Perfection (13 page)

Liza stepped into the kitchen, eager for dinner. “Why are you laughing at the noodles, Mama?”

Though it seemed that Cathy
had something long term in mind, Henry’s correspondence suggested that he had no plans to change his living arrangements. In fact, the secrets in his life served to excite him. He liked the feeling of having it all, even if having it all had created the internal chaos that had driven him to seek a two-hundred-dollar-an-hour psychiatrist.

When Cathy pressed him to offer a clear demonstration of his love for her, he responded with this message.

As I read e-mails, I discovered that after our New Year’s Eve party that began 2002 (when Cathy told me she was planning to “get shitfaced”), another secret drama had played itself out.

Cathy followed Henry’s postmortem with a torrent of self-criticism. She worried that she had ruined everything in their relationship. She apologized for her drunkenness. She felt humiliated, and wondered anxiously what other party guests thought of her behavior. Later that day Henry consoled her:

Cathy, drunk on the living room couch and, later, vomiting in my downstairs bathroom on that New Year’s Eve had not looked happy or uninhibited. At the time I had not understood why she had willfully made herself ill.

But now I knew why she had drunk herself into oblivion. She must have been miserable, lonely, confused, conflicted, and perhaps even guilty, though not guilty enough to stop trying to get Henry for herself. Perhaps she hoped to force him to pay attention to her, to rearrange his life for her. Perhaps if she was wounded enough, he would leave me, and take care of her.

Henry, burdened with two very unhappy women—this was rich.

Within the next months, their relationship cycled back to mutual obsession and jealousy. Cathy described their energy as so complementary that it was as if they could feed off each other. This imagery of a kind of cannibalistic feast made me shiver. These kinds of relationships never turn out well, in novels or in real life.

Having criticized her for being jealous, Henry expressed his own irrational jealousy, and a few weeks later they were in the midst of another battle over the nature and future of their relationship. Ignoring the obvious conflicts of his life, Henry was consumed with resentment.

I couldn’t help but notice that Henry’s complaint about Cathy was Cathy’s very complaint about him. And of course my very complaint about him, the source of many of our arguments.

Mostly, we did things his way, according to his schedule. “All my ideas are good ideas,” he liked to joke, though it never felt like a joke to me.

Their battles built up over the next weeks of correspondence, and with conflict came gloom and depression. During this same time, I too had been anxious and depressed. Henry and I had fought continuously. Henry said I was overreactive, overemotional. He said I needed more medication. After several pitched battles of our own, I had finally succumbed. It was my fault, I agreed. I would ask my doctor for different medication. Henry described this private issue in one of his e-mails to Cathy.

It was true that in April 2002 I was a mess—anxious, agitated, and suffering from insomnia. I remembered going to the city with him to see my psychiatrist. I remembered how earnestly he had spoken to my doctor. How caring and thoughtful he had seemed. He had even charmed and deceived my psychiatrist.

I had been off medication for almost six months now. I had dragged myself through the terrible time after Henry’s death without the antidepressants that he had insisted were so necessary. And horrible as things were now, my head had never felt clearer.

My college friend Sara called me
from her home in England. She would be back in the States in a few weeks, meeting me on the Maine island where I traveled each summer. Anna and Leo would share my rental house with Liza and me. Sara and I talked about the longed for summer holiday; then I gave her a brief synopsis of the latest catastrophe.

“He gaslighted you,” she announced tartly.

I struggled to recall the plot of the film
Gaslight,
which I vaguely remembered watching years earlier with my dad. Ingrid Bergman is cruelly manipulated to the point of madness by her husband, the handsome and charming Charles Boyer, who is after some jewels hidden in the attic. Things disappear; the gas lamps flicker on and off for no reason, as if possessed.

I thought again bitterly about the trips to the psychiatrist and the medications I had taken. Then I remembered the desperation I’d felt arguing with Henry over the barking dog next door.

The small barking terrier
was named Rebel, of all things.

On the day we looked at the house, Rebel was barking.

“Henry, it’s a nice house,” I said, as the dog ran manically around the yard. “It’s a nice house, but I’m telling you right now, that barking will drive me crazy.”

“Oh, don’t worry, he’ll stop once he gets to know us.”

From the day we moved into the house, it was eight hours straight of barking terrier while the owners were away from home
at their respective jobs. For days and weeks, until a kind of insanity took over. It was like Chinese water torture.

You can tell a lot about people by the ways in which they inflict their poorly trained animals on others. I did not have high hopes for my neighbors, a Mr. and Mrs. Caine. I suspected that they would prove to be thoughtless, inconsiderate people, who felt, under some homespun Second Amendment, entitled to subject the neighborhood to Rebel, the public good be damned. Henry had grown up in a small, conservative town, so I figured he’d know the best approach to take. I asked him to speak to them.

Henry refused. “Why can’t we have a pleasant time in our new town? We just moved here. You don’t understand. The dog will stop barking after he gets to know us. You’re completely overreacting.”

“Henry, I told you I wouldn’t be able to stand this. I’m telling you now, again, it’s driving me crazy.”

Henry said I had to wait. I waited. But even with my office door closed, I could still hear the incessant barking.

I called the prior owner of our house. She sighed with exasperation. “Oh, that stupid neighbor, Mr. Caine!” she blurted loudly. “That dog of his never stopped barking!” She told me that the neighbors had been rude and unresponsive to her repeated requests to keep the dog indoors. I didn’t ask her if this was her motive for selling the house, but when I hung up the phone, my first instinct was to pack our belongings and put the place up for sale.

After a few months, with Rebel still barking, I nursed murderous rage, and in passing moments wondered if I could get away with poisoning the animal. A chocolate brownie wrapped in a meatball might go undetected. These thoughts pained me. I’d al
ways liked animals. In rational moments, I realized it was the owners who were responsible, rather than the lonely dog.

When I called the neighbors, they were, predictably, short-tempered and rude. Another neighbor offered to intervene. He’d known the Caines for years, he said. But his efforts didn’t help much either.

Fall came, then winter. Rebel was mostly inside during the cold months. Anticipating spring, Henry and I continued to argue about approaching the neighbors more forcefully. Rebel began barking again as soon as the weather warmed.

One early summer weekend in 2000, Irena came to visit from the city for the weekend. I knew that she had never been convinced of the wisdom of our move. I wanted to present our new life in the best possible light. We did have a modestly sized swimming pool and an enviable view across the river. My work in the garden was beginning to pay off. Despite the risk of the barking, it seemed best to stay outside, where these assets were on full display. We arranged towels on the stone terrace and settled in for what I hoped would be a comfortable afternoon together while Liza played with Amy at Cathy’s house.

Rebel burst out of the Caines’ house into the yard, barking, barking, barking. After some minutes, Irena looked at me quizzically. A deep embarrassment sparked and grew. For this we had left the city? We’d left the relatively tolerable hum of city traffic, occasionally punctuated by sirens and car stereos, to be tormented by this incessant noise? I tried to ignore the barking and carry on our conversation. An hour went by, the barking continued.

“Is it like this all the time?” Irena asked at last, her brow furrowed with concern.

I couldn’t answer her. The truth—that moving to this house
had been, possibly, the most wretched mistake of my adult life, with this infernal dog the most potent metaphor of that error—was too painful to bear. I had left behind my comfort and my closest friend, a woman who had been my steady cheerleader for nearly ten years. I had no friend like her here, with such long and meaningful history. Despair flooded over me, and I felt tears coming. The barking became the main event in my head, blotting out everything else around me—the river view, the sparkling pool, the roses in their full glory. The effort of maintaining calm became so much of a distraction that I couldn’t focus on anything Irena was saying or my responses. A surge of humiliation and rage exploded, sparkling upward, right up to my eyeballs, where I felt a sudden pinging and throbbing, the precursor to one of the migraine headaches that plagued me in periods of intense stress.

“That fucking dog!” I screamed. “I can’t stand it anymore. It’s ruining my life! I’m going crazy!” Irena stood stunned as I stormed down my driveway. She ran after me onto the main road as I charged around the corner to the Caines’ driveway and up to their door. I rang the bell again and again, but there was no answer. I was sobbing now, my chest heaving. Irena was comforting me. I kept ringing the doorbell, then, accepting defeat, we came back, the barking continuing as we walked into my house.

Henry, who had been out shopping for the barbecue planned for later that afternoon, returned.

“That fucking dog!” I screamed at him. “It was barking for two straight hours while Irena and I were trying to sit outside! I can’t stand it anymore. You have to go speak to them, because I can’t stand one more day of this shit!”

Henry looked at me with rage and disgust. As Irena stood amazed, he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the hallway, where he pressed me against the wall. “You’re out of control,
you’re crazy and out of control. You’re not rational, this isn’t rational, your way of looking at this. It’s just a dog.”

“I told you I wouldn’t be able to stand it, I knew I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it. Why are you defending those people instead of helping me? They won’t deal with me. Why can’t you do the husband thing and deal with them? Why won’t you do it?” I was sobbing again. “Why?” I was terribly alone. I was married, but I was alone and isolated, feeling crazy and unbalanced. I learned that day that there is no more lonely state than being lonely in a marriage.

Later that afternoon, Cathy, Steve, Amy (bringing Liza), and other friends from town came over for the barbecue. I performed my hostess duties. Irena still seemed troubled by the afternoon incident. At one point I observed her in close conversation with Henry. She was talking, with a serious expression and urgent hand gestures. Henry was listening, but he was not his usually sunny host self.

After that weekend, I didn’t see Irena again for some time.

“I don’t understand why we’re drifting apart,” I lamented to Henry one night as we lay in bed. We had by this time contacted a lawyer to deal with the Caines (the attorney told us that a good deal of his practice concerned barking dogs and fences). We were also seeing a therapist, one that Cathy had recommended. The issue of the dog came up immediately and repeatedly. To me it showed one of many ways Henry ignored my feelings and my clearly stated needs. To him it showed that I was unreasonable and overreactive, and probably needed more medication. Outside the therapist’s office, Henry was less diplomatic. He told me I was crazy. As I thought about Irena, I began crying again, something I did a lot. “She’s been my closest friend for years, and now it’s like she doesn’t want to see me. I have no friends like Irena up here, Henry. I don’t know if I belong here. I feel lonely.”