Five days short of our first wedding anniversary, I went to bed early. I had a big day at work the next morning—alarm clock set, my suit, shoes, and jewelry laid out. After bending down to kiss my husband good night, I left him in the living room watching television.
Hours later, I woke with the moon shining gray-blue through the curtains. He was beside me, then over me, his randy mood obvious. He didn’t know that in that moment, he reminded me of Wes—and the salty guilt I’d sometimes felt when I would wake to find Wes taking off my clothes and then go along with it just to keep the peace.
Brad also didn’t know how relieved I was that, in the dark of our room that night, I wasn’t afraid the way I sometimes was with Wes. I could tell my husband that I needed to sleep, and he would still love me. When Brad heard “no” that night, he simply went to sleep, and so did I.
The next morning, when we were standing in the kitchen dressed and ready to go our separate ways, I said, “I didn’t know who you were last night.”
In his starched white shirt and navy tie, he looked at me, startled. He’d been about to take a sip of coffee but stopped. “Why, what do you mean?”
“It was just kind of weird,” I said. “You knew I had to get up early to get ready for my meeting.”
Through gold-rimmed glasses that always struck me as a Clark Kent disguise, his blue eyes searched me. He didn’t reveal it then, with me on my way out the door, but he had no idea what I was talking about.
After work that evening, we sat on our Sven couch from IKEA as he told me his version of what had happened the night before.
He had no recollection of coming to our room. He didn’t remember waking me. He didn’t remember me pushing him away or telling him “no.” Apparently that morning had been like many other mornings we’d shared: him asking me questions, gathering intel, trying to piece together the previous night’s blackout. Only this time, I’d said something that scared him: I didn’t know who you were.
He revealed that he’d thought it would be different with me. That from that first weekend we’d spent together, I’d become the talisman he held up to an addiction he’d been hiding since he was fifteen. He told me that after I went to bed, he finished the wine we’d opened at dinner and then he finished another bottle. And then he wasn’t himself. And for the first time, I saw him that way.
As he spoke, I looked at our wedding picture on a nearby shelf. I stared at my stupid smiling face, the French lace of my dress, and the bouquet of gardenias as I took in the fact that I’d been fooled. I didn’t really know my husband at all. How had I ignored the clues? Why hadn’t I noticed all of the morning interrogations as he tried to reconstruct the activities of the night before?
Or had I?
At the bar we frequented, hadn’t I recently taken to downing his third bourbon with all its “tobacco, woody, smoky” bullshit that he and the bartender discussed in loving detail? Wasn’t that the same thing as pouring my father’s booze down the drain the way my mother and I had? Had I intuited that three bourbons after sharing a bottle of wine with me was a line my husband shouldn’t cross?
It was like a preposterous Greek tragedy. At the beginning of the story, the oracle predicts an outlandish outcome and you wonder how it could happen—no one would intentionally kill his father and marry his mother. No child of an alcoholic would intentionally choose one as the father of her children. But just like in Oedipus Rex, the improbable came true. My husband didn’t act like any of the other drunks I’d known. He didn’t rage. He wasn’t depressed. He didn’t sabotage good jobs and he’d never been in jail.
It was only then that I understood why his memory of proposing to me had been lost in a blur. A shared moment I’d filled with so much meaning—a moment I assumed we both brought to every experience of “us”—wasn’t shared at all.
A few days later, we celebrated our anniversary in a French bistro without wine and with little conversation. He’d been to five Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—one every day. At the time, I didn’t know how lucky I was. I didn’t know that a single event—his coming to me like that in the night, and my calling him on what he’d done the next day, something I’d never done with any man before—would change our lives for the better forever.
Because in the immediate aftermath, I was angry in a way I didn’t know how to handle. Feeling more betrayed than I ever had, I stewed and sulked. To me, alcoholics were people who repeatedly, inevitably disappointed you. They said sorry all the time for things they did again and again. Alcoholics were people who claimed they loved you but in the end they left you or you had to leave them. I just wanted Brad to say it had all been a mistake. That he wasn’t an alcoholic after all.
For months while he went to meetings, I stayed home. He told me I should go to Al-Anon. I was not in the habit of swearing, but I screamed back at him, “Don’t fucking tell me about Al-Anon!” I told him I’d known about the group for “family and friends of alcoholics” long before he did. When I’d first moved back to L.A., I’d gone to a few meetings, sharing about my father, about Wes, about my grandmother who’d died prematurely from the disease, and about my Uncle Don, who by the time I was in junior high had taken to sobbing on my shoulder about his life’s regrets. I thought I’d escaped all that when I found Brad.
But finally, after sitting home alone night after night, I did go to Al-Anon with an “I’ll show you” hostility. Ninety meetings in ninety days was what they told AA newbies. If he could do it, so could I.
One Saturday near the ninety-day mark, I was driving home from a meeting, stuck in traffic on the 101 Freeway. I glanced at my Al-Anon books lying on the seat beside me. So far, all the stories I’d heard had been about dealing with the kinds of addicts I’d known before—mean, scheming, unreliable, maudlin, itinerant. That was not my husband. As I waited for the car in front of me to move, I picked up one of the books and began thumbing through it. The phrase “suffocating grip of self-pity” jumped out at me.
The woman in the story had come to Al-Anon when her husband was already sober. Rather than fearing his drinking, she feared him seeking solutions without her. She feared him getting well while her own soul festered. Would he get better and leave her?
I thought about the self-pity I’d wallowed in for the last few months because our happily ever after wasn’t turning out the way I’d planned. Since my earliest childhood memories, I’d never really been at home in my own skin. Like the woman in the story, I had always looked to others to feel happy and whole— relying on my mother to soothe every wound, on my father to be my “dream dad,” on Liz to love me like a sister. On romantic partners to love me as unconditionally as my mother always had. And when I found the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and who wanted to spend his life with me, I thought I was home free. But none of it turned out to be enough.
While I was lost in thought, I didn’t notice my foot lifting from the brake. The front of my car nudged up to the car ahead, pushing repeatedly at its bumper. The other driver craned his head around. We looked at each other in anger and confusion. For a panicked moment, I didn’t know how to stop the bumping and pushing. I’d forgotten how to operate the car. Finally I stepped on the brake as if I’d only just discovered its purpose.
I clung to the steering wheel. Nearly all my life a refrain had wafted through my head like a line from a poem or a song or a cry to my mother: I want to go home it sang to me, even when I was home. It rose up in me even when I was with those I loved most. It rose up in me now.
After that, I started going to meetings for no one but me.
We hadn’t talked about the marriage proposal in a long time— not since our recovery was new. Then one day our ten-year-old daughter—in the thrall of watching a rom-com on television, no doubt dreaming of her own future proposal—asked, “Daddy, how did you propose?”
Brad and I looked at each other. The truth was he had said the words will you marry me in the pizza place. The truth was all he really remembered from tha
t night was a warm, vague idea that someday I was the woman he wanted to marry. What he remembered more clearly was our conversation a few weeks later when I asked him to set the date, simply thinking I was closing a deal he’d already proposed.
I wished we could tell our daughter what she wanted to hear: that he’d gotten down on one knee, arranged violinists or skywriting, opened a velvet box before me. But that’s not our story. Only we know that our story holds within it the best of our marriage: his unguarded love and mine in gushing return. It holds, too, our shared commitment in spite of—and later, because of—the thrill of never completely knowing one another.
As I waited for Brad to answer our daughter’s question, I saw my husband just as he was when we first met: the handsome stranger. My heart raced, my pulse quickened. I wanted him even more now, years later, because of the secrets we’d shared since and the secrets left to know.
“We both sort of asked each other,” he finally said.
Early in our recovery, Brad and I often rode the mountain bikes we’d gotten for our wedding. Climbing steep grades in low gears, we’d go high into the sage- and chaparral-covered hills above the Pacific Ocean. I’d watch his calves work the pedals, feeling sidesplitting pain as I toiled behind him. Still, I liked the uphill climb best—I knew I could control it. After ascending for miles, we’d rest at a crossroads where several trail systems merged and the vista stretched from ocean to valley. He’d check on me to make sure I wasn’t overheated, make me take off my helmet so my brain didn’t cook, cool my neck with water.
Then we’d jump back on our bikes for the descent. Downhill was his favorite part. For this he rode behind me, urging me to go faster and faster. Our voices echoing through the canyon, sometimes I’d yell at him to stop pushing me. But invariably I laughed, giddy when the tires lost traction for just a moment and we hung midair above bumps and dips.
I used to wonder what I would have done if I’d known he was an alcoholic before we took our vows. I think back to our Making Marriage Work class and our private session with the instructor. We’d filled out individual questionnaires in preparation for the session. When we met with our teacher, he turned to Brad and said, “She’s stronger than you think. She can take it.” I’d waited expectantly, but my husband-to-be denied knowing what the guy was talking about. Something in the way he’d answered the questionnaire must have revealed his alcoholism. The therapist had been trying to get him to tell me.
But ignorance had truly been bliss. If I’d known before we married, I might have blown it. I might have walked away. Duped though I may have been by his secret, I became glad I hadn’t known. My husband would become the first person in my life who didn’t indulge my tantrums the way my mother, father, and even Wes had done. With Brad I felt foolish storming off when we fought. He dismissed drama as immature. He might never have said the exact words, but his response to my fits seemed to be “grow up.” That was new.
The message I got from him was that, in fact, he would not love me unconditionally—and he didn’t expect me to love him that way either. We would need to try, day by day, to be people worthy of each other’s love.
I never could have known that his addiction would put us on our own paths to saving ourselves. That, at last, I would begin to grow up and find a sense of home within myself.
A Measure of Desire
BRAD WAS FOUR YEARS SOBER WHEN WE MOVED TO Maine from Los Angeles. Our daughter was nearly three, and we had another baby on the way. Our blue Cape-style house on three acres had the dormer windows I’d dreamed of when I was a kid. Still early in our recovery, I imagined that a simpler life in Maine would save us from further dangers that can creep into relationships: serpents in the grass like infidelity, boredom, and debt.
That first winter, we learned to skate on frozen Megunticook Lake. Around tiny islands in the middle of the lake, Brad pushed the baby jogger that held our young daughter. Although the ice popped like gunfire as the whole town skated in circles, we were assured there was no danger of falling through.
By Christmas, we placed single candles in each window instead of stringing colored lights the way we would have back home, and I gave birth to our son in an ice storm.
When we’d first moved to Maine, my mother had been hurt that we’d taken her grandchildren so far from her. Then the idea struck her that she was now free to move too. She landed in New York City, managing an international law firm and living on the Upper West Side, where at last she embodied the urban sophisticate she was born to be.
“I never liked Los Angeles anyway,” she said. It didn’t hurt that her move put even more miles between her and my father. I would learn later that my mother’s friends referred to her relocation as her own witness protection program. Nick didn’t have the means to hop on a plane the way he could drive from Vegas to L.A. and ring her doorbell.
With the kids in tow, Brad and I began to regularly visit her in New York City. During one such trip, as she and I walked up Madison Avenue, I burst out with a question I’d been silently grappling with for months. “How do people go without sex?”
“They eat a lot,” she joked at first, thinking I was asking rhetorically.
As we paused at the Valentino boutique window while she checked out a pair of black suede pumps, I said, “You don’t.”
She glanced up, catching my eye. “So by ‘people’ you mean me? How do I go without sex? How do you know I do?” For a moment I wondered if she had some secret lover. I dismissed the idea even though I would have been glad if she did.
“I guess because I don’t see you having any.”
“Well, I don’t see you having any either. Does that mean you’re celibate?”
Sex conversations with my mother had always made me squirm. I’d brought it up because I was growing desperate, but now I shrugged, wanting to drop the issue. She raised a perfectly arched eyebrow, assuming she knew my answer anyway. My good-looking husband and I must have sex all the time. We had the babies to prove it.
But what did she and I really know about the other’s intimate life? How could she know that sobriety with all its wonders had also brought an end to the kind of closeness sex brings?
Only now do I see that it was both sobriety and parenthood that sent Brad and me retreating to separate corners after our move to Camden. Gone was the lanky kid I’d married, the lighthearted guy who had always wanted me. In his place was a quiet, broad-shouldered man with a strong jaw, focused on providing for his family. I watched him become the kind of father I’d never had, tossing our laughing children into the air, always there to catch them. Surely a good thing, yet I had trouble feeling I belonged with them. I marveled at their ease in this white-picket-fence life we were living, native speakers in a world that would always be a second language to me.
I began to wonder if I even deserved the man Brad had become. As if playing out a scene in an old movie when a doctor removes bandages from a patient’s wounded eyes and everyone waits with bated breath to learn if the hero will see again—I waited for this new version of my husband to see me again and want me with the same abandon he once had. I wondered what kind of job I would get if he left me. Knowing that if he did, I would end up returning to my mother— dependent on her love once again.
The more frightened of that possibility I became, the more I began to see them: my replacements. I spotted these women the way my small son and I hunted through his I Spy books for “a key, a silvery fish, and a Christmas tree.” Sometimes we stared and stared, unable to see the hidden objects. Other times a neon arrow might as well have pointed the way.
Surely, such an arrow directed me to the woman in the supermarket. I can see her now, even today.
It was our fourth Maine winter—not the pretty part leading up to Christmas, but the dreary aftermath. Pushing my cart past a display of scraggly poinsettias, I noticed her immediately. She was weighing snow peas, watching the scale’s arrow flick near the pound mark as she tossed in handfuls. She must have felt me watching he
r.
“I can’t get my kids to eat them,” I said to explain my staring. “What’s your secret?”
“A little sugar and butter.”
I saw her in my kitchen then, standing at the stove in thick wool socks, sleeves pushed up. As she sautéed the peas, she reached to the cupboard for the sugar, knowing just where everything was.
Before I pushed my cart away, I thanked her. Her shell-thin nostrils drew up along with her generous smile. That was a smile Brad could love.
I forced myself to imagine her then as my children’s mother, tears starting when I thought of their brown hair matching hers—my impatience, insecurity, and red hair gone from their lives, a fluke of nature corrected.
I didn’t tell anyone how I tortured myself choosing second-wife possibilities for my husband, how the riches shimmering in other women dazzled me. The closest I came was on a walk with my friend Annie. She was older than me with teenage daughters and a marriage I admired.
We had taken to meeting for a three-mile walk almost every day, past pine-covered hills and around the rocky edge of the ocean. Waves crashing nearby compelled nontrivial topics of conversation.
I told her that when Brad was away, I lay awake at night wondering how to escape the house if someone broke in or fire broke out. I saw myself fashioning a rope from sheets, my babies clinging to me as we climbed out the dormer windows.
I told her how my daughter was at an age when she just wanted Daddy. How one night as the four of us sat reading bedtime stories, she’d given me a little push away and told me to leave the room.
Of my daughter’s rejection, my friend said, “You shouldn’t leave. You are the mother.” She said “mother” as if it started with a capital M—a word to be revered, a word that imparted inviolate stature. As she stopped on the path, her hand on my shoulder, she wanted me to feel the freedom of being “mother” and to, at thirty-eight years old, at last let go of the “child” mantle I’d worn so long. Rather than being the child waiting for love and approval, it was time for me to be the mother generously offering such love and understanding to her children even when they rejected her.
I'm the One Who Got Away Page 10
