I ripped the bill open, feeling guilty and wondering what John would say. I ran my finger down the list, looking for long distance calls. Yes, a few calls to my mother, but that was all. So why so many pages? I flipped through a few of the pages and discovered my answer. There was a separate section on the bill for “900-number” calls.

There were dozens of them. The company name was listed as “Continental Enterprises,” but I checked the times:

10/04 2:12 am 20 minutes

10/06 3:37 am 14 minutes

10/08 4:28 am 8 minutes

10/09 1:19 am 29 minutes

It went on-dozens of calls, dozens of minutes.

I had apparently neglected and underestimated my ability to sleep through anything. John got up in the middle of the night to make phone calls to sex lines! I sat there, my breath caught in my throat, my heart hammering in my chest. This is what I had been looking for-proof that the man of steel had a weak spot. The pages shook in my hands. It was just what I had wanted, and yet now part of me didn’t want to know.

My chest burned. He wasn’t sharing his fantasies with me, but he was apparently sharing them with some sex phone operator who was probably some three-hundred pound housewife eating Doritos and Ho-Ho’s and watching the soaps with the volume off while she fake-orgasmed for him!

I sat there for a long time with the bill in my hand, thinking about what to do. I knew John. If I confronted him, he would either deny it, or he would simply clam up and not talk about it at all. I couldn’t see how that would be helpful. I realized that I wasn’t really offended by it-not in the way I would be if I found him cheating on me with another woman. He was just exploring his fantasies in a place where he felt safe.

Yeah, ok, it hurt that he didn’t feel safe enough with me, but I already knew that, right? Getting him to share that part of himself with me was like pulling teeth, and I didn’t understand why, but now I knew, at least, that he actually had a part of him that fantasized, that he actually did masturbate. He was a flesh-and-blood man after all. So why did I feel so empty, sitting with the knowledge that I thought I had wanted to know?