Authors: Julie Metz
I called our local doctor to arrange for an HIV test.
“I am so relieved to hear from you,” the doctor said, with an audible sigh.
It turned out that Henry had requested an HIV test in early December 2002, a month before his death. Confidentiality agreements had prevented the doctor from calling me to have me take a test as well. I did recall that Henry had avoided sex with me right after his return from that West Coast trip. He was exhausted, he’d said apologetically. And he certainly had looked tired then.
So, perhaps he had cared enough about me to wait to have sex till he got his negative HIV test results. Though I seethed, won
dering what he would have done if the results had been positive for something less immediately devastating, such as a more garden-variety venereal disease. Would he have let that go, hoping that he hadn’t infected me, waiting till unavoidable symptoms presented, rather than tell me about his infidelities? How ill would he have allowed me to become before he confessed? Perhaps it had been fear, not just exhaustion, I had seen in Henry that early December. He must have understood that his situation was dangerously unraveling.
The doctor suggested I get tested just to be sure and rushed the tests, which, to my intense relief, all came back negative. Somehow, miraculously, I had dodged at least ten bullets.
The number in Henry’s address book turned out to be the home of Eliana’s sister in Canada. Her sister gave me another number, in a nearby town. Eliana answered this time.
“I have been expecting you to call. In these last days I have felt your presence strongly.” Her voice had an airy, singsong quality, her sentences floating upward. My imagination conjured a palm reader or a crystal ball gazer.
“You were expecting me!” I was shouting at her already, though I’d wanted to remain calm. “What does that mean? Did you think about me when you were fucking Henry in a goddamned hotel room?”
She did not hang up. Like Christine, she listened to me. She apologized quietly.
Now we could get somewhere. I got my yelling out of me, and we started talking. After that first conversation, I wasn’t ready to talk to her again for several months, but we began an e-mail correspondence that very first day.
Since the moment he passed, I have visualized your essence and what you must be living through. I have known since that day, you would find the thread and come asking. I did not expect you so soon. Thank you for having the courage.
There are spiritual dimensions and doings of this relationship between him, you and me that are beyond logical comprehension. I can only unveil to you what I sensed and experienced in my friendship with him. I ask you to listen to what is relevant for you to understand in all this and release the rest.
Eliana used language I couldn’t work with easily—a “New Age” lyrical vocabulary very uncomfortable for me. I was familiar with its forms from the college health-food co-op I had joined, and many yoga classes I had attended. I understood it, but I didn’t like it, not one little bit. I had been educated to write clear sentences with identifiable subjects and predicates. I had learned to diagram sentences. I practiced again, on some of Eliana’s sentences, but it was like taking a walk in an overgrown forest, through thoughts intertwined like vines.
I was bewildered. Henry himself had always been brutally dismissive of New Age culture. My decision to buy organic milk, eggs, meat, and vegetables peeved him, as did Emily’s occasional Berkeleyesque meanderings about astrology and goddesses, and the spiritual aspects of my yoga practice. Had he truly gone off the deep end having a relationship with a woman so nonlinear in her thinking?
To her, the word “sphere” did not represent a round ball, a social group, or an arena of geopolitical influence. It was a kind of spiritual energy force. “Congestion” was not nasal, pulmonary, or coronary but a kind of emotional and spiritual phlegm. She spoke about visions, energy waves, and the paranormal with the certainty of a scientist cataloging research data. I didn’t know
what to make of this woman, but I knew I wanted to smack Henry upside the head, with a swift kick in the ass for good measure.
Whatever else she might have been, Eliana was possibly the true witness to Henry’s last, very troubled months, during which time he was, at the least, in a crisis of confidence about his book and desperate to entangle himself with and untangle himself from Cathy, before I found out about their affair.
I speculated about the lost correspondence between Cathy and Henry. What exactly had happened between them during the last six months of his life? Had Cathy threatened to tell me? Anything was possible, but without evidence, Cathy could hide—and I was left to wonder without any hope of really understanding the truth. The best I could hope for was a glimmer into his world through this woman.
I had to admit that Eliana’s voice was soothing and kind. But for all her airy-sounding language, she was clearly wary about revealing everything right away. I would have to prove to her that I could handle it. I needed her to tell me what she knew. I wanted to see everything now. Something had changed in Henry’s thinking, and whether from anxiety about the book that wasn’t writing itself or out of a sense of being more profoundly lost, he had reached out to this woman for guidance and she had answered.
Eliana had presented herself to him as nonjudgmental, liberated, and unchained from convention. She told me that she had lived for years this way, seeing herself as a free spirit who could make her choices without consequences, moving in and out of relationships with men and women. She said she was reassessing this path in the aftermath of Henry’s death.
Eliana had spoken to Henry on the phone, she told me, the
evening before his death. I must have seen them talking as I passed in and out of his office while Henry organized his papers.
And when she sent me their e-mail correspondence, I saw that they had exchanged important ideas about the future in his last days, after our New Year’s Eve party.
On January 3, five days before his death, Eliana wrote:
Well, this can be a long journey of discovery…in the path of spirituality, emotions are a part of our beings that we need to learn to observe and have distance with…feelings reflect our inner ways of knowing truths, value, honor, so they differ from the games we as humans use in the emotional spheres…if we are truly conscious of our actions, when an emotion arises, like anger, if we are in truth of ourselves and wanting to nourish our inners in the strongest way, it is by feeling what this emotion brings to us, allowing ourselves the place creatively to let it go through us and find peace, calm, balance within ourselves with it…. I am working at looking at the emotions which get triggered when I am with you and let myself breathe with them, yet always keeping the love flowing.
My first response was that this was all a turd wave of bullshit, that she was the expert surfer girl riding the big turd wave and Henry was the newbie, thrilled to discover the newest surf shop, filled with all-new gadgets he’d never tried before.
When I made an effort to be more generous, though, I thought her e-mail also could have been a preclass talk a yoga teacher might have offered on the topics of nonattachment and compassion, ideas I certainly struggled with but whose wisdom I appreciated. In her way (very different from my way, I had to acknowledge), Eliana
was explaining to him how much damage we create for ourselves, and others, when we have no understanding or mastery of our emotions, when we are too attached to the outcome of a situation.
I thought about what Matthew had said, that Henry had no spiritual life. Perhaps, just at the end of his life, something had changed in Henry; perhaps, having dug himself into such a deep mess, he was trying to understand himself in a different way. Having exhausted the patience of other women in his life, he had at last found a most welcoming listener. His long e-mail response devolved into a self-involved rant about his anger at Christine for ending their sexual relationship.
I am “congested” at the moment as you say. It really isn’t in my temperament (or anyone else’s that I’ve ever met) to be able to transcend emotions. I’m just honest about it. I don’t want to transcend things; I want to meet them head on and work through them.
But I am trying to learn to let things go (at your urging). At the moment I am having difficulty emotionally with both Cathy and Christine, I admit it. It’s nothing that I can control; I am just trying not to be compelled to act on these emotions, which is an entirely new thing for me.
[Christine] was most probably pissed at me for a variety of things: (1) seeing other women, (2) seeing other women who are younger, (3) hearing from her friend that I thought she was in love with me (which is not exactly what I said).
This was followed by a longer rant about Cathy, which confirmed my suspicion that their relationship was very much in play throughout the fall until his unexpected death. He recounted the scene at his final New Year’s Eve party.
As for Cathy, let me describe some ugliness.
I suppose it was my own stupidity that caused me not to delete those emails (yes, stupid). But for her to generate all that hate after seven months is just too much.
At first I thought it was going to be okay. I gave her a lot of space at my party. At one point she grabbed me by the arm to ask me to get some more champagne for one of her friends. But basically she spent the whole time clinging to her husband, or talking to two of her friends who go to the same church as her. Other than that, she spoke to no one.
She drank heavily and toward the end she spilled wine on these two above-mentioned friends. I handed her a stack of napkins and mildly joked by asking her if she needed a permanent supply, to which she hissed, “No.” At that point, I knew that things weren’t going to go well. Then, as she was getting ready to go, she looked really tired and drained. I asked her very gently if something was wrong, and she said, “With whom?” Then she said I should “check my paperwork” to understand what was wrong. I think that was a reference to the emails she had discovered. I then asked her if she would like to get together and talk about it, to which she sneered and said, “Nah.” She comes over to say goodbye, again in a really hostile way, and when I get up to see her and her family to the door she shoves it closed in my face.
Part of me so desperately wants to call her up and set things right…but I know it is hopeless and I’m just going to have to live with the situation. What I have to learn, and what I did learn by listening to you is that there is no way I can apply “reason” to this situation. The fallacy, the projection that I had been operating under for the time I was seeing her (all the way until a lightbulb went off in my head five mornings ago) was that she was like me…that she has a psychology that resembles mine. But this is not true. The reality is that she is emo
tionally unstable. The reality is she is certainly too small emotionally. She is one of the most rigid, fearful, and narrow-minded people I have ever met.
And the larger reality? Any energy I am directing at these two women is really some sort of pathology on my part. I need to keep that energy inside of me and conserve it for my wife and for my new husband/boyfriend—you. So, instead of obsessing about these things today, I was able to convert this negative energy to thoughts about a positive path for myself. That indeed is a change in my behavior, and I have you to thank for it.
I noted, with more confusion, that Henry seemed to think of her as his male partner, which revealed something about the nature of their sexual-emotional relationship. Eliana had taken control of the relationship in a way that was new for him, and because of that, he was listening to her in a way he did not listen to his other lovers or me, his wife. A minute later he sent her this note:
Sweet Eliana:
Really, you don’t have to read that email. It really was just a way for me to clear. I can’t tell you how much lighter I feel.
Light and clear like water…like a flowing crystal. If you want to read, just read the last few lines—that’s the important part.
Snow is falling outside. I’m getting ready for bed. The world is hush, and I feel, by some miracle, some peace. We are good for each other.
Love, Henry
A flowing crystal? These were new words for Henry. He had been in treatment with his psychiatrist for over a year. Though
Leslie Burns had told me much in our meeting, this mystery woman with the leather studded bracelets had managed comparable insight into Henry’s personality. Eliana had also allowed him to really hope that he could repair his life. She was telling him that this would be hard work, and that he would have to make real effort. He was still rationalizing his affairs, and still making excuses, but he was starting to understand that he alone had to make changes. Perhaps, for a few days, he had that hope. Then, he died.
There had been hints of Henry’s brief time with Eliana. During our last Christmas vacation together, in Seattle, Henry and I went out for a drive without Liza. After an obligatory trip to REI, he insisted on taking a detour to a sex toy shop he had heard about. He was sure that this would be fun for us and was disappointed at my lack of enthusiasm. “Jesus, you have no sense of adventure, Julie.”
His insistence, which to me felt harassing, was, of course, incredibly unsexy.
He must have ventured to the store at another time during our trip. During the last week of his life, I walked into his office while he sat at his desk. I noticed a small, unmarked corrugated box on a chair, flaps open. A peek inside revealed its colorful contents: red leather wrist restraints and other sex toys. He had often suggested using toys in our sexual relationship, but since I wasn’t that interested in sex, or at least sex with him, during our last years together, the idea had not been appealing. Restraint was not appealing at all—some part of me didn’t trust him. But I hated being thought of as a poor sport, and I was hoping very much that the new year would bring some joy and spontaneity back into our marriage.