Perfection (12 page)

I knew many of the faces. My gaze roamed a familiar trail, and I found Henry’s face on the right-hand wall. He was in his favorite winter parka and cap, staring out at me with his winning grin.
I had an urge to walk up and rip the picture off the wall. As the woman wrote up my bill, I wondered if anyone had glanced over the pages while they were printed and bound.

What a horrible task Henry left for his friend. Matthew lost his best friend, and the next morning he had to clean up Henry’s trash so that I wouldn’t stumble on it. The trash is in this envelope in my hands now.

I took my package and headed for the door, feeling quietly relieved that my picture had never made it to the store wall. What remained of my privacy suddenly felt intensely valuable.

The heat ambushed me as I stepped out of the cool bliss of the store. I opened the car door and sat in the driver’s seat. The car’s interior had warmed up in the few minutes I had spent in the copy shop, and the steaminess softened my brain. I felt safe and relaxed in my car, full of the clutter of empty juice boxes, snack wrappers, and cookie crumbs. Henry had frequently chided me for messing up the car.

Well, fuck you, asshole. This is my fucking car now, and if I want to trash it, what are you—fucking dead guy—gonna do about it?

I looked at the package containing Henry’s personal diary, and in a state of terrified vertigo I opened the envelope. I could see the first page of text through the clear plastic cover. My fingers were sweaty and sticky, my tongue raspy and dry. I opened the cover and began to read. The excerpt was from early August 1999. At that time we had been living in our town just over a year.

I closed the book—my mouth was open—sucking in air. Once I had some air in my lungs, I cried till my head ached. My chest hurt like it had been cleaved in two with one of Henry’s beloved cooking knives.

I called Tomas from my cell phone. I could barely speak.

“Julie, just remember that none of this was real when it happened, it wasn’t real when he wrote it, and it isn’t real now.”

I thought I understood what he meant—that Henry’s writing and thinking and behavior during his affair with Cathy was a kind of fantasy. That what had happened between them was part of a game. But something had happened, they had done these things.

The Henry in the journal was wholly unknown to me, a fictional character. This was not the man who had proposed to me
over champagne in a romantic restaurant, not the man who had promised to cherish me when we married, nor the man who had written me tender love notes, waited out my long childbirth labor, carried our wailing and sleeping child. Even the man I fought with was never so callous. Which man was real? Had my marriage been real?

“Do you still love me?” he’d asked. “I don’t think you still love me. Do you still think I’m handsome?” I had always answered yes.

I sat in the car, mesmerized by the dashboard panel lights, soothed by the hum of the engine and the air-conditioning until I was calm enough to open the book again. I read like I was eating a package of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, right down to the bottom of the bag—feeling a slight nauseated bloat when I was finished.

It’s like reading Henry Miller.
Even though I was reeling after reading Henry’s journal entry, I couldn’t help but recall similar passages from Miller’s novels. Certainly some of Miller’s tales of sexual conquest are male-fantasy bullshit, but they are thrillingly written bullshit. I had to admit that page 484 of the unexpurgated Grove paperback edition of
Sexus
was some of my favorite masturbation reading.

But just as Henry Miller used his own life as a point of departure, my Henry’s journal entry had the ring of truth about it in all its details. I could picture the scene in the spare room in Cathy’s house. I had stood there myself on other occasions and seen the view into the old lady’s house.

Breathe deeply.

I was ready to move on to my Henry’s e-mails.

July 14–18, 2003

The heat continued unabated.
People were dying from this heat. While a fan blew heated gusts on my sweaty skin, a part of me was dying as I sat reading the stack of e-mails Henry had left behind.

I could not remember what I had been doing that January morning when he e-mailed Cathy. Maybe I had made a run to the store to get milk and eggs or a stop at the post office followed by a few minutes at the bank to take out cash for the week. No, by 9:32, I’d have finished all that, I’d have been in my office, staring at the computer screen, just as I had been doing the day he died. I tried to conjure up images of the alternate reality he had created with Cathy, the signs of which I hadn’t wanted to see.

I was like the Bubble Boy, the kid who was allergic to the outside world and had to live his life within a plastic enclosure. I had become allergic to my marriage. Over time I had thickened the
walls of the bubble till I could see nothing except the most contained domestic world of mothering, work, laundry, backyard garden, school, and playground.

Their adultery had its own small-town, workaday rhythms. Henry e-mailed Cathy in the mornings, took a shower, read the paper, shut himself in his office, and then went out around lunchtime, often telling me that he was food shopping. Sometimes he did tell me he was going to Cathy’s for a coffee, and that he would pick up Liza from school. Not perceiving Cathy as a threat, I had welcomed the extra work time. Steve left most weekdays for his city job on a lunchtime train. This left Henry and Cathy with three hours till school dismissal, at 3:00
P.M.
, longer if I did the school pickup.

I got up to pace my small office. I stood in front of the fan, taking some comfort in the white noise and the airflow. I closed my eyes, trying to imagine all those days of the last years of my marriage. The details were mostly as hazy as this hot day. The heat drove me out to the back garden, where I hoped that staring at the last of the fragrant, sun-bleached roses in full explosion would calm my rage, the rage that made me want to tear up everything tender that remained from the years I had spent with Henry.

What is real? What do I get to keep? The love notes and poems Henry wrote to me? The contents of our photo albums? Did any of it really happen? Does any of it mean anything?

Liza meant something. Everything. Maybe she was the only thing that was real. I could start from there. How and when would I ever be able to explain this to her, that her father loved her but not enough to do right by her? He had been careless, even reckless with us. I walked back into the house, retreating
from the glare. Inside was a dark cave, and that suited me perfectly.

Back at my desk,
I continued reading e-mails. Henry and Cathy discussed Steve’s train schedule, the timing of my yoga classes, child care. They arranged the purchase of sexual lubricant. Cathy offered opinions about our couple’s therapy and worried that her neighbor Jenny was onto them. Henry complained about my angry outbursts. Cathy was jealous of our modest vacations and dinners at restaurants. She asked Henry for advice in preparing her taxes. She complained when her husband hovered near her computer. Henry wrote back: “Give him a blow job; that’ll get him off your back.”

In evening e-mails, Henry and Cathy compared notes on Ambien, Xanax, and Klonopin—medications they took for insomnia and anxiety. I do not think I was mistaken in detecting a competitive edge to their playful bedtime chatter.

They gushed about how great sex had been the day before. And how mediocre married sex was by comparison.

On February 11, 2002, Henry wrote,

Reading that hurt me in ways I could never have imagined, every word a spike in my chest. I had lost him long before he died. I had lost a love that had once been central to my life. I felt like the soldier in the opening D-Day battle scene of
Saving Private Ryan
, who searches around for the arm that has been blown off, before another shell takes him right down.

This is part of my inherited property. What to do with this? What to make of it? The bubble is bursting, the bubble I created to shelter myself and Liza.

Still, no one else here in my town had seen it either, the big, whopping It that was Henry and Cathy’s affair. No one in our circle of friendly couples had had the slightest clue. Cathy’s neighbor Jenny and I had idly speculated that summer day in her backyard, but we had both jokingly dismissed the idea. Henry flirted with every woman he ever met. All my friends in town had reacted with genuine shock.

“But he loved you so much. He always said so. I don’t understand,” said one bewildered friend after another. Their confusion was a comfort. I felt less like a complete idiot, but only slightly less. Mostly, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

I was desperately trying to keep my rage
contained to the hours between 9:00
A.M.
and 3:00
P.M.
, while Liza spent her days at a nearby day camp with Anna’s son, Leo. I was not always successful. Many evenings Liza saw me crying in my office. You know you have reached a low point when your first grader is trying to comfort you.

I kept reading. I couldn’t stop. I was disgusted, outraged, but also ravenous. I had to understand, to have some idea of what his
life had been like during those last years. I wanted to understand my own attraction to a man who had done such great damage. I experienced the irresistible, vicarious thrills of reading a trashy tabloid magazine. The same part of me that sneaks furtive peeks at the covers of
People
and
Us Weekly
in the grocery store checkout line and looks forward to the occasional satiating read at a hair salon couldn’t get enough of this, my very own small-town celebrity horror show. How bad would it get? How deep would my humiliation be? How would it all end?

And how did he juggle it all?
If he hadn’t died, I might never have known. Though truly, the more I thought about it, the clues had been everywhere and I had chosen to ignore them. Perhaps he was begging me to find out, by leaving everything so carelessly on his computer desktop in neat, labeled folders. Most husbands are more careful. And they don’t drop dead on the kitchen floor before finding the time to hide their correspondence.

It might have gone on until his psychiatrist persuaded him to tell me. We might have continued in couples therapy until he convinced me to give him another chance, all while he continued to have affairs. I would have withdrawn further into the bubble, until, perhaps, one day I would have turned on him, fully enraged, ready with an exit plan.

The bubble was a bad idea.

It was an odd comfort to discover
that Henry and Cathy argued with each other at least as often as Henry and I did. The
fights must have occurred in her home or in a car. The e-mails referring to their fights were short, testy exchanges.

Later on February 11, 2002, Henry wrote:

How, exactly, did he expect Cathy to show “natural affection” for him in public? Was he honestly expecting her to snuggle up during a party, surrounded by friends?

This attack was every fight Henry and I ever had in the sixteen years we lived together. It was truly some bizarre parallel universe. The anger, her anxiety, the intellectual one-upmanship, all masking his own insecurity.

Of course not, she replied. But he needed to hear from her, over and over again, that he was the most thrilling and perfect
lover and that no other two persons could possibly have what they had together.

While I was home, working, being a mom, paying bills, doing his fucking laundry. Sometimes taking care of her kid.

I had to get up and walk again, just to leave the e-mail pile. Pacing around and around the pool, I tried to distract myself with gardening. I crouched low to yank out a dandelion that had invaded my rosebushes. I was too impatient to pry under the deep taproot with a trowel. When I tugged, I held a mere half a root in my clenched fist and pricked my finger on a rose thorn to boot, scattering the shrub’s remaining petals.

Cathy’s astonishing hypocrisy made more sense to me now. It was perfect that a woman so awkward and needy, so desperate for approval would be able to rationalize a long affair that involved daily deception while singing in the church choir. I tossed the dandelion into the lawn in disgust.

Then I laughed my first dark laugh. At some point, I had to start laughing, because I was all wrung out from crying.

Emily seemed traumatized
by the fallout from Tomas’s disclosure. By now, I deeply regretted having called her on the afternoon of Henry’s death. I also regretted that I had caught her unprepared when I’d called her from Tomas’s house. Keeping my secret had been unsettling enough for her. Releasing the secret was like removing the last essential log from an already fragile dam. Suddenly a surging torrent of confused emotion rushed out over sharp, broken rocks.

I had needed and wanted to see Emily as a strong woman the
day Henry died and during the months after his death. But now I was seeing something else. She seemed vulnerable, and shaky. I regretted all the favors I had asked and would likely still ask. I wished I could do something for her—be her happier, supportive friend from before everything bad happened. I was no life preserver. In fact, my own ship was taking on water fast. I couldn’t do much more than I was doing for Liza and myself. I was alone, whereas Emily had Justin, a superbly caring husband.

“When do I get my friend back?” Emily still asked me, though less often. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the friend she had spent time with before Henry’s death, the woman in the bubble, was gone for good. Standing on my own without the bubble was terrifying. When she told me that she had woken in the middle of the night, anxious about an upcoming art show, and had talked to her husband for a calming hour, I quietly reminded her that when I woke up in the middle of the night (which happened almost every night), I was alone, looking at my sleeping child.

Emily said she wanted to burn sage in my house, to purify it. She brought over a beautifully tied bunch, a gift from a recent trip to New Mexico. Secretly, I thought exorcism would be more appropriate than sage burning.

I wondered what I might say to prospective buyers of my house.

Um, guy dropped dead on the kitchen floor, right here, sort of where you’re standing now, but no need to worry, he’s a mostly harmless spirit now, just gives cooking advice once in a while and messes with the plumbing, rattles the windows, that sort of thing.

I was fine with sage burning, or whatever else would make Emily feel better about being in my house. She moved through the rooms holding the smoldering sage in an abalone shell, making shooing gestures, as if she were blowing Henry out the win
dow along with the smoke. I didn’t think even the most potent sage from the most sacred pueblo in New Mexico would chase him out just yet. He was in some weird purgatory, trapped in our house, forced to watch everything unravel, including the public image he had cherished. One day I would have to leave this house, seal my boxes tight, and run away as fast as I could, to be sure that Henry remained behind.

I wanted Emily to feel comfortable. I still wanted to spend time with her. She was my friend and I loved her and relied on her, even though there were days when her moodiness and fragility frightened me, because they reminded me of my own tenuous grasp on life.

I felt Henry brush by me in the kitchen
while I prepared dinner, such as it was.

“Oh, go fuck yourself, asshole,” I muttered under my breath, while stirring elbow noodles in boiling water. “Leave me alone, I have work to do.” Liza and I were back to this sort of meal. I could barely muster the energy to rip open the cardboard boxes day after day. At least it was organic. I was maintaining some standards. At least we were eating. I wondered about my earlier sensations of Henry’s presence during the winter—had he been trying to warn me?
Well, too fucking late. I’m left with your big pile of shit. Happy now?
I recoiled from the sharp sting of droplets of boiling water that I had whipped into a churning whirlpool in the pot.
I wish you’d just left me and gone off with that twisted bitch. That’s what she wanted.

No, wait. You’re better off dead.

Cathy must have hoped for a real relationship with Henry. Her e-mails described her intense love, her wish for a deep commitment that she hadn’t copped to when I confronted her in the parking lot near her house. Then she had only been willing to say that she realized Henry hadn’t cared sincerely about her. She had hidden the affair from her husband and closest friends and risked everything while waiting for Henry to make up his indecisive mind. I chuckled again, darkly.