by Jessica Love
“Yeah. Well, you let me know,” I said with what I imagine was the same expression of grim determination my grandmother had as she swept up fragments of her beloved tea cup, her youth in France, her heritage.
• • • •
A week later Mark moved out to a small furnished apartment not far from Pike Place Market “to get his head together.”
“You know this isn’t fair,” I said when he told me.
“I know. I can’t help it,” he said.
“You were the one who broke our rules in Denver,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I just didn’t think I’d feel like this. I thought it would be contained.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“Somehow it’s different that I wasn’t the sole source of your pleasure. Somehow that diminished me.”
“How can it diminish you!? It was your idea!” I said.
“I know.” He just left that there, as if it didn’t matter. Maybe it didn’t, and that started to piss me off, too.
“This whole fucking thing was your idea,” I said.
“I know.” He looked again like that stealing six-year-old.
In that moment, I despised him for that, for looking like a child, for acting like a child, for what he was doing, what he was doing to us, what he was doing to me, for leaving me behind in “our” house.
But as they say, when you are run over by a train, it’s not the caboose that kills you.
“The first time, every escalation, every new thing, every new erotic moment, was your fucking idea,” I hissed at him.
“I know,” he said.
“Get out of my sight,” I told him. “I’ll let you know when you can come back for the rest of your things.”
“I don’t want to get the rest of my things. I just want a little time,” he said.
“Get out.”
In a week, I’d left the house on Queen Anne Hill as well. I took my clothes, my jewelry, my toiletries. I found a place downtown, and I’m not saying where because I still stay there. Sometimes.
Suffice it to say that in the anger I was feeling when I made that decision, I decided to spoil myself a little. It was a luxury that nearly upended me, but we’ll get to that.
The thing is, before Mark, it was me fighting to be who I was. Then it was Mark and me against the world. Suddenly, now, the person whom I’d been protecting and who had been protecting me was the threat. For years I’d been intentionally open, vulnerable to Mark, and had mostly avoided dealing with him defensively.
Now I was unarmed.
All of a sudden, not only was Mark the source of my pain, but I still couldn’t react in ways that truly protected me without definitively causing the end of our relationship.
I wasn’t ready for that, so I had to wait it out, passively, not protecting myself. That reawakened some emotions from a long, long time ago.
What happened in Denver unwound my life, leaving it like a tangled garden hose in winter, wrapped around and through itself in stiff coils and knots that would resolve only in their own sweet time, in their own sweet way.
Part III
My father blamed me for the breakup with Mark. I wasn’t surprised. Mark could do no wrong. Mark could not possibly have been at fault. Mark could not have had anything to do with it. My father repeatedly asked what I could do to get back together with Mark.
For so much of that weekend with them I wanted to tell the whole story but couldn’t say a word. I was already miserable with loss. Finally I cracked.
“Why are you putting this all on me?” I asked my father. “What about what Mark could do? What about Mark’s responsibility? I’m your fucking daughter, for Christ’s sake. What about being in my fucking corner on this one?”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said.
“Why don’t you just answer the fucking question instead of criticizing how I asked it?” I said, my voice dripping with anger, scorn, hurt.
“Jessica!” said my mother.
“How about you, Mom? Want to be on my side?”
“Sweetheart, I’m sure Mark has some responsibility. He may be in the wrong, too, but I’m sure it had something to do with work pressure. He’s got some some big cases coming up, doesn’t he? He’s a wonderful man. We don’t want to lose him. Sometimes, we just have to reach out when things get difficult.”
I just looked at her. Then at my father. They had turned my loss into their loss and had somehow made me responsible for it. I didn’t have anything left to say.
I became deaf to them. “Blah blah blah,” was all I heard. I went upstairs, gathered my things together, got in my Porsche, and drove off.
As I always did, I went to my grandmother’s house. She had not answered the phone when I tried to call, but she frequently didn’t. I was convinced she would be the last person in the Pacific Northwest to get a cell phone, if she ever did. Even getting her to use an answering machine was a battle.
My battle, because no one else in the family would deal with her Gallic stubbornness.
“Why I need one of these?” she asked.
“So someone can leave you a message,” I said.
“If what they want to say is important, they will call again.”
“Maybe they just want to say hello.”
“That is so important I spend this money?”
“I am buying it for you, Grandmama.”
“You may not buy. I will buy with my money. But you choose one good for me.”
So I left her a message that I was coming over. When I got to her small house two blocks of the main street of town behind the Safeway, the house was dark, and I worried that she might not be okay. I knocked on the door because the doorbell had not worked for a decade or two. Finally she appeared.
“Oh, Jessica!” she said when she saw me, because I saw her first and as soon as I did, I started to cry.
She swung the door wide and held out her arms. We hugged for a long, long time. She felt smaller than the last time I’d held her. She was always thin, but she seemed to becoming even more like the birds she fed in her backyard.
“Is good to see you,” she said at last, pushing me back.
“Hi, Grandmama,” I said, wiping a tear from my cheek.
“Oh, bebe,” she said, looking right through me. “You are so sad.”
I gave her a rueful smile and nodded my head. No hiding anything from her.
“Tout passé, tout lasse, tout casse,” I said.
“Let’s have café,” she said. We went into her tiny, wonderful kitchen where, as always, herbs hung from the cupboards, flowers were drying, the ever-present basket of fruit sat in the middle of the table. She threw several sidelong glances in my direction while she put water on to boil.
“Grandmama, you need a microwave,” I said.
She pursed her lips and let out a small burst of air. “I don’t need, I don’t want. Ruin the delicates of food, the aromas, the flavors,” she said. I wasn’t going to argue. Some things simply were not worth arguing about. Besides, in the kitchen, she was almost always right.
“Trouble with Mark?” she asked when she sat down with two cups. I nodded.
“I just don’t know what to do,” I said.
“Another man, another woman?” she asked.
“It’s complicated,” I said. She knew I was evading, but her sense of propriety and privacy kept her from asking more.
“I don’t think I can fix it,” I said.
“If you don’t think you can fix, maybe is not yours to fix,” she said.
“We’re not even talking. He’s shut me out, and honestly, I’ve put up some walls of my own. I don’t know how to break those down, or get to a place where we can at least be honest, let alone vulnerable. I’m not even sure I want to.”
“If you did wrong, you a
pologize. If you did not wrong, apology from you cause only problems, if not now, then in future. If he did wrong, he must apologize. If he did not do wrong, you must not expect apology.”
“We did something we should not have done,” I said. “Together.”
“There is no ‘should!’” she snapped at me, then realizing how sharply she spoke, immediately softened.
“You do what you do, you own what you do. You accept consequences or try to change. That is the only should, my Petite Princess,” she said.
“We did something together we knew might cause problems, but did it anyway.”
“If you broke it together, is yours to fix together. Is only way,” she said.
“And if he can’t, or won’t try to fix it?”
Grandmama sighed. “C’est la vie,” she said, putting her hand on mine.
“You can only do what you can do. You can’t do for him,” she said. “He is not as strong as you, Jessica. He has a place inside him that is empty, that can’t be filled.”
“Why do you say that? How would you know that?” I asked, surprised. She rarely offered such comments.
Mark had sat in this kitchen only a half-dozen times, and at my parents’ house with my grandmother a few more times over various holidays. I had no idea how she could presume to see inside him.
But she just shook her head, looked into my eyes and did not take her hand from on top of mine. When I started to cry, she scooted her chair over and somehow managed to take me into her arms.
And, as always, she said very little. She did not try to tell me what to think or what I should believe or what I should be feeling. She let the emotions wash over me but in the safety of her arms. She knew that when I was ready, I would pull away and move forward. She knew that I would discover my path, and at the same time, know I was loved.
It was raining hard when I left, and I wasn’t sure if I would make it all the way back to Seattle, but there were no motels I wanted to stay at on the way.
I did have to stop for gas once. When I finished filling up, I got back in my car and just sat there, lost, lonely and alone. I didn’t even try to wipe away the tears washing down my face.
Finally, the car behind me gave a polite little honk on his horn. I was blocking the pumps.
“Exactly,” I said out loud, giving the driver a little wave of acknowledgment. “Get a move on,” I said to myself. I started the Porsche and pulled away.
It didn’t take long for word to get around at work that Mark and I had split. I don’t remember telling anyone. Maybe it was acknowledged when Claire put the tip of her index finger on the ring finger of my left hand, where the robin’s egg diamond had been.
“I’m sorry, dear,” was all she said. I really loved her for not asking questions.
My paralegals were not quite as circumspect, but they were smart girls. Sarah asked twice, and twice got the same answer.
“Mark and I are taking a break.” When I said it the second time, she was smart enough not to ask again. Lily looked at me with an invitation in her eyes to talk, which I declined with a little shake of my head. And because it was Lily, she acknowledged that with a slight nod of her head.
A month or two later, Tony Stevens was true to form, and in a weird way, I kind of appreciated it.
“Sorry about you and Mark,” he said in his first breath. “You want to grab a drink after work?” he asked in his second.
When I laughed out loud at him, at first he looked perplexed, then said, “I mean to talk about it. Really. Unless… never mind,” and he walked away.
Tony would not have been my first choice of a shoulder to cry on and he knew it. And he knew, though maybe no sooner than I did, that a shoulder wasn’t what was being offered.
I wasn’t in the mood to cry on shoulders anyway.
Mark and I never had “the talk.” One day I got divorce papers in regular mail, not even certified, with a letter from Max Moore, “not representing Mark in a legal sense, but helping him through this difficult time,” expressing regret at the breakup, regret that I would not ever be able to join their firm.
Enclosed was a check that represented what Max Moore wrote was “a possible difference between Mark’s income and your income for a period of three years.”
It was a very, very sizable check. Either Mark was making much, much more than I knew, or they thought I was making much less than I was. But they never asked for numbers and neither did I. For a variety of reasons — don’t ask — I signed the papers and sent them back without even a note.
But since I know you have to ask, I did put that check in the bank.
When papers came to list the house on Queen Anne Hill, I recognized the name of the real estate firm and I signed those, too. I made no comment, no muss, no fuss. When the house sold, I signed the escrow documents. We made a very nice profit.
When the papers came to sell the house out on Whidbey Island, I signed the listing agreement, then the escrow. We lost a little money on that one, but not enough to squawk about.
I got title to the Porsche in the mail. I didn’t even know Mark had the title; I hadn’t remembered it was in both our names. He signed his interest over to me for $1, and he certified that $1 had already been received. I sent a $1 bill back to him, folded in the same envelope and inside a business envelope. Again, no note.
Everything passes, everything wears out, everything breaks.
For a long time, and no, I really don’t know how long, because to figure it out would take time I’d rather spend doing almost anything else, I did not go out. I went to the gym. I ran, and even did well in a couple of marathons. Not great, but I set a personal best in the second one.
I didn’t travel much, because there was no place I particularly wanted to go alone, and there was nobody I really wanted to go with. I just wasn’t up for it.
After a while, I’d go with Sarah or Lily or both to a movie. Sometimes I’d go listen to music with other friends. Tony used to say some women “had the scent.” By that he meant that he could tell they were available for sex or a relationship. I think during this time I had the opposite scent, that men could tell I was not available, regardless of how nice or accommodating or charming I tried to be.
And they were right. I wasn’t interested.
I’d sit alone at a table for lunch reading the current week’s The Sound. They were still hyping their exposé of the anonymous benefactor they now called the “Prince of the Poor of Pike Place Market,” in a scandal they named “Meals at Midnight.”
Street people would gather from around the area, from behind fences or under the bridges and get a hot meal handout that seemed to appear from nowhere. The Sound had identified someone from Microsoft or Amazon as the donor.
If somebody came up to me while I was reading, I’d wait silently with my newspaper for them to go away.
But after a while longer, I’d have the occasional date with someone I’d met through a chance encounter, or with someone who someone else said I just had to meet. It took a while, but I began to see guys for coffee, then dinner.
More occasionally I’d agree to a sleepover, always at their place, or a weekend trip to Friday Harbor or Port Townsend.
For reasons that weren’t clear to me at the time, I never, ever had anybody to my place. I never, ever told anyone where I lived. Not even girlfriends, though I didn’t have many of those. I thought about getting a dog, or a cat, but I wasn’t inclined to walk a dog twice a day or ever, ever scoop up cat shit.
So I started dating, and I had occasional sex. Never great sex, but okay sex a few times. Good enough sex, certainly.
Most guys are not content to be told the sex was “okay.” They need to hear that it was mind-bending, the best ever, cataclysmic, galactically orgasmic, change of consciousness great.
Which is just stupid. If everything is the best ever, then there c
an be no best. Everyone can’t be above average, and all that.
And every time we have sex, it does not have to be the “best ever” for it to be satisfying, good, or even damn good. So it became pretty obvious when men asked me if the sex was good, or above average or whatever, the question was not really about how I felt about the sex.
It really wasn’t about me at all.
It was about them. In some ways, it had little to do with the sex and nothing to do with sharing, even affection. They wanted me to judge their performance, but at the same time, they wanted nothing of the sort. They wanted accolades.
An honest, even a half-honest, response was not going to satisfy them. That was not as easy a lesson for me to learn as you might think.
The fact is, for the most part the sex wasn’t that good…
We’ll start with the obvious. Men often think they have to “lower my inhibitions.” I think we’ve dealt with that issue here. I really don’t have many inhibitions. If you want me drunk, it’s about you, not about me. And what that’s about, I don’t like all that much.
You don’t want me to be fully aware, fully participating, fully consenting with all my faculties? Too bad for you.
Secondly, many men are just not good at sex. It’s like once we get to the bedroom, they bounce between “can’t shut their mind off” to “can’t think at all.” Maybe when they get an erection all the blood leaves their brain.
The mystery here is that these are men who spend hours in the gym to look good, or who will study every stroke of their golf game, buy books on how to swing a club, how to hold a putter, how to read a green. “Keep your eye on the ball. Swing relaxed. Concentrate on the the ball in front of you, forget the last shot.”
Some of the same techniques apply.
Or those who take driving lessons:
After my divorce was final, I went down to Seattle Raceway for a day of driver training in my Porsche. Just for fun. There was one other woman there, about a dozen guys.
They taught us to look where we wanted to go and not at the wall, to drive with relaxed hands, and that we’d lose control if we weren’t smooth or tried to do too much.
