Resilience

by Jessie Close

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know I love you?” he said. “Do you know that even if you’re having an affair, I’ll still love you? So don’t lie to me. Please, tell me the truth.”

  The truth. It was under my tongue, under my fingernails, under my crazy, pounding heart. If the vomit came, Tom would stop asking questions. But why would I vomit if I were innocent? I desperately wanted it to be night, the boys asleep in bed, the pony safe in the barn, the dog on her bed in the kitchen. I wanted to be in Tom’s arms, safe from what I had done. I wanted it to be the way that it should have been but was no longer.

  I couldn’t tell him. The truth wouldn’t come out of my mouth. Instead, I snapped: “There’s only one answer you’ll accept!” It was as if he were the one at fault for daring to question me.

  I hoped my anger would make him go away and prevent him from seeing through me and knowing what I had done.

  “That’s not true,” he replied. “You’re just not willing to tell me the answer that is the truth!” He turned to leave the room.

  I stared at his back. Don’t walk away! Save me! Please make all this just go away; make everything right again, make our family right again, make me love you again.

  He knew.

  I started to say something but couldn’t. Instead, I hurried into the kitchen, where I opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of vodka, and took a long swig, the liquid burning as it went down.

  I was looking for liquid courage, and I kept drinking until I found it.

  Tom was in the living room, glancing at a magazine. How could he just be sitting there as if nothing had happened? I knew I was drunk, and I wanted it to be that way.

  “Tom,” I said. “I am going to tell you the truth, all of it.”

  I did. I apologized. I cried. I begged him to take me back and forgive me. We talked for hours about our marriage and about what I had done and why. Incredibly, he told me that he loved me and that we would get through this. He didn’t want a divorce. I was overwhelmed with gratitude and relieved. Forgiveness is possible in a marriage!

  David’s wife was not so forgiving. David telephoned and said she had filed for a divorce. He asked if we could talk about what had happened between us. He was losing his marriage over me. It seemed the least I could do.

  We met in an out-of-the-way bar. It started with conversation and drinks and ended with our having sex. Why am I doing this? Especially after Tom forgave me. Am I really in love with David? Why else would I be doing this to Tom? Can I be in love with both of them?

  As before, I began making a mental list of all of wrongs that Tom had committed to justify my double betrayal.

  Tom’s mother happened to arrive in Bozeman for a visit. After dinner, I excused myself, saying that I needed to go out on an errand. Instead, I met David, got blindly drunk, and fell asleep in his arms. I didn’t make it home that night. Tom was humiliated. My risky behavior was ruining my life, and even I didn’t understand why I was letting it. It was as if there were a demon inside me.

  I knew Tom still loved me, but I seemed determined to make it impossible for him to keep loving me.

  After Tom’s mother left, I told him that I had been meeting with David and having sex with him. Tom was dumbfounded and asked me if I really loved David or if I was doing this because I hated being married to him.

  “I do love you,” I said.

  But I also loved David, although I wasn’t sure whether it really was love or simply that I wanted that intense feeling of being in love, the romance and passion of an illicit affair.

  Tom was as confused as I was. He didn’t want to break up our family, but I’d destroyed all trust between us. How could he not suspect me of cheating each time I went out? I couldn’t blame him.

  While we were talking, I felt as if I were having another out-of-body experience in which I was floating above myself, watching quietly, knowing that I was participating in a conversation yet having little control of my words.

  Our gut-wrenching conversation ended with Tom deciding that we were done as a married couple. He wasn’t going to live with someone whom he couldn’t trust. I didn’t believe him at first. Then I realized he wasn’t kidding. Our marriage was over, and it was my fault.

  When Tom told our boys that Daddy and Mommy were getting a divorce, Calen screamed and bolted through the farmhouse door toward a hill near the barn. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, and it was winter.

  Screaming “No!” Calen collapsed in the snow, spread-eagle, like a face-down snow angel.

  I thought, What am I going to tell his teacher? I thought, Calen must be cold lying in that snow. He should have a coat on.

  I felt invisible and had no idea what to do.

  Sander didn’t run away. He crawled into my lap and began to cry. He wrapped his tiny arms around my neck and asked, “Where is Daddy going? What will Daddy do?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  Tom went to fetch Calen, picking him up from the snow. He brought him into the kitchen. My older son was clinging to Tom and refused to look at me.

  All I could think about was how I had betrayed all three of them. I should have remained in my marriage even if Tom never asked me a single question about my book. It would have been better than the numbness I was feeling now. There could be no pain like the pain of breaking your children’s hearts. My choices had done this. Why? And for what?

  I wanted to die.

  I moved out of the bedroom that night into a tiny room off the kitchen. The deadline for my book was approaching, and I couldn’t miss it. Tom stayed in the bedroom. A few days later, we tried to mend the damage. We decided that we needed a new interest—something that would bring us together—so we went out and each bought Harley-Davidson motorcycles so we could go on rides. When I crashed mine and couldn’t walk for a while, Tom put a chaise longue next to my desk so I could keep on working. He was being sweet, and it looked as if he was willing to forgive me yet again.

  I wanted his forgiveness, but part of me seemed blocked, and I found myself unable to return his love.

  When I finished my book, I thanked my boys in the acknowledgments, writing, “To Calen and Sander, my favorite human beings, who have given me the privilege of being a mother.” I did not mention Tom.

  By the time my book was published in 1990, I knew there was no turning back. A divorce was inevitable. What of David? He was nothing more than a sad memory.

  Because the characters in my novel were based loosely on my own family, I was not surprised when my siblings, parents, and readers who knew us began speculating about who was who. Mom and Dad were the easiest to recognize, although I suspected that both of them dismissed my less-than-flattering portraits of them. It was easy to identify Glenn as a character, because she was the daughter who was most cherished by her father. As the only boy in the novel, everyone assumed Sandy was Al. Much to my irritation, the character whom I’d patterned after Tina had been cut from the book by Charlotte Zolotow. That left two daughters for readers to choose from when it came to identifying me.

  When writing the novel, I’d always pictured myself as Flavia, the depressed daughter who avoided her father by hiding in her room. I thought it was painfully obvious to anyone who knew my father and me.

  Who, then, was E—Ethel—the feisty daughter who fought with her absentee father? In my book, I described E as a child who couldn’t “talk about anything without getting all worked up about it. I mean, she’s one of those people who seem to think that every thought should be paraded around until there aren’t any sides of it left to look at. Talking to E is kind of like trying to peer into an unlit tunnel: You’re never quite sure what’s coming at you.”

  I’d pictured E this way: “Her hair’s shiny brown and straight but looks reddish when she’s out in the sunshine. She gets very tan during the summer; a lot of freckles pop out all over her face, like they were there all the time but appear only under heat, like lemon juice invisible ink. Her eyes are such a dark blue that so
metimes they look like they’re all pupil. I’d use crimson red and midnight blue to paint E, if I were going to paint her…”

  One of my girlfriends took me aside and said, “I figured out everyone but E. Who is she supposed to be?”

  “No one,” I replied. “I made her up. She’s not a thinly veiled character of anyone in the Close family.”

  Years later, I gave a therapist a copy of my book, and after she’d finished it, we talked about how I had modeled my fictional characters after Dad, Mom, Glenn, Sandy, and myself. Was that really so odd? Many first novels are autobiographical. Curious, the therapist asked me to identify each family member, and when I explained that I was Flavia and that E was a made-up character, she stopped me.

  “Don’t you see what you did?” my therapist asked.

  “What are you talking about?” I replied.

  “Flavia, the depressed and afraid character, is definitely you,” she replied. “But so is E. You are Ethel, too. Flavia is your depressed side, and E is your manic side.”

  I had never made the connection. Without realizing it, I had created two characters in my book that both represented me. The therapist was seeing what I had missed and what Tom had been forced to live with during our twelve years together. With my highs and lows, I really was two different personalities—the frightened, insecure Flavia and E, the confident, ballbusting spitfire who recklessly raced through life angry at the world, destroying relationships.

  I had unknowingly described my still-emerging bipolar self.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  One of the symptoms of mania, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is overindulgence in “enjoyable behaviors with high risks of negative outcomes.” The World Health Organization defines one of the signs of a manic episode as “behavior that is out of character and risky, foolish or inappropriate that may cause a loss of normal social restraint.”

  Those definitions pretty much described me at the arrival of the 1990s.

  The Warping of Al didn’t hit The New York Times bestseller list, but it did sell enough copies for my publisher to ask me to write a second novel. I was on my way to becoming a notable author—at least that’s what I thought.

  I came up with a new plot for a second book: a young teenager lives with her mother and abusive father. She decides to run away and joins an itinerant camp of the Grateful Dead’s hard-core fans. I started writing and really liked the beginning, where the main character hears her mother being slapped and punched then goes downstairs to help after her abusive father leaves the house. My editor liked the first few pages, too, but when I started writing the book’s second chapter, the flow of words stopped. I had fallen victim to the infamous writer’s block.

  Frustrated, I decided to take a break and focus on something else. I didn’t need to lose weight. I was thin. But I decided I needed to build much-needed muscle. I went on a health kick. To purify my body, I stopped taking all medication, including Zoloft, and joined a local gym.

  From the day I first slipped on spandex, I began pushing myself harder and harder. It wasn’t uncommon for me to spend two hours in the gym six days a week. I wasn’t the only gym rat. Noah Davis was a trainer, and we immediately noticed each other. I liked Noah instantly, in part because he was big and strong but also because of his banter and charm.

  Noah told me that he’d been drawn to weight lifting because it required him to push himself without forcing him to compete with anyone else or depend on other people. Mind over his own body.

  “It is all about you testing yourself,” he explained. “I’ve never been interested in team sports.”

  Noah had come from a military family that had moved constantly, and his father, like mine, had been a largely absent figure who’d always been at work. After graduating from a suburban Washington, DC, high school, Noah had gone to “find himself.” Eventually, he’d ended up in Manhattan, where he’d become a close friend of Fabio Lanzoni, the Italian fashion model whose physique and long locks had inspired hundreds of romance-novel covers. Noah and Fabio shared mutual interests in weight lifting, riding motorcycles fast, and bedding equally fast women. A motorcycle collision in Manhattan had sidelined Noah and prompted his move to Bozeman, where his parents had retired. At age thirty-seven, he still viewed himself as a drifter, much more comfortable being a “voyeur of the world” than getting locked into a daily grind.

  I’d just finished doing a series of gut-punishing crunches one afternoon when Noah strolled over and ran his finger up the back of my leg, from my knee to my butt.

  “Nice hamstrings,” he said.

  I smiled.

  He smiled back, with a twinkle in his eye.

  We continued to flirt whenever I was in the gym. Noah and I decided to rent a room at Chico Hot Springs, a resort about an hour and a half away from Bozeman in Paradise Valley, just north of Yellowstone National Park. It was a romantic spot with two natural hot springs. After a soak, drinks, and dinner we called it a night and fell into bed.

  I knew I was ovulating; I could tell from the sharp pain in my abdomen. I told Noah, and he joked that we’d make a daughter and would name her Doom.

  We both giggled, but the next morning I told him: “I think we made a baby last night,” and I wasn’t kidding.

  “That wouldn’t be good,” he replied in a serious voice.

  I was surprised. “I told you I was ovulating,” I said. “And you knew we weren’t taking any precautions!”

  A horrified look swept over his face. While he enjoyed my company, he wasn’t in love with me, and he certainly was not in a position to become a father. “I can’t even take care of myself,” he admitted. Our night together was the result, he joked, of a “hormonal collision.”

  Not for me. I was in love and determined to make him love me. His casualness about our night of passion became a challenge. We continued to date during the coming weeks, and in my journal I wrote long passages about how much I loved Noah, as if I were a schoolgirl having her first crush. I wrote poetry about him and couldn’t think of much else except him. Neither of my sons liked Noah when I introduced him. And Noah, from his perspective, instantly recognized how unprepared and uncomfortable he would be playing the role of father. Being a dad was just not something Noah wanted or was ready for.

  There was another problem besides my sons’ negative reaction to Noah. When he’d asked me out, I actually was seeing someone else, a Bozeman businessman. He’d taken my boys and me back east to meet his parents on Long Island and to attend a New York Rangers hockey game at Madison Square Garden. If I were going to be dating anyone, Calen and Sander would have preferred him.

  On January 17, 1991, the same day Operation Desert Storm was announced, I discovered life-changing news. At age thirty-seven, I was carrying Noah’s baby.

  Because I had wrapped myself in a puppy-love cocoon, I was thrilled, and I immediately began fantasizing about marrying Noah and raising our love child with my boys. We would all be one happy family.

  Noah wasn’t thrilled.

  “How do I know it’s mine?” he asked.

  “Because I haven’t fucked anyone else since my last period!” I said angrily.

  Noah was convinced that the best course was an abortion, and he offered to help pay for one.

  “Maybe I don’t want an abortion!” And again, “I told you I was ovulating!”

  I remember him mumbling, “All the other girls had them.”

  “Well, I’m not ‘all the other girls,’ you jackass!”

  It turned out that Noah was dating someone else on the side and had no interest in stopping. My big announcement turned into a gigantic screaming match that ended with Noah storming out and Calen hollering and covering his ears.

  Once again, “Jessie the fuckup” was at work.

  Rather than walking away from Noah, I dug in my heels. With time, I thought, he would get rid of the other woman in his life and realize how lucky he was to have me. That fantasy gave me hope.

  I’d a
borted Brad’s baby during my first marriage—under pressure from his parents—and terminating this pregnancy would have been the simplest step to take, although I didn’t tell Noah that. It was what several of my friends were urging me to do and clearly what Noah had said we needed to do. Although I was pro-choice I didn’t like the idea of abortion as birth control, especially when both parties knew that the chances of getting pregnant were good.

  But still, I made an appointment with the local doctor who performed abortions. I canceled it the next day. Then I made another appointment but canceled that one, too. Then I made yet another appointment, and this time the nurse on the other end of the line told me to come in right away so the doctor could pack my uterus with seaweed.

  “What?” I asked.

  She explained that seaweed would begin opening my uterus. I’d have to leave it in for twenty-four hours.

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear the thought of some man putting his hand in me, either to pack my uterus with seaweed or take the baby out. I canceled that appointment, too.

  My father and Tina were just as alarmed as Noah was. They recognized that I wasn’t in the best shape financially to take on the raising of another child, especially if I were unmarried. Plus, my erratic mood swings were becoming more and more obvious to everyone.

  My mother surprised me, though. When I called her back to tell her I had canceled my appointment for an abortion, she let out a sigh of relief and said, “Oh, thank God!”

  Sandy got angry and told me that I was lucky to be having another baby.

  I poured out my heart to Glenn. What should I do?

  By 1991, Glenn had a three-year-old daughter of her own, Annie, whose father was John Starke, a producer whom she’d met while making her first movie, The World According to Garp.

  “If you really want to have this baby,” Glenn replied in her calming voice, “I will take care of the child if you decide you can’t. I will raise the baby as if it were mine.”

  My eyes filled with tears, and my voice cracked. “You’d do that?”