On the night I married Peter, my dad gave me his best advice about how to make it last. He said, “Put protecting the marriage before everything else.” I had taken his advice to heart, and, in response, I never consciously did anything that might put my marriage in jeopardy. I did not flirt with people. I did not go out drinking at bars. I did not develop close friendships with guys who were not Peter. Except, of course, these days, for Nelson—sort of. Nelson had kind of snuck up on me. It had never occurred to me that a man as goofy as Nelson could be a threat to anyone other than himself.
But seeing it from Peter's view, I realized that he might, as impossible as it seemed, actually be thinking that I'd been having an affair with Nelson. I was, without question, obsessed with photography and that class. It was true, I realized with a little jolt of horror, that I spent more time with Nelson these days than I did with Peter. I had stayed at the studio until midnight at least four nights a week for months. I could easily have been having an affair. It would have been a perfect cover. And Peter didn't know Nelson well enough, or possibly even me anymore, for that matter, to rule out something even that ridiculous.
Chapter 27
In the early morning hours, that first day without Peter, I'd tried to call my mother. At 5:15, while I'd been nursing Baby Sam and panicking about how I was going to make it through the day, she was the only person I could reach out to. After all, Dubai was nine hours ahead of us, so she'd be awake. She wasn't home, of course. I just got her cell phone voice mail.
And so I just started talking to it, glad we had a family calling plan that wouldn't charge me, as if I were writing a long letter. When it cut me off, I hit “redial” and continued talking. I started at the beginning, with the first photos I took with her camera, and ended with the vision of Peter's angry back as he strode away on the packed sidewalk snow. All in all, I left fourteen messages on my mother's phone. By the last one, I was in tears again, and my voice had a frenzied, hoarse quality that caused even Baby Sam to keep a wild eye on me.
These were my first fourteen phone calls of the morning. The next one, hours later, was an incoming. It was Amanda, on her way to my house, with some news of her own. Grey, in a stealth move that not even Amanda had anticipated, had just asked her for a divorce. After a home-cooked breakfast of poached eggs and rosemary new potatoes.
“Grey just left you?” I said.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“This morning?”
“Uh-huh.”
And then in a tone of voice that sounded almost delighted, as if we had bought the same shoes on the same day or chosen the same nail polish color at a mani-pedi, I said, “Peter just left me last night!”
Amanda paused to correct me. “Left for the fellowship.”
“Yes,” I said. “But also possibly left me, as well.”
She couldn't imagine what I was talking about. I gave her the two-minute summary, and then said, “So I'm not sure if he left me, or if he left me left me.”
“He caught you smooching your art teacher,” Amanda said, unwilling to engage in ambiguity. “He left you.”
“I wasn't smooching anybody,” I said. But we had to marvel at the timing. It was incredible. The two of our marriages breaking apart within hours of each other. “What are the odds?” I said.
“Not good.”
Grey and Amanda were supposed to be leaving that morning for a weeklong trip to Santa Fe. Her bag was packed, as was his, and she'd bought a new winter scarf—a scarlet color that would have looked great among the adobe.
Instead, their plane took off with them still at home, arguing in hushed voices while the housekeeper pretreated the laundry. Grey seemed irritated that Amanda had kept him there so long, as if his leaving had been a foregone conclusion. As if she were petulantly delaying the inevitable the way a child delays bedtime.
Amanda told me she'd been half-joking when she worried about Grey's affair. She'd worried about every man she'd ever been with cheating on her. She believed it was the things you didn't worry about that always got you in the end, so she hedged her bets by worrying a little about everything she could think of.
But without meaning to, she'd hit on something. Though Grey denied the affair—and she'd never found any proof of it, despite hours of searching—he was leaving her nonetheless. No couples counseling, no trial separation. He was happy to give her full custody of Gracin, who he still wanted to try to see “as often as possible.” He was thinking about taking a job in Chicago and apparently had been mulling it over for a month without even saying a thing.
They had gone out to the movies the night before, as they did every Friday night, to see the new James Bond, which was, apparently, the nail in the coffin on their marriage. Watching Bond Jet Ski through a shark-infested ocean and wind up at the side of his lady love, Grey had had an epiphany: His life lacked excitement.
“His life lacks excitement,” Amanda said, skipping the greeting, as I opened my door. Her eyes were smudged with dissolved mascara. Minutes later, she was on my sofa with a compact open, cleaning herself up. I, on the other hand, was dashing around the apartment, pulling Toby down off the toilet tank, guarding Baby Sam as he teetered around the living room, warning Alexander not to throw any more cold spaghetti noodles at anyone, especially Amanda. Gracin was at school, so Amanda could do exactly what I would have done, if I'd had the option: She curled up on the sofa.
“Grey left you to become James Bond?” I asked.
“It looks that way,” she said. Then she looked right up at me. “But he's never going to get any action. He's so homely.”
I was completely shocked. “I thought you thought he was gorgeous.”
“He was gorgeous,” she said, “when I loved him.” She picked a spaghetti noodle off the arm of the sofa. “People are always beautiful when you love them.”
While Grey was ending their marriage, Amanda had kept glancing at her chipped nails, thinking about what lovely hands she'd wound up with, and how much they looked like her mother's, and how she really needed a manicure and ought to take better care of them.
“You can't leave me,” she finally said. “That's not going to work.”
He gave her such a patronizing look, then, that she had been tempted to throw the butter knife at him. And he said, in a voice far too matter-of-fact, “You can't make me stay.”
That was the moment she believed him. After fifty-five minutes, she finally believed him. He was leaving her. She determined that she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. If he didn't love her, then she didn't love him. If he could walk away, then she could, too. She made her voice very calm. She started cleaning the kitchen, pulling clean silverware out of the washer basket and putting it in the drawer. She kept it together at that moment. She was being left by her short, pug-nosed husband, but she was far too fabulous to care.
And then their conversation shifted into logistics. He would take the bags he'd packed for the trip and come back in a few days for the rest. He'd be staying at a hotel over the weekend. He was sorry to miss the trip, and he hoped she'd go anyway later in the afternoon and “take a little time.” The sitter was coming, he pointed out, and the relaxation, he added in an insultingly tender voice, might do her good.
That was when she lost it. The faux-sympathy got her. “Don't fucking talk about what will do me good!” She slammed the silverware drawer closed so hard that a piece of wood at the corner popped off. It felt good to slam something that hard. She had always loved to throw things when she got angry, and this morning was no exception.
She threw the silverware basket on the floor and watched the forks and knives scatter. She slammed the cabinets closed over and over with increasing frustration as they popped back open each time. She took a dish off the counter and shattered it. She picked up one of the breakfast chairs and smashed it down against the floor, knocking off one of its legs. She'd never broken a piece of furniture in anger before. The destruction, in that moment, felt great—even though th
at chair was an antique that had taken her two years of searching to find.
And all the while she was shouting any words that came into her head: “Don't talk to me about what would do me good! You selfish prick! You don't get to walk out on your wife of seven years and hand out tidbits of wisdom for living as you skip out the door! You don't get to take up residence in a hotel and turn into Dr. Phil! Don't tell me what to do! It would do me good to have a husband! It would do me good to have a person who loves me best in the world! A person who keeps his promises! Who takes me to dinner! Who takes out the trash! Who changes the lightbulbs! Who brings me Starbucks! Who wants to know how my day was! Who holds my hand at the movies! Who goes with me to Santa Fe! That would do me some fucking good!”
She paused to stare him down. She was breathing hard and feeling a little triumphant. As if she'd really let him have it. As if this were any kind of argument that she could win.
“That's the thing,” he said. “I don't want to take out the trash. I don't want to change the lightbulbs.” He moved toward the door. “And I don't want to go with you to Santa Fe.”
It was hard to top the smashing of the breakfast chair, but she saw a chance, and she took it. She picked up the orange juice pitcher on the table—Tiffany crystal that had been a wedding gift—and without thinking about the fact that the pattern had been discontinued or how much she'd miss that pitcher after it was gone, she smashed it on the floor, aiming straight at Grey's feet and managing to soak his suit up to the knees with juice.
He walked out the kitchen door after that, leaving her alone. She stood for just a second, watching orange juice drip down the low panes of the French doors. But then she took a deep breath and held it and turned to head out herself. That little rodent was not going to make her cry.
By the time she showed up at our apartment, of course, she was crying. And on top of that, she'd broken a nail during her tantrum.
“He said he wanted passion,” she told me on the sofa. “He said he was bored.”
“You've got passion!” I said. “You've got passion to spare!”
But the truth, and Amanda and I both knew it, was that if passion was what he really wanted, if he really needed thrills and excitement and uncertainty, if he really wanted to be James Bond, he might just have to go somewhere else. Because being married—and raising kids, especially—was about stability, about certainty, about patterns and expectations. It had to be that way, for the kids if nothing else.
Grey had said he felt suffocated, and not in a metaphorical way—physically suffocated. He said he couldn't breathe sometimes in their house, the way it's hard to breathe in a smoky kitchen, and that he'd come home for supper and have to stop at the front door and take deep breaths before he stepped over the threshold. Amanda and I knew that feeling. It wasn't a reason to leave. It was just part of parenting.
But he was tired of parenting, and marriage, and “the whole thing.” There was, as he put it, “too much shit work.”
And there was nothing to say to that. Some aspects of marriage were shit work. And many aspects of parenting were. Literally. But the payoff for the drudgery—the laundry folding, the toilet plunging, the prescription filling, the trips to the dry cleaners—in theory, at least, was intimacy. Something you could not buy, or pick up at a bar, or have a one-night stand with. Something you could earn only by putting in the man-hours.
“Did you point that out to him?” I asked.
“I did,” she said.
“Well, what did he say to that?”
Amanda had her cell phone out and was poised to dial. Within the hour, she'd be at the nail salon, starting fresh with a dark raspberry color she'd never tried before called “You Wish.” She took a deep breath. “He said, ‘You know as well as I do that intimacy is overrated.'”
The next call of the day just after Amanda left was Nelson, apologizing.
“You're not drunk,” I noted.
“Not yet,” he said.
“I thought for sure you'd fall off the wagon.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
In fact, Josh had driven him home in the art van. And stayed with him overnight. And given him some good books to read. And talked to him about the Twelve Steps. And agreed to be his sponsor. And listened to some Steely Dan on vinyl. And turned out to be a poster boy for turning your life around. “He really knows his shit,” Nelson said.
“I'm glad,” I told him.
There was a pause, and then Nelson said, “I'm sorry about last night.”
I took a deep breath as he said it. I knew that Nelson was not a bad guy. And I knew that he posed no threat to Peter. But I also knew that this would be the last time I'd ever talk to him.
I said, “Nelson, I know you're sorry. But now I can't talk to you anymore.”
“Hold on—” he started, but I was already gone. And that was it. After all the ways we'd gotten tangled in each other's lives, I untangled us like that. I'd find a new photo lab, and, possibly, a new gym. But I wouldn't talk to him again. Even if he passed me on the street.
Just as I hung up with Nelson, Nora, who had heard the news about Peter from Josh, knocked on the door, wanting to check on me.
“He left,” I said. “He left last night.”
“He left for his fellowship, or he left you?”
“The consensus so far,” I said, “is probably both.”
Next thing, she was running me a hot shower. She called Josh to take the two big boys down to his place—and he was glad to do it: He had some packing peanuts they could jump in—so I could take a minute to pull myself together.
“It's going to take a lot longer than a minute,” I said.
“Wash your hair,” she said. “When you can't do anything else, you can do that.”
One of Nora's books on grief had been a national bestseller in the eighties. My mother even owned a copy, and Josh had a signed first edition he ‘d found on eBay But Nora didn't write about grief anymore. Or teach classes. Or claim to know anything. She decided, after Viktor died, that she ‘d had no idea what she was talking about—and she ‘d gone on sabbatical. She did, however, after a year and a half without Viktor, have some advice for me about how to get through the day alone.
“Shower every day,” she said. “Brush and floss. Blow-dry your hair and wear something nice. Don't forget lipstick and mascara, at the very least. Do not look at old photos. Do not hold articles of his clothing to your face. Do not close your eyes and try to pretend that he is sitting across the room reading the paper just so that you can feel okay again, even for a second. Do not sit in his desk chair, put on his glasses, put his shaving cream on your face, or carry his toothbrush around in your pocket. Do not read his books. Do not stand among the clothes in his closet. Do not write letters to him at night. Stay in the present, or, if at all possible, in the future. There's nowhere else you can go.”
I didn't ask about the bathrobe. I just nodded and took it all in.
After my shower, I helped Baby Sam toddle around the kitchen while Nora made French toast. I gave her the whole Nelson story, too, and she listened as she cooked. By the time we were sitting at the table, Baby Sam on my lap, she was convinced about what to do. “When we finish eating,” she said, “we're buying you a plane ticket to California.”
“I can't go to California,” I said. “I don't have any money.”
And then, in a way that never seemed to happen, the universe came to my rescue. The phone rang, and it was Amanda, on her cell, with a new manicure, giving me the scoop that Anna Belkin had decided last night, while she was closing up the café, to buy one of my photographs herself. The one of Gracin in all her Band-Aids next to the tree with the gnarled trunk. “She's leaving a check at the register,” Amanda said, “for three hundred and fifty dollars. Less her ten percent commission.”
“That's a ticket to California,” Nora said, when I hung up, as if that settled the matter. “That's exactly what they cost.”
“Yes,” I sa
id, “but I would need four tickets to California.” I pointed at Baby Sam, who had crawled up under my T-shirt to nurse.
“Leave them here,” Nora said. “I'll watch them.”
But I wasn't leaving them with Nora. Babysitting three sleeping children for a couple of hours with their parents at the end of the block was one thing. Babysitting three children for an entire weekend with their parents on the other side of the country—especially my three feisty children—was too much.
“I'll think about it,” I said. But I wasn't going to think about it. I couldn't leave them. I'd have to figure out this thing with Peter some other way.
Chapter 28
The next morning, I couldn't find my phone. I went to check for a message from Peter, and it wasn't hooked up to the charger. When I thought back, I couldn't even remember hooking it up to the charger. And so I looked everywhere. I started with my purse and worked my way out. I spent the morning peering into the refrigerator with a flashlight and waving my arm behind bookshelves. After five hours, I called it: It was lost.
I packed up the boys and we hiked over to the cell phone store. The boys knocked over displays and crawled between customers' legs while the salesman explained to me that it was going to be $189 to replace it. If I'd had insurance, a lost or broken phone would have been free. But as things were, it would be $189. “That's why it's a good idea to take out insurance,” he said. “For when you lose your phone.”
“But I never lose my phone,” I protested.
Everyone Is Beautiful Page 19
