by Ariel Levy
“I am working,” Jim told me angrily. He was writing a book about his transition. But I didn’t take it seriously. In fact, like almost everything else he did, it made me irate. What I had spent fifteen years learning how to do, he had decided he could do professionally, just like that. (This had happened before: There was a time when he was going to be a singer, then an actor. But a writer? That was just offensive.)
And yet. I was unrelentingly distracted. I thought most often about the physical acts themselves, but there were corollary sensory flashes. Like: the taste of the soup at the Japanese restaurant where we went once afterward. Or: the sound of the wind in that bedroom.
I began to feel claustrophobic in my own house. I shared our cat’s fevered desperation to find an open window, a door left ajar, a precious opportunity to escape and go…where? I am afraid that I will pull this house apart, I wrote in my journal. And then it will be winter and I’ll be outside, freezing.
The thought of leaving Lucy made me feel physically ill. To abandon my best friend in the world? Unbearable. But then I was already gone. The parallel narrative of my secret, imagined other life was always swallowing my attention, the life in which I was single, vibrant, liberated.
It was awful having someone you loved swallowed up all the time. It was bad banging on the door for your mother while she dipped into her other life in the next room. But I knew now that it had been awful for her, too—that lurching between lives is hell. Even if one life is manifest and the other is mostly hypothetical, the inability to occupy your own reality is torment, is torture. It is sin and punishment all in one.
10
If I took a long enough flight to a strange enough place, maybe I could leave this fever dream behind. I accepted an assignment to write about the conservative politician Mike Huckabee; it was not my usual beat, but I wanted to be as far away as I could get. In January 2010, I met Huckabee in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall. He was leading a tour group of 160 Evangelicals through the Holy Land with the singer Pat Boone. It was easy to spot them amid the black hats, the bearded men davening in front of the white-gold Jerusalem stone. Huckabee was wearing a pink shirt with white polka dots and a yarmulke. “I think what I should do is convert,” he said, squinting in the sunshine. “This covers my bald spot completely.”
He had a folksy self-assurance I found seductive at that fraught moment. “Character is who you are when nobody else is watching,” he wrote in one of his books—the undeniable, hokey truth. (I had to stop cheating. I had to locate some integrity.) I was writing about Huckabee’s prospects for the presidency, but what really interested me was how someone whose positions I found so upsetting could seem so decent when you spoke to him, so thoughtful, really. While the Christians were shopping for olive-wood Jesus figurines in a souvenir shop, we had a cup of tea in the back room and he told me about how he “grew up in a culture where everybody went to church but nobody took it that seriously,” in Hope, Arkansas. He found the reflexive piety in his community “very pharisaical in nature” when he was young: “People would say boys and girls shouldn’t go to R-rated movies, or they shouldn’t swim together,” he said. “I was the guy that always asked why.” In high school, he was sent to the principal’s office for leading a group of students in protest against the Vietnam War. “I always questioned, even when it was inappropriate to question,” he told me.
But, like all of us, I guess, Huckabee questioned only the rules that struck him as questionable. He was sure, for example, that homosexuality was “unnatural and sinful,” and, as governor of Arkansas, he had successfully championed laws that prevented gay people from becoming foster parents, and banned gay adoptions. “We can get into the ick factor,” he told me, “but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically that doesn’t work.” It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might not find gayness icky. It didn’t matter to him that a twenty-five-year study had just come out from the American Academy of Pediatrics concluding that children brought up by lesbian parents were better adjusted than their peers. The wrongness of gayness was something Huckabee believed. It was as real to him as Jim’s belief that he was a man.
Huckabee’s wife, Janet, was with him in Israel. They had known each other since the seventh grade. On their first date, Huckabee took her to a truck stop after he covered one of her high school basketball games for the local radio station, where he worked as a student reporter. “We started dating at seventeen, got married at eighteen,” she said. “What were we thinking?”
“We weren’t thinking!” Huckabee replied. “We weren’t thinking at all!” I asked him what he’d learned about love as a person who’d been married for thirty-six years. “I think we both went into it understanding it was for life,” he told me. “I’ve always said, if you believe divorce is an option, you’ll take it.”
—
AT DINNER AT THE David Citadel Hotel, I sat next to Mary, a perky woman with white hair and cornflower-blue eyes. She was very excited that I was Jewish. “I mean, you’re the chosen people!” she said. Many of the Christians on the trip were passionate Zionists, at least in part because they believed that Jewish control of the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean is a biblically ordained precondition for the Second Coming of Christ. (Some of them politely admitted that they had no doubt that most Israelis would be spending eternity in Hell. “That is an issue,” a man named Randy told me apologetically.) But Mary seemed ingenuously curious. She asked about how we celebrated holidays, and I told her about the Orthodox nursery school I’d attended, where I played Queen Esther in our Purim pageant, and we all ate hamantaschen and shrieked when the teacher said Haman’s name. (I did not mention that my parents moved me to public school before first grade because they thought I was getting too Jewish.)
Mary told me that God spoke to her. “Don’t laugh,” she said, “but it’s like seeing words pop up in my head the way you do on a computer screen.” Her husband, who was seated to her left, was a loud, avuncular Southern man with white hair and a barrel chest—I could hear him denigrating Obama at the top of his lungs, which seemed to make Mary only slightly less uncomfortable than it made me. A few weeks before the trip, she said, when she was in the shower, seething about something he’d done, the words I chose him for you came up on the holy computer screen in her mind.
What peace it must be to know that someone is yours, no matter what—it is ordained, can never be otherwise. (Motherhood, I heard in my head.) How relaxing—how enviable—to believe that an omnipotent other has a plan for your life. Mary said she would pray to God to talk to me, too.
I thought: I will never have that. I had Lucy—who understandably sort of hated me and got weird and drunk on a regular basis because I was a terrible fake wife—and I had my garden and my friends and my job.
But it’s more than a job, I told myself. It’s a calling!
Seriously? was my next thought. Writing magazine articles is your sacred duty?
Then: There’s something of value in trying to put the world into words.
And finally: You spend your entire life picking people apart. You use them and then you rid yourself of them the way you want to rid yourself of your spouse.
“You just throw away another human being like a toy you’re sick of playing with?” Huckabee said the next morning. He was waiting to do a radio appearance, eating a chocolate croissant in the lobby outside the recording studio, and explaining why he did not believe in comprehensive sexual education for high school students. Information about how to prevent unwanted pregnancy would only encourage teenagers to sexually exploit and then discard each other, he reasoned, when they ought to be encouraged to save intimacy for marriage. I thought his conclusions about education were daft. But his description of a selfish beast who cares only for her own esurient desires haunted me. You just throw away another human being?
Who would do that?
Such a person was unworthy of love, of kin. Such a person was unfit
to be a mother.
—
WHEN I RETURNED FROM JERUSALEM, I told Lucy that I had been heartless and selfish and greedy like a child: that I’d had an affair because I didn’t know the first thing about love. She punished me by routinely getting inebriated at the worst possible times, which I hated but knew I deserved. (It did not cross my mind that this might not be all about me.)
You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one. You want more: more love, more sex, more attention, more fun. You want someone to look at you with lust—after years of laundry—transforming you into something radiant. You want it, you need it, you owe it to yourself to get it. To live any other way is to be muffled and gray and marching meaninglessly toward death. You want what she gave you at the start (but what you had hoped would expand and intensify instead of shrinking until you find yourself so sad, so resentful, you can barely stand to be you).
You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.
11
We separated for a while. Lucy stayed out on Shelter Island and I found an apartment in the city. Sometimes it was a relief to be on my own, not feeling (as) awful about myself, not fixated on how much she’d been drinking or what I could do to stop it. Sometimes I inhabited my life: I looked at the trees outside my window and felt unconfused. Other times I missed Lucy so much it was nauseating.
But I started up my affair again. I’m separated! Why not? If I was going to suffer like this, there might as well be some kind of payoff. I would get to the bottom of it. I would get it out of my system! Addictions that are fed get worse, though, not better.
My email account kept getting hacked. Jim denied doing it and said it wounded him that I would accuse him of such a thing. I told myself it was the work of a stranger, that these things happened in the modern world. I started feeling wary of him, though—cornered—as I had years before, when he would show up at my door without warning.
One afternoon Jim drove me to Ikea in his black car to look for a sink. I was almost weak with gratitude as we walked through the aisles of white ceramic basins with their Viking names: Odensvik; Bråviken; Hagaviken. How kind he was to bring me here, to do an errand like this with me, when I had been relegating him to the periphery of my life for as long as we’d known each other. He was guilty only of wanting to help me set up a new home, where he’d be welcome.
We got lost in the bunk-bed region on the way to the cash registers. As we wandered through the airless maze of simulated children’s rooms with no exit in sight, I started to sweat. There were sheets printed with kangaroos. There were beanbags and small desks. There were blunt miniature forks and knives, and everything else you need to buy for a normal life. By the time we found an escalator going down and I paid for my Tornviken, I felt dizzy.
Back at my apartment building, Jim carried the sink up the stairs with me and asked if I wanted help installing it. I said that I would tackle it another day. “I really don’t feel well,” I told him when he asked to stay, which was the truth.
“Did you promise Lucy you would never let me sleep here?” he asked.
“No,” I said, which was a lie.
—
ONE MORNING, AS I was staring at my computer, I saw something impossible. An email that Jim had written me—in which he made his case for our relationship by recapping every detail of our affair—had been forwarded to Lucy. From my account.
Was I actually insane? Had I sent that email to Lucy in some kind of trance? Was this my monstrous way of ending our marriage?
“No, you fool,” Emma said when I called. “Jim did this.”
“I don’t think so,” I told her, and started crying. “I feel like I’m in a pressure cooker.”
“Well it’s turning your mind into short ribs,” she said. “Jim did this. It couldn’t be clearer.”
I knew it was Jim—an incubus, it seemed, who couldn’t be kept out of my mind or my home or my correspondence—but I could not quite believe it: “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”
“He’s a sociopath,” Emma said. “And you’re scaring me.”
Matt told me, “You should never, ever talk to him again, for the rest of your life.”
“I’m trying,” I said. “It’s hard.”
Matt sighed. “I was watching that show Intervention the other night and the people sound like you: like they’re missing a piece of their brains.”
You have to be that way when you’re addicted to something. In order to finish your cigarette, you have to cordon off the knowledge that it’s killing you. (And if you are addicted, you will—it won’t even feel like a choice.) It was not until Jim slipped and quoted something I’d written in an email to someone else, which he never would have seen if he hadn’t been hacking my account, that I was forced to admit he was a liar. That he was just as crazy as a man as he’d been as a woman.
I was crazy, too, though. I had let this happen—made it happen. Extricating myself from my affair was like shattering a great pane of glass in the middle of a room: months after I’d finished cleaning up the crash, there were still shards lurking in the corners. I was still picking small, vicious slivers out of the soles of my feet.
—
IF YOU ARE LUCY, meanwhile, you are trying to start a company. It’s a bold act, in your mid-forties, when you already have a solid career that you could continue with for another couple of decades, and then slide into a modest retirement. But you want something more: You don’t want to be a cog; you want to make a new machine. You want your parents to be impressed and your wife to stop worrying.
She doesn’t. In fact, when you invest—little by little—all the money you’ve ever made into the company, the only person who worries more than you do is your wife. Your wife. You changed your entire life for her. You left your girlfriend; you sold your house; you moved across the country. And it was worth it, because what you gained was the deepest adoration you’d known since childhood, when you would come home from the fruit tour to find you were the apple of your parents’ eyes. That has stopped, and now the woman who worshipped you is angry at you all the time, for not having a paycheck. For drinking.
But you don’t have a paycheck because you are trying to make it big—to become again the champion whom everybody cheers. (That is the side of you she fell in love with, you fear, the side she’s counting on to rescue her from the sucking pull of the shtetl, where women get old before their time, eating mud-colored gruel with mouths missing half their teeth.) And what is the one thing that gives you some peace from the churning anxiety that is waking you up at two in the morning and tormenting you until the alarm goes off and it is time, again, to rise exhausted from your bed and face another day of convincing your staff and your wife and yourself that you’ve got it all under control? A drink. An innocent beer, like you pounded with your teammates. A vodka soda that passes as 7UP if nobody sits near enough to you to smell it at lunch. A kind, loving drink that washes away your stress and suffering as it slides coolly down your throat. Sometimes your wife says that alcohol is your mistress, that you love it more than you love her. And sometimes she’s right.
Then a vile, unbearable email, written by her hideous lover—her bearded girlfriend—arrives in your in-box, announcing disgusting things, like: They have been shopping for sinks. They went to Fire Island one afternoon and walked on the beach. They have sex, lots of it. They are in love.
You rush out of a meeting when you read the email on your BlackBerry, and you think you will throw up, but then you don’t. Because you know something: They are not in love. Your wife is possessed. Her real self loves only you. You will remind her of this, and the nightmare will end. Your company and your marriage and you will succeed, if it kills you. And it may.
12
We made a pact. I would stop cheating. Lucy would stop drinking. No more agony. No more disloyalty. We woul
d grow up now, for real.
We moved back in with each other. On my thirty-sixth birthday, Lucy gave me an old green bicycle and a pink helmet. I started riding that green bike everywhere, thrilled to be zipping past the taxis locked in traffic and the slow-moving pedestrians clogging the sidewalks. I was fast and unfettered, flying along the Hudson, safe under my pink hard hat. Despite everything I put her through, Lucy had given me that.
One night, she called from the apartment when I was about to bike home from a party for someone at work. She was frantic: “Paolo is dead.” He had started making a horrible sound and then crawled under the couch. Lucy had lifted it off of him in a burst of maternal strength and then held him in her arms until his body went limp. When I got back to the apartment, Lucy was lying on the bathroom floor, sobbing next to his corpse.
Something had to be done—it was urgent; that much was clear. We decided that we needed to bury him, immediately, on Shelter Island. So we wrapped Paolo in a Mexican serape with his toy bunny, got in the Jeep, and started hurtling east, through the Midtown Tunnel, past the endless cemeteries of Queens, past the Paris hotel with its tree-size replica of the Eiffel Tower on top. Lucy was driving and crying and briefly convinced that Jim had broken into the apartment and poisoned Paolo. “That cat was my family,” she said. That, and, “I can understand why couples break up after they lose a child.”
We were well into Queens before we realized that we would never make it out in time to catch the last ferry to Shelter Island. We turned around, drove back to the apartment, and left Paolo in the cold car. Then we set out again the next morning, through the Midtown Tunnel, past the endless cemeteries of Queens, past the Paris hotel, and on toward the vineyards of the North Fork, the mariners’ shops in Greenport that sell ship cleats and heavy rope. We buried Paolo with his sex bunny at the foot of a tree in the backyard, where they lie wrapped in an endless embrace in their Mexican serape.
