Too Much
Page 23
Brice, of course, has remarried a fresh Christian beauty; forgiveness does not mean condemning oneself to damaged goods. Judith, we understand, regards her circumstances with penitence. As Lindy West argues, Tyler Perry’s women are never victims, but sinners.4 For Judith to desire more than her lot—a puerile husband who forgets her birthday—indicates that wantonness has derailed her perspective and good Christian sense. If she had identified her lustful stirrings as sinful, rather than nurture them, then the most eligible bachelor would not have tempted her. And she would have immediately sent Harley packing, intuiting his hedonistic lifestyle as brutal contagion that would be doubly contemptible if she were to partake.
* * *
My sin started in earnest during the holidays that winter. The night that Nick arrived at my apartment for Thanksgiving, I told him we needed to talk, but the words at the back of my tongue—“I can’t love you; I want a divorce”—were shoved to the side by more tempered speech. I mentioned the inadequacy of our sex life, foregrounding it as the primary reason for my unhappiness. Feebly, I told him, “I know you’re a really good guy.”
“That’s what people say when they’re about to break up with someone,” he quietly replied.
I don’t know if Nick perceived what I was withholding, what pressed behind the vague, elliptical words I clumsily harnessed to convince both of us that everything would be okay. For my part, I attempted to swallow my own lie because I didn’t see another choice. It never occurred to me that I could have made what would have seemed a rash and selfish decision and demanded an immediate separation. Perhaps in retrospect that would have been the better course of action. But we had only been married since August, and we still lived separately. Didn’t I owe this man more time? Didn’t I have an obligation to try, untenable and imprisoning as the idea seemed? If I found myself incapable, my own fears would be confirmed: I was both too impulsive and too unstable for healthy romance. I was one of the irredeemable people undone by a society that, somehow, scores of others could navigate. “You can’t always do what you want,” I chided myself, “because that’s not being an adult.” At the time I could not parse responsibility from misery.
My family gathered at my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner, and as my mother and I sat together on the couch, tiny cousins rolling across our laps, she snatched a moment to ask, under her breath, if everything was “okay” now that Nick and I had spent some time together. Weeks ago I had confided to her about Paul during a long and aching phone conversation. She had met my desperation with sympathy, even remarking that it was difficult for her to fathom my wedding as an event that had really happened. Finally we were together, albeit surrounded, and I cannot remember what I answered her. I only know that I passed the evening trailing after my sisters and parents, attempting to shed the husband who was in turn always looking for me.
When I found my father in the basement, parked in front of Thanksgiving Day football, I situated myself on the couch directly behind his rocking chair. We were quiet—my father prefers quiet—but so much the better. I sat with him in silence, willing my heart’s pace to settle to the creak of the rocking chair. Still, I felt alienated from his calm influence, set adrift in a marital calamity of my own invention. What if my parents—made aware of my unhappiness—seized me from Nick’s grasp, whisked me home to Virginia Beach, and divested me of accountability for my mess? I’d be even more of a coward then, but at least I’d be safe. As far as I was concerned, I had forfeited my right to autonomy. It was tantalizing, this notion of my parents shooing Nick away on my behalf, leaving me unfettered and free to love Paul openly once the fires had burned themselves out.
My mind had relaxed into a fanciful free fall, and yet it was only a few moments after joining my father downstairs that Nick followed, again, in search of me. I looked at him and tried to love him. I could not. Nor could I conceal my irritation at his arrival. With a loaded sigh, I trudged back to the living room, taking my place among the family as a happy and gracious newlywed.
I cried when Nick left at the end of the break. He was relieved and seemed to pocket my tears as evidence of affection. In some ways, they were. Amidst the misplaced anger, physical disinterest, and the terrifying realization of our incompatibility, I’d located tendrils of melancholic fondness. We had spent five years together, after all, and I was grateful for everything that had been good between us. I wish I had had the courage to accept that our relationship had run its course years ago, to have left him honestly, and to have faced the solitude that can accompany living and navigating the world alone. In truth, I was crying in reminiscence, in mourning. I was also crying because somewhere in the depths of myself I had already decided to betray him.
By the time I returned to campus, my attention, previously straining in Nick’s direction, swiveled back to Paul as if by magnetic pull. When he stopped by my office door to say hello, I nearly knocked over my desk chair in my haste to embrace him. I wore my love without trepidation. The shithouse was going down, and I was a terrible actress—why even make an attempt at concealment? I did not hold him long, but in that quick pause I arrived at an understanding. If Paul had committed himself to caution before, he was, just a little, letting me know what he had been protecting.
On the day the semester ended, we planned a night to watch movies and share music. I wanted Paul to see Empire Records, and we were both tickled by the prospect of sharing the stories tied to our favorite songs. (It’s not lost on me that the characters of Empire Records would certainly have regarded our evening’s agenda as fundamentally precoital.)
I woke the morning of our get-together vibrating with excitement. But I continued, as I had done for weeks, to admonish myself that our end-of-semester celebration was perfectly innocuous. Whatever Paul meant to me I would have to suppress—just enough, if not entirely—so as not to let the reins that had been gliding steadily out of my grasp fall away completely. And so I told myself that I wasn’t shaving my legs for any special occasion, though I rarely touch a razor once the temperature drops beneath sixty degrees.
I spent all day masquerading as an easy, breezy gal who—no big deal—was headed over to a male pal’s house for the most casual and chaste of get-togethers. The afternoon seemed contemptuously long, as if time, already aware of what would transpire, was implementing preemptive punitive measures. When Paul turned up at my office to escort me back to his house, I felt relief. Soon we were seated on the couch in his bedroom, narrating our lives through our iTunes libraries and wooing his cat, Hobo, out from behind the bed.
I don’t recall why we eventually embraced; perhaps I had confided some intimate detail of my personal history. Perhaps we were looking for any sliver of opportunity. But when we pulled away, it was only for me to rest my head against his shoulder as he held me close.
Silence. But I could only stand it so long.
“Are we going to talk about the fact that I’m married?” I blurted out. Or so my memory tells me.
According to Paul, I spoke these words softly and calmly, albeit with distinct sadness. It’s remarkable to me that this could be true. What I do know is that, as I broached this topic, the muscles in my chest throbbed, vibrating as if an invisible hand carelessly strummed across them. I did not especially want to discuss my marriage; in fact the mere act of pronunciation seemed beyond my physical capacity. And so, uttering this question—elliptical and uncommitting though it was—felt akin to choking out a tumor. It plunked out, sloppy and stumbling, but at last unavoidable.
“We can if you want to,” Paul replied. But for his part, he said very little. I would not have blamed him for telling me to go, for coming to his senses that moment and realizing that I was foolish and selfish, the sort of woman who was careless with others’ most tender emotions. Hadn’t I been?
Not looking at him, but not letting go, I told him the truth.
“I have never felt for anyone what I feel for you.”
Paul merely nodded in response.
My chest tightened with barbed joy when Paul replied, so softly, “Yes.”
After that, I know we kissed with loving relief and with sorrow, and I know, too, that I sometimes gave into self-pitying sobs. Nick texted me later that night to ask if I was home; I lied. I promised myself I wouldn’t stay the night, but by two a.m. I knew that I had intended to do so anyway. I slipped on one of Paul’s old T-shirts, and gently, as if fearing the air around us would shatter, we made love in his bed.
For one night, my brain allowed me to play make-believe. I wasn’t married—I wasn’t myself—I was an obscure body and brain following impulse. The following morning, however, my brain had had the opportunity to take stock of recent events, and I crumpled.
I said goodbye to Paul and returned home with neither firm plans to return nor to stay away. I texted Leigha on the train, and she met me back at my apartment. We passed the day together, me scarcely aware of anything beyond my own frazzled free associations. Leigha, for her part, remained a steadfast wellspring of calm and refrained from scolding me because she was confident in my own self-condemnation. The truest friends, I have learned, expect the best from us without balking at each misstep.
But I’m sure I tried her patience, as I certainly tried my own. In the middle of that sticky, befuddling mire, only a few things seemed clear to me, and I recited them like the alphabet. First, that I was in love with Paul. Second, that I did not love Nick enough to remain married to him, and that I wanted to leave him. And finally, that however much I wanted to jettison my present life and begin anew with Paul, I felt certain that leaving then, after barely four months of marriage, was socially unacceptable to the point of futility. However, none of the above deterred me from seeing Paul every day for nearly a week.
The mundanity was at once dazzling and devastating. One night we ordered pizza; I waited downstairs to greet the delivery person. Paul intercepted me, laden with plates and utensils, and paused for a quick, rosy kiss before continuing up the stairs. I thought to myself, brazenly defiant, “I will never give this up.” And for a handful of disoriented minutes, playing the runaway newlywed would seem plausible, even righteous.
But those moments quickly dimmed. As Paul and I worked side-by-side, thighs pressed together as if oxygen were the enemy, I would founder, pained by the fresh realization that this precious intimacy was purchased with deceit. The complexity of my predicament always reasserted itself. Paul never attempted to sway me, to coax me out of my marriage, but I also knew he wanted me to leave as much as I wanted to myself. Both of us, I think, understood that we toed the brink of alienation. So as the week stumbled on, and Paul prepared to return to Colorado that Saturday, we grasped at what we could offer each other: foolish, reckless love, the fear of hurting each other, and mutual pity for the fallout that we would each inevitably negotiate separately.
But all the while I was crumbling from the core. I saw clearly an inevitable trajectory of destruction, but I had been swinging my bat for too long to combat inertia. I won’t credit myself with breaking anyone’s heart besides my own. Yet I would close my eyes and see my likeness beating three of them, bloodied, sputtering, and suspended from dark air: Nick’s heart. Paul’s heart. Mine.
By Thursday, I forced myself to return home for at least one evening. My last term paper was due the following day, and I had barely written half of it. Moreover, Nick would be returning to DC in several days, and I needed to determine a next move before his arrival.
Or perhaps I should say: summon the courage to end my affair with Paul, a necessity I could not deny regardless of whether I chose to stay married. But the prospect of detaching myself from him made me miserable. Our immediate future was so bleak that, in his absence, it seemed that I had already lost him.
The solitude of my apartment meant being cloistered with my own increasingly panicked thoughts. I opened my laptop and pulled out Villette, reasoning that if I could just finish my term paper, I could more adeptly navigate my topsy-turvy circumstances. But anxiety coursed through my body without remission.
Nick, I knew, was studying for exams, but in more companionable times we had spent end-of-term trudges working together on video chat. I suggested we initiate one of these chats now, though I was not especially keen to talk. But the longer I fretted in that capsule basement apartment, the more my worries seemed to clutch and smother me. I felt like the most banal of stereotypes, but there’s no solidarity in wandering a well-traveled narrative.
For perhaps a half hour, I choked up conversation with my husband, attempted to feign the demeanor of one merely unsettled by garden-variety academic stress. But as he turned his eyes away from me and back to his books, his face lapsed into glum worry. Did he already know? Was it fair for him to know? Shaking and sobbing, I told him anyway.
Nick grew quietly furious, muttering that he had already guessed my transgression—when, that week, I had assured him I was home and alone, he counted it as one more lie charged to my account. And, of course, there was nothing to dispute: I had lied about everything until my feeble conscience broke open.
In an obscure corner of my brain, I wondered at my vigorous promises to be a better wife while every nerve screamed at me to get the fuck out. But it’s emphatically clear to me now that I held my own judgment in deep suspicion (not without cause, perhaps) and instead panted after external guidance: family, novels, friends, song lyrics—it didn’t matter, so long as the execution was confident.
And so it did not occur to me, as I admitted my deceitfulness to Nick, that I could have demanded a divorce and braced myself against the resulting familial tempest. My resolve was too limp; besides, I assumed what I wanted was impossible because it was both selfish and unconventional. Could a choice that seemed so solipsistic be fundamentally correct? Months later, I would read between choked sobs Dear Sugar’s warm assurance: “wanting to leave is enough.” But deep into that gnashing December night, I could only fathom the route of penitence. I contemplated the combined fury of my extended family and Nick’s; it seemed to girdle me, shroud me so that there was no escaping it or my circumstances. Coward that I was, I feared Nick’s anger too, and I was loath to supply any further information that would intensify it. Besides, protesting that I was in love with Paul was futile if I had already determined the inevitability of giving him up.
All week, I longed to follow my emotional compass, and in the abstract I had always touted the necessity of doing so. But I had been an irresponsible custodian of my emotions and impulses. I had explained away my diminishing affection for Nick, so careless of romantic love’s absence that I had married him anyway. And then I had so freely indulged my desire for Paul that I had pursued an intimacy I knew was illicit. I was not the intuitive, emotionally perceptive woman I prided myself on being, but rather clumsy under the weight of my own contorted passions. How could I be confident that I would commit myself to another person when all evidence pointed to me as mercurial and impulsive? How could I claim to be informed by feeling when, in truth, I was haunted by emotions that terrified me or felled me in a deluge?
As my thoughts traveled down this darkening path, my present circumstances began to resemble a mire of roiling shit. I was begging forgiveness from someone I didn’t want, someone whose forgiveness paled in comparison to the prospect of Paul’s love. But I had to abandon Paul. We, but mostly I, had done everything wrong. I had wrecked my ship; now I was sinking with it.
Nick was sputtering mad. I was weeping. I glanced over at my unfinished seminar paper. At some point in the evening I had dashed off a frenzied email to my professor asking for an extension because “my husband was threatening to leave me.” (He granted my request.) The world was absurd. And me? I was a fool.
I walked into my bathroom and pulled out a bottle of Tylenol, filled to the brim. I shoveled it into my mouth and forced every single one
down. I heard Nick calling to me. I felt Paul in my bones. Would he be there when I died?
* * *
Were this a nineteenth-century novel or a Tyler Perry film, the story might end here. The camera would draw slowly back as I double over, heaving and spewing bile—paying the piper for my sins of lustful excess. The scene might then fade to black, emitting only the telltale moan of the ambulance, then the muffled bustle of the emergency room, and finally a heart monitor chirping listlessly before giving way to the flat line’s monotone. A new scene would come into focus, bespeaking the ruin I had left behind. Perhaps we’d be faced with a long shot of Nick weeping in the hospital corridor, the indisputable victim of both marital treachery and my suicide. We would be urged, through our sympathy, to glance over his imperfections, not least because he had loved someone as flawed as me.
And then, of course, a mournful Paul would be presented to us, so that we might benevolently pity him in spite of his own transgressions. Maybe Nick would even shake his hand at my funeral, the perfect bastion of wounded gentility. Hate the sin, not the (male) sinner, right? My casket, like my narrative, would be shut: after all, cheating suicidal wrecks like me are events, not agents. We cannonball through innocent male bodies, dragging them to the brink of annihilation. But there is gruesome relief in the unfaithful woman’s death. It is a reprieve; the space she vacates, however haunted, no longer heaves with the weight of her emotional largesse. Packed away in a coffin, she is subdued and contained, no longer speaking but spoken for.
My own story, as you may safely assume, does not end this way. I did not die: I immediately regretted the Tylenol and ran to my landlady, who drove me to the hospital. (“What happened, honey?” a nurse asked. “I cheated on my husband…I’m such a cliché,” I slurred. My landlady, by now used to my pedantic literary monologues, sighed. “Oh, Rachel, of course you would give that answer now.”)