The first hint that Julie Metz's husband was a cheater came at his own funeral.
Cathy, a gaunt churchgoing friend, draped her body over the man's corpse and sobbed.
The woman was an everyday fixture in Ms. Metz's life: Their daughters were best friends, and Cathy had even thoughtfully recommended her own marriage counsellor to the couple.
It would be another seven months before Ms. Metz learned that Cathy had a turbulent, three-year affair with her 44-year-old husband, Gordon Lee Churchwell, who died of a pulmonary embolism – and that she was one of at least six mistresses he'd kept during their 14-year marriage.
The discovery came when family friends were sorting through the late husband's paperwork and found piles of illicit e-mails.
There was Cathy; Mandy, a bisexual ad executive; Christina, a recently widowed knitter; Alicia, an Argentine university student; and Eliana, a liberal woman who “rode a turd wave” of New Age dialogue – and got to know Mr. Churchwell's “inner reality” when she tied him up during sex.
Ms. Metz decided to track the mistresses down, one by one. She recounts her experience in Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal. Ms. Metz spoke with The Globe and Mail from Brooklyn, N.Y., where she lives with her partner and 12-year-old daughter.
You discovered your husband's infidelities because he catalogued them in an e-mail to one of his mistresses and failed to delete it.
From clues in that e-mail, I was able to identify who it was I needed to find. I had my husband's address book and I went through it looking for names of women that I personally didn't know but who lived in the right neck of the woods. At the same time I was reading through his diary and as I did that, I made other connections. At the time I was discovering this, every day was a fresh outrage. This went on for weeks.
As you got each one on the phone, you let the profanities rip. But you ended up forming very different rapports with the women. Who got your mercy?
This woman Ellen in my town, she was in tears in minutes. [Ms. Metz's husband seduced her at the gym.] It was also clear that she had done immediate corrective work. They'd slept together twice and she told her husband and was off to a marriage counsellor. These encounters had obviously caused her an enormous amount of pain. … [My husband] seemed to have a knack for finding women who were in very vulnerable periods. There was even a theme: Christina and Ellen both had mothers who were dying.
Cathy did not earn your sympathy. You reamed her out in person and launched into a days-long phone campaign. On Day 4, she hung up on you. You write that you were relieved. Why?
These conversations with her felt very poisonous; it was becoming kind of obsessive. It was a relief when she hung up on me because I wouldn't have to talk to her any more. On the other hand, there were many questions that I never had answered. … [Cathy and my husband] had used the children as a remarkably effective cover. Sometimes I had the kids: I was babysitting while they were together. It happened so organically, back and forth, that I wasn't really paying attention. I was the mom and I was working. This woman never felt threatening to me.
Another one, Mandy, actually deigned to chalk it up to 9/11: She said your husband comforted her after she witnessed the terrorist attacks from her apartment in [New York's] Battery Park.
She lied to me that they didn't have sex. It was her unwillingness to be honest with me, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that pissed me off.
You were most nervous about Eliana, but you ended up becoming close and still e-mail today. That's surprising.
I feel like we both did a lot of work because of our correspondence. I think she understood certain things about long-term, committed relationships that she hadn't understood, and I got to understand a lot more about my husband.
