Outtakes from a Marriage (11 page)

That night I stayed up late, eating ice cream and watching a movie after Joe and the kids had gone to bed. It was the film version of
The Crucible,
and I was quite taken aback by Joan Allen’s heroic speech to her husband at the end. “It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery,” she had said to Daniel Day-Lewis during their moment of reckoning before his execution. “It were a cold house I kept.”

Was our house—our marriage—cold? Had I caused Joe to stray? There was certainly no disputing that our sex life wasn’t what it had been before we had kids. Whose was? Babies change you. Before I was pregnant with Ruby, I used to watch mothers tend lovingly to screaming babies and toddlers, and I worried that I might never be able to summon up the appropriate maternal instincts toward any future offspring of my own. In my mind I was witnessing an extremely annoying little person and an adult with an almost Christ-like capacity for love, tenderness, and forgiveness. I didn’t understand their history the way I do now. The history of the mother and child’s love for each other, which, for me, began almost immediately after Ruby was conceived. Nine months before Joe ever saw or touched Ruby, I was awash with her, my every waking moment consumed by thoughts of her. Then, in those first days and nights of her life when she needed to suckle almost hourly, everything beyond her spiky pink hair (really, it was pink), those dimpled knees and elbows, those gorgeous lips…everything beyond Ruby disappeared into a sort of soft-focus backdrop. We spent endless hours gazing into each other’s eyes. Nobody had told me about the urge to gaze, about the instinct that compelled Ruby and me to peer at each other, over and over again between feedings, passing the gaze back and forth. All night and all day, milk, breaths, gazes, and sighs were passed back and forth between us like life-giving transfusions until both of us were just pumped full of love for each other. And every now and then, from somewhere far off in the murky distance, I’d hear Joe’s voice saying, “I got a callback for that Barry Levinson film. It’s not a big part, but it could be good because…,” and when he was finished with whatever nonsense he was droning on about, I’d say something like, “The skin on her cheek is so soft, it’s like kissing air. Kiss her. It’s like kissing nothing. I can’t stop kissing her.”

When I read
The Crucible
in high school, and later when I saw the play, I had imagined that “Goodwife” Proctor was probably not such a great wife at all, and I always felt that her personal revelation at the end was simply too little, too late. She was obviously not giving her husband enough sex, so he
had
to go elsewhere. Now I didn’t feel so generous. Why couldn’t men see that the children grow, they leave the bed? Then, eventually, they leave the home. Someday there’ll be just the two of them again, the husband and wife. I saw now that the whole mess—the witch hunt, the trial, and the executions—all of it was John Proctor’s fault. He had seduced an unstable girl, then he had cast her aside. The girl was enacting her revenge and his wife and kids were the victims.

A parable of the McCarthy trials, my ass.

My big, fat, whopping ass.

When I went into the bedroom, I saw that Joe had fallen asleep with his laptop open on the bed next to him. I went to move it and wondered if he had been looking at the Gawker site. I crawled into bed next to him and placed the laptop across my thighs. I went to
Gawker.com
and typed Joe’s name into the search box at the top of the page. A series of dates appeared on the screen. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be an archive of previous Joe Ferraro sightings, but indeed there was. I clicked on January 6, which was the night before.

Spotted Joe Ferraro and two women walking into the Dublin House on the Upper West Side. Appeared to be wife and younger woman. Threesome drank at bar for almost an hour. Wife and younger woman disappeared into restroom together for about ten minutes, then returned to the bar looking disheveled. The Ferraros left around 1:00, Joe helping giggly wife who appeared to have had one too many.

Ruby had read this. My sweet Ruby had read about her drunken mother. I read and reread the line about Nikki and I going to the ladies’ room together and I wondered what Ruby had made of that.

“Joe?” I said. I said it before I had a chance to think. I just said it because I felt so alone.

“Hmm?”

“I’m scared,” I said. It felt like I might start crying, so I focused on my breathing.

“What?” Joe mumbled.

I closed the laptop and I placed it on the floor next to the bed. Then I shut off the light. Breathing in and out.

“Honey?” Joe mumbled.

“Yeah.”

Joe rolled over toward me and I turned away. He put his arms around my middle and pulled me in to him, pulled my shoulders back up against his chest and cradled my breast in his palm. Joe has always found great comfort cupping something while he rests, his balls or one of my breasts, either will do. He held my breast in his palm and he dozed back off. I could feel his sleep in the heaviness of his limbs on me and in the steadiness of his breath, and the disgust I had felt toward him was slowly displaced by the familiar warmth of his skin against mine, his chest pressed into the curve of my back, our bodies intertwined as they had been thousands of nights before.

“So?” Beth had said after he left that first morning. That blistering hot July morning in 1986. She was trying not to laugh, I could tell.

“What?”

“Just a little surprised to see the Spaniel here this morning, that’s all.”

We called Joe “the Spaniel” back then.

“Okay, well, don’t tell Alison.” Alison was our other roommate.

“Soooo…” Beth grinned, kicking a chair out for me to sit on and handing me her pack of Marlboro Lights. “What happened?”

“I took him to see that band.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh, because you wouldn’t come!”

“Oh, so this is my fault. I see.” She grinned again.

“He called last night to see what we were up to and I asked him to go to CBGB’s. Because nobody else would come…”

“Because we knew it was going to be a hundred fucking degrees in that place…”

“Well, I still wanted to go.”

“Because you thought the Weasel was going to be there!”

We called this guy Eddie “the Weasel.”

“Did you make coffee?” I asked Beth, trying to change the subject.

“Yeah. I had to use toilet paper for a coffee filter again. It’s your turn to go to the store.”

“I know.”

“So let me get this straight. You took Joe…stalking with you? That’s an interesting idea for a first date.”

“Scalding coffee,” I said, pouring myself a cup, “about to be dumped on your head.” I was giggling now, because I was deliriously tired and a little hung over. It was still early morning and I was already drenched in sweat. “It wasn’t a first date! I’ve known Joe for months.”

“Well? Was Weasel there?”

“Yeah, he showed up toward the end of the set. He was with that freaky redhead who always wears the boots.”

“You mean…his girlfriend?”

I shuffled over to the refrigerator and removed a carton of milk. I smelled it and then poured some of it into my coffee.

“You know, I think you’re right. I think they
are
going out,” I said.

“Julia, they’ve been sleeping together for months—he told you that! Why do you deny this obvious fact?”

“I don’t deny it,” I said, “and I don’t really give a shit anymore.”

“Wow! You and Joe must have had some big night.” Beth laughed.

This was when we were living in the loft on Avenue B, Beth and Alison and I. Alison and I were both at NYU—Alison was a drama major, I was supposed to be a journalism major, and I have no idea what Beth was supposed to be studying at the time. She was at Parsons—drawing or illustrating or something. Anyway, we lived in a huge unfinished loft that had once been occupied by Alison’s brother. He had moved to Amsterdam with his boyfriend but he still held the rent-controlled lease, and he sublet the place to us for something crazy like three hundred dollars a month. Almost the entire sixth floor of an old warehouse building, it had two long walls of floor-to-ceiling arched windows and was only approachable by stairs that were littered with beer bottles and cigarette butts. Beth had a very useful boyfriend when we first moved in—a sculptor named Chris who was handy with tools and drywall and paint—and he lived with us for a while and built a few bedrooms in exchange for rent. The only toilet was in an old-fashioned water closet down the hall, and we shared it with a frail but kindly former junkie who lived on the floor below us. We lounged on colorful thrift-shop furniture and bathed in our industrial-sized kitchen sink, which sounds ridiculous now, but this was the eighties. The city was filthy and crime ridden. We threw great parties and were comped at all the best clubs and once had a short feature written about us in
New York
magazine. Sam Shepard showed up at one of our parties. Somebody whom Alison and Beth swear was Joe Strummer appeared briefly at another (he was gone by the time I got home from work that night). The graffiti artist Zephyr tagged one of our walls one night in big, loopy orange and gray letters. We had a gigantic old black Garland stove, but none of us cooked, and on occasion, when Alison came home a little tipsy, she would decide to have a nice hot soak in the sink next to it, and if Beth and I brought friends home later, we would have to explain why there was a naked model sleeping in a sink full of dirty dishes next to our front door.

Joe has said during interviews that I was a model when we met, but I never really modeled. I did a fashion show once for this Israeli designer we hung out with, stomping down the runway in a clear cellophane blouse, leather pants, and heavy combat boots, and I was on the cover of a Chemo Haze album (they had a hit song in the early eighties—you’d know it if you heard it) because Alison was seeing their bass player at the time, but I wasn’t a real model. Alison was a real model. She had been signed by Eileen Ford the first week she arrived in Manhattan and she did a lot of runway stuff and features in
Elle
and
Harper’s Bazaar.
She also auditioned for films and television shows and NYU productions, and that’s how we met Joe. He was in a play with Alison. It was Bertolt Brecht’s
Baal
and he played the wino. Alison was in love with the guy who played Baal. She’d had a one-night stand with him and now she wanted Beth and me to come to opening night and to the after-party so we could tell her if we thought he was straight.

“You slept with him but you want
us
to tell you if he’s straight?” Beth had asked.

“Well, I think he might be kind of bi.”

“Based on what?” I had asked.

“Just a feeling. I dunno.”

“Did he have…problems in bed? The night you guys were together?” asked Beth.

“Yeah, a little.”

“But you said you were both drunk. That’s probably why,” Beth replied. “You’re just being neurotic.”

“No, it wasn’t just that. He told me he’s been with a guy.”

“What?!” I said.

“Alison!” Beth cried out.

“It was just once,” Alison said. “He was just experimenting! Jesus, you guys have such a naive view of sexuality. Lots of people try homosexual sex when they’re young.”

“Yeah, I know,” Beth said. “And those people are called homosexuals.”

“Wait until you meet him,” said Alison. “He’s gorgeous. I mean, I’m sure everybody comes onto him all the time, male and female, and he just…well, just come. You won’t think he’s gay when you meet him.”

So we went to the play, and at the party afterward, I met Joe. I had hated the play and didn’t really notice him onstage. Joe wasn’t as noticeable then, especially near Ben Grier, the lead who—Alison was right—didn’t seem gay. Or maybe it was too difficult for women to imagine that he was gay because he was so gorgeous. Tall, lean, yet muscled. Tousled sandy-blond hair. He’s on
All My Children
now, but at the time we all thought he was going to be the next Marlon Brando.

Joe was more heavily muscled—even a little chubby—back then. “That was baby fat,” I would later tell Ruby when she laughed at early pictures of Joe and me. “You still have baby fat in your twenties?” she asked, and I said, “You do if your diet consists entirely of waffles, macaroni and cheese, and beer.”

Joe wore unflattering glasses, and his dark hair was short, but still somehow always messy, and he usually had rough stubble on his cheeks and chin. He always had those great eyes, of course—“seaglass blue” was how a critic would describe them years later—with those thick brown lashes, and his lips that turned up at the corners like a kitten’s. He had a shy way of tilting his head down a little when he was talking to me, then glancing up quickly and looking straight into my eyes and then looking away.

I had a thing for a guitar player at the time, a tall, skinny Irish kid named Eddie O’Malley (the Weasel) whose band opened for Aimee Mann one night at the Bottom Line and now there was a record label interested. Or so he said.

I was crazy about Eddie O’Malley but, unfortunately, he just wasn’t that into me. He
was
into the press ID I had forged that got us backstage at all the shows. I was doing an internship at the
Village Voice
then and had altered my intern identification into an ID that said: