I took another step toward the garage and he leapt for me. I tried to run, but the floor beneath me was slick and I couldn’t gain traction fast enough to get away. Sean was too quick and too strong an adversary. He grabbed me around my waist and tried to wrestle the keys away from me.
“Give me the fucking keys!” he shouted. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
I was hysterical by then. He twisted my arm behind my back and the keys fell to the floor. He let go of me for a split second, trying to grab the keys, and I ran for the front door. But it was no use. He was on me before I could get out of the kitchen.
Swooping me up from behind, he threw me over his shoulder. This time, he slipped and we went crashing to the floor, him on top of me. When I hit the tile, a wrenching pain shot through my hip.
“You broke my hip!” I screamed. “Oh my God! You broke my hip!”
Sean looked as if he’d been Tasered. His mouth was agape and he didn’t move.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to drop you. There was water on the floor and I was trying to stop you from going out in the dark. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I am so sorry.”
I writhed in pain, shaking and sobbing. Sean helped me to my feet and guided me to the bedroom. He brought me ice to put on my hip and I eventually fell asleep.
I walked with a limp for days afterward. When his parents asked me what happened, I said I’d slipped on wet tile. Sean said nothing.
As miserable as I felt, leaving the marriage wasn’t an option. What was it that L. Ron Hubbard said about people who walked out on their spouses? “People leave because of their own overts and withholds. That is the factual fact and the hardbound rule. A man with a clean heart can’t be hurt.”
I told myself that I needed to get back to the church. A clean heart would be the armor that protected me from Sean’s cruelty. I promised myself to get back into session, and get Sean back into session too. Then I pasted on a permanent smile and pretended that all was right with my world. No such things as problems, just situations and solutions.
Sean and I never talked about that night. Everything went back to normal. After a few weeks of relative calm, I told myself that getting back to the church could wait after all. I was too busy with work to do much of anything else.
It was during our truce that I was shopping for groceries after a long day and heard someone call my name. I turned to see Lacey standing there, the girl I’d shared a kiss and a few touches with when we were in high school. It was good to see her after so long. We talked briefly, then exchanged phone numbers and promised to get together.
I was excited at the prospect of seeing Lacey again. I had no intention of resuming our sex play—at least that’s what I told myself. I’d spent too much time getting “cleansed” in the church to make that mistake again. But I missed our friendship and the easy conversations we’d had.
Not long afterward, Lacey called, asking if I wanted to meet for a drink. I said I’d have to check with Sean and get back to her.
To do right by my marriage and be honest with Sean, I told him about Lacey and our history together. I assured him I had no romantic feelings for her. I just wanted to catch up with an old friend. I prepared myself for Sean’s reaction, certain he would be furious and forbid me from rekindling the friendship. Instead, he encouraged me to go.
I met Lacey on a Friday after work and we spent hours talking over cocktails. It had been a long time since I’d spent an evening without talking about work or Scientology and it was a refreshing change.
A week later, Lacey called to invite both Sean and me to a party. I was surprised when he agreed to go. It turned out to be a pleasant evening of drinking wine and playing board games with new friends. Sean seemed to enjoy it as much as I did.
Lacey and I continued seeing each other. One evening, she asked if I’d ever thought about having a threesome. I was shocked because all of our conversations until then had been strictly platonic. I told her honestly that Sean had suggested it, but I’d never taken him seriously. Then I quickly changed the subject.
The next time the three of us were together, driving back from a dinner date, she broached the idea with Sean. “I understand you want Michelle to have a threesome,” she said. “I’m guessing with another woman?” I stayed quiet while the two of them bantered back and forth.
After we dropped Lacey at home, Sean brought it up again. “Well, that was interesting!” he said, grinning. I laughed it off. We had all had too much to drink, I said. I was sure most people our age thought about such things when they were tipsy, but they didn’t necessarily act on it. “It was just talk,” I said.
Sean initiated sex when we got home, but rather than make an excuse, I responded by closing my eyes and fantasizing about Lacey.
She called again and asked us to come to dinner at her place. We took a good bottle of wine and our favorite board game, but I was pretty sure I knew her real purpose for inviting us.
After a few glasses of wine, Lacey made her move. She sat down next to me on the couch and began rubbing my leg. “Here’s how I think things should go,” she said, looking at Sean. “Michelle and I have to get comfortable with each other before you are included. Why don’t you give us a moment upstairs?”
Sean looked like a kid who had just been given the keys to a toy store. “Take whatever time you need!” he said.
Lacey took my hand and led me toward the stairs. I turned to Sean, uncertain how I felt about what was happening, and he smiled his approval. My body trembled with excitement and anticipation, but my conscience reminded me of the consequences of my actions if the church found out.
As conflicted as I was, when Lacey and I reached the bedroom, my body took over. We fell onto the bed in a passionate embrace. A moment later, I heard Sean on the stairs. Reality set in. I was a wife and a Scientologist and what I was doing was wrong. Very wrong.
I looked up at Sean, now standing in the doorway. “I can’t do this,” I said.
I was appalled that I had considered committing adultery.
I was scared that the church would find out and I would get into trouble.
I was nervous about being with a woman, but I was aching to feel her touch. My body was telling me that this was more right than anything I had ever felt, my mind was telling me that it was wrong because I was married and a Scientologist, and my soul was screaming, RUN!!! Just get out of here!
Sean looked at me pleadingly. “It’s fine—there’s no rush. I can just watch.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
We all went back downstairs. “I think we should go,” I said. My remorse was immediate. How could I have been so dumb? After all the work I’d done in auditing!? On the drive home, I told Sean how worried I was the church would find out. No one had to know, he said, conspiratorially. It could be our little secret.
And so . . . it happened again. A few more times, actually. I told myself it wasn’t a betrayal of my marriage because Sean was a willing participant. I knew what I was doing was risky. If the church did find out, I’d be severely punished for having had sex with a woman again. But how would they find out? Lacey wasn’t associated with the church. And Sean promised not to tell.
CHAPTER FOUR
Indiscretions
Larry began calling, asking when I planned on getting back to the church. Soon, I said. As the weeks passed, the trysts with Lacey became fewer and farther between. Any pleasure I’d felt at the beginning was eclipsed by the guilt over flouting church doctrine and, perhaps even more so, fear of being found out and punished.
In the summer of 1995, shortly after our one-year anniversary, I learned that Sean had cheated on me with one of our friends from the gym. It happened one night while I was sleeping. My brother, with whom I’d kept in close contact after he’d gone to live in Nevada with our father, had recently moved to California and was staying with
us until he found his own place. He told me he’d walked in on Sean and the woman and got a weird vibe. I chose to ignore it.
Weeks later, I came home from work and found Sean packing an overnight bag.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
He was frantic, angry. “I have to get away and think a bit.”
“I don’t understand. What do you have to think about?”
Without answering, he picked up his bag and walked out the door.
I was dumbfounded. Where had this come from? I wondered. What was he talking about?
Sean called me that night and said he was staying at a cabin in Big Bear for the weekend.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’m just very confused about what I want,” he replied. “I just need to think.”
Talk about confused. On one hand, I was grateful to have time to myself, to go to bed early, rather than on his schedule, and not have to fight off his unwanted sexual advances. On the other hand, I was bewildered by his need to get away from me.
He returned on Monday. I had just finished dressing for work and was packing up my briefcase when he dropped to his knees next to me with tears in his eyes.
“What’s wrong, Sean?” I asked, genuinely concerned.
“I cheated on you,” he said, bowing his head.
I never saw it coming. “What? . . . What do you mean?”
Sean explained that he’d cheated with our friend from the gym. She had driven him home. He’d invited her in. One thing led to another. He was drunk at the time, but otherwise confused about why he’d done what he did, he said.
My brother’s intuition—that “weird vibe” he’d told me about—had been valid. I was furious. To my way of thinking, this was totally different than what had happened between Lacey and me. Sean had pushed for me to be with Lacey, and he was there with us.
I know it seems like I shouldn’t have cared that he’d been with someone else, but for some crazy reason, I did. I believed in marriage and I looked at our experience with Lacey as the equivalent of watching porn together. But Sean had gone behind my back. He had cheated on me at the same time we were supposed to be working on our marriage.
The anger I felt wasn’t out of any grand jealousy or fear of losing Sean, because I felt neither. I cared for him, of course, but it was hardly the passionate kind of love I’d read about. I supposed I loved him, but as Scientologists we were taught not to focus on the word “love” per se. Hubbard dismissed it as having “too many meanings.” Romantic love was for the weak, for people who operated out of their “reactive minds” and allowed their emotions to control them. As Scientologists, we were always striving to eliminate the reactive mind and develop our “analytical mind,” which gave us full control to make decisions that promoted survival. The anger I felt was less about romantic jealousy than it was about his betrayal of our partnership.
I did the only thing I knew to do. I contacted Larry for advice. Larry instructed me to write up a Knowledge Report for the Ethics Department, which I did: “Sean told me he kissed her; he touched her; he told her his heart was breaking, but she gave him more attention than I gave him. He didn’t know what to do. I left the house when he told me this.” I concluded the report the way we did in the church: “This is True. Michelle Seward.”
Larry submitted the report to the Ethics Department and the church called to schedule a meeting with Sean and me. A few days later, we arrived at the Celebrity Centre to talk things over with the Chaplain, the highest-ranking officer there. He read us church policies on the sanctity of marriage and related quotes by L. Ron Hubbard. To sum up, the Chaplain said, when couples betray each other and trust is breached, the only way to repair it is with communication, and that could be handled with auditing. The Chaplain prescribed the church’s marriage counseling, the “2D Coaudit,” which the church touts as “an exact procedure for alleviating marital problems.” He sent us to the registrar to buy a 12.5-hour block of auditing time for $5,000 and schedule our first appointment. Our auditor was a young girl, no more than twenty.
Our first session together was relatively benign. I was hooked up to the E-meter first. I knew the drill. As much as I wanted to complain about Sean—about his poor work ethic, his bad temper, his fling with the woman from the gym—the purpose of auditing was not to blame, but to acknowledge our own misdeeds and mistakes.
“What have you withheld from Sean, Michelle?” the auditor asked.
Here we go. What have I done? Can’t we just concentrate on Sean? He’s the reason we’re here.
“Well, one time I went shopping and hid the shopping bags in the trunk of the car,” I said obediently.
“Thank you. What else?” she asked, scribbling notes for my file.
“I had credit card charges I didn’t tell him about.”
“Okay. Thank you. What else?”
“That’s about it.”
“Okay. Thank you,” she said, motioning for me to switch seats with Sean.
He took the chair opposite the auditor and grabbed the cans.
Looking down at the meter, the auditor asked, “Sean, what have you withheld from Michelle?”
Finally!
“Um . . . um . . . Well, I think I may have complained about her to one of our friends,” he said quietly.
“Thank you. What else?”
“I may have yelled at her once.”
Yelled at me once? And what about the time you threw ice water on me? The time you pushed me? I wasn’t allowed to respond to Sean, so I just rolled my eyes.
The auditor looked at me with indifference. I looked at her face and wondered, What could you possibly know about marriage?
On it went for more than an hour. At least it was a start, I thought.
With each session after that, Sean opened up a little more, but he would never volunteer the more egregious things he’d done. He guessed he’d raised his voice at me. He might have called me a name one time. How about picking me up and dropping me on the floor? Blocking the front door so I couldn’t run away when he was berating me? But I couldn’t prompt Sean. My role was to confess to my own failures and let the auditor worry about getting him honest.
During the third or fourth session, with the auditor pressuring Sean to come up with anything else he might be suppressing or avoiding, he started shaking his head from side to side, as if trying to shake loose some deeply buried thought. Tell her about forcing me to have sex, I thought. After several minutes of silence, he finally spoke. Yes, he said, he’d had a brief encounter with a woman from the gym and that was wrong. “And, well,” he said, pursing his lips, “I guess I haven’t talked about another thing I’ve done.” Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. Let the auditor see who you really are! Sean paused. The auditor signaled for him to continue. “Well,” he said, haltingly, “I really haven’t confessed that Michelle cheated on me.” I stifled a gasp. What? . . . Are you really going to go there? “I guess I’m kind of responsible because I knew Michelle was going to have relations with a woman and I allowed it to happen.”
Tears of anger and frustration stung my eyes. I was stunned by Sean’s deviousness. He was ostensibly taking responsibility for withholding information from the auditor, but in a way to make me look bad. I looked at Sean and sensed the glee concealed behind his rueful expression. It was the first time I realized just how calculating he was.
Just as he had planned, the auditor abruptly switched her attention to me again.
“Thank you very much, Sean,” she said.
At the instruction of the auditor, I switched seats with my husband and grabbed the E-meter cans.
“What have you done to Sean?” she asked.
I knew the drill. Attempting to justify my actions or place the blame on Sean would only get me more trouble. My role was to accept responsibility for what I had done and take my pu
nishment.
“I was with my friend Lacey,” I said.
The auditor wanted details. My face was red with humiliation and I tried to avoid specifics, but she insisted I give her a step-by-step recounting of what Lacey and I did together. When she was satisfied that I’d told her everything, she called for a break.
“Let me get this written up,” she said, “and I’ll see you next session.” With that, she headed out, leaving Sean and me to sit there, staring at each other.
Sean taunted me all the way home, laughing as he recalled how embarrassed I’d been when I’d revealed what Lacey and I had done. He clearly felt in control. He said he didn’t even know if he wanted our marriage to work anymore, that I had a lot of making up to do if there was a chance of us staying together.
I returned to the auditor’s office for our next appointment, expecting that Sean and I would go back in session together, but I was sent alone to the case supervisor and grilled about what else I was withholding from the auditor. My file had details of my history with Lacey. Had I been with her more times than I’d admitted? Had I been with other women? Had I ever spoken in derogatory terms about LRH or Scientology? No, no and no, I said.
Two days later, I was released back to the Ethics Department and dropped down into Lower Conditions again. Sean was assigned readings and sent home.
For the next two weeks I spent endless hours with a male ethics officer in order to determine “who I really was.” The sessions often lasted from early morning to late at night, with only short bathroom breaks, and they wiped me out. I was bombarded with readings from L. Ron Hubbard and questions about my innermost thoughts and beliefs.
“Do you fantasize about women when you masturbate?”
“What exactly is your fantasy?”
“Tell me how you touch yourself when you think about women.”
He told me I had a choice. Did I really want to be part of a damned culture, one prone to promiscuity, AIDS and a lifetime of sickness and misery? Or was I really a High Ethics, highly productive, morally sound heterosexual who was just pretending to be attracted to women? I chose the latter.
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