Until today, I’ve told no one but my shrink about the darker corners of my marriage. There’s the shame of speaking the words out loud, but also the shame, self-blame, and dissonance of believing myself to be a strong and capable woman who is simultaneously too weak to leave a dysfunctional marriage. Or even to admit it is dysfunctional. (We’re just going through a rough patch. We’re not getting along.) I also don’t want to speak ill of the father of my children to anyone, let alone to my mentor and superhero. But that afternoon, in Nora’s light-filled kitchen, feeling both safe in her maternal presence and confident of her discretion, I unearth all of it. Every last bone.
Later, after the exorcism, Nora’s husband Nick joins us for lunch, placing his hands gently on his wife’s shoulders before kissing the top of her head. “Is this for real?” I say dubiously, air-circling their conjoined heads with my finger. “Is this as good as it seems?” It’s almost cloying, the way the light haloes their happy coupledom: Harry and Sally, in their golden years. My jealousy of their bond burns almost as brightly as my admiration.
“No,” says Nick. “It’s better.”
“Deb!” Nora laughs, standing up and walking to the kitchen counter. “He’s my third husband. If you can’t get it right by your third marriage, well…come. Help me carry the salad to the table.” She slices thick slabs of peasant bread. “Are you staying over tonight?”
“I can’t,” I say. “I have to pick up my son from the camp bus stop at 5:30.”
Nora purses her lips and tilts her head down, leaving only her eyebrows in place. “Might his father be able to do that?”
“I’ll ask,” I say, knowing before dialing his number what the answer will be.
To this day, I’m still angry at myself for not saying to him, “I don’t care. Figure it out. I’m not coming home. I’m too angry and hurt right now. I’m sleeping at Nora’s.” But I hated discord more than I minded picking up the kids or the slack.
After lunch, Nora drives me back to the jitney and scribbles the name and number of her friend Joyce, a Jungian therapist whose specialty is treating couples at an impasse. My husband and I had stopped seeing our previous couples shrink several years earlier, when she showed up for lice check on the first day of our older son’s kindergarten, and the three of us stood there, speechless, suddenly realizing that our kids were in the same school. “You know I’m here for you,” Nora says, “if you decide to pull the plug, but please: Try to fix the marriage before taking any drastic measures.”
“I think we’re too far gone,” I say. “I think it’s too late.”
“You know I always say this, but I’ll say it again: Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever. He loves you. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even if he is an excellent liar.” Nora and I would often take turns cooking for and hosting twenty-person dinner parties that would end in hours-long, knock-down, drag-out mafia games, during which one of my husband’s lies once rattled all of us.
Lies, of course, were part of the game if you drew one of the three mafia cards: You had to lie and say you were a villager, to fool the other villagers into believing you weren’t in the mafia, while simultaneously urging them to kill off their innocent neighbors.
On the night of his infamous lie, my husband was in the mafia, I was not. Meaning, he knew who else still left in the game was on his team. I was a villager and therefore playing blind. It was down to the wire, with only a few players left. If we villagers killed one of our own, the mafia would win. If we killed a mafioso, the village would win. My husband looked me straight in the eye, in front of eighteen of our mutual friends, and said, “Deb, look at me. I love you. You’re my wife. You know I would never lie to you. I promise. I swear to you. I’m not in the mafia. If you kill me instead of Adam, the mafia will win.” This was an unusual, last-ditch tactic. Laying the trust in one’s marriage on the line, and publicly at that, was a move of desperation. I’d seen it used only a few times before, but always for the good of the village. Trusting him, thinking maybe he was even the commandant, falling on his own sword to save the village, I voted with him to kill off our friend Adam, the last villager standing. And with that one kill, the mafia won.
Everyone laughed about it afterward. Especially me. But the more I thought about it in the months that followed, the more I was unnerved by a simple truth his lie had unveiled. It wasn’t that I felt humiliated. Or that I was shocked by or angry about the lie. It’s that it had felt too familiar, our not being on the same team. And now that private and troubling part of us, on which, I realized, I was expending far too much energy keeping hidden, was out there, public, for all our friends to see.
“Yeah, that mafia lie was definitely odd, but whatever,” I say to Nora. “It’s not about his lies or his love.” My husband told me he loved me often. I didn’t doubt the truth of his feelings. “It’s about empathy. Or rather his lack of it. And how that absence is slowly killing me.”
“Joyce is a genius,” she says. “Call her.”
FIVE
Empathy
JULY 2011
Joyce’s bright, white, and welcoming office is on West 67th Street, just off Central Park West, and she makes you take your shoes off at the front door: a disarming trick every shrink should copy, as it immediately removes the artifice of decorum and sets patients at ease. Exposing one’s feet, I now firmly believe, is the gateway to exposing the psyche. It’s also an apt reminder, when you leave weekly couples therapy, that each person in a marriage stands in their own shoes, and that the work of marriage is to try to understand how those other shoes might fit, were you to stand in them. “Why are you here?” Joyce asks.
“Because she made me,” jokes my husband.
I laugh. His sense of humor is another one of the reasons I fell in love with him. Then I immediately feel the pinprick of tears. “Empathy,” I say, and the deluge begins.
Alas empathy, we will soon find out—a key ingredient in mature love if not the key ingredient—is beyond the capabilities of the man I chose to marry. As in literally, neurologically beyond them. For years I did not understand this. I thought he was deliberately not trying to stand in my shoes, which only furthered my frustration and anger. It takes Joyce, twenty-one years into our relationship, to suggest a lack of empathy might simply be my husband’s set point. And that the daily harm caused by this might be wholly unintentional.
Watching us interact in her office, week after week, she notes that the man who once vowed to love, honor, and cherish the woman sitting next to him never once places his hand on her thigh or shoulder when she cries. He simply stays on his side of the couch, watching my tears fall. This leads to a consultation with an autism expert, who gives us each an emotional intelligence (EQ) test. The test assesses empathy, scored from 0 to 80, with 0 being the least empathic, 80 being the most. I score a 68. My husband gets an 8: one of the lowest the doctor has ever measured.
The approximate cutoff is 30 for what was then called Asperger’s syndrome (AS) but what is now called falling within the high-functioning range of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). “Mind blindness,” it can also be called. Meaning, neurologically, he could neither intuit what was going on in my mind nor react appropriately when I told him how I was feeling. In the nature/nurture divide, I’d always assumed my husband’s emotional shortcomings were due to his upbringing and therefore not insurmountable, given the right dollop of love, intention, and therapy. That his biography was to blame for our marital woes, not his neurology.
I was wrong.
To be fair, it was an honest mistake. He’d recounted the tale of his upbringing on our first date: the deadbeat father; emigrating from Brezhnev’s Russia to the U.S. with his single mother and identical twin brother when he was nine; being orphaned at fifteen when his mother died; the struggle to fit in, both with the Orthodox kids in his yeshiva, after having been raised by an a-religious mother, and with the modern Orthodox
family who took him in after she died. We were twenty-four years old at the time, sitting on the banks of the Seine in Paris, where we both then lived. His story hooked me. Made me cry. Made me forgive all of the little quirks and idiosyncrasies I saw early on. I pictured his émigré mother, the brilliant art historian, working as a diamond sorter to make ends meet. Sacrificing herself in a foreign land so that her sons might have a better life, only to die, soon thereafter, of heart disease.
In retrospect, I probably fell in love with her that first night more than with him: with her moxie, her bravery, her willingness to sacrifice herself for the sake of her sons’ futures. And part of him, whether consciously or not, understood this. “Women always leave me,” said my future husband that same night, his first gauntlet of many: I dare you to be the woman who stays. The next gauntlet was the houseplant he left in my apartment as a homecoming surprise when I was off covering postcoup Romania. “Take care of me,” said the note affixed to its leaves. “I need lots of water, sunlight, and, most of all, love.”
Two weeks before I’d walked into my home to see that plant aglow in afternoon light, I’d witnessed a dead Romanian orphan being disemboweled with a rusty saw on a slab of wood after he’d hit his head, too many times, against a piss-stained wall. This was in Vulturești, in 1990, at the now infamous Hospital for the Irrecoverables, where Romanian children with disabilities were left to suffer in conditions so shocking, they still haunt me: bedframes with no mattresses; tattered, filthy clothes; a toddler’s ankle tied to his bed; Dickensian gruel slurped ravenously and spoonless into, well, I wouldn’t necessarily call them bellies. More like skin stretched drum-tight over bone.
Hospital for Irrecoverables, Vultureşti, Romania, 1990, © Deborah Copaken
The disembowelment of the dead boy, I was told, was Romanian law. Every organ of every Romanian corpse had to be removed then placed back inside, but you only had to show proof of their removal to be in compliance of the ridiculous law: a long scar down the middle of the body, another across the forehead, which was peeled down to expose the brain, the sight of which caused me to retch.
“Now what?” I’d asked the woman with the rusty saw, through a translator, as she stood in front of the boy’s emptied corpse, now surrounded by his lifeless organs. She was not trained as a doctor, a coroner, or even a nurse. She was a poor village woman, whose job it was to care for too many abandoned and disabled kids with zero resources with which to care for them. Would she write up a report of her findings? Did she have the proper tools to measure his heart, his lungs, his brain? Would any of this data provide any insight into his suffering or death?
“Now we put the pieces back inside,” she’d said with a shrug. As if this were a game of Operation. I had to leave the room once more to throw up.
Two weeks later, when I walked into my apartment in Paris, and I saw that backlit houseplant my future husband had left as a surprise, with its note asking for love, care, sunlight, and water, did some part of my subconscious decide: Here’s an orphan I can save? Yes. Absolutely.
And here was a nurturer, his subconscious must have decided, he could claim. Most marriages in which one partner has Asperger’s and the other does not are forged precisely on this dynamic. We’d fallen straight into a trap so typical for a neuroatypical/neurotypical relationship, it was mundane.
After his diagnosis—a relief to both of us, as it explained everything we’d been up against as a couple—I read every book I could on the subject of Asperger’s and intimate relationships, discovering passage after passage describing our dynamic in textbook detail. “There can be a strong maternal compassion for the person’s limited social abilities,” wrote Tony Attwood in The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome, “with a belief that his social confusion and lack of social confidence were due to his circumstances as a child, and can be repaired over time. Love will change everything.”
I was, it suddenly dawned on me, reading these books, 100 percent complicit in my own unmet needs from the start. Therefore at least 50 percent responsible for the broken marriage that followed. Nowhere in that note left on the houseplant or later, in our marital vows, which we each wrote privately, did my future husband ever promise or even mention reciprocal care. I had simply convinced myself, without any concrete evidence to the contrary, that if I nourished the parched soil of this once-broken child, he would grow into the kind of man who’d produce the emotional oxygen I, too, needed to survive. Instead, over the course of the next two decades, I struggled to breathe. “You have no empathy!” I would scream, over and over again.
“I don’t even know what that means!” he’d shout back, visibly shaken and hurt. I thought he was being deliberately dense.
“No,” says our Asperger’s therapist, Dr. Richard Perry, decades after the steps of this dance were firmly entrenched. “He’s not being deliberately dense. He literally does not know what you mean.”
How did this dynamic play out in day-to-day life? In ways, I told our therapist, both large and small. If I stepped on a shard of glass or cut my finger in lieu of an onion and said, “Ow!” this did not elicit an “Are you okay?” but rather either a kind of stunned silence or rebuke for not wearing shoes or being clumsy. My tears over the death of a beloved professor evoked an “Eh, death,” with a blasé flick of his hand. He once stepped outside a restaurant to take a non-emergency call from his twin brother at the beginning of our fifth wedding anniversary dinner, before the appetizers had arrived, and didn’t return to the table until after the main course had grown cold. When our boiler broke one particularly cold week in February and left us with no heat or hot water, and I emerged blue-lipped from a cold shower and asked him to please bring me a dry towel, as he’d taken mine, his response was a terse, “No.”
One of the clearest signs of a person with Asperger’s, Dr. Perry tells us, is that what often seems to be an intentional infliction of pain is actually completely unintentional. This rings painfully true. My husband isn’t cruel, I say, but his actions—or in many cases his lack of actions—are. Not only to me, although I bear the brunt of it, but sometimes with our kids and friends, too.
When our four-year-old was admitted to the hospital with what would turn out to be Kawasaki disease—the leading cause of heart attacks in children under the age of five—and I pleaded with him to come to the hospital to help me, he went out for drinks for his boss’s birthday instead. Fifteen years earlier, when our eldest, then eight months old, produced several diapers full of gelatinous blood, the pediatrician on call correctly suspected intussusception and urged us to meet her at the hospital immediately. “Deb, it’s ten o’clock!” said the father of our critically bleeding child. “Couldn’t you have waited until morning?” Intussusception, the doctor had told me on the phone—though common in infant boys between the ages of five and nine months—is an intestinal blockage which, if left untreated, is uniformly fatal.
That’s not to say he was a bad father. Unlike his own absent father, he wasn’t. In fact, in so many important ways, he was better than most, particularly after the kids turned five. (“Call me when they’re five,” he’d often say. It took me a while to realize he wasn’t joking.) He could sit for hours with them in front of a bowl of fruit, teaching them how to draw. During summer vacations, he had the energy, enthusiasm, and creativity of a camp counselor. He loved exploring foreign cities and experiencing art and music and nature with them, often planning hikes and trips and excursions weeks in advance.
But these carefully wrought plans could also be extremely rigid. If he’d planned to take our children to a museum, but they wanted to go bowling instead, the resulting dissonance could ruin the weekend. Meanwhile, his sudden impulse or desire to do a new activity, once something else was already in full swing, resulted in moments such as the time we were hosting our friends Rebecca and Matt for dinner, and he stood up, just as the four of us were all sitting down to eat, announced he was g
oing to the gym, and walked out the door.
It wasn’t until two decades into our marriage, while speaking with Dr. Perry, that I would learn that hosting meals—a task my husband seemed unusually adept at both planning and enjoying—was so stressful to him that he would have to periodically get up and leave the table, go into our bedroom, and lie down on the floor to stare up at the ceiling and regenerate, a habit I’d always chalked up to frequent bathroom breaks. This was doubly confusing to learn as he was, more often than not, the initiator and executor of these meals, such as the all-day cassoulet feast he personally planned, cooked, and organized every winter for years.
Preparing that meal, which our children once mistook for a national holiday (“What do other families do on Cassoulet Day?”), took three full days of painstaking, bean-by-bean, sausage-by-duck steps, which he would then carefully notate in a growing multipage file on his computer. I finally read that mad scientist document, for the first time, after we were asked to co-write an essay in a food anthology, which would take its title from our essay, “The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage.” Our contribution was written in the form of emails back and forth between us: his heartbreakingly hopeful and minimizing; mine burdened with the deep ambivalence and sadness that would augur our end. I begged the editor to please consider changing the title of the book—she couldn’t—as it was being published at the precise moment that our marriage was in free fall.
But the real revelation of co-writing that essay with him for me was this: Until I saw his multipage, minute-by-minute, step-by-step cassoulet document, with its yearly honing of precise methods and temperatures and times, I hadn’t realized that the three-day preparation of the dish was not the challenge he had to get through every year before enjoying the meal with friends but rather the point of the exercise entirely. Serving it to our guests, including Nora, Nick, and others, was the challenge.
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