Breakdown Lane, The (2 page)

Years later, when Panicked in Prairie du Sac would write to me, desperate because the half-dozen weeklong biking trips that Panicked’s
sister
kept taking with Panicked’s
husband
turned out not to have been a shared interest in sport but
an affair
, I would wonder how this woman had behaved before her lobotomy.

How,
I would marvel, could anybody
not know
?

But you can. It’s possible. You
can
choose not to know anything you want not to know, if you want badly enough not to know it. And if you have a little help. A husband who lies, for example, not only next to you in bed, but through his teeth.

Why did Leo get sick of me, our family, our food, our spir-it-u-al-ity-lacking life? It wasn’t because I spent too much money on makeup or ballet.

I think he turned forty-nine and realized he was going to die, and wanted to negotiate this with the universe. I think he started to see his job as handholding instead of a quest for justice. I think the cuckoos who sent him literature like
Beneficent Bounty,
a cheesy magazine about sustainable agriculture and other great things a person could do to simultaneously rescue earth and soul, which he left lying all over the house, convinced him he was a hopeless bourgeois.

I know this because the one thing I learned from my parents’ marriage was that it took work to stay together, and it was essential to remember what you loved instead of what drove you nuts, and to idealize your spouse. Maybe being a drunk helped.

And I did. I tried very hard.

And Leo did, too. He at one time brought me green tea every morning before he left for work (I worked from home by then). He made his one dish, bacon ravioli, which we all loved though it sounds putrid, every Friday night.

See me for a moment as I once was, before I got too sick to wash my own hair. See us.

Leo’s cousin once told Leo, “Julie’s pretty enough to be a second wife.” (I didn’t even like Leo’s cousin, Jeremy. It’s pitiful how much that comment still matters to me.)

I was a wife who left notes on the pillow. Funny cards. For our twentieth anniversary, a new ring with a
J
and
L
so cleverly intertwined in white gold that no one but someone who was really looking for it could see it wasn’t just an abstract design. And Leo, Leo gave me a moose wearing ballet shoes, with a box holding diamond earrings tied to one paw, after letting me stomp around all day thinking he’d forgotten. I never went to bed without a pretty nightgown and brushed teeth. He never failed to carry in the grocery bags. I always wore something to the chancellor’s picnic just unusual enough to gather approving comments but not arched stares, size ten, loose, Katharine Hepburn slacks, crisp, man-tailored shirt. I kept my mane when my contemporaries gave up and got those sheared little flat-bottomed ice-skater bobs, finger-tossing it wild, or looping it into my dancer’s knot at the nape. See. A mother who never missed a play, a field trip, a game, a chess meet, or an excruciating band concert, who read
Charlotte’s Web
and each of the Little House books aloud three times over the course of ten years, and got a karaoke machine for the kids instead of a Hotbox or whatever they call those hideous, violent video-game machines. Got (way) involved in school. Was gainfully, if not particularly profoundly, employed. Planned the vacations. Wrapped the packages. Still played quotes and strip Scrabble with Leo in bed, as we had when we were newlyweds.

And yes, I was conceited. Doesn’t that make sense? Even in a yuck way? I thought I was an interesting wife. A cut above. I lived in Wisconsin, but I was clearly
of
the Upper West Side. I thought it was, well, grace and an aura of self-possession that kept me from disappearing when the clock struck forty. Vigilance and not blind, dumb luck that kept my kids safe and accomplished. And yes, I
did
think the outsides mattered. (Sonofabitch, given what happened, I have no reason to think otherwise.)

I was in fine shape.

Fine shape.

Not one single pound over the exact middle of the middle range of the actuarial tables.

Not one gray hair. Okay, a few gray hairs, a tiny thicket at one temple, which Teresa used her hairstylist’s art to make resemble a small and perfect platinum fan.

Cholesterol, 188.

Yes, I got flanked—as one of the Civil War cavaliers in the books my father wrote would have said. Foes from within. Foes from without. Assassins’ stealth.

And yes, I was the perfect medium, the well-prepared agar for this virus. Hominidus Gillis Julieannus, I could ignore, as a guy once said, the plank in my own eye even as I searched for the sliver in another’s.
Your in
stincts are always right
, I would tell people forty-seven times a year. Listen to them, no matter how lonely it feels, or whom you may think it might hurt.

The irony of that. It kills me.

It burns me.

And I haven’t even gotten to what this really is about.

How can I write about that?

What this really is about is not me at all.

It’s about the willful trashing of three great kids.

I can barely think about it.

That’s why I babble about slacks and rings and picnics.

I can’t stomach telling you about their burden. What they went through that I know about, and worse, what they went through that I don’t. Gabe, Caroline, Aury. My rock, my lost angel, and my baby.

I’m so sorry.

Not that it makes a difference, but I’m so sorry.

“My conscience or my vanity appalled.”
—Yeats.

“What a maroon!”
—Bugs Bunny.

When I consider the extremes to which my illness and Leo’s defection drove my older children, I cringe. When I think of Aury’s contorted, tearful, lost little face…I loathe myself.

In my column, I told people every single Sunday that they weren’t allowed to feel guilty about things they didn’t cause. But the kids couldn’t help it, and neither can I. I feel more guilt about what I did to them, and it wasn’t deliberate, than about what Leo did to all of us. I could imagine
other people’s
children suffering the pangs and pains of guilt, the fallout of their parents’ misdeeds and misfortunes. But not mine!

And yet.

The old adage says that every police officer, turned coin-side over, would be an outlaw; every psychiatrist, daft; every judge, a scoundrel. This said, how many of those who dispense wisdom possess it to any special degree? Or do they really, unawares, need it most of all?

All those warnings.

Still. Most suspected infernos really do turn out to be a toaster on stuck. Most stalkers in the covered parking lots are…just shoppers.

But sometimes they aren’t.

Two equal and opposite things can happen simultaneously. You can make a living as a mountaineer and fracture your skull tripping over a curb.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I thought of myself as the woman least likely to be served a big, bitter dose of my own medicine, the least likely actually to champion that old sauce I ladled out to my readers in a dozen different ways a dozen times a year—whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!—figuring that the least these poor mopes deserved was some kind of life raft.

Did I ever really believe it?

Nah.

Well, I was wrong.

End of story.

Beginning of story.

Everything truly interesting happens in the middle, don’t you think?

In the beginning, there was Leo.

The end product of a family who’d built their heritage on four hundred years of hard work, cruel bigotry, and absolute loyalty, he had character. In other words, he had no excuse.

In the other corner, me.

You know all about me.

Leo and Julieanne, cut from different bolts, decided to stitch together a garment called marriage.

The simple history of us came what seems like thousands of years before my final diagnosis, before about eighty doctors told me I had everything from chronic fatigue syndrome to parasites to locomotor ataxia caused by a brain hemorrhage to catatonic depression.

But any woman can be dumped, although it is unusual for the dumper to describe a carefully planned path as “accidental.” And “nothing to be ashamed of.”

It’s not unusual for a woman—angel, harridan, sickly, or snooty—to be royally dumped. It is a cliché, not original enough even for one more country-western song. The great ones have all been written. Dolly Parton did a terrific job in two minutes and thirty seconds in “Jolene.” Or if your brow is higher, you can read all about the betrayal of a haughty beauty unjustly brought low in
The House of Mirth
.

What makes this story different from those is this: Since those things were written, a whole lot of things are supposed to have
changed
between men and women.

Take the acceptance of aging. Men are supposed to accept the changes that go along with a woman’s getting older, just as they accept the changes in their own bodies. Breasts that no longer leap to attention at an even slightly carnal glance, well, those are still good breasts. They are the breasts that perhaps have nurtured children. They may have cradled a man’s head as he confessed his grief or frustration, as he could to no other person on earth. When the frantic oscillation of early passion has slowed to a gently swinging pendulum, that’s supposed to be okay now, because the sacredness of a long and honest partnership outlasts even the delicious scrimmage of new sex.

This shift in manners and values is, however, bullshit.

For nothing has changed—only, as Alice might have said as she climbed back through the looking glass, the names of what those things are
called.

We loved each other like crazy, Leo and I.

We also sort of wanted to spite our parents—who expected Leo to marry Shaina Frankel. My parents expected me to marry…up.

It began at college.

Mother and Father (okay, that
was
what we called them) had gone to NYU. For them, there was no point in any institution of higher learning unreachable by the A line. I rebelled. Their very best little girl
rebelled
. I chose the University of Colorado in Boulder. “Why would you want to sequester yourself on some dusty mountaintop?” my father asked, picturing Boulder as an outpost on the Pony Express with teepees for classrooms and tumbleweed blowing through the dusty track between storefront saloons. I explained that I wanted to scale peaks and wear blue jeans and dance in scarves and leg warmers under the tutelage of Rita Lionella, the legendary modern-dance instructor who had returned from New York to her birthplace and who headed the dance department there. This trilling fell on the deaf ears of a man who could fly to London as if he were taking the crosstown bus, but considered driving to Provincetown equivalent to traveling through the Cumberland Gap in a Conestoga wagon. Father believed climbing the steps of the West Side Y to the tennis courts was all the elevation a normal person needed.

I won, although I already knew I was not going to be a “real” dancer. The ABT and even the Winnipeg Ballet were dreams I’d left behind when I hit five eight and a hundred and thirty pounds. A practical girl, I wasn’t willing to live on cigarettes and pepper vodka to dance for three years in the corps of the Houston Ballet, which I did manage, for one summer. Still, I wanted someday to do local theater, perhaps teach dance or teach English at a small college, English lit being for me a medium as familiar as water to a gill-breathing creature.

So one day, I came out of the backstage, after the winter recital. I had done a solo turn to
Afternoon of a Faun,
and I was furious because I had been good. I had been good, and my parents had been in Switzerland. They’d sent roses, all of which I had given to the other girls, who thought of me as a benevolent princess. My hair was still painfully drawn back, my eyes still painted into golden almonds with kohl and gilt. And there was this boy. A boy in a black leather jacket, with what looked to be black leather curls and a reluctant one-sided smile.

“Hi,” he said, “you were great,” and then, as if he thought I might walk away after thanking him, he added, “You know, I was the only male in there who wasn’t a boyfriend or a father.”

“You like ballet?” I asked, wondering if this cute guy was either gay or a fellow New Yorker.

“No, I sweep here,” he said. I thought he had a speech impediment and starting walking. I was a little pig.

It turned out that he knew this.

“I sweep the
floor,
” Leo added, breaking into a trot to catch up with me. “All round here. Outside all the rehearsal halls.”

“Do you wait tables at sororities, too?” I asked. I knew scholarship students did. Belatedly, I was considering joining one, though I already had enough credits to be a junior. I lived in a crummy apartment and had learned that divine independence was really having to make new pudding every time one of your roommates got stoned and ate all four servings.

“I’d rather sweep, frankly,” Leo said.

“Why? Waiters get free meals.”

“I’m not that fond of stuck-up bitches. And I don’t think anybody whose first name is Spenser deserves to be waited on.”

I studied him. “I’m a stuck-up bitch,” I said, allowing one strap of my leotard to slip.

“No,” he said, again with that fishhook smile, “you can be stuck up and still not be a bitch.”

“Who says I’m stuck up?”

“I know people. I know you name-drop. I know your dad has Kurt Vonnegut over to his house….”

“That’s just because they’re the same age and he lives down the street—”

“It’s still name-dropping.”

“Oh, well,” I tossed back at him, “thanks for coming to my recital to preach moral hygiene to me. Happy, uh, sweeping.”

“Let me sweep you off your feet,” Leo said.

I winced at the line, “Ouch!”

“Well, I can do better. Listen. I came because it was the only time I could watch you dance without pretending to work. You’re…so beautiful it hurts to look at you.”

“James Jones,” I said.

“Close enough,” said Leo.

“Who’s stuck up?” I countered.

“Oh, I’m stuck up in a different sense. I have a high IQ. My parents are poor but proud. My mother is a Holocaust survivor. She was two, and her whole family escaped, but it still counts.”

“You’re a
reverse
snob, then.”

“Exactly. And that’s ever so much better, moral-superiority-wise.”

“Jack Lemmon.”

“Well, Billy Wilder.”

“So what’s your major?”

“Not dance.”

“Neither is mine. I love it, but I’ll end up forcing kids to read Nell Harper.”

“Known to the world as Harper Lee.”

“Shut
up
!” I told him, laughing, “I’m not used to guys I can’t fool.”

He wanted to be a poet. He was majoring in business administration.

We went to the Kafé Kafka for sticky buns and tea. Never made it to the table.

We
fell
into bed. The tea with milk we’d taken away in paper cups grew a gelid overcoat through the long, long night. I was as eager to be devirginized as I was to learn to rappel down a real mountain. (We ended up doing both those things together, for the first time. Leo said
that night
he’d been around the block, but later confessed he’d stopped at the cross-walk.) We tried ably to coach each other, and the morning after my recital, neither of us could walk without pain. I personally wanted to stand up in English 303 (Swift, Pope, and Fielding) to cry out,
I’m changed!
It took a week for the scabby irritation (we called it ‘kissing chin’) to clear up.

Two months into our affair, a word we never would have used to describe what we felt, which was Love Everlasting, Leo wrote,

Has anyone past college age ever used the word
hue
?

Well, good God, how could I fail to fall in love with a boy who was not only assured of earning a good living, but had also already formally designated me his muse? Business management was transparent, if uninspiring, to Leo. He understood and committed things to memory that were impenetrable to his classmates. And he already had a decent business going, ghostwriting term papers.

On fire, burning through the racks of Trojans, we waited until the following fall, enduring a hideous summer apart. Then, with our parents’ bemused permission, I married the boy who described himself as “the only Jew from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.”

I was twenty. Leo, who’d had to take fewer class hours to have time to earn out his scholarship, was nearly twenty-five. Think of that. Twenty. Barely. Had our life been normal, I don’t know if I’d have let my son Gabe go to Florida on a
road trip
at twenty, much less get
married.
Well, maybe a road trip to Florida. But why did our parents permit this? Were they nuts? Was it a more innocent or perhaps not so tarnished time of the world?

Were we just so evidently right for each other?

The comedy of our parents’ meeting was rich.

Hannah and Gabe Steiner Sr., funereally attired in black wool, in the month of June, came to dinner. They were as properly impressed with Ambrose and Julia Gillis as my parents’
droit de seigneur
required. They gazed around my parents’ tenth-floor (of ten), ten-room flat at the Venecia, overlooking Central Park West, with the affect of people who feared they might at any moment be arrested. But after three glasses of champagne, my father grew historically and histrionically teary over Hannah’s simple description of the disappearance of her entire family into the maw of Buchenwald, their rescue, at the eleventh hour, arranged by the wealthy family of a German priest who’d been a boyhood pal of Hannah’s father so captured Dad with its poignancy that I was terrified he would get up and start singing “Sunrise, Sunset.”

“I’ve always admired the chosen people,” Father intoned, as Leo and I tried to fold ourselves into a corner of a loveseat.

“We keep hoping the Lord will admire the Lutherans,” Gabe Senior told him. They exchanged cigars.

The Steiners’ adoration of their beloved, excellent, and only boy was extravagant. My parents clearly considered me a pearl beyond price. My sister, Janey, thought Leo delectably ethnic, though he truly was anything but. He said he’d never even owned a yarmulke. Despite their antecedents, the Steiners were the most casual of Jews, my parents the merest literary Episcopalians, fond of quoting Saint Luke at Christmas. For holiday fare, both families preferred Chinese food. There was no question of a clash of values. In short, we went from dinner to a match. Six weeks later, at Thanksgiving break, we left my parents’ apartment for a six-day sail in the Seychelles—my parents’ wedding gift—and then set up housekeeping in a crummy apartment of our own, but with good towels and wineglasses.