To My Ex-Husband (14 page)

The truth is, you had rejected me, and now I did the only available thing, which was to turn around and reject him.

And now here you are, telling me that this is painful for you. Is it because you and Isabel aren't seeing each other anymore? Is it because you sense something potentially serious about Edward and me, and that it has occurred to you finally that leaving me might actually have long-term consequences?

But you were so magnanimous when we were separating. I was smart and attractive, you said, and had so much to offer, whereas you were middle-aged with no money and a family history of heart disease. (
Heart disease?
It was almost laughable, how you threw that in. That was the first I'd heard of it.) Anyway, I was a bargain—but not for you, who were old and poor and had every right, genetically speaking, to drop dead. It was better than a note from your doctor.

I have remembered all this, Nick, not just because of how shamefully duplicitous it looked when I found out about Esther, but because of how completely content you were with the notion that I might one day float off into another life with someone else. That may prove to be the one aspect that I can't forgive. That I could go, with your blessing. You wanted me to be happy. I was to understand that.

JUNE 11

How I envy your freedom to conduct your social life in private. I enjoy having Peter and Annie around. Their presence confirms my image of myself as a parent, an image that suffers under the yoke of a single's life. So I'm most at home with myself when they're here; it feels natural. But there's this other problem. My dating life is monitored, every nuance taken in.

I don't think that Annie and Peter really care what I do so long as I don't embarrass them, or worse, involve them. They've been disappointed, disgusted. What are these supposed grown-ups
doing
, they must wonder. They'd like not to be involved. But they can't help observing—and absorbing—while resisting. It's as though they're watching a horror movie with their hand over their eyes and are helplessly compelled, peeking through their fingers.

This isn't me, I want to say. Only it
is
me, it's just not the me they know. And why should they, why should they want to? It's important for them to see the whole, not just the mother. But how painful and annoying that other part of mother must be when it serves merely to remind them of how their lives are changed, and, worse, that they're innocent and unwilling participants in that change.

It would help, as Nina reminds me, if you and I were to wind up in permanent, happier places. But we're free-floating, without any obvious direction.

JULY 2

Forgive me, Nick, if I'm missing something. But this sudden backpedaling seems adolescent to me. The more interest I show in Edward, the more interest you show in me. Is this really a sense of loss, as you put it, or is it competition, possession? I'm not being facetious, or glib. I really want to know. Because I do not, cannot, trust this feeling in you.

AUGUST 31

What do you mean, “How could you?” As though I'd committed murder. Of course, it was a rhetorical question; you didn't expect an answer. But because I think it raises important differences between us, I'm going to give you one anyway.

I won't dismiss it by saying it wasn't easy. Just to take a vacation with another man and place my feet next to him in the sand was something of an issue for me. But I had to decide, early on, what was going to be off-limits. Was I never going to the island again in my life? And if I was, where exactly? On what street would I agree to rent a house? How close to the village? In which market would I shop, on which beaches would I dare to step? So I drew in my first breath on getting off the boat, and said, “There.” I'd done it. One bogeyman down.

I could not go so far as to stay in the same house that we went to with Annie and Peter for most of their childhoods. It was much too big and rambling, for one thing; but those summers in that house were sacrosanct. The rooms would have been full of ghosts, the children's noises, footsteps, even the way the water looked in the moonlight from the upstairs windows—so much I would not have had the energy to overcome.

You're forgetting, though, that not all our summers there were idyllic. I'm speaking particularly of the last one, in the cottage, when we were talking about the possibility of separating. “Where did it all go?” you asked me one night, holding your palms up to the ceiling.

I hate metaphysical ponderables like that. I guess I'm less heady than you are, too down-to-earth, and what I wanted to know was, simply, why you didn't love me anymore. You couldn't make love to me, couldn't pretend, even, couldn't get close enough for tenderness, for consolation. I was as lonely then as a woman could be, there with my non-husband, my non-lover.

Mostly what I remember about that time was lying in bed at night, trying to stifle the crying so that you wouldn't hear me in the next room. I'd emerge in the morning with bulging eyes and the thick upper lids of a frog. Yet no one who didn't know us would have guessed, as we walked along the road with Dickens, our arms wound tightly around each other, that we were a couple in the process of breaking up. No one would have guessed that the man who was leaning close to the woman at his side, pressing his head against hers, was asking as gently as he knew how whether there was anything he could do to make this easier for her.

One afternoon, being slow to wean myself of wifely duties, I cut your hair on the porch steps. I was cutting around your ear, and saw in your glasses the reflection of the daisies in the meadow behind me, across the road. And while I snipped, I considered that small framed bit of wildness that so typified what had been our paradise, and knew that a time would come when we would look back on this, on all we had, and wonder what the hell we thought we were doing.

I couldn't stand it. I wanted to pass away during the night, to magically stop breathing, so that I wouldn't have to wake up with that sickness rising in the pit of my stomach, remembering, as the early-morning light sifted into the room, that it was over.

I wanted to go home, I wanted to stay, I wanted to do anything to ease that pain, but I didn't have any idea what. So now you ask, how could I?

I could because I had a bitter taste about the place that had tainted my memories. But it wasn't the place that was wrong; it was you. You and me. So now I've done something about the place; I've given it a more positive slant. I couldn't, after all, do anything about you.

I said there were differences between us. I don't happen to share your impulse to remove everything from sight that could serve as a reminder of you, or of us. If I did, nearly everything around me would have to go. Then, when I'd gotten rid of all the things, I'd have to do something about the smells, the light at certain seasons of the year, certain cloud formations, music. Imagine the music I could no longer listen to! You're in my blood, Nick. Don't you see? To protect myself from reminders, I'd have to close off my ears and my eyes, my every sense. I'd have to die.

I chose instead to live with it all, and thus live not only with it, but through it. I'm just starting to come out whole to the other side. This experience, this story, every detail of it, is part of me. I roll along, gathering myself toward completion. It's a growing process I don't ever expect to finish; but having survived each day, I wouldn't dream of lopping any of it off. I don't want to surround myself with a lot of unhappy memories any more than you do. But if I don't look them squarely in the face, if I don't accept them and take them in, who am I? I'm somebody who spends her life looking the other way.

I have to say that there were preoccupations with this vacation other than those presented by the past. More than being haunted by you and Annie and Peter, I was concerned about how to handle being with someone I didn't actually know that well on a twenty-four-hour basis. Edward and I had spent only one whole night together. Yes, we had made love several times, but only after three or four months of seeing each other. Even then, we were being chaperoned by Nina and Stephen at their house on Long Beach Island.

Nina was in her bedroom that Sunday morning—
the morning after
—and I ran in and leapt gleefully onto the bed like a kid who's high on cake. I thought I might be in love, and that if I were very careful not to say so out loud, it wouldn't go away. But I was so disgustingly radiant that I didn't have to say anything. She laughed and gave me the biggest hug, and I remember thinking how lucky I was to have a friend who could be so happy for me.

But until then it had been a rather cautious, old-fashioned sort of courtship. Edward and I would lie in bed together for hours and hours, making out and talking. It was like the '50s, except in those days we didn't say much. We just ground our bodies together until the guys complained of “seminal backup” and we girls whined about whisker-burn.

At first I wondered whether Edward was attracted to me, he was so unpushy. But then I got this picture of a man who'd been divorced for several years, and who had plenty of opportunity to recover. (He did a lot of “recovering,” I gather.) I also realized without discussing it that he felt, as I did, that there was something to be said for being friends first. And yet I was intensely curious about him. I wanted to know what he would be like, the way he would breathe, the expression on his face, the force of his body against mine.

By the beginning of August, we had worked ourselves into such a pitch that we'd slip out of our houses on two or three hours' sleep and meet in the woods. Sometimes I'd bring a book that I wanted him to know about. I felt that to understand me he'd have to have read certain essays. So we'd walk, and I'd be reading aloud to him from
Private Lives in the Imperial City
. As the twigs snapped under our feet and Dickens sloshed through the creek, I'd rush through all the best essays, desperate to fill his mind with the same words, the same frames of reference, as mine. I never thought of it as foreplay, but that's what it was. It couldn't simply have been that I wanted to change my image of dentists as people who never read anything other than the copies of
People
that lie splashed across the coffee tables in their waiting rooms.

I adored the frenzy of that time. We were out of control, like two adolescents. And then, not long after, there we were, on vacation, having a sleep-over.

My first thought was that I wouldn't be able to go to the bathroom for two weeks. I'd be like those guys you told me about in basic training who couldn't “go” in a foxhole and were sent home, on the verge of being poisoned by their own waste. I would be carried by helicopter to the mainland, whisked along on a gurney, with this great distended belly, through the throngs of travelers in Logan Airport, to the waiting ambulance.

Fortunately, Edward was very discreet. Or else he reset his body clock for 3
A.M.
In any case, our paths never crossed at crucial moments.

Thus the small hurdles of getting acquainted were overcome early on. The first night when we got into bed, Edward peeled off my nightgown and reached down to caress me. Just as I was getting aroused, he stopped suddenly, as if he had discovered that I'd shaved all my pubic hair off or something. Then he brought his hand out from under the sheet.

“What's this?” he asked, holding up the remains of a Monistat suppository that had failed to melt. It was the third night of a three-part treatment; treatments that are like second nature to me at this point. I had inserted it earlier, without thinking, and then forgotten about it.

“Well?” he said. I had taken one glance at the slender white worm that had become but a sliver of its former self and dived under the sheet. Edward was beside himself, gleefully insisting that I had, in a spasm of unadulterated pleasure, ejected it like a bullet.

Thus was the ice broken. By the next night, I was even able to brush my teeth beneath the critical eye of the professional. My flossing habits are less than systematic, but then Edward himself is nothing if not systematic in all things. He's the sort of person who always has his pencils sharpened, and a completed shopping list that he follows to the letter. He's not like me, someone who writes “trash bags” on her list, only to come home with a large roasting chicken. So there you are. The givens are understood. We're operating from different sides of the brain.

It might interest you to know that I am being schooled in opera—not that I'm a good student. I've told you that Edward adores opera; it's part of his genes, like the way he
knows
olive oil. He'll be in a restaurant, eating tuna carpaccio and suddenly, woefully, he'll shake his head. I don't ask anymore; I know what's wrong. It's the olive oil.

Even I, despite my reckless acceptance of almost any kind of food, have absorbed some of the finer points of olive oil. I've been less successful in the operatic milieu. Edward loves to test me; I, in turn, love to thwart him. Take
La Traviata
, for instance.

It's important to Edward that I understand not only the background of the story—that it's based on Dumas's play,
La Dame aux Caméllias
, et cetera—but the story itself, and which pieces of music go with which parts. I've always been content just to enjoy the music, while paying very little attention to what these people are actually saying. We'll be listening to the second act, and Edward will ask, “What's happening now?”

“Alfredo's father has just come to visit Violetta,” I'll begin, promisingly. A small smile will appear on Edward's lips. I'll continue: “This is just after Alfredo has been singing about the idyllic happiness of his life with Violetta, rejoicing that she has so eagerly given up the excitement of Paris, where she had been such a social butterfly, to be with him in the seclusion of the country.” So far so good. Edward is radiant. I have satisfied the true pedagogue in him.