Perfection (14 page)

“Cathy is a friend, isn’t she?” he said.

“I don’t get Cathy,” I replied, sitting up in bed and turning toward Henry. “I don’t feel comfortable around her. She’s very hot and cold. And she and I never do anything together on our own anyway. It’s not like we’re real friends. We’d never spend so much time together if Liza and Amy weren’t so close.”

“Well, I think you should give Cathy a chance,” Henry said gently. “I think you should make some new friends. You don’t need Irena.”

I called Irena now,
on one of these sweltering July days. She told me that she had seen It—Henry and Cathy. She had the advantage of being from outside our small town. During that weekend three years earlier, she had seen Henry and Cathy interact, put the puzzle together. Unknown to me, or anyone else at the gathering, Irena had confronted him directly.

“I said to Henry, ‘What’s going on with you and that woman?’ And he said, ‘Is it that obvious?’ I told him, ‘I don’t want to know anything about this, I don’t want to be your confidante. Julie’s one of my closest friends. I just want you to deal with this now and tell me when it’s over.’ So he said, ‘Irena, you understand that if this gets out my marriage is over.’ It felt like a threat. If I told you, then he would blame me for the consequences.

“I couldn’t spend time with you while he was doing this,” Irena continued, recalling her confusion and the anger she had felt toward Henry. “I didn’t know what to do—I was caught in such a bad place. I felt like I was lying every time I saw you.”

Listening to her, I recalled one strangely strained lunch during this time. Irena had asked me pointed questions: whether I
was happy in my marriage, how I really felt about supporting Henry’s writing career, did I feel fully appreciated, weren’t there dreams of my own that I should be pursuing? These queries had prompted a performance of loyalty on my part that felt less than authentic, as I tried my best to create the vision of Henry and myself on a path together with common goals for the future.

“I didn’t want you to go through what I had just been through. I had just been through my divorce,” Irena said, recalling the painful drama I had witnessed as her friend. I shivered, wondering how difficult it would have been to tangle legally with Henry, a man who never liked to lose an argument.

“I hoped he would just end the thing with Cathy, quickly, and this would be a small blip in a long marriage. And mostly, I was afraid that if I told you what I knew, you would just defend him and reject me, and then our friendship would be broken forever.”

Here I had to admit, sadly, that she was probably right. I would have continued to defend Henry, because making allowances and excuses for his behavior was part of living in the bubble.

“But, Julie, I know he loved you,” Irena said. “I know he did. That’s why he kept it secret. I worried that he would never let you go if you found out and wanted to end your marriage. He wouldn’t have made leaving easy for you. He didn’t want to lose you or Liza.”

My life in those last years of marriage was like a blister that forms on your heel from a too-tight shoe—the body’s imperfect attempt to create a protective layer over a wound.
Now I will have to lance the blister, endure the pain, and then try a different life, one that fits me better.

Late July 2003

The days crawled by,
the heat relentless. At least Liza was out of the steamy house and safely away from most of my unpredictable bursts of rage. Anna and I took turns ferrying the kids back and forth from day camp, morning and afternoon. One morning Anna returned unexpectedly after camp drop-off, carrying a large manila envelope.

“What’s in the package?” I asked grimly. The two of us seemed dogged by bad luck. No packages were innocent now. We both looked like hell, exhausted and miserable. I’d stopped eating again, and she looked haggard as well. In moments of dark humor, we called it the Death and Divorce Diet.

Anna held out the package. “It’s all the e-mails John exchanged with his little chippie,” she said, confirming my fears. “I was going to ask you if you could keep this here for me. It’s too painful to keep in my house. But I might need it.”

I took the package from her, and we chose a place on a high shelf in my office, so that I would not be tempted to open it. I had enough of my own toxic waste to read through.

We wandered back into the kitchen, where I poured us each a glass of iced tea. We sat at the table quietly, clutching our sweating glasses.

Anna, twirling the end of her red braid, broke the silence. “Julie, do you ever think about moving back to the city?”

“I think I’ll go crazy if I stay here too much longer,” I mumbled, doodling a city skyline in the condensation on my glass. I pressed the cool, wet glass to my cheek.

Oh, for
Star Trek
technology, whereby Liza and I and the cats and our stuff could be beamed into a decent and not too expensive two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment. Maybe with a little garden, like that place Henry and I had when Liza was born.

“My brother says I shouldn’t run away,” I said, feeling tears well up. “He says I have to be patient, and wait out the first year. But I don’t know how much more of this shit I can stand.”

“Yeah, I hear ya,” Anna said, laughing bitterly. She came over and gave me a hug. “I hate being here, kicking around such a big house.”

The knowledge that we shared the same vast loneliness helped me stop crying.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’ll never be able to afford it after the divorce.”

“I am a bit scared to uproot Liza right now,” I said, my mind momentarily tangling with the thousand small details a move would involve.

“It would be tough,” Anna said. “But I bet we could do it,” she added with sudden brightness.

We had already made elaborate shopping and packing lists for our August trip to Maine. We were the List Queens. I wondered if we could plan a move back to the city together the same way. We could make lists; accomplish tasks. This woman was not flaky, even though her life was splitting at the seams, just like mine. If we decided to do this, we’d do it. But I wasn’t ready, not
yet. “Let’s think about it,” Anna said, looking at me intently, sensing my uncertainty. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”

Late at night, Liza asleep in my bed,
I was still wide awake and reading again in my office. Here was a jaw-dropper. This, from a man who prided himself on his self-awareness and sophisticated understanding of human nature.

A little conflicted? Ya think? How could he be so detached? How did he not understand that his actions, even secret ones, were causing damage to our marriage, and his daughter
?

I had never enjoyed smoking pot or taking drugs, though I had certainly made futile efforts to be cool in high school. In the end, I hated the sense of dislocation that drugs produced. I was not comfortable taking on roles. It was enough of a daily struggle to identify my true self. But clearly Henry loved playing games.

My brother, David, sent me an e-mail he had found while going through Henry’s financial records months earlier. He hadn’t understood everything at the time; he didn’t even know to whom Henry was writing. But he had guessed enough to know that he couldn’t send the e-mail to me then; its content was too combustible.

When I read the exchange, dated September 20, 2002, I could
imagine something of the situation. Henry wrote:

He was trying many roles, alternately bewildered, seductive, pleading, condescending, and belligerent. There was something cold in his way of shutting Cathy down at the end. “I am going to be very upset with you.”

Cathy followed with a note to Henry about her joy seeing him again after not speaking for several months but insisted that they must not resume their sexual relationship. Her note read like the “no, no, no, we mustn’t” that is, in fact, an invitation.

I wondered if Henry was looking forward to the game of winning her over again, just so he could despise her more. It was clear that he liked fucking her, he liked that a lot.

No later correspondence survived. I could only imagine how this drama would have turned out. In her phone conversations with me, Cathy had taken credit for ending their sexual affair the summer before he died. Henry’s therapist had suggested to me that he wanted to end the affair. There was no way to know the truth now.

When I recalled the scene as Cathy wept over Henry’s body at the wake, it seemed most likely that on the day of his death this relationship wasn’t over at all, not by a long shot. The game hadn’t lost its appeal for him, and perhaps she hadn’t yet given up hope that he might still leave me for her.

Although most of Cathy and Henry’s e-mails had been lost or destroyed at some point following their discovery, there was plenty of other e-mail from the months before his death. I turned to that next. In one long letter, Henry unburdened himself to Christine, the woman in California—the woman Henry, and then Tomas, had told me about—the knitting divorcée, with ex-husband, two kids, and a messy house. For Christine’s benefit, Henry glamorized Cathy in his tale. It’s good to believe one’s own stories, and he could be sure that Christine would never meet Cathy. Henry was what my high school English teacher would have termed an “unreliable narrator.”

There were certainly prettier women than Cathy in our town. Her availability and willingness to play a dangerous game by his rules must have been sufficient compensation. But the danger was key, the big bad-boy thrill.

In a fury, I slammed the e-mail down on my desk, crying as much in rage as from my own shame, that I hadn’t seen all this before. More pacing in the garden, more yanking of weeds.
I may not have wanted to see this before, but I will look at it now, every fucking square inch of it. I am sick of feeling like the town idiot. It can’t be that I am the only woman in this situation. This must happen every day, just like it happened to Anna. Just that most of the assholes don’t drop dead and leave all this debris behind.

I stomped back to the office. The practical planner in me—
who made lists, paid bills, completed work on deadline, boiled water for endless spaghetti dinners, made sure that Liza’s homework was done and that she had clean underwear—began a research project. I took out a fresh ruled pad from my supply cupboard, made a list, and started calling up the women.

I found Christine’s phone number, and I left a message for her. I returned to Henry’s long letter and hunted for the other women in his address book.

Another muggy afternoon.
Liza had returned from day camp, but I felt unable to be her mother. Instead I sat alone in my office thinking about the last years Henry and I spent together, comforted by the drone of the TV in the living room. SpongeBob had been steadily babysitting Liza for months now. Television had been an acceptable distraction from the sadness of Henry’s death, and now the horrors unfolding in my office.

I had been distracted long before Henry’s death, in my marriage, even when we had sex. Nestled in a familiar tangle under our sheets, I’d run through to-do lists in my head. When I opened my eyes, I’d muse on the sparkly dust on our windowpanes and the moonlight outside, while he was inside me, making me come. I was tired a lot, and tired of fighting with him. The truth now settled hard upon me. Of course there had been signs of his bad behavior, but I had willfully ignored all of them.

“I want you to be more like my girlfriend, less like a wife,” he told me several times during that last fall.

“You should pay more attention to me, less to Liza.” This had been a continual refrain since her birth.

It was clear that Henry’s well-known flirtatiousness was not
innocent fun but in fact a well-used modus operandi that had been wildly successful, not only in charming our immediate social world (
hundreds of people at his funeral!
), but also in winning female admirers in many corners of the land. I smacked my fist down hard onto my desk so it would hurt, a better choice than smashing it into a wall.

I had been afraid to look at the truth, because there was so much at stake. I had been afraid of being alone. Now I was alone. I had accepted intolerable behavior because of the fear that I couldn’t live without him. But here I was, living without him.

Henry had sent the same Valentine message to Cathy and Mandy (the hot-and-cold advertising executive he’d identified in his letter to Christine) within several minutes of e-mail time. I had to smile at the efficiency of it all, a savage little cut-and-paste job.

I had not received that naughty Valentine. That year Henry gave me a handmade card, penned with a freshly composed poem, as well as a gorgeous arrangement of roses, iris, wild thistles, euphorbia, and hydrangea, flowers he knew I loved. Which Valentine offering, I wondered, represented the more authentic sentiment?