by Jen Waite
“I was married to a Cuban guy,” she said, concentrating on the eye shadow she swept across my lids. “I fell for him hard. I mean, hard. He was gorgeous and so charming. I got him his green card.”
I listened carefully, not moving a muscle.
“While we were married, I started a makeup line, and it became really successful. My husband didn’t work, but for some reason that never bothered me. He was so supportive, and I was making plenty of money from my company. Anyway, right after he got his ten-year green card, I found out he was cheating on me. With, like, a dozen women.”
“Oh my God. What? That’s so fucked up,” I gasped as Delaney dabbed blush onto my cheeks.
“I’m not trying to scare you,” she said, tapping her makeup brush against her palette.
“Oh no.” I laughed loudly. “Marco would never ever cheat. I mean, thank you for sharing your story, but no.” I laughed again, too loudly. “Just trust me, it’s completely different. He’s my best friend; he’s really my other half. He would never do anything like that.” I changed the subject quickly.
Her story had been running through my mind since January 20, rising closer and closer to the surface, until finally, after talking to Ava, I e-mailed Delaney.
I don’t know if you remember me—you did my makeup for a L’Oréal photo shoot. I had a baby a few months ago. When my daughter was a month old, I found out my husband had a girlfriend. You told me about something similar that happened to you. I’m not sure exactly why I’m e-mailing you. I just felt like maybe you told me your story for a reason and I wanted to reach out. Jen
Within hours her response appeared: “HOLY SHIT girl. Call me.”
“First, tell me everything,” she said as soon as she picked up. After I brought her up to speed, she said, “You know, I wasn’t sure why I told you my story when I met you. I had barely told anyone what happened at that point. I just felt compelled to tell you. There was something about the way you talked about Marco. I can’t explain it. I felt I needed to warn you.” Delaney then told me the part of the story she left out two years ago. As part of the divorce settlement, she had to pay her husband $500,000, half of what her company was worth. She had just finished paying him alimony a few months earlier.
“Wait, what do you mean? Why did you have to pay him when he was the one who cheated?” I asked in shock.
“New York is a no-fault state. That means it doesn’t matter why you’re getting divorced; you split the marital property fifty-fifty. And my company was considered marital property since I started it during the marriage. I ended up selling the company and paying him half. I had to completely start over with a brand-new company, which is now building momentum and becoming even more successful than the first line. It was that or he would continue to own half of my makeup brand forever. And since I was the breadwinner, I’ve been paying him monthly alimony for five years.”
“Wow . . . fuck,” was all I could get out.
“So in a way you’re lucky that you don’t have much in the way of marital assets. It seems like all Marco left you with is debt. I know that doesn’t seem lucky, but trust me, it’s a good thing. It will make the divorce much, much easier.” Delaney went on to tell me that once she got through the divorce and over her heartbreak, she realized how ridiculous the whole relationship had been. “I mean, I’m smart. I’m from a good family. I have a lot to offer, and I picked this dude because I felt sorry for him? And because I wanted to, like, lift him up or some shit? Honey”—her voice boomed through the phone strong and loud—“when you come out on the other side of this, the amount of power you walk away with is going to blow your fucking mind.”
TRUTH LIKE FIRE
IT has been about a month since I have had any contact with Marco. I feel good. I have taken a part-time job at a small financial planning company. Louisa will go into day care three days a week. After the cost of day care, I will take home exactly fifty-eight dollars a week, but it’s a way to transition back into the workforce and, more than that, back into life.
My phone lights up on my bedside table, and I glance at it out of the corner of my eye. It’s a text from Nat: “Wow, he’s really going for it, eh?”
“Going for what?” I suddenly feel nauseated.
“Oh no, I thought you’d have seen by now. His Facebook profile picture.”
At the same time, I receive a text from Holly that reads, “Hey my friend, stay strong. Remember, you are the better person and the best revenge is to not let him affect you.” Holly and Stella from the beginning have taken the same stance: Yes, Marco is a Grade A dickwad, but turning the other cheek is, in the long run, the best for Louisa and me.
I tap the Facebook icon on my phone and type “Marco Medina” into the search bar. Even though we are no longer Facebook friends, I can still see his public profile picture. For a moment my brain doesn’t register what I am seeing. A shirtless man drapes his arm around a woman in a bikini on the bow of a yacht. She kisses his cheek. He holds a cocktail in one hand. Her long blonde hair covers her face almost completely. His hair is greased back. Her legs are crossed into an unnatural position that reminds me of Betty Boop. His face is pursed into a smug smile. For several minutes, I stare at the image on my phone. After six months of Marco denying the existence of this relationship, this feels like seeing the Easter Bunny riding a unicorn. There are two comments. I click them with a trembling thumb.
“Noooooo???” from his dad. Oh, Oscar. I ache for him for half a second before my eyes travel to the next comment. “You DO know adultery is a misdemeanor, right?” from one of his best friends.
“Oh my God.” I breathe. I sit staring at the picture. Comment after comment comes in, half of them condemning Marco and half of them totally clueless that the blonde in the picture is not me. I can’t look away. I click refresh over and over. “Look at mommy!! Woohoo!!” writes an old coworker of ours. Jesus Christ. A few minutes later, a picture of Andrew’s gleaming bald head appears and his reply reads, “That’s not mommy, my friend.” The next time I click refresh, all the comments have disappeared.
I can’t look away.
I click refresh again and my stomach drops. Five new comments. How is that even possible? I click the comments and they open. For a second, I’m not sure what I am looking at. I see Oscar’s first comment “Noooooo???” followed by Marco’s friend’s adultery comment over and over. For a split second, I wonder if Facebook has been infected with a magical virus, and it is spitting out the deleted comments over and over. And then I scroll up and see Holly’s tiny face above each screenshot. Holly is posting screenshots of the deleted comments faster than Marco can delete. For every screenshot that Marco deletes, Holly posts two more until there are eleven new comments and “Noooooo???” and “You DO know adultery is a misdemeanor, right?” unravels down his Facebook page like a spool of yarn. Finally, the comments once again disappear one by one until the picture stands alone like a shining beacon of sleaziness.
“I’m sorry dude. I just fucking snapped,” Holly texts me.
I love her.
That night dozens of texts and Facebook messages come in. Everyone who either didn’t know what had happened or were waiting for an obvious moment to contact me do so tonight. “Wtf!” “He makes me want to vomit.” “Scum of the Earth.” “Don’t waste your time on them. The sooner you don’t think about them at all, the better. Let them dig their own graves,” they say.
These past few days I have felt something growing inside me. At first I thought it was my good friend anger. But it is not anger; it feels similar, but there is something different about it. I concentrate on the feeling and let it grow. I know what it is. It is bloodlust. I want revenge. I can taste it; the metallic tang on the tip of my tongue. There is a storm brewing; the gathering winds whip my insides. I understand now that the truth, like fire, starts as a tiny ember. At first, I could see only billows of smoke. Temporarily blinded, I stum
bled, tightly closing my stinging eyes. But then the ember began to catch and the fire grew. Flame by flame, it rose. The smoke surrounding me began to lift. The fire raged. My body grew hot, and, suddenly, the air was pure. My eyes opened, bright and clear. Now that the fire is inside me, I can’t go back. I know deep in my bones that, eventually, the Universe will do its thing. Marco and the Croatian will destroy themselves; they will implode into a million shards of bad decisions.
For every woman who has been cast aside like yesterday’s trash after placing her life in the hands of the man she trusts. For every woman who has a child with a man who thinks parenting is taking “the kid” to the movies once a month. For every woman who sighs to herself and thinks, Karma will get him in the end. For every woman who has been cheated on, taken advantage of, deceived, taken for granted, betrayed. This next part is for you.
RISE
NERVOUS, but feeling alive, energized even, I sit outside Lisa’s office, waiting for her to peek her head out her door and call me in. It has been six months since the first time I sat in Lisa’s office, staring at the whip-smart, put-together woman across from me and thinking wistfully, I used to be like you. I bounce my knee rhythmically while I wait and fidget with a necklace Stella gave me. A small blue stone, Louisa’s birthstone, set on a simple gold chain.
“Jen?” She smiles, and I stand up quickly, grabbing my purse off the seat beside me and slipping into the office.
“How are you?” Lisa asks, settling into her armchair.
“I’m OK,” I say. My foot taps the floor. I take a deep breath. “Actually, I’d like to talk to you about something.” Here goes. “I’ve been thinking the past few weeks about something more and more. And I have this idea that’s taking shape. It’s feeling good, like it’s coming from a really grounded place.” Lisa looks at me encouragingly. An idea has been circulating in my head for weeks, but I pushed it down. It’s unrealistic, I thought. It’ll take too much time. Finally, I decided to listen to what my intuition was trying to tell me. I let it live in my head for a while, burrowing deeper and deeper, taking root in every cell of my body.
“The more I think about it, the more I am gravitating toward something.” I take another deep breath. “I think I want to become some sort of therapist or counselor and specialize in personality disorders—or, rather, helping women recover from sociopathic relationships.” The last words come out in a rush of excitement. I brace myself for Lisa to laugh. Or gently tell me that I’m way too fucked up to ever be able to help someone else. Instead, she sits straight up in her chair. “Yes,” she says. “Yes. Yes. Yes. I’ve been waiting for this. OK, let’s talk.”
Encouraged, I ask her carefully about her own background, not sure what kind of privacy issues she might have as a therapist. She dives right in.
“So there are two paths to becoming a licensed therapist. You can either get your LCSW or your LCPC.” She explains to me what these initials stand for: Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor. I scribble notes furiously in my notebook as she talks. She explains that the master’s program she did met on-campus only during the summer, from June to August, and then during the fall, winter, and spring you do your fieldwork wherever you want.
“Can you get paid fieldwork?” I ask hopefully. I have to start making money. I’ve been living off credit cards for months now. Luckily, I don’t pay rent, and until recently Louisa’s needs were mostly met by my body. Soon, though, we will need a place of our own, and I will need to prove that I can support myself and my daughter.
I understand better now why women stay with men in horrific, abusive situations, especially with small children involved. It would seem as though a woman would leave an abusive situation to protect her children. But those first few months, I was barely functioning, so deeply immersed in the pain of losing Marco and the future I thought I would have. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I shook with anxiety. I placed Louisa’s well-being in the hands of my parents. I knew she was safe and that I could safely go through the necessary emotions, the grief, the withdrawal, the anger. But what about women without support systems? Without the means to leave?
“Unfortunately, no, it’s all unpaid internships for three years. But, you could have your own practice in three years.”
We talk about other master’s in social work programs and master’s in counseling programs, too. There are a couple of decent ones in Maine, and I’m surprised to learn that a lot of good master’s programs are offered online. I leave Lisa’s office excited. Yes. I am actually excited about something. I remember six months ago, thinking, I will never laugh my high-pitched hyena laugh again. The laugh that came out naturally before I could stop it. A free, full-body, two-toned shriek. And then it happened a few weeks ago. I don’t even remember what spurred it, but I remember so clearly thinking, Oh my God, my real laugh! As I skip out of Lisa’s office, I have that same feeling but even deeper. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped feeling excited for myself and only felt excited for Marco. I lived vicariously through his achievements, his pleasures, his dreams. I have a lovely, grounded, deep-in-my-bones feeling of excitement for myself and for Louisa. I want to show her what strength is, that it’s OK to stumble, hell, it’s OK to fall on your fucking ass. Eventually, you will get back up. I want to inspire her. I want to teach her that sometimes it takes going through hell to find yourself. I want her to know that she doesn’t have to fix anyone, or give a part of herself away in order to love someone else. And I want her to know that she, she, is the reason that I got this amazing chance to create the life I was meant to live. Our life.
—
I WAKE up to silence and immediately roll over to check the time. It is 6:30 A.M. No squawks yet from Louisa’s room. I luxuriously stretch my arms and legs, pointing my feet and wiggling my toes beneath the down comforter. I flick on the table lamp and let my pupils adjust to the bright rays of light. I wonder if I can sneak into the bathroom and brush my teeth before Lulu wakes up. I slowly lower one leg to the floor and then the other and take one tiptoe step toward the bathroom when I hear a high-pitched burst of sound. Seb is visiting for the first time since we left New York, and he’s sleeping in my old room, right next door. I don’t want Louisa to wake him, so I change my course and patter into Lulu’s room.
“Do I hear a happy baby?” I whisper as I open the door slowly and peek my head around the edge. “Why yes, I do hear a baby!” A bouncing Lulu clutches the end of the crib and gurgles. Her face lights up in a big gummy smile as I move toward her, and she lets out a celebratory shriek of being found. I unzip her sleep sack and scoop her from the crib. “Hello, animals,” I say to the mobile hanging from the ceiling. “Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq,” I recite softly to the five stars draped across the window. I nuzzle my mouth and nose in Louisa’s hair and breathe in her soapy honey smell. “Come watch me brush my teeth,” I tell her, and carry her into the bathroom and plunk her down on the floor. She stares at me as I prepare my toothbrush, and then her face breaks into a smile as I brush. “I know,” I say through toothpaste, and spit, “it’s pretty funny.”
I hoist her back onto my hip, and we trudge down the stairs and into the kitchen, where my parents are already bustling around. My mom pours steaming coffee into a mug, and my dad unloads the dishwasher.
“Lulu!!!” they both cry, and in response Louisa smiles with her whole face and bounces against my hip. It is Sunday morning. It is the last few weeks of summer, and the temperature hovers near eighty degrees mid-day but has started to drop in the mornings and at night—that first chill that lets us know fall and then winter are just around the corner.
“How’d you sleep?” my mom asks, pulling another mug from the cupboard.
“Really well, actually. I didn’t hear a peep out of Louisa until six thirty-five. So I got like nine hours of sleep.”
“Oh wow, that’s amazing,” my mom says, passing me a cup of steaming
-hot coffee and scooping Louisa into her arms in a fluid exchange. I sip the coffee gratefully and stare at Lulu. “She’s just so amazing,” I say. Louisa whines and struggles desperately to reach the iPad on the kitchen island. Later, my dad sets up the checkerboard in the library as I hold onto Louisa’s hands and walk with her in a zigzagging pattern of a drunken sailor around the room. “You guys, look!” I say as she twists her feet and stumbles. “Look how close she is to walking!”
My mom and I bring Louisa to Scratch to stock up on homemade granola and rosé. The bakery is warm and bustling. The smell of croissants and freshly baked bagels hits us as we walk through the creaky wooden door.
“Look at those blue eyes! And that beautiful skin! What a lucky girl,” one of the young employees says. I follow her eyes down to my own pale white arm and laugh. “Her father is Argentinian.”
“Wow, that’s the way to do it!” The employee laughs. “Good for you,” she says with a wink. My stomach drops. “Well, actually,” I start. And then I stop. “Yes,” I say with a small smile. “She’s a very lucky girl.”
Seb wakes up around 10:00 A.M., and it feels like a whole new day is starting as he trudges into the family room, rubbing his eyes. “Hey, guys, what’s up? What’s the plan for today?”
When I heard the crunch of Nat’s tires a few days ago, announcing their arrival, I leaped up from the couch and ran out the front door. I stopped short for a moment, unsure what I would feel, seeing Seb for the first time since it all happened. And then he stepped out of the car and it was Seb. It was just Seb. We hugged, and I said, “You have an adult nose now?” and he grinned proudly. “I know. My mom says my features have developed literally overnight into ‘man’ features.”
