To My Ex-Husband (7 page)

I shouldn't pick on Nancy. It's just that I don't even know where to begin. I suppose I should be sitting here trying to figure out why, trying to understand, to make sense.
Why has this happened? What did I do?

Isn't that what women do? In the end, they blame themselves. Somewhere I read that—that women see themselves as the cause when things go wrong, whereas men blame something external, some other person, a malady, an ulterior motive, the weather.

But right now I'm not interested in any of that. It's after 4
A.M.
I can't sleep, can't imagine sleeping ever again, and I don't care about blame, or if blame is even an appropriate issue. All I want to know is, what was it like with you and Esther? What did you do to her, what did she do to you? If you'd kissed Esther, if you'd held her close, that knowledge would be enough; but that you traveled inside her body, straight into forbidden territory, makes my stomach turn.

Some would say I'm punishing myself, trying to visualize all this. But I want to know, I really do. Does she like the same things I like? Is she anything like me? My husband leaves me after twenty years and doesn't, until many months later, tell me the whole truth, doesn't tell me he was in love with someone else, had been for two years, had a secret agenda. He isn't the man I know, he's some other man.

You can't imagine how disorienting this is. If I could have named a single quality of the man I married, the person who has been at the center of my life for two decades, that word would be “integrity.” Even in the tiniest ways, you were someone who never compromised himself. You had that core of wholeness that could not be cracked or chipped. A truly solid man. You were capable of being boring, stubborn, compulsive, irritating, judgmental, oblivious, and, occasionally, of having bad breath. But a word like “dishonest” could not possibly have applied. That integrity was your draw. It was the thing that made me the most secure, the thing I could depend on. Some women compensate for their own insecurities by marrying money, someone warm and loving, perhaps, but prosperous absolutely.

I married you because I knew, with a certainty that I'd have bet my life on, that you could be trusted. I married you because you were not like me. I was whimsical and impulsive and given to waves of elation and despair. I might fly away and self-destruct. You would keep me grounded.

This feels like a rape; the betrayal is that profound. It really would have been so much better if you had died. I heard a woman express that very sentiment once at a dinner party. “It's always best when your first husband dies,” she said, stabbing a smoked oyster with a toothpick. It was delivered as a simple statement of fact, and I accepted it with a single knowing bark of a laugh. Certainly I had wished as much for my mother's sake. When, more than ten years later, he did die, it was too late. So much of her had already been trampled to death.

Now I see why, among other things, I seemed “just fine,” as everybody said. Nina told me that it was amazing, I was going through all this stuff, but that I looked better than ever. True, I'd managed to have good days, but there had been some bad ones, too. I was on a roller coaster that I learned to let take me whichever way it was going. And yet, beyond it all lay a challenge, an enticement that I couldn't identify, some sparkling pool of untested water collecting on the horizon, like a diamond in time. A day might come when I would grab it and run.

And now this pain, searing and endless. There's nothing else like it. I keep thinking,
It could be worse
. Peter or Annie could have died.

My reality has been turned upside down. How could I have been so out of it? The lecture tours, the stopovers in Denver. What about the times Esther visited us? How did you stand my presence—by praying that I would fall backward down the cellar stairs?

I picture you two tearing across the room, flying into each other's arms every time I went off to the bathroom or to turn the chicken. Ninety seconds here, two and a half minutes there. The image is almost comical. Scramble, scramble, kiss, kiss and then, quick! Here she comes!

How does the busiest man in America have time to leave his studio? Or did you walk out on your students? Why wasn't it some stringy-haired postgraduate groupie, or a model from a life drawing class, some faceless female I couldn't appreciate your interest in? It's a bit ironic, all those times we played the Who-would-you-marry-if-I-died? game. Somehow, there's very little satisfaction in knowing that I always had it exactly right.

Where did you go when she was here, whose apartment? A hotel? One of those tasteful places with gold faucets and a hundred-and-fifty percent occupancy? If you weren't the busiest man in America, you were the poorest. See how you've managed to overcome the two revolving reasons why we could never do anything. Emily,
please
. I have to work. Emily,
please
. We don't have any money. Isn't it amazing, the obstacles you can overcome, obstacles as insurmountable as time and money, when you're in love?

When I'm not thinking about this, I'm thinking about how stupid I feel. Or maybe it's naiveté. Whatever it is, I seem to have raised it to an art form. I always was that way. Even as late as college, when other girls were saying things like, “He only wants her for one thing,” I thought, what? What's the one thing? People tried to explain it to me, and I still didn't get it. “Why,” I said, “would anyone want to do that with someone he didn't like?”

This morning I saw Dr. Bloom on what you could call an emergency basis. He just looked at me and, in that voice that's so soft, so smooth, it's as if he's swallowed 3-in-One oil, said, “Nick's behavior makes a lot more sense to me now.”

I love that voice, am hypnotized by it. But without even realizing it, I've come to associate it with bombs falling. The smoother the voice, the more terrible the discovery. My body prepares; it knows. My chest heaves, moisture oozes through my skin. My hands fly up in front of my face to break the fall.
Please. I don't want to know
.

I recall that voice speaking to me last June, when I told him that you'd gone to bed one steamy night with your jockstrap on. It didn't matter that I wanted you to take it off. “You're going to sleep with
that
on?”

I got the same weary response that I always got when I wanted something.
Emily, I'm tired. Emily, I just want to go to sleep
.

Sleep
, with these poor, pink little buttocks bound in a veritable highway system of thick, sweaty gray elastic. “It has to be,” I told Dr. Bloom, “one of the ugliest articles of clothing known to man.”

He laughed. He's not above letting me have fun with a story. Then he looked at me solemnly and said, in his 3-in-One voice, “I think that something is bothering Nick.”

I keep thinking about that night at Isabel's. I wish I'd known it at the time. I wish I'd known that of all those women, I had the best story of all.

APRIL 9

Nina has spared me. She refrained from saying, “I told you so.” What she said instead was, “On some level, I knew it all along.” It was that “on some level” that I was grateful for. What I thought she meant, of course, was that she knew there had to be someone. She knew there had to be more to your leaving than just, “We want different things.” But it was worse than that. She knew all along that it was Esther.

Funny how you lock something in your mind without knowing why, a single word spoken in a certain way, a mood, a facial expression. The shutter clicks, and there it is, forever. I remember it as vividly as if it were yesterday, a sweltering August weekend that Esther came for a visit. I'm not even sure what year it was, just that it was unbearably hot. She had just arrived, and was standing in the dining room. She had a book, something by Susan Sontag, and she was telling you about it—and it was clear that she was talking to you, as if I weren't even in the room. I remember the look, an unmistakable look, lovely and exclusionary. It was a look of love.

There was a shy, breathless air about Esther at that moment, no doubt because she had just arrived, and there you were, right in front of her, literally taking her breath away. I even remember the way she stood, her left knee bent, her foot lifting ever so slightly off the floor. She was tense, excited, her rotten little toes curling in her shoe.

“Some of this is very difficult,” she said, opening the book and turning to the place she had in mind.

It's stunning, isn't it, that a moment could so etch itself in your head and yet not register? But this is what I've been doing, all day, every day, highlighting the moments. They're not what I thought at the time, those moments. They're not what I thought, because while I was with you, every single day of the last two years, doing things that couples do, eating sandwiches and talking about remodeling the kitchen and cutting the grass and watching the kids orchestrate their social lives on Call Waiting, you were in love with Esther. It all looks different now, cast in a new and ugly light. I thought we'd had some good times, even in those last stressful months, and that nobody could take them away from me. But you managed to do it. You took all those memories—damn you!—and turned them into something I can never think of again without thinking of Esther. It's like looking at a photograph, of your son's graduation from high school, say, and seeing this shadowy figure lurking in the background. And you hold it a little closer, and you think, My God! There's Esther. There's my husband's lover. What the hell is she doing there?

APRIL 13

“How can you blame someone for falling in love?” This is Nina's feeling, anyway. It's not exactly the cozy, commiserative comment I needed, but she's always felt that way, even when she found out about Alec and Nicole. Everybody said, “Don't you just
hate
Nicole?” No, she really didn't. She didn't hate anybody. She just wanted to die.

Well, I don't hate Esther, either, nor is Nina going to do me the favor of hating her for me. But I can't be Esther's friend. She did make a choice between you and me. The fact that Esther eventually worked things out with her husband doesn't change that.

There was one thing Nina said that made me feel better. “What I can't understand,” she said, “is anybody's having a choice between you and Nick and choosing Nick.”

I don't get it. I thought I was Esther's friend. But friendship pales, apparently, in the presence of a man. That's the great female malaise that makes a woman rush, headlong, every time, toward the man, the generic Man. Never mind that he's taken, or that he happens to be married to a friend, or that she herself happens to be married, or whether he's inappropriate in a hundred other ways.

In time, I may soften my line on Esther, as Nina has done with Nicole. Of course, it helps that Alec has now moved on to someone else, just as it helps me to know that it's over with Esther, that it has been over. But it is fresh for me, as if you had been in bed with Esther yesterday and still loved her today. I have to remind myself that it's been nine whole months since Esther left you in an August thunderstorm and flew home to tell Don what was going on. Their marriage may be better for it. I may even be generous enough someday to say I hope so. It would be good for the supermarket tabloids, too:
HOW HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH MY FRIEND'S HUSBAND SAVED MY MARRIAGE
!

I read something in a Miss Manners column once on the subject of faithless husbands. She said it was an old and ugly trick of society to pit the women against one another and forgive the men. She's right. It
is
an old and ugly trick, and I shouldn't bother playing it on Esther who, after all, may not be worth my wrath. She isn't the woman I thought she was. Nor you the man. Not because of the affair, but because of all the disguised weaknesses that were revealed. Telling me, for instance, as if I could be sympathetic, even so long after the fact, “Emily, I had two separations to go through.” If you had been watching a play, you'd have loathed the character. You'd have said, “That worm.” If being single has taught me anything, it's that nothing,
nothing
, is what it seems.

MAY 5

Ah, yes. To sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. I know there was a time when I went to bed at night and slept until morning. I can't really imagine that now, can't feel in my bones what it must be like. I'm beginning to look deranged, nervous and big-eyed, like a lemur. It dawns on me, finally, the full meaning of an acquired characteristic. Because, in point of fact, I am getting awfully good at seeing in the dark. By summer, I will have completed my metamorphosis into a nocturnal animal and you will be able to tell people, with some accuracy, that you were once married to a small monkey. Do I sound insane? I NEED TO SLEEP.

And yet I don't feel in the least tired. On the contrary, I'm oddly energized, racing toward my middle-of-the-night high, when I write letters, or roll around in my/your old bed and think delicious, murderous thoughts. Years ago, I remember, someone in our neighborhood created a scandal by suddenly leaving his wife and running off to Florida with their babysitter. The next day, that short, funny woman with the frosted hair and the foul mouth who lived down the street came over and said, “Honey, if that ever happened to me, it would be on the front page.” God, she made me laugh.

But the thing was, the reason I laughed was that I knew it was true. It
would
have been on the front page. One didn't mess with that woman. She was all heart underneath, but she meant business.

Well, I wish I were more like her. I wish I were a front-page kind of woman. Even my “murderous” thoughts are mild, as if I could be jailed for dreaming. Fantasies can be pretty dull if you don't know what you want. Do I want Esther dead, so that practically everybody I know can sit around and mourn? Death elevates. Imagine. My adversary, an angel. Angel Esther.