Photo of our back patio of our house in upstate New York

This is when I first met Tom’s secret self, his inner devil driving him to self-destruction.

It was around the fifth year that Tom was on the show that daytime ratings for all soap operas started to drop precipitously. There were probably many causes. Cable TV was stealing audience share in the big cities by running feature films during the day, as well as round the clock news channels. The stay-at-home moms, who were the mainstay of the soap audience, had gone back to work, leaving their daytime stories behind. And people had begun to buy VCR's and rent movies. The audience share for soaps fell, which made them less economically viable because of the large cost of all the creative people needed to mount the daily new shows.

This was especially devastating for Tom, because he was used to being busy on the show. More bad news came when P & G shifted the writers who’d brought him onto The Guiding Light to another one of their soap operas. The new writers created their own new story lines and characters, so Justin Marler’s storyline was put on the back burner. Going in and sitting around for hours to do a short, meaningless scene was a real come down from the days when he'd been one of the main characters on the show. His character was sidelined, as were our dreams.

We spent his last two years on the show waiting for the ax to fall and working furiously on our country house. It was a way to stay productive, because everything we did would increase the value of our investment. With all the soap opera ratings in the proverbial toilet, our house was no longer our home, but our investment. That's what we told ourselves, but in my heart, it was still our home. It took a lot in those distant days to come up with the down payment for a house. You needed to have about one third of the total price of the house to get a mortgage. Quite a chunk of change to save up. But we’d done it and turned that house into something very charming.

We had struggled so long and so hard to get somewhere, and now it was turning to dust right before our eyes. We could lose everything: Tom's job, our house, our future, even our New York apartment would have to be given up if we had to move to LA to advance our careers.

The Guiding Light increasingly became a place of turmoil and unpredictable change. Producers were being fired, actors were being fired, ratings were dropping, and eventually Tom got fired. We’d gone from our greatest triumph to our most terrible disappointment, and in the span of just seven years.

The stress caused by all these changes had a toxic impact on our personal lives as well. We were facing hopelessness again, both now older and running out of time to make our dreams come true. During these last two years on the soap, an incident occurred that, as I look at it now, provides pretty convincing evidence that Tom was in still in very close and secret contact with his woman friend from his early soap days.

My guess is he thought she was his secret savior who would use her insider status to help him get a job. I believe around that time she’d moved back to California. Maybe he contacted her in a panic hoping she’d offer him a way out of his career dilemma.

Tom never breathed a word to me about her. I don’t know anything for sure. But her footprints are all over these next events in our life, so it’s likely there was some kind of secret whisperings going on. That flame had not gone out, at least not for Tom.

I had forgotten about this strange scene in our marriage, until I learned about Tom’s cheating. A friend who was a travel agent set us up with a long weekend deal in Puerto Rico. The stress at the soap was so punishing that we both needed a getaway. Tom wanted to get a tan, and I was thrilled to escape winter by visiting the Caribbean. We arrived at our hotel, and it was lovely. Under the palm trees, barefoot in the sugary sand, I happily signed up for yoga classes and snorkeling. The whole tropical atmosphere of the island was a wonderful relief from the winter blues in New York City and all our problems.

At dinner, as I sipped my Pina Colada, Tom looked at me and, without any preamble or even much emotion, announced, "Well, I'm thinking of asking you for a divorce." I remember those were his exact words, because for months afterward I grilled him about it. Needless to say, I was absolutely thunderstruck. Divorce!!!? If this was a movie, I’d have done a spit take. I didn't even know we'd had an argument.

Through my tears, I asked why. He said I didn't listen to him. Now, I know I am quite a talker, but frankly, with all the problems that were going on down at the show, it seemed to me that all I did was listen to him complain. There had to be more to this than my not listening. We’d been married for about seven years, and he’d never complained about my talking too much before.

If he was considering divorcing me, I had missed something gigantic, but what? Unfortunately, I am not one of those people who can remain cool and in control in trying situations. I wept and was in shock. The word divorce was just stunning. The bar bill at the hotel was stunning, too. It was all completely baffling. But I could get no more out of Tom than that he was seriously considering a divorce because I never listened to him. And though I was certainly listening then, that was all he would say.

That someone could reach the point of considering divorce, without ever bringing up any previous grievances, was so bizarre I really didn’t know what to make of it. And he was perfectly serious. My perception at the time was that he was so completely stressed out that he wasn’t quite himself. Not insane, perhaps, but overwhelmed by the stress.

Of course, had I been more mature, I should have stepped back and taken a long, hard look at my marriage. Something must have been terribly wrong and probably had been for years, if he could mention divorce so casually and with such finality. This should have been a big wake-up call for me.



In all honesty, I was so naïve and trusting that it never occurred to me that he might have been interested in another woman. The idea of divorce seemed to come out of the blue. It wasn't like he’d said he didn't love me. He never said that, but he wanted a divorce. I pestered him for months afterward for a reason, but he never gave any better answer, always insisting that I had to listen to him. I was listening, but he never told the truth of what he was doing and planning.