Cape May, New Jersey. Where have I been the last nine years? The auditory cue saying that professional investigators could help if you suspect your spouse or lover of cheating was what caught my attention. It was somewhere between 8 and 9 a.m. as I waited for Dennis to finish showering so we could head over to Bill’s Pancake House for breakfast. Understand that relative to what I’m about to report, my husband and I lead blissfully mundane lives, including vacationing in the wedding capital of the Jersey shore.
I thought Dennis had the television in our hotel room tuned in to some Philadelphia news program. Apparently not, because what flashed on screen was a scene of a very obese woman clad in slacks going out to meet her equally obese lover, a guy with white shoulder length hair and a cowboy hat. He presented her with flowers and a necklace, and then they went their separate ways before meeting up at a hotel, presumably for a romantic rendezvous.
A few minutes later, the show presents footage of a tearful husband confronted with the evidence of his wife cheating on him with the man he recognizes to be her ex-husband. When I told Daphne that I’d seen this sordid version of Candid Camera broadcast from Philadelphia, she rolled her eyes, explaining that Cheaters is a nationally syndicated television reality show that’s now in its 9th year.
Once in a while she and Etan, who live in Orlando, watch Cheaters for the type of amusement that I suspect derives from feeling superior to people who come across as life’s losers. Were we to identify with the people on the show, I suspect this would be painful rather than funny.
The advertisements associated with the snippet I saw seemed designed to appeal to people in generally desperate straits. One featured a personal injury lawyer warning prospective clients that just because an attorney has spent lots of money on an enormous Yellow Page ad is no proof that he’s competent. Of course the lawyer on screen made no mention that his 30 seconds of on air time costs a lot more than any print ad.
There was also an ad offering to advance money to plaintiffs with personal injury suits pending. No mention was made of the fact that such services charge interest rates just a hair under usurious.
The show’s website, www.cheaters.com, features a process serving service, and ironically an online dating service. The latter demonstrates a fundamental truth, that despite the pain of betrayal, people are willing to try again.
Still I couldn’t help thinking of real tales of betrayal and infidelity, real in the sense that they involved people I knew:
(1) During the years that we summered in Lake Mahopac, New York, I had a best friend named Claudia. Her dad was a dentist with a Manhattan office and her mom divided her time between traveling to Europe and shopping at Saks. It wasn’t until we were in our teens, and her dad asked my dad to represent him in his divorce that I learned her mom was having an affair with “Uncle” Al, a very rich family friend and dental patient of her father.
(2) The year Daphne entered first grade, I went to pick her up from a play date at the home of another little girl. The girl’s father came to the door, giggling uproariously about the tickling game he said the three had been playing. Especially put off by his comment that my daughter would have to stay over because he couldn’t find one of her shoes, I ushered Daphne out very quickly. The next time we saw the classmate, she reported that her mom had a boyfriend and had taken an apartment closer to work.
(3) Just a few years after losing my first husband, I became friends with a periodontist at my gym who ultimately introduced me to Dennis. While waiting for the gym to open, my friend had me meet his wife, a woman I found friendly, funny, and attractive.
During the course of our many 45-minute workouts on Concept II rowing ergometers, he told me he thought his wife was cheating on him. The real reason for her trips to Israel -- purportedly to visit their children studying abroad – was an affair she was having with a guy who lived there. Ironically, when my friend moved out, began divorce proceedings, and started dating a woman he’d known for years, his soon-to-be ex-wife told me she felt betrayed.
(4) Everybody has a story. During the years before meeting Dennis, I took ballroom dance lessons at virtually every studio in the Greater Boston area. I always wondered about a tall, platinum blonde in her sixties named Ellie. Seemingly well-heeled, she initially told me she and her ex-husband had “grown apart.”
As we got to know each other, she said that when she suspected he was cheating on her, she hired a private investigator. Much to her dismay but not her surprise, she said that his Rolls Royce kept turning up at the home of another woman.
Either cool and calculating or just a loving mother, she said she waited until her kids were older before disrupting a lifestyle that included having her own Rolls Royce, living in a home with a pool and sending the kids to private school.
Do you know of any episodes that didn’t make it on to Cheaters?
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