He kissed me hello and took me to lunch. He looked exactly the same, as though he had not aged a day, as though he hadn’t had a moment of hell. He was charming and sexy. It was so easy to talk to him. We were still good friends and while there had been flirtation by email, I knew he had not been prepared to greet this very Rubinesque version of my physique. Yet I could tell I comforted him emotionally and psychologically in a way he was missing and that our friendship was still a comfort to him.
Eventually, months into my divorce, when I was losing weight and feeling more attractive and more like me again, we met in a hotel one afternoon. I got there first and when he came into the room I took his clothes off as quickly as I could. As I pushed him naked on the hotel bed and slid on top of him “Oh my God, that is some sweeeeeet……” he actually said it again right out loud. He knew now the way it had haunted me, surrounded me, and made me long for him. Once again the absolutely perfect fit and the smile of sweet relief upon his face…upon my own, I was in heaven.
“It is. It is. It’s a perfect fit, even now.” I said breathlessly and I made love to him with perfect abandon.
We lay together talking. It had been great, like it always had been between us. I don’t think it meant as much to him as it meant to me, and I don’t think I was prepared to admit what it meant to me even then. His confidence at pleasing me wasn’t there like it had been. He seemed shy even or maybe just hesitant and I misread his guilt for a lack of confidence. I was angry with Roxanne for emasculating him and I felt surprisingly guilt free. I sat there and told myself he had been mine first and since his wife wasn’t the same religion as we were, well, then it didn’t count as adultery. Not exactly. Amazing, my ability to justify the act of taking what I wanted, but there it was and I wasn’t proud of it, but that’s the truth of it.
“I actually have never cheated on her Marissa.” I swore I wouldn’t do this. But God, I’ve been so unhappy for so long. I’m so tired of jumping through hoops and having to say just the right things, and do just the right things, and get her prepared in just the right way. I mean for ONCE I’d like it to be just the way I’d like it to be. She’s just so fucking particular and she’s constantly busting my balls. We’ve been to therapy endlessly, it never gets better. I work my ass off and I just wish she’d back off…” His voice trailed off and I knew inside he was traveling around that same circle I had traveled so many times before and suddenly it didn’t seem right to confide this in me. What to do with a marriage that refused to work? What to do?
I was quiet a moment. Not sure if I should be honest about what I was thinking, but it was our way to be honest with one another. “I wish I could say I was sorry Eric. I’m just not. It was wonderful being with you after all these years. Just the way I remembered it, exactly. I thought of you just this way every time I was lonely or hurt or longing for something better than I’d chosen for myself. I needed you and while I know it’s wrong, and that I shouldn’t be here, and you shouldn’t be here, I just feel like I need you more than she does right now and I’ll just have to live with myself for doing the thing I know is wrong. It is very selfish of me, and I’m sorry not to hold back when I know intrinsically the weakness you feel too.”
“I know Marissa. I understand.” He kissed me, and then, “God what time is it? It’s getting dark.” he got up to get dressed. “That was great, just like it always was. It never changes with us, no matter how long we’re apart.”
Yet again, we parted and my expectations and demands were zero of him. He had to face his own demons as I was facing mine. There was no realistic end of the road that culminated in his loving me instead, in marrying me, and I knew it.
Somehow a lack of a future didn’t matter; the friendship maintained merit without a sexual relationship intact. We still talked periodically and we were both worried about being discovered. We weren’t looking to start an actual affair.
Chapter 23
Six months later I found myself suddenly free of responsibilities and I called him, longing to be with him again, despite the complications, despite it all. He was out of town but not that far away, just two hours in the closest city far enough away to justify an overnight visit. I was trying to seduce him again. He was game.
I got there late in the evening because the weather was horrible and traffic delayed. I felt thinner, more beautiful, more confident yet again than the last time I’d seen him. I entered the steak house, white linen table cloths, candlelight, with the same confidence and sense of beauty I’d felt coming out of the train station years before. My sense of guilt absent once again I just looked forward to being with him again.
He stood as I approached the table and pulled my seat out for me as I sat down. “You are looking quite lovely this evening. How are you doing?” he leaned over and kissed my cheek and then situated himself again.
“I’m doing much better, thank you. It’s hard sometimes, but I haven’t regretted leaving him, not once.” I said while smoothing blonde curls behind my ears and spreading the napkin across my lap.
“You are made of sterner stuff than me, because I do not want to go through what you are going through, no matter how awful it seems in the marriage.” He placed his cell phone on the table and I briefly thought it important that he not lose track of that, or her, or of time and felt a twinge of guilt, but ignored it.
“Don’t call me brave or anything. It was simple self preservation. What choices did he leave me but to leave him when it was all said and done Eric?”
“None, really. None at all. I never could blame you for going.”
“Things are no better for you? Didn’t the last round of therapy help at all?”
“Yeah it helps. It helps with making me more compliant to her needs. It doesn’t make it safe for me to express my own, especially if I am trying to avert disaster for my son and financial ruin.”
“Ouch. No, of course not, of course it doesn’t. I’m so sorry.” I said as I touched his hand across the table and let it rest there feeling the warmth of his hand underneath my own.
“So, what’s your favorite movie these days?” He deftly changed the subject and I withdrew the touch casually, without deliberation and picked up my Sweet Tea.
“My favorite movie? There’s a refreshing question, something actually pertinent to what I like and care about.” I smiled at him. He doesn’t realize how few men ever ask a woman about her likes and dislikes, never mind the reason she has the preferences she has. I answered, “Surprisingly enough, I like ‘Cinderella Man’, something that finally replaced ‘Prince of Tides’ after many years.”
“With Nicholas Cage? I like that too” he said confused.
“No, no. That’s not his name. The guy that had the affair with Meg Ryan.... and it has Renee Zellweiger? He’s a boxer during the depression?”
“Oh oh oh Russell Crowe. Yeah I like that movie too! It’s really great!”
“Yeah, that’s him. Russell Crowe.”
“Why do you like the movie so well?” I couldn’t help but be almost grateful to have a conversation where he was finding out something new about me, even after fifteen years of our friendship, he was still exploring.
God, why didn’t I marry him?
“I liked it because of the way they loved each other. It was so intense, so passionate, and so complete.” And he was nodding across the table.
“It’s not that they didn’t have their problems…” he said, “But…”
“They worked them out together.” We said in unison, and the momentum somehow began to build between us.
“Right!” I said, “They did. They were in it together. He would have walked over hot coals for her…”
“And she would have walked over hot coals for him.”
“And they DID.” We both said in unison together once again. It was a little unnerving to have that rhythm and we both paused, about to speak again.
And even after regrouping we said in unison for a third time, “That’s just exactly what I want
.” What I wonder, are the odds of that?
Looking at one another and sort of laughing, catching the spark in one another’s eyes, I looked down at my plate and twirled an onion on top of my steak. My heart was surging in my chest. I felt so much love and connection for him in that moment.
His cell phone rang and reality struck as it inescapably would have to. His coworker checking in with him, did he want to play billiards at the local watering hole? “No, I’m going to turn in soon.” He said eyeing me, and I smiled quietly in return.
After dinner he slid his key across the table towards me, and placed it under my hand, and said, “It’s room 421. Meet me after I call my wife? Go up ahead of me and get undressed. I need to discuss the latest Martha Stewart-esque renovation and prevent our inevitable interruption.”
He took forever, and from the window above I watched him pace outside in the parking lot over some detail of a renovation with his terminally unhappy wife. He came upstairs to find me unclothed, but for my expensive lingerie, sighed and said “She’s always got to make everything so complicated and perfect and I wish she’d just leave me out of the details.”
I kissed him to quiet him, the less I knew about her then the better off I’d be I reasoned. I stripped him naked again, kissed his mouth, tongued him and placed my hands across his nakedness, all manner of shyness long gone between us and my heart beating in unison to his. He pulled me into his bed and the memory of the first time he’d pulled me into a hotel room bed echoed in the back of my mind.
It was tremendous all over again. This time though, I felt worldlier, more confident, and he seemed uncertain of himself like he never had before. I felt the need to restore him to his former sense of strength and prowess. I wanted him to remember the way he’d felt with me. Nothing had changed, no matter the history or anything else the feelings were still strongly resonating between us.
Passion was unabated and while he didn’t say the magic phrase this time, he smiled when he was inside of me with such utter bliss and moaned in such a sexy way, I knew he felt sexually complete with me. I shuddered on top of him in my own revelry, my own need and came upon him with a fury collapsing on his chest, heaving. Shortly I pulled away and he breathed heavily as he continued to recover. I laid there quietly in the dark next to him, breathing hard, my right hand cradled in his left.
My breath quieted. I was thinking of his last visit to Atlanta after my good bye letter, and smiled at the audacity he had to send me shopping with Dana, his absolute bitch of a customer, and how I had never confronted him with what he had done. Not caring what his reaction might be some fifteen years later, I said, “I cannot freaking believe you could have been such an ass-hole as to have had me go shopping with Dana the last time I saw you in Atlanta.”
“Why?” he said laughing, sort of amused at my sudden burst of fire.
“I can’t believe you had me take another one of your lovers shopping. I mean what kind of balls did that take Eric?” I turned away from him in the bed and stole the covers in defiance.
“Lovers??? WHAT the hell are you talking about?” he says with incredulousness ringing in his voice as he rolls over and looms above me sidling back underneath the blankets with me. There was no reason to hold back now, to lie. What was there but truth between us at this point?
“Dana. She told me you were lovers while we were shopping.” I said turning back towards him again, our skin touching, warm, electric between us.
Eric laughs right out loud, heartily, spontaneously. “Believe me, I never fucked that woman and it wasn’t for lack of trying either.”
“Oh right Mr. Clinton. That woman?” I raised my eyebrow challenging him with doubt.
He laughed at my reference, and said “No really, really. It wasn’t for lack of effort on my part. I chased her all over the country and she blew me off time and time again. I never got into her pants. In fact, once I asked her to dinner in New York City and she climbed into a cab with another man, slammed the door in my face and drove off while I stood there in the street watching the cab disappear. She was a heartless bitch.” I had to laugh at that one myself.
He is still laughing, and says that he and his wife, who also worked for Dana, had watched her cause trouble like that to disrupt people’s lives for her own personal amusement over and over and over again. She’d been sick about the way she would wreak havoc on people’s lives. “I so wish I could tell Roxanne this one. She would die laughing”
“Yeah, that’s not all she’d die of if she heard this one.” I said sardonically.
It was funny enough I guess, that Dana had lied in the way she had, in an ironic way, but suddenly the shock of the lie sort of overtook us like the culmination of high tide seeping up, up and then overcoming us completely. We both were lying there in the dark and the quiet absolutely stunned. I was thinking. He was thinking too in our new found silence.
After a few minutes I said tearfully in a strained whisper, “I just have to wonder what might have happened between us if she hadn’t told me that lie Eric. I see how unhappy you are, how unhappy I’ve been, and I can’t help but feel robbed.”
He was quiet for a few more seconds, and then he reached over and held my hand. “Yeah, I know, it’s totally unbelievable.”
I confessed the comfort in our shorthand, how amazed I was at my passion for him so many years later, how my feelings for him never faltered. But I didn’t understand then that it was my ability to completely be me and only me under the intensity of his gaze that meant the very most. My ability to be unfalteringly myself was the gift that he had given me, the comfort he gave me. He was a mirror into my own soul, when I felt lost and alone, which had been all too often. Realizing he could never be mine was a bitter pill to swallow.
At the time I didn’t realize that my confession was the recipe to my freedom, to my sense of wholeness and completeness, even away from Eric and the relationship we’d accidentally created. That I had to be willing to lay it all on the line and risk being whoever I am, despite the chance I might not be accepted. I have always been so different than everyone else; at times the masquerade has been a necessary shelter from the storm of standing out in the way that I inevitably do.
He fell asleep and I could hear the steadiness of his slumber. I wanted to fall into him and stay there forever. But, I couldn’t stay all night. He had a coworker there. I had someplace to be the next morning. I got up, got dressed in the dark, kissed him gently, lovingly, good bye. It was finally the very last time I saw him and it’s been years now.
While at times that I have typically found myself alone, I have longed for him…I know that whatever happens with him and his marriage has to be only between him and his wife. They have to reconcile their own ability to give each other the room to be their authentic selves, to see if they can mirror their true selves to one another and to overcome all the obstacles they have to becoming their best versions of themselves. She is forever critical of him. She diminishes his masculinity. He is emotionally selfish and difficult with her, and he doesn’t appreciate or cherish her or what she does for him. He denies her the part of himself she needs, no craves, the very most. Her love never measures up against his demands, and his never measures up to hers.
It’s a horribly lonely marriage. It’s so much worse than physically being alone, because within it there is no hope for real companionship. I think to myself that I’d be annoyed with the way he takes her for granted myself. She aspires to Martha Stewartdom, makes a gorgeous home, a wonderful mother, and he feels his abundant providence should be all he should have to give.
That’s not enough to build a happy marriage on; it’s got to be a total and complete mutual submission of self to one another. You have to be willing to see your faults and rise above them and this righteous indignation on his part was just selfishness and nothing more.
I know this. I do.
I don’t know if what we shared in terms of our loving aspirations for ourselves, what we wanted in real love, the la
nguage of love that was alike for both of us, might have meant. But even right there in that moment of total unison for me, Eric could not, did not see it as the signpost to ultimate love for him, for me or for an “us”.
It was simply a coincidence of commonality, and I? I saw it as the ultimate signal of unity and connectedness and it felt like the ultimate betrayal and the ultimate loss had been bestowed upon us by Dana.
Chapter 24
As I pulled out of the dark parking lot and contemplated what might have been, rivers of tears streamed down my naked face. Driving home in the car the darkness inching toward dawn, even then I realized that before Dana, he’d been reticent, that he’d put off my enthusiasm and he’d couched his “I love you.” to me in an offhand, qualified and noncommittal way. Despite Dana, I’d never had the expectation of fidelity, and that he could have continued on with talking to me about “us” years before like he’d said he intended and yet he never had.
No matter all of that, the realization of her lie completely, totally, shook me up for days. I felt I had been robbed of the man that I should have been with all along. I feared on some intrinsic level that he was my one, true and only enduring love and that Dana had stripped me of my rightful place in his heart with her lie. What was worse, I’d never have the right or the opportunity to that opportunity to love and to be loved again.
For the days I ached over it, I talked to a few friends, even confessed the event to Rabbi Ohr. I cried, many, many tears. Yet they all said the obvious. No coulds, woulds, shoulds…if it had truly been meant to be, it would have been, and if Eric had truly loved me in the manner I wanted him to, nothing would have prevented him from being with me fifteen years before, and he had never pursued permanence between us. And for now, that the relationship was forbidden, I couldn’t take what was not mine and expect to make something beautiful out of it. It was tainted if I didn’t respect the truth that we were not together for a reason, even if I didn’t understand it.
Tsunami Across My Heart Page 8
