to Blizzard Entertainment’s customer-service website and canceled the account he had been paying for, enabling his son to play the game in exchange for fifteen dollars a month. The website offered the option of allowing his son’s playing time to continue for the remainder of the current month, which was already paid for, but Kent declined, choosing instead to terminate the account immediately.

He didn’t know what was more offensive, the fact that his son spent so much time in the virtual company of people who seemed to be racists and misogynists, or the fact that they knew more about his ex-wife’s relationship status than he did. And then there was the information itself: Lydia was getting married. Kent had made some peace with the fact that his relationship with her was over. He had managed to find something in Dawn Clint that made it easier to move on. He had feelings for Dawn Clint, but the finality of Lydia marrying Greg Cherry was something he was unprepared for.

Although he was no longer hungry, he ate the sandwich he prepared for himself and returned to work. He planned to go to the eighth-grade Goodrich Junior High Olympians’ final regular-season game after work and then return home to have a long conversation with his son.

H
annah Clint called her mother from the girls’ dressing room in the gymnasium of Goodrich Junior High School an hour before the final game of the season. She said, “So . . . I’m pretty sure they said they were going to let us know by the end of this week, right? Well, it’s, like, the end of the week, so what’s the deal? Oh, also, the site’s down.”

Hannah’s mother, who was driving to Goodrich Junior High School with her camera to document what might be the Olympiannes’ final performance of the year if the football team failed to claim a victory that night, said, “We need to talk about some things. I guess the best place to start is with the show. I got the e-mail. We didn’t make it, baby.”

Hannah said, “What? Why? I don’t get it. I mean, I’m pretty sure I must have been one of the best ones. Did they not like the video or something? Should we have hired somebody instead of having Chris do it?”

She said, “They didn’t like the website.”

Hannah said, “Then screw them.”

She said, “No, baby, I thought about it, and I think they’re right. I took the site down.”

Hannah said, “What?!? Why? What about my fans?”

She said, “Baby, if you want to act, you can act. We’ll get you in as many theater programs as we can. But that website, and that show, that’s not what you want to do.”

Hannah, “Yes it is! It’s all I want to do!”

Dawn said, “You know I’ve supported you in anything and everything, but you’re better than that stupid show and you’re way better than the website.”

Hannah, “No I’m not! You have to put it back up!”

Dawn said, “I can’t, baby.”

And Hannah hung up on her mother.

Hannah was enraged. She felt no sorrow and no self-pity. She felt anger and rage toward her mother and toward the producers of the show. She was certain that, as soon as she turned eighteen, she would move to Los Angeles and never talk to her mother again, if that’s what was necessary for her to achieve her goal of fame. As she slipped on her Olympiannes cheerleader skirt and made her way into the gymnasium to start stretching with the other girls, she thought about what she would do next, about how she would prove them wrong. She would start her own website. Chris probably knew how to make one, she reasoned, and on this website she could do whatever she wanted. She could interact with her fans directly. She could post any kind of video she wanted. She didn’t need her mother, or a reality show, to make herself famous. She was determined to do it by herself and by any means necessary.

She envisioned herself sitting on a chair across from David Letterman as his featured guest. She heard herself telling him the story of how she was rejected from the first reality show she’d ever auditioned for. She heard his audience laughing in disbelief at the absurdity of the notion.

P
atricia Beltmeyer glanced back and forth from an episode of
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
to the printout of every keystroke her daughter had made for the past week. She read every instant-message conversation she had, every e-mail she sent, and every paper she wrote for school. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary—until Patricia noticed a username and password that were unfamiliar to her: username Freyja, password luckycat2, only a slight variation on the password Brandy used on her other accounts: luckycat1. Her daughter had never used these during any of her weekly checks or her surprise checks.

Patricia’s heart rate increased. She began to sweat. The realization that her daughter was engaging in online activity that she was not aware of was almost too much for her to handle. Her initial reaction was to disconnect her daughter’s computer, give her an electronic typewriter for her schoolwork, and forbid her from any computer or cell-phone use until she was eighteen years old. She thought about logging in to the account immediately but couldn’t tear herself from the keystroke document that she had in her hand. She continued reading and discovered multiple messages to and from another Myspace user named TimM.