Perfection (19 page)

“What’s this?” I asked, looking up from the box.

Henry laughed. “Go on, take a look inside.” I lifted out a black metal-studded leather belt. Examination revealed a central metal ring, a holster for a dildo.

Suddenly, I felt silly and playful in a way I had not experienced for years. I tried on the dildo belt over my jeans. In an instant, I was transformed into a tough S & M chick or perhaps a pocket-size version of fearless Samantha from
Sex and the City
—she’d try anything at least once. He laughed again, looking up from his papers.

“I wonder what people would say if I wore
this
down Main Street?”

Henry laughed again, this time a broad actor’s stage laugh, which abruptly broke the spell with its forced timbre. Now I just felt stupid and uncomfortable in the belt. I took it off, happy to place it back in the box. Dress-up game over, I returned to my work.

After an intense week and a half of e-mail correspondence, Eliana was ready to tell me the story of her relationship with Henry. She said that Henry had described me as needy and vulnerable, which explained her initial caution with me. But as our correspondence continued, we both saw each other more fully.

Intrigued by her metal-studded leather bracelets, Henry had approached Eliana at Lindsay’s party. He was particularly interested in her itinerant lifestyle. Eliana had no fixed home at that time but wandered, visiting friends, moving where her relationships took her, a life focused on sexual adventuring. She was happy to live this way, and was open with her partners about her lifestyle choices, though she said that several of her partners were less content.

After their lunch, Eliana and Henry talked several times while she remained on the East Coast. She said that he expressed immediate interest in a sexual relationship. Henry also spoke to Eliana about Cathy, about her neediness and possessiveness. The level of anxiety in his relationship with Cathy had escalated, and he was looking for some way out, to a different, more liberated life. Eliana suggested that his trips out West might also have opened up ideas in his mind about living very differently, in a different kind of marriage. A marriage I never signed on for.

Eliana told me that the day before Henry died she had experienced pain in her own body and sensed strongly that he was ill as well. At another time I would have quickly dismissed this account, but after my own unaccountable “visitations,” I was more open to the idea that some experiences could not be explained in purely rational terms. In fact, it was a relief to write to her about Henry’s visits. She received my accounts with the same calm as had Maya, the massage therapist.

I tried to imagine Henry and Eliana together. During his penultimate trip out West, in late November 2002, Henry had called me every day.

“I miss you and Liza so much,” he’d say before signing off. “I can’t wait to come home.”

He had often called me while driving. I could hear the whooshing of passing cars on some western coastal highway. He told me about the meals he had eaten that day, the food people he had met. Eliana told me that she had been in the car with him during several of these conversations, witness to what I had thought were private exchanges. She was, literally, the fellow traveler he had been searching for.

A wave of nausea consumed me after reading this. The gap between the reality of our marriage and what he had wanted was like the Grand Canyon. My eyes drifted out of focus. I put my head down on the desk. I needed air.

Rebel the dog ran out of his house, barking. I picked up a small rock and threw it at the dividing fence, and Rebel ran off. I tried pulling up weeds, usually a cathartic pleasure. The dog circled back and began his plaintive barking again. At last Mr. Caine appeared and shooed Rebel back inside.

Maybe I am better off without him.
I remembered an afternoon nine months earlier, standing in my autumnal backyard, when this entirely radical thought had come to me, moments after one of our last screaming phone fights. While Henry’s mind had been opening to new ideas out West, mine had been slowly opening as well during that final year, when he was frequently absent, permitting brief moments of clarity.

We had spent sixteen tumultuous years together. I had loved Henry and remained attached, even when I had felt repelled physically and emotionally, because this was the commitment I had
made in front of my family and friends and a benevolent rabbi.
No, things will get better; they are just really bad right now.
On that afternoon, I had chased away the jangling thought:
Maybe I am better off without him.
But perhaps at some later point, after a few more fights, I might have begun listening to myself, concluding that Liza and I would be better off on our own. Though Irena, the experienced veteran, was surely correct—it would have been a terrible divorce.

An amusing idea flitted past, that Henry had been struck down by the Big Guy himself, flattened onto the kitchen floor by the strong hand and mighty arm I remembered from all those Passover dinners, the guy who thought nothing of setting rivers of blood and swarms of locusts against his enemies. I was laughing again, a good sign, considering the situation.

Eliana told me that Henry often spoke to her about our marriage and our life here in a small, conventional town. Though he had wanted to have a family, support from a partner, and success in the “real world,” he also had urges to live freely.

She described an evening in Los Angeles. They went out to a restaurant, and while they sat at the bar, Henry flirted with an attractive woman while Eliana charmed the same woman’s husband. Henry told Eliana that he had ideas about opening up his marriage, but of course he never spoke about that to me. He knew I did not want that kind of marriage. The one we had was hard enough.

Eliana said that Henry talked to her about feeling like a useless member of the family, that he was “not good enough.” This idea felt outrageous to me. Were not these the specious excuses of a coward and a liar, the rationalizing of bad behavior he was too lazy to correct?

I could never have listened to his confession, even if he had spoken in the most sincere way. There was no more trust, and not enough faith in our future. A happy marriage is about having faith in a future together, a shared worldview.

Eliana admitted that she had “boundary problems.” But she had never been involved before with a married man who had a child, or with a man who lived in such a conventional world as ours. She wrote to me that her relationship with Henry had showed her the consequences of ignoring boundaries. She would not repeat this pattern, she told me. She was in the process of radically changing her life.

I felt my initial repulsion for this woman softening. She was not like me at all, and yet, as the days passed I felt that we were drawing closer, that we shared a real bond, one I valued. I was starting to enjoy the idea that there could be a woman like me and a woman like Eliana in the same world and that somehow we were finding a way to connect.

We began to write to each other about our families. She wrote about a niece she loved and asked about Liza in a way that showed me she understood and appreciated children. She knew plenty about me, from her conversations with Henry. She said that he had admired my mothering, my sense of honor, and the discipline of my work life, regretting his own lack of focus. When Henry first approached her about helping him organize his book, she told him that she didn’t understand why he hadn’t asked for my help. I replied that by that time Henry and I were barely able to have a peaceful conversation, let alone a collaborative working relationship. I was pleased, however, to hear the ways in which Henry had appreciated me.

She also offered the first hopeful words about a future life I could not imagine yet. And the idea that what had happened was
a kind of gift to me, a chance to start over, a chance to be free.

I told Eliana that I was leaving for Maine but that I hoped we could continue our correspondence when I returned. I decided that even if she was editing her version of events, what I had now gave me a clearer picture of Henry’s last months.

I had learned a lot from my correspondence with Eliana. I saw more clearly the ways I had sheltered myself in my married life. I had learned that opening my mind to someone so different from myself could have great rewards. I had an urge to make something new for myself, to heal myself.

Healing would require full forgiveness. I wasn’t ready for that yet. Cathy’s long involvement with Henry, her disregard for my family and the idea of friendship disgusted me. I was still too furious to forgive Henry. But it was already refreshing to look at Henry’s dark side with eyelids peeled open, to make myself see how lost we had been as a couple. This was the man who had so frequently told me that my version of reality was damaged. Now I could see that my version of reality was quite fine. My mistake had been allowing him to make me doubt what I was seeing. There had been deception and self-deception.

My therapist, Helen,
shared a strange story with me during our last session before I left for the August holiday. She recalled a private session she’d had with Henry before he left on his final trip out West.

“Henry said this to me, at the end of the session, ‘I am coming to feel that the purpose of my life is risk.’ That’s quite a thing to say about oneself. I wasn’t sure where he was going with that comment. He was leaving my office after that last appointment, his hand was on the doorknob—we therapists call this kind of moment ‘doorknob therapy.’ Then Henry asked me if I thought it was possible to have more than one intimate relationship. I had some idea then where things were headed, so I told him that we could take up that topic at your next couples session. But of course, there were no more couples sessions after that. Henry died a month later.”

It occurred to me now that Eliana might have made headway persuading Henry to come clean, and that during that last session with Helen he was testing this idea out in the safest shared space we had, our therapist’s office, the place where you pay to share your secrets.

While I had wanted to see everything
in terms of absolutes, right and wrong, good and evil, it was clear that I would have to settle for something gray and muddled. I could talk to Christine or Ellen or Eliana every day for a year, and still I would never really be able to understand what had happened to Henry, to the marriage I had clung to, to me in that marriage. I would have to go forward into the gray, muddled place and bushwhack some clear path of my own. And while I had scattered moments of
gratitude for my “second chance,” I was mostly furious, raging, and brokenhearted.

On a superheated early morning toward the tail end of July, Anna found me pacing in my office, still in a nightgown, my hair disheveled and damp with sweat, crying while talking on the phone with my brother.

It was my turn that morning to drive the kids to day camp, but it was clear that I wasn’t ready to go anywhere. Anna sighed, and her expression betrayed exasperation. She stood for a minute watching me on the phone, then left abruptly and strode off to the kitchen. I ended the call to David and sat in my office, praying silently that Anna would bail me out one more time. It wasn’t fair of me, I knew that. Her life was a mess too. Her divorce was in progress, and she and her soon to be ex-husband, John, were fighting over property and child support. But just in that moment, mine felt messier, a disaster, more than I could dig out from in the next ten minutes.

I listened with relief as she got the children organized with their daypacks. She soothed Liza, who was confused by my condition. The refrigerator door opened and closed several times, and I heard the reassuring bustle of Liza’s lunch being prepared and some welcome childish laughter. Skittering footsteps headed for the back porch. The screen door opened, buoyed for a second or two by the antique drop weight tied to a string, then smacked shut. The house was silent. A moment later I heard Anna’s tires crunching the gravel in my driveway.

I was staring out the window, still in my nightgown, sweating and crying, when Anna reappeared in my office doorway. I had not noticed the half hour pass by. She gave me a moment to take her in, then spoke.

“Julie. I had to make lunch for your child because you couldn’t
do it. I had to drive your child to camp because you couldn’t do it. I had to give her a hug good-bye because you couldn’t do it.”

She paused, but she needn’t have worried. She had my full attention.

“Julie, I love you and I want to help you, but there is a limit to what I can do for you. You need to get it together. Because if you let all this take over your life, then
he
wins, and
he can’t win
.”

I looked up at her. My mouth opened to take in air. I was exhausted, my head hurt, throbbing hotly at my temples, the top of my skull ready to blast open. I started crying again.

“You’re right. I’m a mess,” I said. “Everything is a mess. But how could he do this to me? It’s so fucked up, Anna, and it just goes on and on and on. When is it going to stop?”