Perfection

by Julie Metz

  “Whatever happened to the idea of a smart English major from one of the local colleges?” I shot back, amazed that I needed to point out the obvious. “Does this woman have any research background? Does she know anything at all about food? Is she a professional writer?” I edged away from his desk, desperate to retreat downstairs to my office before a battle broke out.

  “She isn’t really a writer,” Henry said. “She’d be more of a”—he paused for a beat, searching for the right word—“spiritual guide.” Henry looked at me, almost plaintively, but still provocatively, melding the two facial expressions into a kind of dare.

  “A ‘spiritual guide’? Since when do you, Mr. Rational Man, son of Voltaire, go for ‘spiritual guides’? I can’t even get you to take another yoga class.”

  This was becoming stupid. The dark-haired woman with the black leather wristbands—an assistant? With regard to his book project, this was the most laughable idea I had ever heard him propose. I wanted to get out of his office, immediately, before I exploded, but I was paralyzed at the doorway with frustration and a sudden paradoxical compassion for Henry, who looked so mournful and lost.

  “I feel blocked,” he continued. “I can’t seem to get started writing my book. I need some help getting organized and focused.” A silent beat passed as we both acknowledged the untamed piles of paper. “And why do you always have to be so negative about everything?”

  “I had lunch with Eliana today,” Henry announced one evening after dinner the following week as he rose from his seat at the kitchen table. Liza was finishing a dish of ice cream. “I really think she’d be great at getting my research together.”

  I turned off the faucet and set down the scrubby sponge and the pan I was laboring over. He was heading into the hallway toward the stairs. I followed him up to his office, already conflicted about leaving Liza to finish her dessert alone.

  “Look, Henry, you asked me before, and I told you what I thought. Why did you ask me for my opinion when you have no interest in really listening to what I have to say?”

  He sat down at his desk gloomily.

  “Henry, it’s crazy in here.” I surveyed the clutter of papers on his desk. His was a long desk, a seven-footer. There were no visible empty spaces. If Nature abhors a vacuum, his office had become a kind of rain-forest jungle without a patch of bare earth. Since our talk the prior week, more stacks of unopened mail and magazines had sprung up on the floor, this in a room lined with custom-built bookshelves.

  “I honestly don’t understand what you do all day. I mean, I get up, I go into my office, I work. I don’t visit Cathy for coffee. I don’t take naps, I don’t go to the gym three times a week. I work and take care of Liza, and I take a yoga class once a week.” I paused, hoping my voice sounded measured, not hysterical and angry.

  “I can’t fix this mess for you,” I continued, wrapping my arms around my waist self-protectively and perhaps bitchily, “we’ll just get in a fight about it. But I really think you need someone bright and capable, not some weird girl in black leather wristbands.”

  “You never like any of my ideas.” His lower lip curled down in a pout, like that of an indulged child who still, after all, wanted my approval before he misbehaved.

  “Yeah, well, then just keep doing what you’re doing since it’s working out so well,” I said. “But I don’t want that woman in my house. And don’t complain to me when you miss your book deadline. I’m going back downstairs. I want to keep Liza company and I have work to finish before her bedtime.”

  Before we could have yet another argument about Eliana, she was gone. Henry, visibly disappointed, told me that Eliana had decided to leave the area and move home. I didn’t care where home was, just that she was far away.

  “A piece of work, isn’t she?” Matthew said, forcing a dark laugh. He’d come over to show me Henry’s computer photo files, previously hidden from view. I looked at the picture of Eliana, in full Queen of the Night regalia, her eyes peering out provocatively between two curtains of dark hair, and I sighed. Now I understood Matthew’s stoic mood during Henry’s funeral. He had known all this already. He had protected me, and I loved him for that. We were happy to close the computer window after a moment. Eliana’s image was already seared in my brain. This is going to be very bad.

  “Something sexual happened between Henry and this woman,” Matthew pronounced quietly. “I read through some of the e-mails. It looks like Henry saw her while he was in California on his last two research trips in the fall.” As if echoing my thoughts, he added, trying for some of his trademark dark levity, “I imagine, you know, sordid hotel room scenes.” I tried to conjure up the very worst, to avoid later surprise.

  Afterward, Matthew and I sat on the porch. I felt unsteady, almost dizzy, with the heat and my anxiety about getting in touch with Eliana.

  “Henry really had no spiritual life,” Matthew said, shaking his head and looking down at the stone floor. “He rejected all that as nonrational thinking. I was always trying to get him to read some books on spirituality. I thought it would help him. I wanted him to be happy.” He looked at me very directly. “I wanted both of you to be happy. I loved you both. A couple of times I think he might have been trying to talk to me about what was going on with him and Cathy, but I cut him off, I just didn’t want to hear this at all. You were my friend too. I told him so.”

  I thanked Matthew for his loyalty to me and to our marriage. Intense fury rose in me again, though I tried to stay calm. Just as he’d done with Irena, Henry had tried to place another person very close to me in a situation where he would be forced to lie.

  “He and I didn’t spend that much time together the last year or so,” Matthew continued. “He hardly ever called me. I could see that there was something really missing in his life. He could be very self-destructive, ever since college, when we all drank too much and did drugs.”

  “Yeah, he loved telling those stories, didn’t he?” I closed my eyes for a moment, remembering the adventures he’d told about his college days (the most colorful tale involved buying LSD preserved from the sixties from a nameless dealer at the Syracuse airport), and our own times together before Liza was born, when we’d all gone to parties and bars together.

  Entering our thirties, we’d cleaned up our acts. I was never much of a drinker anyway. Henry had stopped drinking for a year, and when he resumed, he drank only modestly. Therapy seemed to have been instructive—he spoke to me about how he had used alcohol to “self-medicate.” He understood finally, he said, how to drink in moderation. But I wondered now about the weekly dinner parties Henry insisted on throwing. Perhaps at some level they were about trying to recapture some of that time, to create an atmosphere of lawless abundance.

  “Maybe”—Matthew sighed ruefully—“considering how everything turned out, maybe he was better off just drinking.”

  I wondered about the transference of his addictions—drugging, drinking, adultery, it was all a kind of risk-taking for its own sake.

  By this point, I hoped that nothing could really shock me, that I had reached the end of the line. I had been reduced to the level of silently praying (I, the skeptic) that Henry had cared enough about me to use a condom. Eliana looked like she got around, more than I had anyway in the last sixteen years. I had been a faithful wife.

  I called our local doctor to arrange for an HIV test.

  “I am so relieved to hear from you,” the doctor said, with an audible sigh.

  It turned out that Henry had requested an HIV test in early December 2002, a month before his death. Confidentiality agreements had prevented the doctor from calling me to have me take a test as well. I did recall that Henry had avoided sex with me right after his return from that West Coast trip. He was exhausted, he’d said apologetically. And he certainly had looked tired then.

  So, perhaps he had cared enough about me to wait to have sex till he got his negative HIV test results. Though I seethed, wondering what he would have done if the results had
been positive for something less immediately devastating, such as a more garden-variety venereal disease. Would he have let that go, hoping that he hadn’t infected me, waiting till unavoidable symptoms presented, rather than tell me about his infidelities? How ill would he have allowed me to become before he confessed? Perhaps it had been fear, not just exhaustion, I had seen in Henry that early December. He must have understood that his situation was dangerously unraveling.

  The doctor suggested I get tested just to be sure and rushed the tests, which, to my intense relief, all came back negative. Somehow, miraculously, I had dodged at least ten bullets.

  The number in Henry’s address book turned out to be the home of Eliana’s sister in Canada. Her sister gave me another number, in a nearby town. Eliana answered this time.

  “I have been expecting you to call. In these last days I have felt your presence strongly.” Her voice had an airy, singsong quality, her sentences floating upward. My imagination conjured a palm reader or a crystal ball gazer.

  “You were expecting me!” I was shouting at her already, though I’d wanted to remain calm. “What does that mean? Did you think about me when you were fucking Henry in a goddamned hotel room?”

  She did not hang up. Like Christine, she listened to me. She apologized quietly.

  Now we could get somewhere. I got my yelling out of me, and we started talking. After that first conversation, I wasn’t ready to talk to her again for several months, but we began an e-mail correspondence that very first day.

  Since the moment he passed, I have visualized your essence and what you must be living through. I have known since that day, you would find the thread and come asking. I did not expect you so soon. Thank you for having the courage.

  There are spiritual dimensions and doings of this relationship between him, you and me that are beyond logical comprehension. I can only unveil to you what I sensed and experienced in my friendship with him. I ask you to listen to what is relevant for you to understand in all this and release the rest.

  Eliana used language I couldn’t work with easily—a “New Age” lyrical vocabulary very uncomfortable for me. I was familiar with its forms from the college health-food co-op I had joined, and many yoga classes I had attended. I understood it, but I didn’t like it, not one little bit. I had been educated to write clear sentences with identifiable subjects and predicates. I had learned to diagram sentences. I practiced again, on some of Eliana’s sentences, but it was like taking a walk in an overgrown forest, through thoughts intertwined like vines.

  I was bewildered. Henry himself had always been brutally dismissive of New Age culture. My decision to buy organic milk, eggs, meat, and vegetables peeved him, as did Emily’s occasional Berkeleyesque meanderings about astrology and goddesses, and the spiritual aspects of my yoga practice. Had he truly gone off the deep end having a relationship with a woman so nonlinear in her thinking?

  To her, the word “sphere” did not represent a round ball, a social group, or an arena of geopolitical influence. It was a kind of spiritual energy force. “Congestion” was not nasal, pulmonary, or coronary but a kind of emotional and spiritual phlegm. She spoke about visions, energy waves, and the paranormal with the certainty of a scientist cataloging research data. I didn’t know what to make of this woman, but I knew I wanted to smack Henry upside the head, with a swift kick in the ass for good measure.

  Whatever else she might have been, Eliana was possibly the true witness to Henry’s last, very troubled months, during which time he was, at the least, in a crisis of confidence about his book and desperate to entangle himself with and untangle himself from Cathy, before I found out about their affair.

  I speculated about the lost correspondence between Cathy and Henry. What exactly had happened between them during the last six months of his life? Had Cathy threatened to tell me? Anything was possible, but without evidence, Cathy could hide—and I was left to wonder without any hope of really understanding the truth. The best I could hope for was a glimmer into his world through this woman.

  I had to admit that Eliana’s voice was soothing and kind. But for all her airy-sounding language, she was clearly wary about revealing everything right away. I would have to prove to her that I could handle it. I needed her to tell me what she knew. I wanted to see everything now. Something had changed in Henry’s thinking, and whether from anxiety about the book that wasn’t writing itself or out of a sense of being more profoundly lost, he had reached out to this woman for guidance and she had answered.

  Eliana had presented herself to him as nonjudgmental, liberated, and unchained from convention. She told me that she had lived for years this way, seeing herself as a free spirit who could make her choices without consequences, moving in and out of relationships with men and women. She said she was reassessing this path in the aftermath of Henry’s death.

  Eliana had spoken to Henry on the phone, she told me, the evening before his death. I must have seen them talking as I passed in and out of his office while Henry organized his papers.

  And when she sent me their e-mail correspondence, I saw that they had exchanged important ideas about the future in his last days, after our New Year’s Eve party.

  On January 3, five days before his death, Eliana wrote:

  Well, this can be a long journey of discovery…in the path of spirituality, emotions are a part of our beings that we need to learn to observe and have distance with…feelings reflect our inner ways of knowing truths, value, honor, so they differ from the games we as humans use in the emotional spheres…if we are truly conscious of our actions, when an emotion arises, like anger, if we are in truth of ourselves and wanting to nourish our inners in the strongest way, it is by feeling what this emotion brings to us, allowing ourselves the place creatively to let it go through us and find peace, calm, balance within ourselves with it…. I am working at looking at the emotions which get triggered when I am with you and let myself breathe with them, yet always keeping the love flowing.

  My first response was that this was all a turd wave of bullshit, that she was the expert surfer girl riding the big turd wave and Henry was the newbie, thrilled to discover the newest surf shop, filled with all-new gadgets he’d never tried before.

  When I made an effort to be more generous, though, I thought her e-mail also could have been a preclass talk a yoga teacher might have offered on the topics of nonattachment and compassion, ideas I certainly struggled with but whose wisdom I appreciated. In her way (very different from my way, I had to acknowledge), Eliana was explaining to him how much damage we create for ourselves, and others, when we have no understanding or mastery of our emotions, when we are too attached to the outcome of a situation.

  I thought about what Matthew had said, that Henry had no spiritual life. Perhaps, just at the end of his life, something had changed in Henry; perhaps, having dug himself into such a deep mess, he was trying to understand himself in a different way. Having exhausted the patience of other women in his life, he had at last found a most welcoming listener. His long e-mail response devolved into a self-involved rant about his anger at Christine for ending their sexual relationship.

  I am “congested” at the moment as you say. It really isn’t in my temperament (or anyone else’s that I’ve ever met) to be able to transcend emotions. I’m just honest about it. I don’t want to transcend things; I want to meet them head on and work through them.

  But I am trying to learn to let things go (at your urging). At the moment I am having difficulty emotionally with both Cathy and Christine, I admit it. It’s nothing that I can control; I am just trying not to be compelled to act on these emotions, which is an entirely new thing for me.

  [Christine] was most probably pissed at me for a variety of things: (1) seeing other women, (2) seeing other women who are younger, (3) hearing from her friend that I thought she was in love with me (which is not exactly what I said).

  This was followed by a longer rant about Cathy, which confirmed my suspicion that their re
lationship was very much in play throughout the fall until his unexpected death. He recounted the scene at his final New Year’s Eve party.

  As for Cathy, let me describe some ugliness.

  I suppose it was my own stupidity that caused me not to delete those emails (yes, stupid). But for her to generate all that hate after seven months is just too much.

  At first I thought it was going to be okay. I gave her a lot of space at my party. At one point she grabbed me by the arm to ask me to get some more champagne for one of her friends. But basically she spent the whole time clinging to her husband, or talking to two of her friends who go to the same church as her. Other than that, she spoke to no one.

  She drank heavily and toward the end she spilled wine on these two above-mentioned friends. I handed her a stack of napkins and mildly joked by asking her if she needed a permanent supply, to which she hissed, “No.” At that point, I knew that things weren’t going to go well. Then, as she was getting ready to go, she looked really tired and drained. I asked her very gently if something was wrong, and she said, “With whom?” Then she said I should “check my paperwork” to understand what was wrong. I think that was a reference to the emails she had discovered. I then asked her if she would like to get together and talk about it, to which she sneered and said, “Nah.” She comes over to say goodbye, again in a really hostile way, and when I get up to see her and her family to the door she shoves it closed in my face.

  Part of me so desperately wants to call her up and set things right…but I know it is hopeless and I’m just going to have to live with the situation. What I have to learn, and what I did learn by listening to you is that there is no way I can apply “reason” to this situation. The fallacy, the projection that I had been operating under for the time I was seeing her (all the way until a lightbulb went off in my head five mornings ago) was that she was like me…that she has a psychology that resembles mine. But this is not true. The reality is that she is emotionally unstable. The reality is she is certainly too small emotionally. She is one of the most rigid, fearful, and narrow-minded people I have ever met.