Perfection (11 page)

It was unsatisfying and maddening. My anger was a creature, wounded and flailing. My anger wanted red meat. My anger wanted revenge. It couldn’t sink its teeth in anywhere.

I thought of all the times I hadn’t been able to say no to Henry. When he wanted to buy a new computer, a new bag for his computer, a new pair of biking shoes, a new bike, when he wanted to throw yet another expensive dinner party.

At last, on the fourth day, she hung up on me, in medias rant.

Good. This has to end. It would be so easy to destroy myself with my anger if she didn’t fight back. I need to retain some shred of self-respect.

Steve, Cathy’s husband,
almost forgotten during the first days, phoned me. “Couldn’t we keep things private? For the children’s sake?”

This was my raw, weak spot—my child. I agreed. Yes, that made sense, why did everyone have to know? My own sense of shame longed to keep everything quiet.

But then, later, I imagined future scenes.

We lived in a very small town.

Our houses were barely half a mile apart.

There would be functions at school, concerts in town, encounters at the grocery store and the drugstore, the dry cleaner, the little gourmet shop where I bought cookies for Liza in the afternoons,
the toy shop on Main Street, where we walked on Saturdays to be fussed over by the shopkeeper, grandma to all the town’s kids.

There would be dinner parties. If no one knew, they would continue to invite Cathy and Steve to these dinners, because they were part of our social group. I would find myself sitting at the same table with her, or sitting on lawn chairs at a barbecue, forced to look at her, forced to greet her and make pleasant conversation. How could I keep our girls apart in that scenario?

I will be worn down.

I will lose my mind.

I will have to live a completely false life.

I can’t pretend. I don’t have the stomach for it. I have always been a terrible liar. No more lying.

There was chaos among the members
of the small group who had held the secret since January. This group turned out to be Matthew and his wife, Emily and her husband, Irena, Anna, Tomas and his former girlfriend, who had all come to the house on the morning of January 9 to help with Henry’s funeral arrangements. They had decided to remain quiet for a time, to let me recover from the shock of Henry’s death. Matthew had planned a funeral for his best friend while coping with his grief, shock, and profound disappointment. Matthew and his wife had been our friends for years. None of the group had counted on Tomas telling me when he did. But as in much of life, things don’t always go as planned.

Emily asked if she could now speak to our other friends. She told me that keeping the secret for these months had been emotionally exhausting. She had felt like a liar. I understood.

And of course there was the little matter of revenge.

Emily raged about the last months—remaining silent, forcing politeness when she saw Cathy in town.

Anna, in a fury as bright as her red hair, said it was time for the Scarlet Letter.

Gossip did the job swiftly. Cathy was now fully exposed in our small community. She stood alone at the school playground, she was shunned at the supermarket, but there was intense shame for me as well. The feeling of whiplash caught me unprepared. The pitying looks, the oblique apologies for my latest tragedy. I was humiliated, quite sure that everyone was talking about the scandal my life had become. In fact, my life felt like a complete ruin. Hell is indeed a small town.

Steve phoned me as news spread. “You lied to me. You told me you would keep things private. Do you really want our children to find out about this?”

“I changed my mind,” I snapped back. “I get to do that. And this really isn’t a private matter. Henry and your wife kept their secret by lying to everyone, to all our friends. I won’t lie anymore.”

“You’re a liar,” he repeated.

“Yeah, right. And the liar in your home, who lied to you for years?”

He had already circled the wagons. He was going to stay with Cathy—his marriage vows were sacred. I pointed out that Cathy had not thought much about her sacred vows.

“I’m going to try to forgive her, and I think you should too.”

“I don’t give a shit what you think I ought to do. I’ll forgive her when and if I decide to forgive her.”

Cathy sent e-mails. She was a writer after all, and a good one. She offered articulate apologies about the terrible thing she and Henry had done. She told me that she was determined to win back her husband’s love and trust, that she was committed to devoting herself again to her husband and child. She also accused me of ruining her reputation in town.

We were in our separate trenches.

I need to leave this place.

I called Leslie Burns,
Henry’s psychiatrist. He had been seeing her during the last year and a half of his life. Anxiety, he had told me. He couldn’t work. He was having panic attacks and trouble sleeping. She had prescribed medication, different from mine. Our house was a regular drugstore.

Leslie Burns agreed to meet with me, but only because I was the executor of Henry’s estate. She would need to see that in writing.

I arrived midday in Grand Central Station. I had not been depriving myself much since January had brought its glad tidings, so I hailed a cab and made myself comfortable in the backseat.

Then I looked at my driver to give him directions. He was a very attractive man. Dark, glossy hair tossed to one side. Dark, wide-set, sleepy eyes. Olive skin, high cheekbones. His hack license suggested that he was a recent immigrant from Eastern Europe. His elegant hands rested on the steering wheel like two beautiful, bored fashion models. Tomas’s hands, but softer, unused to rough work. Our eyes met in the rearview mirror as I gave him the Upper East Side address.

Suddenly the air in the taxi felt superheated. I wanted to speak to him. I wanted him to pull over so we could make out in the backseat. He looked at me in the rearview mirror, an uncomfortably long look. I rummaged in my handbag for my wallet and, on second thought, lipstick. When I looked up, his eyes met mine again.

I had the feeling of elastic time, like the day Henry died and the last five minutes of his life stretched out. The trip was completely silent, just the rumbling of the car’s old chassis on the city streets, the traffic outside.

At last and too soon he pulled up in front of a brownstone on an elegant, tree-lined street in the East Seventies. I paid my fare, lingering as long as I could. I stepped out, and he looked at me and I looked at him. I just wanted an hour with this man in a hotel room somewhere. I didn’t want to speak to him or know his name. I wondered if Henry had felt like this when he pursued his women.

I stood outside a bit longer than necessary, arranging my bags. The driver lingered on as well, and I saw him looking again in the rearview mirror while the car idled. I turned away toward the door of the doctor’s office. When I turned back for a last look, he was driving off slowly.

Inside the office was the hush of the white noise machine, magazines to browse. I patted down my skirt, fiddled with my tank top and my hair as if I’d had that hour in a hotel room after all.

Leslie Burns leaned back in her comfortable black leather chair, resting her feet on an ottoman. She was a plump woman who wore overalls. “He loved you, you know,” she reassured me. “He
did not want your marriage to end. He loved you and Liza and really valued that part of his life.”

I wondered if she might lie to me, just to make me feel better.

“But what about this other part of his life, with Cathy and other women?” I asked. “Was he ever going to tell me, or was this going to go on and on?”

“I believe he wanted to tell you about Cathy. You know, it took him six months to tell
me
about Cathy. At first when he told me, he made no apologies.” Leslie shifted her ample body in the chair. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her overalls. In all my many years of therapy, I had never seen a shrink in anything but a tasteful, businesslike outfit.

“As time went on it became clear that his relationship with Cathy was destroying his life. He wanted to end it, but he was afraid to tell you. He was afraid you’d leave him and take Liza away.”

You better believe I would’ve left him.

I looked around on the walls and found the reassuring diplomas from Ivy League universities. I would hear this woman out.

“I believe the other women—there were several—were ‘transitional,’ a way to end his relationship with Cathy and return to you. I was trying to help him do that.”

She told me that Henry showed signs of narcissistic personality disorder. For Cathy she suggested a possible diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Women with borderline personality are emotionally unstable and intensely needy, and often resort to dramatic gestures to win love and attention.

My mouth hung open.
Holy fucking shit.

Leslie explained that both diagnoses refer to the behavior of
people with low self-esteem, usually the result of particular childhood emotional traumas.

“Henry often spoke about his difficult relationship with his mother,” Leslie said. “She idolized him and expected him to take on a lot of responsibility for the happiness of the family. That’s a classic situation.”

Leslie described how, as adults, people with NPD are charismatic extroverts, but inside, in private moments, they are aware of the false social persona. In contrast to the confident personalities they project, they are filled with self-loathing. People like this can’t tolerate solitude because it forces them to see the true self, hidden below the surface. The false persona might, however, win them many friends, sexual partners, and career success.

“And, sadly, our culture often rewards such behavior,” Leslie said, sighing. “Deceptive behavior is very common,” she continued. “I have another patient in this situation. Patients like this have affairs as a way of testing the people they really love, almost to prove that they are unworthy of love.”

I remembered how charming Henry had been when we met, how polite. I had been suspicious of it at first, but he had won me over. This same strategy had obviously worked with Cathy and other women.

Henry’s childhood experiences do not justify him being an amoral asshole as an adult. How much compassion am I supposed to have for him? I had an unhappy adolescence, but that doesn’t give me license to lie, cheat, and steal.

Leslie continued. “Borderline or NPD adults are both very needy, given to extreme emotional fluctuations and distortions of reality.”

“You don’t pay enough attention to me.” Henry’s frequent
complaint. “You should spend more time paying attention to me and less time worrying about Liza.”

Two really messed-up people had found each other, fed off each other. In Cathy, Henry had found a ready worshiper, and in him she had found a love object with an endless need for attention.

Leslie leaned toward me. “Julie, do you mind if I ask you—what would you have done if Henry had told you about Cathy?”

“I would’ve divorced him so fast his head would’ve been spinning,” I snapped back. But those were just words. Really, I didn’t know what I would have done.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Leslie said. She lowered her gaze for a moment. I saw that she really was sorry. She had been rooting for him, hoping that he could repair his life.

I wondered if his death had been not a random medical event but rather the direct consequence of his choices. I left the office with a new feeling about Henry and Cathy. I was not ready to forgive them—my rage was not burned out yet. But to my surprise, I felt sorrow for Henry. He had died before he had a chance to undo the damage.

Matthew had called me every day
since Henry’s death, always comforting, “just checking in.” After confronting Cathy, I’d called him to see what had survived from Henry’s computer hard drive. I had actually given him Henry’s computer, never imagining I’d need it again. Matthew had backed up everything and now gave me three CDs with Henry’s personal journal,
umami
book notes, and correspondence. A few times during the prior months, I’d asked Matthew if I could have copies of material on
the hard drive, but he had always been vague, promising to get them to me, hoping I’d forget. Anticipating a good deal of material, I’d dropped the CDs off at the copy shop the day before rather than print it out at home. Further, my idea was to take the package and mail it to Helen, my therapist, without even opening it, so that she and I could look at the contents together in a safe space. I had the addressed envelope all ready in the car.

The copy shop in town is a very local sort of place, where people know you well. It is wedged between a small gourmet shop (where the coffee is good and the tuna fish salad is supreme) and a service station where I took my car to be repaired. One February morning, when my car wouldn’t start, I’d played Damsel in Distress, and Tony had come right over with his jumper cables. In this same town center are the grocery store, post office, drugstore, and a knitting shop where I spent a good deal of money on yarn.

As I entered the copy shop, there was the momentary relief of air-conditioning and then the familiar chirps, tweets, and silverware drawer clatter—claws on metal—of two colorful caged parakeets, who greeted all the customers. I dislike the insistent chirruping of caged birds, but in this store, mingled with the hum of the copying machines and air conditioners, it became soothing white noise.

The walls of the shop were covered with snapshots of customers, hundreds of them, pasted one right next to the other in a free-form collage. The overflow of photos was strung across the space like a laundry line of clothes. Some couples had played a game of Exquisite Corpse with their snapshots, cutting and exchanging heads and bodies with humorous results.