Out Of His Mind

Bex O’Brian

Word Count 1472

When my husband of nearly forty years told me last summer that he had been having an affair for the last two years, all the noise went out of my head. Between my ears was utter silence. It was a miracle. It lasted only a few seconds, but silence was something I had not experienced in more than a decade. And it was more profound and strange than the idea of my husband fucking another woman.

Let me back up.

I remember precisely when noise first invaded my brain. I had been suffering from vertigo for many years. Because I’m stupid and back then, without health insurance, I did nothing about it. I made sure never to sleep on my right side, never to turn my head to the right. And never to look up into the night sky. I was managing pretty well, but then came the next whallop. I started to go through menopause. I guess there are some women lucky enough to get ferried through without too much trauma. I was not one of them. I was soaked in dread. I had moments where I thought my brain was going to spiral out of control. I was paranoid. In other words, a lot of fun to be around.

One morning, I was lying in bed, on my left naturally, in our trailer on the land that my family had owned since I was two years old. There had been a house, but it had fallen into such disrepair that it was no longer habitable. We did have plans for the 200-year-old cabin, but never the funds or the means. So rather than give up our summers on the land, we bought a secondhand trailer. Which, by this point, was in almost as dire a condition as the house. My husband and I used to joke that we were no better than locusts. Occupying something until it is destroyed and then moving on.

There I was lying on the bed when, all of a sudden, I heard a song. I know you’re never supposed to use the word 'sudden' in writing, but this is the only way to describe it. A country and western song. One I didn’t know. I thought my husband must’ve turned on the radio. It was so clear, so loud, so present, that I sat up to see where he was. A moment later, I realised the song was in my head. Day one of what would be a three-year odyssey of constantly having songs stuck in my head. Songs I knew. Songs I’d never heard. Complete tunes or snatches of tunes. One particularly harrowing stretch was when Whitney Houston’s song Somebody Who Loves Me whittled down to the constant refrain of ‘somebody who, somebody who.’

The only way I could think my thoughts was to have other music or voices playing. I imagined that confused my earworm enough that I could actually get some writing done or carry on a conversation. 

At first, I was so traumatised and confused by this onslaught that I was unable to eat, couldn’t enjoy a cocktail, which led to me losing an enormous amount of weight.

During this time, my husband, who is frightened by things he doesn’t understand, would often tell me to “Put the songs out of your mind.” 

I reminded him that if it were that simple, I would obviously do it. 

Eventually, the songs lost their grip.

Naturally, feeling better, I gained all the weight back. 

Then came Covid. My life didn’t change appreciably during Covid. I walked the dog, cooked meals, and wrote. I was not adversely affected. Then one day, taking the dog out for a walk, suddenly, (yes again) my head was filled with the most god-awful ringing. I knew instantly that it was tinnitus. And I knew there was nothing you could do about it. Once again, I sank into such a nervous frenzy at this perpetual cacophony in my head that I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. And yet again, I stopped eating and drinking and living any sort of normal life. I did what every idiot does when something like this happens: I went to be hypnotised. I saw a psychiatrist. I saw an acupuncturist, I saw every ‘ist’ imaginable. And of course, nothing helped. It was all bullshit.

One day, my sister called, and I was crying so hard that she, out of desperation, said, “You’re losing your fucking mind. Go on an antidepressant for Christ’s sake.” 

Never one to ignore my sister, I promptly went on Lexapro. And now the ringing in my ears and I are best pals.

Until I found chemical help, my husband was once again trying to be helpful. When he saw me looking frightened, or crying on the bed, he would come and wrap himself around me, and say, “Darling, all you have to do is put this out of your mind.” 

Lovely advice, but not particularly helpful 

Tinnitus will never go away and is now the fabric of my brain. Lexapro and living in France, away from America and a good cocktail or two in the evening have kept me on an even keel. That is, until last summer when he informed me that he had been fucking another woman. 

For a few seconds, as I said, there was silence, and then the noise rushed in. First came the weight and knowledge of our forty-year marriage teetering on the edge of the abyss. There are no culprits in an affair. I had chosen to live in France while he worked in the desert. I knew he was lonely. I knew he was stressed from work. I knew he found life in the desert strange while I was basking in the glory of living in a medieval village. There has always been tension between us, and I’ve written about this before for DPA, about the fact that I didn’t make money. Our communication had broken down to the point where we would send a loving morning text and a loving evening text, but that was it. I wasn’t particularly bothered by this because I thought now that both of us were in our late 60s, we had passed the threat of escapades. Twenty years, thirty years ago, I kept myself plastered to my husband, watching every glance, smile, or touch, my talons out to protect what I so jealously guarded. 

I looked at him. Sitting in the chair, hunched over, crying, confusion all over his face, and I thought, Who is this man? What do I actually know of him? Over the next year, I did the worst thing possible if you’re trying to understand your husband. I read every single email they exchanged, and I have seen every text. Worse, I’ve seen her posing for him in fishnet stockings. To give my husband some credit, this is not some thirty-year-old woman he ended up banging, but a near seventy-year-old who has admittedly a pretty good body. 

He has often told me in the last year that by confessing the affair, her hold over him quickly lost its grip. And now he says he feels nothing for her. She has evaporated. Gone.  Great. The problem is, the noise of their commingling has been bequeathed to me. 

These days, he’s happy as a clam. Has gone back to working on his book. And often says to me at night, “Aren’t we lucky to be living here in France? Isn’t our life just about perfect?” 

A couple of months ago, I told him, “I’m happy that you’re happy. And I’m happy that you chose to fight for our long-standing marriage, but you have to understand that you have given me all this noise. The words you spoke to her, words that don’t even sound like you, the idiocy of your sophomoric affections for each other, her penchant for spiritualism which shocked the shit out of me since, the whole time I’ve known you, you’ve had NO patience for, now all of that is in my head.” 

He raised his hands and shrugged. To him the solution was simple. “What’s the problem? Just get the broad out of your head.” 

I had to laugh. Get the broad out of your head? How hard can that be? 

PS. “Get the broad out of your head” is a line from the baseball movie Bull Durham. When Crash Davis goes up to bat, and he’s trying to concentrate on the pitcher, Annie pops into his head. Furious at himself for thinking about a woman at such a crucial moment, he admonishes himself to “Get the broad out of your head.”

Bex lives in France with her husband, Charles, and their dog, Mateo. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius. At present, she’s working on a new novel entitled, Finnick