I sometimes wonder if she shared the secret of her illness with my dad that night at my book party, so intense was their conversation. He was the kind of person in whom you would confide such a thing. Particularly if you saw, from the way his suit jacket hung from his shoulders like an air mattress after deflation, that his time here was limited: a few weeks, as it turned out. But by the time I found out Nora was sick, it was too late to ask her.
“He’s amazing,” Nora would later say, having met him for the first time that night. Everyone who met my father said the same, from taxi drivers to teachers, homeless men to heads of state. The writer Malcolm Gladwell wrote a profile of him for The New Yorker after meeting him, describing his guileless glee, his giant Charlie Brown head, the way he was not afraid to cry in public when describing film scenes that moved him. His existence, in many ways, had allowed me to stay in my marriage far beyond its expiration date: He was the one who showed up to wheel me out of the hospital after an emergency appendectomy; who answered my calls with open ears and soothing words; who slept on my children’s bedroom floor—speaking of air mattresses—for six weeks to be the on-set guardian for my eldest, who had been tapped to play a role in a film, when I was on bed rest during my pregnancy with my youngest. “I couldn’t believe how completely at ease he was with his diagnosis,” Nora continued. “Cracking jokes about the born-again plumber who came over to fix the toilet but ended up telling him to take Jesus into his heart.”
Dad loved Harold, his plumber. He helped his son get into college. They spent hours gabbing in the kitchen together, after whichever clog Harold had come to fix was unclogged. When born-again Harold found out Dad was dying, he was distraught. He sat him down and spoke his mind. My Jewish father just nodded and promised Harold he would do whatever it took to stay alive, including accepting Jesus into his heart, if that would make Harold feel better. “I have to say,” Dad later wrote on happydickissick.com, the blog I helped him create to keep friends and family apprised of his health, “whether it was Christ’s will or just Harold’s plumbing skills, the toilet now flushes beautifully.”
“Look,” says Nora, switching back to her no-nonsense self. “In terms of the hysterectomy, what exactly are you worried about when you imagine going under the knife? Aside from the whole ‘not feeling like a woman anymore’ because really, stop.”
“I’m not worried about going under the knife,” I say, moving the pieces of cucumber around on my plate like pawns on a chessboard. “I’m worried about the aftermath. About being helpless with a man who’s not shown himself to be helpful when I’m incapacitated. Remember what happened after my appendectomy?”
“Yes,” says Nora. “That was less than ideal.”
Fun fact no one tells you when you get pregnant, or at least no one ever told me: The risk of acute appendicitis in postpartum women over the age of thirty-five—otherwise known as a “geriatric pregnancy” or “advanced maternal age”—is 84 percent greater than the risk to the general public. And so four months after giving birth to my youngest in 2006, when I was forty years old, I found myself writhing in pain on the emergency room floor, frantically trying to finish an edit of one of my essays with Dan Jones, the editor of The New York Times Modern Love column, before being admitted for an appendectomy. But the emergency room was crowded, the hospital guard kept yelling at me to get up off the floor and sit on a chair, and I kept telling him that sitting, right now, was not an option for my body. Then I had to explain to Dan what all of the yelling and commotion was about. “Wait, what?” said Dan, when he found out where I was and why and that I’d called him to finish the edit before calling my spouse to come join me. He insisted I hang up the phone and call my husband before we finish the edit, so someone could be my advocate in the hospital and get me admitted. How to explain to Dan that my husband’s presence during times of need could be a kind of absence? Couldn’t he divine that from the essay?
“Maybe he’ll surprise you,” says Nora. “Plus you can’t get from point A—my uterus is diseased and needs to come out—to point B—it’s out—if you don’t take that first step. You look completely wan. Anemic. What are you, forty-four?”
“Forty-five.”
“Your skin should not be that shade of gray at my age, let alone yours. So no more excuses. Get it done.” Nora’s tone is unusually urgent: a demand this time, not a suggestion. In seven months, she will be dead. She’s in full-on mother-hen, affairs-in-order mode. “Or at least just promise me you’ll make the appointment to get a hysterectomy as soon as possible. I’ll come visit. I promise.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll schedule the surgery for after my book comes out.” I fiddle with my wedding band: a new tic.
Nora notices. She notices everything. “How are things going with Joyce?”
I laugh. “Joyce is great. Really great at her job. Thank you for the recommendation.”
“And the marriage?
I sigh. Not wanting to disappoint Nora, but unable to find hopeful words.
My desperation for love—to be seen and heard and understood and mirrored—has become pathological. I feel lonely all the time. I’d had lunch earlier that year with an old boyfriend who lived across the country and was in town for work, and we’d struck up a lengthy email correspondence afterward. We’d met and fallen in love in Jamaica in our early twenties, spent a week together in London when he was studying there, and then our budding relationship abruptly ended not because we’d broken up or fallen out of love, but because when he’d flown to Paris to spend the weekend with me at my place, he’d lost the scrap of paper with my address and phone number on it and wound up spending two nights alone in a youth hostel instead.
For twenty years, I thought he’d stood me up.
“It was nuts,” he finally explained to me, of the missed connection nearly impossible to fathom in the age of the internet. I was unlisted. He’d wandered around Paris the whole weekend, trying to come up with any clues: the name of my photo agency, my neighborhood, an address, anything. Two years after that thwarted weekend, a friend of his had come back to the U.S. from a vacation in Paris with a stack of photos, and there I was, apparently, in the background of several of his snapshots of Père Lachaise, the Parisian cemetery in which Jim Morrison is buried. I’d had an assignment from Libération that day, to shoot the anniversary of Morrison’s death. “That’s my old girlfriend!” my once-boyfriend said to his friend. “Did you talk to her? Did you get her number?”
The friend hadn’t. But even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. By the time he saw those photos, I was already living with my future husband. When Google came along, the lost boyfriend googled my name. A photo appeared of my older kids and me in an article about my first book. Until then, he said, he’d still held out some vague hope we might find each other. He then married and started a family with the next woman who came along. And so life goes.
With this man, because he was not part of my social circle and never would be; because our relationship had ended the way it had, and we had a lot of catching up to do; because he’d known a past me that had not yet been beaten down by my present self; and because I had the shield of physical distance and a blinking cursor on a screen, I felt comfortable being brutally honest about the day-to-day exigencies of living with a spouse on the spectrum. His responses floored me with their perception and empathy. How was it that this person with whom I’d spent only a few weeks in my early twenties and who lived three thousand miles away saw me more clearly than my spouse of two decades? That was the kind of love I wanted: To be known. To be seen. To be heard and understood. No, not by the lost boyfriend—he was married, with three kids, to a wonderful woman—but by someone like him or, in the absence of an empathic substitute, by no one: The loneliness of single parenthood, I finally decided, would be preferable to feeling alone in my marriage.
And with this too-obvious epiphany—an epiphany I should have had years befor
e—I finally spoke the words out loud in couples therapy: “I want a divorce.” My husband, shocked, asked for one more chance to get things right. With our therapist’s blessing, after a discussion of specific changes to be made as conditions for staying in the marriage, I agreed.
That week, the man I married put tangible effort into being a loving partner and a good father. He communicated clearly. He came home in time for dinner. He helped with the dishes. He listened. He tried. He turned down NPR when the kids asked him to and apologized when he messed up. He was kind and thoughtful in our intimate spaces. He paid careful attention to the needs of others. He brought home flowers. He did not complain or induce guilt when I went out to my monthly Torah class, whose topic that week was, ironically, empathy. Specifically the moment in Exodus when Moses asks God why he, of all humans, should be the one to lead the Jews out of Egypt. To which God says, “I will be with you.” Not, “Buck up, kid, you’ve got this!” or “Because I’m too busy,” or “So what, what’s the big deal?” but a simple expression of empathy for the difficult journey ahead and a promise to be present throughout it: “I will be with you.” Which is all I’d ever wanted out of my marriage.
Through tears of gratitude at couples therapy at the end of that week, I said that if that’s the kind of spouse he could be from now on, I was absolutely willing to give our marriage another shot: to forget all his injuries and oddities and move forward into a clean-slate future.
It was a Friday night. I cooked us dinner: roast chicken, potatoes, spinach, a challah. We lit candles. He cleared the table. I swept the floor. The kids scurried off to their rooms, leaving us knee to knee on the couch, holding hands like moony teenagers and listening to The National’s “Slow Show”: my then favorite song, his less-than-favorite, but this time he didn’t skip to the next song with an “Ugh, I hate this, it’s so whiny.” He simply let it play, knowing its notes brought me joy.
Finally, I thought, tearing up from the simple delights of a conflict-free Friday night: a real marriage. We can do this. I thanked him for his efforts. Said I noticed them and was grateful. Told him that if we could keep going forward like this, we’d make it. But then his BlackBerry buzzed, notifying him of new emails, and he fished it out of his back pocket to read them. There, on the face of his phone, a dozen or so emails from Jdate—a dating app for Jews seeking to date other Jews—suddenly went scrolling by, one atop the other, a waterfall of wishful Wendys and randy Rebeccas. He immediately tried to turn the screen away from me, but it was too late. I’d already drowned.
“Why are you getting emails from Jdate?” I said, feeling suddenly sick, on the verge of regurgitating challah and chicken all over the living room rug.
“It’s just spam,” he said.
“Please don’t lie to me,” I said. “The cover-up is always worse than the crime. I get it. I said I wanted a divorce last week, so you signed up for Jdate to see what else is out there, and now—”
He cut me off. Looked me straight in the eye, just like he did during our mafia game at Nora’s. “I swear to god, Deb. Look at me. I did not sign up for Jdate. It’s just spam.”
“Stop lying!” I said. “Companies don’t send spam fifteen emails at a time! And why would they target you anyway? You’re middle-aged and married! Just admit it, please, and let’s deal with this new wrinkle next Friday with Joyce and move on honestly from there.”
“I’m not lying!” He doubled down. “I swear to god! I swear on our children’s lives!”
The gaslighting went on for five days, back and forth, back and forth—“Stop lying!” “I’m not!” “Stop lying!” “I’m not!”—until finally, on the fifth morning, after the kids had left for school and were out of earshot, I lost it. I screamed. I cursed. I strained my vocal cords until they broke—unfortunate, as I was scheduled to perform live storytelling at the 92nd Street Y that same night. I called him a fucking gaslighter and an asshole and a dick and a liar and everything horrific and ugly and insulting in between. “Stop lying to me! Stop lying to me! Stop lying to me!” I wailed, unable to control myself. Snot poured out of my nose. I was part trapped animal, part monster on the verge of ripping off his head with my giant monster teeth. If he was telling the story of our marriage, he could point to that morning and say, “My wife was totally unhinged.” Because in that moment, like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, I was. After about an hour or so of this ugliness, he finally admitted the truth. “Okay, fine, I signed up for Jdate! So what? What’s the big deal?”
I shook my head and walked out. If he couldn’t understand why this was a big deal to me—or, rather, why his five days of lying about it were—we were done.
“How’s my marriage?” I say to Nora. “About as healthy as my uterus.”
“Are you still corresponding with that old boyfriend?”
“No. It was palliative but stupid.”
“Thank god,” says Nora. “That would have gone nowhere good.”
Nora grabs for the bill when it comes as usual.
“No,” I say. “This time I want to pay. Please. I insist.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, after several rounds of this, finally releasing her hold on the server book. “But, I need to say something, and I don’t want you to get upset.” She pauses, weighing her words. “He doesn’t have Asperger’s, you know. I’m sure of it.”
“What? No, stop.” This is the only argument we will ever have in our eleven-year friendship, the only time her well-earned confidence about always being right gets in the way of the truth. It’s partially my fault. For years I have shielded her, my trusted confidante, from my marriage’s uglier moments the same way I’ve shielded my various doctors from what was really going on inside my body. Why? A combination of shame and not wanting to complain. “You’re wrong,” I say.
In many ways, Nora’s and my backstories are similar: both the eldest of four girls; both writers of personal essays; both authors of memoirs and novels; both mothers of firstborn sons with the same first name. But we’ve become so enamored of our similarities, I haven’t wanted to point out our one major difference: When her second husband, Watergate wunderkind Carl Bernstein, did something unforgivable—he cheated on her when she was pregnant with her second child—she walked out the door and never looked back. When my husband did something unforgivable, I pushed it aside, telling no one, and stayed. And stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Repressing the memory until it lodged in my body like a neglected splinter: a vague ache, somewhere there under the skin, but when you touch it, fire.
Asperger’s, no Asperger’s, in the end, what did labels matter? Bruises need not be visible to be calamitous, and I stayed in a sometimes abusive and empathyless marriage for decades instead of leaving it. That’s on me and solely on me, and I regret not leaving years earlier. It’s not that I couldn’t leave, as much as I told myself otherwise. It’s that I chose, every day, to stay. I was the peacekeeper as a child as well. It’s a learned behavior, this avoidance and suppression. Always saying sorry first and solo, even if it’s not your fault. Presenting a false front to the world for the sake of family loyalty: the ultimate self-annihilating omertà. But once you’ve learned this behavior, like a drunk party guest it lingers, permanently occupying the sleeper sofa of your psyche. Even now, after years of therapy, knowing everything I do about my own propensity for peacekeeping and minimizing, I’ll still catch myself saying a cheerful “No worries!” to someone who’s hurt me. When what I want to say is “Fuck you.”
“I’m not wrong about the Asperger’s,” says Nora. “But we’re going to drop this conversation right now, because I see that I’ve upset you.”
“You are wrong, and we’re not going to drop it,” I say. With rare people, I’m sometimes able to suppress the suppression, to go to war with the peacekeeping. Nora, at the end of her life, was one of them. My husband’s diagnosis, I tell her, in so many words, is not the daily special instead of the chick
en salad at Freds or the beets instead of the cucumbers with dill at E.A.T. You can’t just choose no Asperger’s over Asperger’s on the menu because you have a hunch the doctor is wrong. “He was diagnosed,” I remind her, “by one of the foremost experts in autism spectrum disorders in New York City. He scored 8 out of a possible 80 points on the EQ test. He has all the hallmarks of the disorder and then some, whatever you want to call it, Asperger’s or garden variety lack of empathy.” Nora knows all of this. We’ve gone over it countless times. Plus no one knows what goes on in a marriage except the couple in it, and even they are living two different realities of the same relationship.
“But he’s so at ease at our dinner parties. And he truly seems to love you. It doesn’t make sense. I know people who are far more dysfunctional than he is. I’ve seen Asperger’s up close, and I’m telling you: He doesn’t have it.”
“It’s a ruse, his ease,” I say. “He mimics it. He was a child actor, remember?” When his mother lost her job after applying for asylum under Brezhnev and became a refusenik, he and his twin brother made up the difference in lost income by acting in Russian films. “He’s a chameleon. It’s a survival skill. When he’s with his friend Joe, he starts talking with Joe’s Reno drawl and Hollywood swagger. When he’s with his Orthodox family, he might as well be a Hasid. When he’s with you and Nick, he becomes the urban sophisticate. He knows how to watch and listen carefully and learn behaviors. He watched rom-coms, for example, to figure out how to woo me.”
“Seriously?” says Nora, rom-com auteur.
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