During the summer before we separated, Cal and I sold our perfect little apartment. We’d always hallucinated about buying a house, but we knew we’d never actually be able to afford one—never mind one of those classic early-1900s four-story Brooklyn beauties made famous by Moonstruck. But somehow, we had done it. For one thing, we’d gotten tapped by good real estate karma during the housing bubble, and we were able to sell our apartment for double what we’d paid for it five years earlier. I found a beautiful fixer-upper for well under market value. It was an estate sale, and the seller had cheaped out by opting to go with a schlubby local realtor rather than one of the carnivorous Manhattan-based firms. With no advertising in The New York Times, the house was flying under the radar; I swooped by, and we snatched it up. For another thing, we’d done pretty well financially, especially considering that both of us worked from home and arranged our work hours to fit our kids’ schedules. We had made it—again.
The day we closed on that house, I cried: This is the place where we are going to raise our children until they go to college. It will be their childhood Home. Having moved again and again as a kid following my parents’ divorce, this was a huge, huge deal to me. It was the big door prize. With a jumbo mortgage in our pocket, we poured everything we had left into a gut renovation of that house. We hired a contractor to update its foundation and infrastructure, an architect to help preserve its period feeling. We installed new steel I-beams to bolster the century-old building. We updated all the electrical wiring and plumbing; installed new walls, closets, and floors; mounted antique lighting fixtures, claw-foot tubs, and pedestal sinks. We modified the floor plan to make the first floor a separate apartment, which we would rent out to cushion our monthly mortgage payments. Everything was figured out. We had made it.
That summer, as the contractors ripped out the innards of the old house and erected in their place a skeleton of steel beams, we stayed with Cal’s parents again. We slept in separate bedrooms. Cal’s parents urged us to go out together; they’d be happy to watch the kids. I’d look at Cal; he’d shrug. He never took them up on it. The demolition wore on, and our stay extended to autumn. Cal’s mother grew insistent: Take a break! Enjoy! Anak, Cal—why are you so antisocial? Ano, take your wife out! Thus pushed, Cal could not refuse. So, that November evening, we finally went out alone. I don’t think that either of us knew what was coming. But it came in any case.
“Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.” There it is—the old standard poem of high school English class, T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock. He sits in the mind as a neutered Edwardian bachelor, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Modern Man yearning to find meaning in a mannered world. But these days, he is considered an anachronism. You do not expect to see J. Alfred Prufrock sitting across the table from you at dinner, alive in the aspect of a twenty-first-century Generation X husband and father. You do not expect him to have seen the moment of his greatness flicker, to have seen the eternal Footman hold his coat and snicker, in short, to have been afraid. You do not expect him to be sitting across from you in a love kills Ed Hardy sweatshirt wrestling with those selfsame quietly desperate, punishing questions.
We had wanted to go to this restaurant since it had first opened, nearly four years before. And there we were, at our first dinner out alone together in close to a year. The weight of it was so great that I broke down. I said, after our appetizers had been cleared away, that I thought we should look into seeing a couples therapist, that something needed to change. I did not see that this would be his moment. But it was, though I don’t believe he knew it until it was right in front of him. It was his moment. He pushed it to its crisis. “We should have broken up ten years ago,” he said coldly. “I’ve been completely fucking miserable; I have nothing to look forward to; I don’t want to wake up at fifty and be in the same place. I’m done.” He was not Prufrock. He was not my father. He was not my mother. He was not my husband. He didn’t want to.
It was over.
We drove back to his parents’ house. He went into one bedroom, I went into the other. The next day, I was aware of every speck of dust, flicker of light; nothing else seemed real. In hindsight, this was the most real moment of all. Why didn’t we stop right there—figure out a way to patch things up? This is the most painful question of all. It is still the only one to which I do not have an answer I can articulate. All I can report is that it was as if a cosmic force had been unleashed, and in that instant—the instant in which Cal said “I’m done”—the finality of it roared in like an enormous black cloud blotting out the sky, over every inch of the world. It was done.
But then, one of the first things that you find yourself doing in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is thinking logistically. And you think strangely fast, making quick, practical decisions that you believe, in your revved-up mind, will help resurrect order. Cal and I went from barely talking to speaking in businesslike terms, ticking off agenda items. First, we will move into the house, we said; we will not tell the children anything. So, a few weeks after our dinner conversation, we did that. Then we were in the house. Cal would sleep on the sofa until the apartment downstairs was ready. Since we hadn’t slept in the same room for years, we reasoned, this would not strike our children as the end of the world. We would not tell them that the plan was for him to move into the downstairs apartment, not yet. We would discuss that when it came up. But they knew something was bad. We climbed into bed one night, and as we were snuggling to sleep, my younger daughter whispered: “I’m scared of our house—it has ghosts.”
One of the things I have always despised so intensely about Baby Boomers and their divorces was how breathtakingly egocentric they were. That they were so eager to trade in their children’s very sense of safety in the world for access to an unfettered sex life and a sense of “personal fulfillment” was so shocking and brutal to me that I have to storm out of the room whenever I hear some self-aggrandizing asshole talking about it. The cognitive dissonance is nauseating.
The few times I was invited to visit him, my father used to sit in the “family room” of the suburban McMansion he’d built for his wife and four stepchildren—scotch in hand—lecturing me about how important it was to be true to oneself, not to be tethered by others’ expectations, to just say “fuck it” and “do it”—that this was the path to happiness. And I’d be thinking: Monster. How can you possibly sit there, looking at your thirteen-year-old daughter who misses you so consumingly, with her little shaved head and ripped black punk uniform, who sends you bad poems slashed with grief and fear, and say you’re walking along the road of happiness? Is your heart a lump of charred charcoal? Are you even human anymore?
Cut to—me, age thirty-eight, front seat of the brand-new BMW that Cal and I have decided to go halvesies on since we still need a car for the kids, and we both are shamefacedly fond of good driving cars. Zanny is in the backseat, and we are listening to the Pixies. I turn down the music and tell her I’ve noticed that she’s been really angry lately; would she like to talk about it? She asks why Daddy is sleeping on the sofa. When we come to a stoplight, my voice says that though it is hard to understand that Mama and Daddy have a grown-up relationship that is different from our being her and her sister’s parents, we do, and we need a little space from each other: a time-out of sorts. She starts to weep and asks if that means we’re getting a divorce. It is now raining. Because it is a fancy new car, the windshield wipers come on automatically. We’re not talking about divorce now, my baby, the voice says. This is grown-up stuff, and Daddy and I are working on it, but we love you, and because we love you, we will always be a family. We will always know how to take care of you. She wails: Please tell me if you are going to get divorced before it happens, so I won’t be surprised, okay Mama? I’m thinking: What the hell am I doing? Who the fuck am I? How can I be saying this shit to my beautiful daughter, my firstborn? What am I doing? What am I doing?
What am I doing?
The only thing that mattered was the kids. We had not yet told our children that we were separating, much less divorcing, because we had not figured out what we were going to do, logistically. We said to each other that we didn’t want to traumatize them with frightening terms until we could all get used to what “separation” and “divorce” would actually feel like to the four of us on a day-to-day, rhythmic basis. We said to each other that we wanted to do everything possible to make sure that our children were not feeling the impact of what we were feeling. What were we feeling? What was happening? What am I doing? What am I doing?
Early in our separation, I was up in my room, on the floor, rocking on my knees, guttural and howling. I heard the downstairs door open and my children and husband walk in. I panicked, listening to them scampering up the stairs to me: Get it together, Susie. I pressed my forehead into the floor, and the door flung open. “What are you doing, Mama?” I heard my little one ask. “Hold on a sec, guys, I’m just finishing up a little yoga,” I said, head still down, trying to buy myself a few more seconds. “Let’s go wash hands, and then we’ll get a little ice cream, and you can tell me about your day.” More scampering, into the bathroom. I raised my head, wiped my face, shook my head, and pinched my cheeks. “Okay!” I called. “Ready?”
What am I doing? Everything was happening so fast. One of the things I knew we were not going to do was to sit down and have the Important Family Announcement. Cal said: Fine. From my point of view, the big thing was for our guys to feel secure that both of us absolutely loved them, beyond a shadow of a doubt. If there was no modulation in that sense, they would be generally okay. The little girls would pad around in their footie PJs, getting books ready for bedtime, and just kiss their dad goodnight, unworried that he would be leaving for the night to go sleep with a friend. Then the three of us would crawl into bed, read, and snuggle as we always had.
The problems seemed to come when there was modulation, which was hard to avoid when we were distracted or angry—which is pretty much the milieu of divorce. That is, if he hesitated at all before leaving—or indicated that he would rather not be leaving—that was it. The children would collapse in tears on the sofa, clinging to him desperately. I wanted to kill him for involving them in his feelings. They were so sad I almost couldn’t look at them. This was exactly why I never wanted to get divorced. What am I doing?
One night, on the eve of his returning from a month-long trip early in our separation, I had a hysterical crying fit. I hadn’t realized how anxious I was about his coming back, about separating at all, about anything, really—and I just lost it. I couldn’t stop crying. In front of my guys. They stared at me, then tried to comfort me by bringing me toilet paper and rubbing my back. My boo-boos. I couldn’t believe I was doing this to them, this Medea tantrum. I tried to apologize, but it was useless, I knew. I had done exactly what I never, ever wanted to do.
Neither Cal nor I could imagine him living outside the house. The idea that our children would think that he left was unbearable to both of us. What am I doing? But I could not stand the sight of him on the sofa watching TV. I wondered if he would end up being a dick about money, like my father, who had, I later found out, died with a warrant out for his arrest in Norristown, Pennsylvania, for failure to pay my mother outstanding child support. Was this Cal? Where was Cal? What was happening? What am I doing?
What was happening was inconceivable. People think you have discernible feelings right after something like this happens. I did not. I only knew that it was happening, and it was happening faster than I could process it. Cal’s and my conversations were quick, efficient meetings. We had reached the point, we said, at which it is appropriate to tell the children that something bigger is happening. But not too big. We should do this gradually, we said, so that nothing like the Important Family Announcement drops like a bomb on them. Small steps, we said, small steps. So we took the next one. We said that, as they had probably noticed, Mama and Daddy had been pretty grumpy with each other lately, and that we had decided to have a time-out from each other. They were concerned and fearful, wanted to know how long this time-out was going to last. We said that we didn’t know; we were just going to see how it went, until we had a little space to ourselves to calm down. Mama and Daddy had an adult relationship, and we were taking care of it. We loved them, and we were always there to take care of them.
But after Cal moved into the apartment, we both erupted, though we disguised our feelings in the children’s presence. Although the living situation provided an essential sense of continuum and stability for the children—and I’d do it the same way again in a second because of that—it quickly devolved into hateful late-night texting tirades. It was a torrent. Every drop of poison that we’d choked back for years—verging on two decades—came vomiting out of each of us, almost involuntarily. I had never loved him, he spat; I only loved that he took care of me! Frankly, when he thought about it, how well did I really even know him? Did I know what he dreamed about, what he wished he had done with his life? Had I ever even see him for who he was? I was just like my father—I used people, then I threw them away.
I shrieked in literal agony when I read this. Was this true? Was I a black-hearted narcissist? What had I done? After sitting with this for several days, however, it occurred to me: How could everything be my fault? For the last seven years, I had assumed blame for everything because I really did think that everything was my fault and that Cal was perfect. I realized: Cal had not disabused me of this perception. Not once.
That’s when I became livid. You have been taking advantage of my guilt and my shitty self-esteem to hide from yourself! I lashed back. How can you say that I am throwing you away when I have worked for seven years to right my wrongs? You have ground me into the asphalt, you have made me feel worthless, you have rejected my every gesture at closeness because you do not want anyone to know you! If I am my father’s daughter, then you are his ill-begotten son.
A détente ensued. The eruption, though furious, was weirdly purifying. Cal and I both seemed to sense that in it we had come up against something hard and real. In the final analysis, the truth was that neither had Cal been revolving around me nor I around him. We were both solitary entities revolving around a star that was finally dying.
EIGHT
THE CUTTER:
SEPARATION
In the immediate aftershock following a bomb going off, everything goes flat, noiseless, vacant. This sounds dramatic. It didn’t feel that way. It just felt like what reality actually is. It had been here, undergirding everything, all along. There was a vibratory quality to it. If “Om” is the rich, living sound of the universe, the sound of this place was its polar opposite. If there can be such a thing, it was the vibration of nothing at all. This was not unfamiliar terrain for me. I lived there for many years after my own parents’ divorce. I lived there for much of the year following our separation. But after the flat, white-noise period, cracks appeared, as if the land was just now responding to the blast.
About three months into the separation, an abyss began to open up in front of me. I didn’t see it coming. But I felt it, and the wider I felt it opening, the more I became convinced that in fact it had always been there, it was all around me, and it was never going to close. Let me be clear that this is not a metaphor. The pitch and depth of this void—I felt it, palpably, all the time. After it had been with me for about a month, unabating, I started to think that maybe the seismic impact set off by my marital rupture had blown open the door to some higher reality for me. You hear of people who say that following an operation, accident, or some other major trauma, they were instantaneously endowed with the sense datum of collective purpose, universal light. In my case, the blunt force of trauma had blasted open this abyss. It was my ultimate reality.
I didn’t know what to do. In spite of my other nasty experiences earlier in life, I had no experience with this. I was aware that I was losing it. But I was already doing everything that everybody tells you
to do. I was already in therapy. I was already on antidepressants. I was already doing yoga. I was already eating right. Still, it was there. When I was alone, it was just the void. When I ventured out into the world or was with other people, however, it took on an almost malevolent quality. It was like being a character in a Stephen King short story. Your workaday life is mundane; you look okay to people. It’s simply that wherever you go, an invisible grotesque presence is three steps behind you. There is no question of shaking it. Sometimes it speeds closer, its breath at your cheek; other times it lags. It has been there all along; you just see it now. The question was not how I could make it go away, but rather whether it was worth it to walk with it at all.
One crystalline day in February, I sat in my car underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. I got out. I looked up. For a while. I got back in. My babies.
The only time I felt okay was when I was with them, transported back to the world in which I was the mom with her schmushkies. I was able to make dinner, sing loudly, and dance, which are normal mom things to my children. But the way Cal and I had decided to arrange things—trying out joint custody—I was without my children half the time.
Because I didn’t know what else to do, I met with the minister of the church I attended intermittently. Since Zanny’s birth, I had come to a relatively comfortable meeting place with God, especially in my conversations with my children. It was always cast in the rubric of love. When we were mad and struck out, we had a talk about how we were ignoring God for the moment. But we could always go back, and when we did, we felt better because then our hearts were restored to normal. When we talked about life after death, we said that there is nothing to be afraid of. Our bodies were our bodies, and they were good and useful while we were alive, but the bigger deal is that we had always been together, and we always would be. And these things felt real and authentic because I just knew, in my gut, that it was the truth. Especially after my dad died.
In Spite of Everything Page 20
