Perfection

by Julie Metz

  After that weekend, and a few weeks sooner than Eliot would have liked, I invited Will up for a visit to meet Liza. She crushed him at checkers on the blue-painted kitchen floor, where fortunately I no longer saw an image of Henry’s body.

  Will laughed after being beaten. Observing their easy interaction, I thought that maybe letting Liza pick my boyfriend wasn’t a bad idea after all. I wondered what she’d seen so quickly, why she was so immediately comfortable. I wasn’t comfortable yet, but then I had accepted that hardly anything made me comfortable. I’d be patient and wait for comfort. As long as Liza liked him, I’d wade forward a bit further into the stream.

  I wrote to Eliana about Will, and she expressed happiness for me.

  “The more you begin to blossom,” she wrote back, “the more healing, love, compassion which enters your being, the more you will begin to find others who not only admire, but who also want to care for and nourish you deeply.”

  By now, we corresponded less frequently. I did not value Eliana’s e-mails less but was happy to see that we were both moving onward and forward with new plans. We wrote to each other about our work lives, and she shared with me the beginnings of a relationship that sounded entirely different from those in her past. Her new man sounded calm and loving, and their connection was a true partnership.

  Will came up on Fridays after work and stayed till Monday morning. I drove him down to the train station, just like the other women with commuting husbands. But I was happy this was a boyfriend, not a husband. I was glad to have my own space during the week, and glad to see him again when he returned.

  Will said, jokingly, that I was a fancy French girl (perhaps because of my fondness for frilly-edged skirts) and began addressing me in the French manner. So now I was Jzhooleee. In the mornings he sang me quirky songs of his own invention, which made me laugh in a fierce, goofy way that felt entirely new. As after rigorous exercise, muscles in my chest and throat ached and then expanded. It seemed like a miracle to rediscover my sense of humor. Bravely, after a few months together, Will even ventured a few dead husband jokes that made me spit out my morning coffee.

  Mostly, I appreciated how he was able to listen to the full, sad story of my previous year without running away at high speed. I found I needed to talk a lot, to be sure he knew everything, so that he could be patient with me while I worked through all that baggage. He said he understood my skittishness but did not shy away from expressing his own interest in pursuing what we’d begun.

  The journey of these long talks revealed strange coincidences. It turned out that while Henry and I had lived in Brooklyn with our newborn Liza, Will, then a graduate student, was living just around the corner. I’d walked up his street countless times, pushing Liza in her stroller, trying to get her to nap.

  “Didn’t you ever see me,” I joked, “pushing a blue and green plaid Maclaren, with a bunch of grocery bags hanging off the handles? I used to sing her Gershwin songs to get her to sleep.” Here I launched into a verse of “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” Well, maybe he’d seen me, he said, laughing, perhaps mostly at my singing. We had shopped in the same markets and eaten at the same restaurants, but in those days he would have been trying to dodge the onslaught of Park Slope strollers on the way back to his apartment to study, while I was elbow deep in Earth’s Best puréed peas and diapers.

  Will might not have been interested in parenting in 1996, but he was very motivated now. I came to see quickly that raising a child with this man would be an entirely different experience than what I’d lived with Henry. Will didn’t try to compete with me; he did want to begin a real relationship with Liza. After the “honeymoon” phase, Will graciously endured a few weeks as Liza withdrew a bit, but she emerged from that with enthusiasm. She couldn’t have her “real” father back, but this guy might do after all. He was fun, he was a good listener, and he was happy to play games, all sorts, even Attack.

  In contrast to the blistering and damaging fights Henry and I had over the years, the occasional conflicts Will and I had seemed to propel us forward. We discovered that we were both solitary by nature. While his work required meetings and engagement with many people, he could hang out with Liza and me on weekends without too much other excitement. At night he held me tenderly and I felt appreciated.

  One sweltering July weekend, Anna came over with Leo for a swim and, of course, to check out the new boyfriend. She took a little stroll with me, supposedly to inspect my flowers, and whispered the words every woman wants her close friend to say.

  “He’s cute! Nice butt! A real mensch…and clearly, he completely adores you.”

  The annual August trip to Maine was approaching. Anna planned to come up for two weeks of the month with her son, and once again she and I began packing up foodstuffs and linens. I decided, after consultation with Liza, to invite Will to visit us for part of the time on the island.

  From that time there is a photograph of Will and Liza standing by their bicycles. She is tiny next to him. They are hugging. She looks relaxed and content, perhaps a bit shy. One knee displays a large white bandage, a souvenir from a bike fall earlier that week.

  Will, it turned out, was a serious cyclist. At twenty-seven, he had cycled alone from Seattle, through the Canadian Rockies, across the Plains and the Midwest till he reached New York City, sleeping in a tent while living on cheese and bread, Alberta peaches, sardines, and the occasional beer, an odyssey that suggested much about his self-reliance. He was eager to help Liza embrace her inner athlete. She proudly showed off her healing wound to her island friends, displaying some of Henry’s storytelling flair.

  Will accompanied us on our shore trail hikes, where I painted and he and Liza hunted for more interesting rocks to add to our exploding collection. We drove down the dusty road to the sand beach, where to Liza’s delight he swam in the frigid water without complaint, while I huddled on a beach towel.

  He drove down to the city for a week of meetings, but he was back with us the following weekend—ten-hour drives didn’t seem to bother him at all, and we were glad to see him. We hit a foggy patch of days. Stuck indoors, remembering past years on the island with Henry, I became gloomy and sullen. Will had a knack for finding humor in my dark moments, a talent he’d need and use during our early time together. In this case, the mood changed with a Monopoly game, one of those three-day ordeals where alliances are formed, all the official rules are bent, sweet deals are made, and properties are swapped and mortgaged to the hilt.

  On the day of Will’s final departure, Liza and I followed him in our car to the ferry landing. I watched him drive onto the ferry with a sense of genuine loss that pleased me. This was how it was supposed to feel. Once on the ferry, he got out of his car and waved to us. He was wearing a white shirt that flapped in the breeze like a ship’s flag. I remembered an entry from my childhood encyclopedia that had particularly fascinated me, diagrams of sailor’s semaphore hand signals. As the ferry sailed away, I raised my arms in a V shape, and from the deck Will responded. Liza joined the game, and we continued sending made-up signals until the boat picked up speed, his white shirt just barely visible in the distance.

  Fall arrived, and we each returned to our separate homes. Will continued to travel up for weekends.

  “So,” I asked him one night as we lay in bed, “I have lived through one man’s truly horrible midlife crisis. What’s yours going to be?”

  “You are my midlife crisis,” he said, giving me a playful squeeze. “This is what I always wanted. To have a partner and a family.”

  “Okay then,” I said, stunned. “I think I can handle that.”

  Though we were still a new couple, Will and I began talking about living together once I moved back to Brooklyn. I was more eager than ever to start searching for a place to live, and once our kids were back to school, Anna and I began real estate shopping. Miraculously, a conversation with a friend I hadn’t spoken to since Henry’s funeral produced a buyer for my house. I packed my first box—the elegant
wedding dishes I knew I wouldn’t need again for a long time. I was surprised how few dishes fit into such a tall box. I concluded that I’d need a shocking heap of boxes to move my life. A trip to Wal-Mart was in order.

  As I approached the exit lane on my way to buy more boxes, I recalled another otherwise forgettable October lunch hour, like many during that last autumn of Henry’s life, when he and I were still going about the business of being married, parenting, and stocking a house. On that day in 2002, Henry was driving us toward the same Wal-Mart, where we stocked up on paper towels, spray cleaner, jumbo cans of crushed tomatoes, and the like—life, purchased in bulk.

  From his command post behind the wheel, and without looking at me, Henry said, “Julie, I just want to say that I am sorry about the Caines’ dog. I don’t know why I behaved like that. I would never do that again.”

  In movies, when The Important Scene is set in a moving car, a character often turns his or her attention away from the road to communicate the big bombshell to the driving companion. A nervous moviegoer, I can never pay attention to the big news—I am more worried about the car accident that would occur if this were not being shot on a soundstage. In this case, however, the big news was delivered with no interruption in Henry’s driving flow, so it took me a moment to process the importance of his apology. As if sensing that he needed to reinforce the message, Henry looked over, and our gaze connected for just a flash. I looked away, stunned and inexplicably heartbroken, as he said, earnestly, “And I hope you can forgive me.”

  “I accept your apology,” I answered, bewildered, feeling ambushed. We continued on, silent. What happened to change his mind? A sad and vacant feeling grew inside me—too little, too late—that diminished his apology, though I didn’t have the heart to tell him so. He might be genuinely sorry now, but I couldn’t quite believe him when he said he’d never behave like that again. I didn’t trust him anymore, to care for me and support me through a hard situation. I knew he’d do something else like this, maybe bigger, and he’d apologize too late and again ask for my forgiveness. Really, I was on my own. I had lost the important faith one needs to be with a partner. I had lost love. Yet paper towels had to be purchased, and life had to go on. Marriage was for keeps.

  “Julie, I just want to say that I am sorry about the Caines’ dog. I don’t know why I behaved like that. I would never do that again. And I hope you can forgive me.”

  I changed the words “the Caines’ dog” to “Cathy.” That’s how he would have apologized to me later, about Cathy and the other women: “And I hope you can forgive me.”

  Now I opened the car door and stepped onto the asphalt, fixing my gaze on the large Wal-Mart logo above the store entry-way in order to memorize my position in the parking lot. I paused, wondering how I would have answered. There was so much at stake: our life as an intact family, the big house, the car, and the other trappings of our comfortable world.

  I suddenly had a sad image of Henry as a lonely terrier abandoned in a backyard, racing around and around in circles, barking, trying desperately to get my attention, everyone’s attention, anyone’s attention.

  “Do you still love me? Do you really love me? I don’t think you still love me,” he had said to me repeatedly during his last few years, during which he had most flagrantly betrayed my trust. I had always answered yes.

  fifteen

  September 2004

  Your body is the life force power of some fifty million

  molecular geniuses. You and you alone choose moment by moment

  who and how you want to be in the world.

  —JILL BOLTE TAYLOR,

  My Stroke of Insight

  The shelves of Henry’s office library were packed past capacity. I needed smaller, sturdier boxes for the books. I stopped by the local liquor store to ask Henry’s redheaded eulogizer when their next wine shipment would arrive.

  Even with thirty wine boxes, this was to be a survival-of-the-fittest selection process. The titles, organized by subject matter, included works on philosophy, food, and science, books I wished I had time to read but knew I never would. I began sorting, a process that felt uncomfortably like performing a vivisection, because in this room Henry always felt very present. The larger pile, the books I would not keep, I planned to donate to the local library.

  A black-spined paperback with white lettering stood out from the chunkier and more colorfully jacketed titles on the shelves. A battalion of Post-it notes caught my eye, a parade of flags above the book’s spine. When I slipped it from its position between Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works and Consilience by Edward O. Wilson (a new display of Post-its now visible along the long right side of the book), I recognized The Evolution of Human Sexuality, published by Donald Symons in 1979. Henry had spoken about this work frequently during the writing of his first book. Almost every page of Symons’s well-thumbed book was marked with notes in Henry’s script. The sheer quantity of Post-its signified that somewhere in its pages I might find clues about Henry’s understanding of human nature and relationships. And sex. Because it always comes down to sex. Without having read the book, I nevertheless sensed that I had stumbled upon Henry’s bible.

  My attempts to read a few pages were discouraging. It seemed that Don Symons had written mostly for his peers in the scientific community, at any rate, not for a lay reader such as myself. The book assumed knowledge about biology and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection that I had not retained. Unfortunately, the dissection of formaldehyde-preserved frogs in ninth grade had turned me off science for the remainder of my high school and college years.

  Nevertheless, I was intrigued, and stopped my packing to look through the book. After perusing the table of contents, I bypassed niceties such as the introduction and early chapters and opened straight to “The Female Orgasm: Adaptation or Artifact?” The conclusion of the chapter offered a not altogether encouraging view that our interest in pleasure-seeking in sexual behavior was part of the larger human “ability to transact favorable compromises in the economy of the emotions”. I had hoped for something more poetic than “economy” when it came to sex.

  And this passage from a chapter titled “Pair-Bonds, Marriage, and the Loss of Estrus,” described my life as a wife-mother all too precisely:

  Wifely virtues—overlapping only partially with indices of sexual attractiveness—might have included evidence of sexual fidelity, youth, health, industry in gathering, and skill in mothering. As discussed above, marriage is not in essence a sexually based behavioral association between a male and female, but rather an economic and child-rearing partnership, embedded in networks of kin, and entailing sexual rights and duties.

  Henry had highlighted these lines with a yellow marker pen and flagged the page with one of those hundreds of Post-its.

  I mailed a letter to Don Symons at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I briefly detailed the discoveries I had made about Henry’s affairs and asked if I could speak to him about male and female sexual behavior in a professional way. I recalled Henry’s glowing account of meeting Professor Symons and the photos he’d shown me of the two of them on a beach, their tanned skin glowing in the late afternoon sunshine, Don the handsome older man, with close-cropped gray hair and an open smile. To my delight, Professor Symons replied by e-mail within two weeks, apologizing for the delay. He had since retired and didn’t check his university mailbox regularly.

  After an exchange of e-mails, in which I further explained events since Henry’s death, we spoke on the phone. Don (we were now past the need for the formal “Professor Symons”) recalled his conversations with Henry but said he’d had no idea about his “secret life.” We ended our call, agreeing that I would contact Don once I was resettled. Meanwhile, I wrestled with the last cardboard boxes of my old married life, carefully packing away Professor Symons’s book.

  I e-mailed Don again and asked if he had written any other texts that might be friendlier for a reader such as myself. A few days late
r a package arrived with a dainty-size hardcover titled Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution, and Female Sexuality. The first half of the book, coauthored with Catherine Salmon, provided just what I was looking for: Darwin 101.

  During this time I had noted with interest several mainstream magazine and newspaper articles on relationships and fidelity. Genes were the hot topic. They made you fat, they made you depressed, and it might be, these authors suggested, that they explained our sexual habits, specifically, why men seemed to be “hardwired” for infidelity and women ended up raising the children.

  Don Symons offered himself as my “go-to guy” in my attempt to understand these issues. My central concern: if men and women were so seemingly incompatible in their mating goals, were we in some ways prisoners of our genes, or were we responsible creatures, capable of free will? In other words, was Henry a lying, cheating, no-good spouse because he couldn’t help himself? And if our genes incline us toward certain likes and dislikes, can we still make choices? My initial impression, based on passages like the following from Warrior Lovers, was not entirely optimistic.

  Humans evolved a taste for sugar, fat and salt because these substances were both nutritious and relatively difficult to obtain during the overwhelming majority of human evolutionary history. In recent, evolutionarily novel environments, however, in which technology and capitalism have rendered these tasty substances abundant and cheap, most of us consume far more of them than is good for us…. Our gustatory adaptations—like all our complex adaptations, psychological and nonpsychological—are designed to function in the conditions and circumstances of the evolutionary past.