Making Piece

by Beth M. Howard

  “Good wife” wasn’t a role that came naturally to me and I lasted five months with Marcus in Mexico, where I spent too many long and lonely days in our house on the pecan farm before I reached my breaking point. So I took a position as U.S. Director for a London-based speakers’ bureau, for which I would book famous people for public-speaking gigs at a rate of 120 grand for one hour of their time. The height of a tanking economy ensured I wouldn’t succeed, not when company meetings were the first budget items to get cut. No meetings, no guest speakers. Thus, six months later, the phone call from my boss in London with news of my termination came as no surprise. I’ve been fired from many jobs (let’s just say I’m a little too entrepreneurial in spirit to be employable) and I’ve never mourned the loss of anything that confined me to a cubicle in an office with sealed windows. I never looked back, because I always saw endings—fixable endings such as these, anyway—as opportunities for something new, something better. In this case, I used the free time and severance pay to travel to Texas to rent the miner’s cabin for the summer so I could write about quitting one of those cubicle-confining jobs to become a pie baker.

  So during this first week of May, between the ending of Marcus’s Mexico assignment and the beginning of his new one-year contract in Germany, and coinciding with the termination of my L.A. job, we met up in Portland. Portland had been our home for almost two years, it’s where we still had a lot of friends, a houseful of furniture in storage and where his company’s North American headquarters was located. We spent four honeymoon-like days together, eating at our favorite French, Italian and Thai cafés, getting massages, drinking lattes at the hipster coffeehouses, having dinner with other couples and holding hands a lot.

  We agreed we could manage the long distance with me in L.A. and him in Germany and still keep our marriage intact. We had done it before; we could do it again. We would see each other once a month and it would be a win-win, because he could continue his steady career climb, and I could avoid being a stay-at-home nag. After one year he would either find another position back in the U.S. or find a different kind of work altogether.

  Our whole existence—all seven and a half years of it—was like that. It was about international airports, romantic hellos and tearful goodbyes, about job changes and job transfers. When asked what the biggest challenge of our marriage was, he would say, “Logistics.” (Though he used to say it was my lack of concern for stability, for things like health insurance and a retirement plan.) I would say the biggest obstacle was his job.

  “My job provides a roof over your head,” he liked to remind me. “And health insurance.”

  “I didn’t marry you so you could be my provider,” I argued. “I married you because I wanted a partner who would want to spend time together, do things together, participate in the marriage and not expect me to be the one to do all the housework while you go off to work like we’re some 1950s couple.”

  “I’ll pitch in more when I’m not so busy,” he insisted. “And when you get a job.”

  This made no sense to me, as there would never be an occasion when his work didn’t demand so much of his time. (In fact, it would only get worse.) And besides, as a freelancer, I wasn’t really looking for a job per se. My projects, which provided decent income, came and went, but in a “feast or famine” way—not the German way. Not the steadfast, loyal “Employee for Life” way that Germans revered.

  I retaliated by applying for and getting full-time jobs. And since the only career-type work I could find was back in the U.S., I was the one being driven to the airport. This usually resulted in me getting fired and running back to my safety net, my rock, my man. I ran away, but I always came back. But once I got back, it was never long before I again faced the reality—and loneliness—of a mostly empty house and a life that was about dishes, laundry and shopping—and waiting for Marcus to come home.

  His job demanded long hours, which he willingly gave, which inevitably drove me to look for something else to do. I needed to keep my brain busy, needed friends, needed to keep from getting angry with him for having moved my life halfway across the world only to feel so alone. Ironically, the only solution I could find meant living apart. It wasn’t what I wanted. I just wanted more time with him. Even if he couldn’t give me that time, I wanted him to at least acknowledge how his schedule was affecting our relationship, affecting me. I wanted him to apologize when he came home three hours later than he said he would be. Just a little “I’m sorry I was late” would have been enough. I wanted him to tell me he missed me when he was gone all day. But he said nothing. Instead, he accepted—or at least tolerated—the situation in stoic silence.

  And so it went. I felt hurt, I left, I returned for happy, passion-filled reunions, the loneliness gradually set in and the cycle started all over again. It was a pattern we couldn’t seem to break.

  At the end of our long weekend, Marcus drove me to the Portland airport so I could return to L.A.; he was flying to Germany the next day. I stood there in his arms, at the curbside drop-off, on a rare rainless Pacific Northwest morning, while the engine of his rented Subaru Forester idled.

  Marcus’s brown hair was flattened under a tight wool cap, making his high cheekbones look even more pronounced and his almond-shaped green eyes appear even deeper. He wore a brown fleece pullover and Diesel jeans with clogs. He was secure in himself and, being European, his range of style went miles beyond an American baseball hat and sneakers. Clogs had become his signature footwear. They suited him in that ruggedly handsome way, though he could as easily transform from rugged to pure elegance and sophistication when dressed for work in his hand-tailored wool suits.

  My head rested against his broad chest and I felt his breath on my neck. I breathed in his clean scent and felt his soft lips on my skin as his arms pulled me closer. “Have a safe trip, my love,” he said, in the British-German accent that I never tired of. The way he talked was so soothing, even when speaking his mother tongue, that more than once I made him read to me from a German washing-machine manual or DVD-player instruction book just to hear his sexy voice.

  “And you have a safe flight to Germany,” I replied. “Let’s Skype later.” We parted with a tender kiss, our mouths touching lightly in a sort of half French kiss, until I felt self-conscious about people in the cars behind us watching and pulled away. He stayed by the car and waved until I disappeared through the revolving door. I looked back through the glass window and watched him get into his rented Subaru.

  And that’s the last time I ever saw him alive.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Three and a half months later on August 19, 2009, in Terlingua, Texas, I thought I was dying of a heart attack. I didn’t answer my phone because I didn’t have the energy to lift my head off the pillow. At 11:05 a.m., I finally checked my voice mail.

  The message was from a man named Tom Chapelle, who apologized for having to call, but he didn’t have my address. Why would he need my address? Why would he need to come to my house? Hell, he would have a hard time getting to my house, seeing as I was a five-hour drive from the nearest airport in El Paso, a 90-minute drive from the nearest grocery store and I lived on a dirt road with a name not recognized by the post office.

  In his message, Mr. Chapelle said he was a medical examiner and he was calling because I was listed as the emergency contact for a Marcus Iken. He used the article “a” as if my husband were an object. A car. A watch. A book. A husband. I clearly don’t watch enough television as I didn’t have the slightest clue what a medical examiner was. I scribbled down the phone number he left and my heart, which had finally slowed a little, revved right up again, double time. My hands shook as I punched the numbers into my BlackBerry.

  I might not have known what a medical examiner’s job was, but instinctively I knew the call wasn’t good. Worst case, I was thinking Marcus might have been injured in a car accident. He was simply in the emergency room, waiting for a broken bone to be set. Or he had fallen off his bi
ke and needed stitches in his head, and was unable to call me himself. During his vacation, he’d been riding his road bike a lot, going on thirty-mile outings. Surely it must have been something to do with his bike and he was going to recover from whatever injury he had suffered. He was going to be fine. I didn’t know that the job title “medical examiner” could mean only one thing.

  In May, after I lost my job and Marcus flew off to Germany and I left Los Angeles for Texas, I prepared for my twenty-hour drive from L.A. to Terlingua by going to the library to check out some books on tape. Since I arrived at the Venice Beach branch five minutes before closing, I had to be quick, which meant I wasn’t able to be terribly selective. I just grabbed an armful of CDs with authors’ names I recognized. Among the titles I checked out was Joan Didion’s, The Year of Magical Thinking. I listened to it in its entirety as I drove through the tire-melting temperatures and endless shades of red-and-brown landscape, crossing Arizona and New Mexico, until I finally reached West Texas.

  I couldn’t stand the reader’s voice, an affected British actress, who made poor old Ms. Didion sound like a spoiled snob instead of the devastated widow that she was. A widow. A grieving widow. The book was interesting, but it wasn’t anything I could relate to. I hadn’t lost my husband. My husband was young and fit. I hadn’t lost anyone close to me, except for my grandparents who’d lived well into their eighties when their aged bodies finally wore out. Death was not a subject on my radar. Still, I listened and the book’s opening lines stuck with me the way pie filling sticks to the bottom of an oven. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

  I stood in the living room, next to my writing desk, my hand placed on the desktop to steady myself as the medical examiner’s phone rang. He picked up after two rings and I started shaking even more. “What is your relationship to Marcus?” Mr. Chapelle asked first.

  “I’m his wife,” I answered. And I was. Barely. I’d asked for a divorce and pushed Marcus into starting the proceedings. We were working through a mediator in Portland who was drawing up the papers. I didn’t want a divorce. I wanted him to fight for me, for him to say, “No! You are the love of my life and I can’t live without you. I want to stay married.”

  In my perfect world, he would have also said, “I promise to work less, worship you more and, above all, be on time.” He would have said, should have said—oh, why didn’t he say it—“My love, if you say you’re going to have dinner ready at seven-thirty, by God, I’ll be home at seven-thirty. I’ll even come home at seven, so I can make love to you first.”

  Had it really come down to his long work hours and lack of punctuality? We had been married a few days shy of six years. That’s six years of cold dinners and hurt feelings. Six years of moving from country to country, continent to continent. Setting up a new house with each move; taking German lessons and then Spanish lessons; making new friends; saying goodbye to those friends and then making new ones again. Six years of trying to get Marcus to acknowledge me, what I needed, how much I wanted our marriage to come first and how his work, his schedule, his priorities were wearing me down.

  Before we got married, during our year-and-a-half-long courtship, the majority of time I spent with Marcus was when he was on vacation. Europeans get six weeks of holidays, which meant six weeks with Marcus in laid-back mode, Marcus wearing jeans and reading books, not donning a suit, not checking his email, not coming home late. He cooked for me. He grilled steaks and shucked oysters. He did my laundry. He washed the dishes. And he made love to me for hours. It’s no wonder I wanted to marry him!

  But that was on my home turf. When I moved to Germany, everything changed—Marcus changed. When he put on his suit and tie, he became a different person.

  “What about me?” I pleaded time and again. “Our marriage centers only on you and your job, your promotion, your schedule. What about my career and my happiness? What about where I want to live? Why can’t we pick a place we both want to live, a place where I can speak the language and not feel so lonely, and just move there and we can both get jobs?”

  We eventually moved to Portland and that helped for the year and a half we lived there. But then Marcus, thanks to his steady corporate executive career climb, got transferred to Mexico and we were right back where we started. My unanswered questions inevitably escalated into louder cries, harsher words. “I want to be in an equal partnership. Instead I feel like you just expect me to serve you!” I shouted. “I have a life, too!”

  I had a life, all right. And now he didn’t.

  Joan Didion’s suggestion that “life changes in the instant” might have been true for her. She was physically there in the room when her husband’s heart stopped and caused him to fall out of the chair and hit his head on the corner of the table on the way down. She saw him lying on the floor, unresponsive, his head bleeding. She had proof, evidence, visual aids. She could put her fingers on his pulse and feel he didn’t have one. She could blow air into his lungs and watch his chest rise. She could call 911 and watch the paramedics as they stormed into her apartment and hooked up their electrodes and squeezed their syringes. Being there, in person, absorbing the immediacy of the action, then yes, time must have felt compressed into an instant.

  News—specifically bad news—when delivered over the phone causes time to take on a different dimension. With no visual cues, there is nothing for the mind to grasp but whatever is imagined—drama, gore, violence, struggle, pain—combined with fleeting, movie-clip-like flashes of memory. There is no proof. There is only the voice of a stranger on the other end of the line. Someone you don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t want to believe. Someone in a government building 2,000 miles away. Someone who has never met your husband, who sees the man you loved only as a corpse lying on the examination table, waiting for an autopsy.

  With this one phone call, life as I knew it ended.

  “Your husband is deceased,” he said, his voice deep and gravelly. He had the air of a military officer, serious, official, no emotion, detached. I could just picture the man sporting a crew cut, fleshy jowl, perfectly starched shirt, maybe even khaki in color, with the buttons pulling tightly across his ample belly. Deceased. The word didn’t register at first. Deceased? No, that can’t be. Injured is what I had expected him to say. Hurt in a car accident or from a fall off his bike, just out of surgery but recovering nicely. Not deceased. Not Marcus. Not healthy, robust, sexy, stubborn Marcus.

  I would sell my soul to turn back the clock, to never get a call from a medical examiner and continue living in my happy oblivion to never even know what one was. I wish with every cell in my body to go back three and a half months earlier to May 5, the day Marcus dropped me off at the Portland airport. I wouldn’t get on the plane to L.A. I would fly to Germany with him instead, and worry about getting my belongings there later. Or I would turn the clock back even earlier. Five years, five months, it doesn’t matter. I’d settle for turning the clock back five hours. Maybe that way I could have saved him. I still want to save him. I still want him to be alive. Seven hours before Marcus was supposed to sign his half of the divorce papers, I killed him. I asked him for a divorce neither of us wanted and I killed him. To verify this, I asked Mr. Chapelle in a meek tone that didn’t sound anything like me, “Was it suicide?” The words snuck past my vocal cords and tiptoed out of my throat, which tightened with each passing second. It was the worst thing I could have asked; I was ashamed for asking it, but I had to know.

  “No,” he answered quickly. “It was something with his heart.”

  Of course, it was his heart. I broke it. He wanted to stay married and this was his way of making that happen. This was the second time we tried to divorce, and the second time we didn’t sign the papers. We were still married. And now we would be married forever. That’s a hell of a way to avoid divorce.

  “The divorce almost killed both of you,” my sister said later. It hadn’t occurred to me, but she was r
ight. During the hour he was struggling to stay alive after collapsing from a ruptured aorta, I felt my heart about to give out, thinking I would collapse in the middle of the Chihuahua Desert. I turned to go back home at 8:36 a.m.—that was 6:36 a.m. in Portland, the exact time Marcus was pronounced dead. Is it possible we were that connected? Were our bodies functioning in unison, joined by some inexplicable force? Was I feeling what he was feeling, the struggle of his heart to keep beating? While he was hit with defibrillator paddles and receiving epinephrine injections, I was enduring my own struggle, staggering with weakness back to my miner’s cabin with my dogs—our dogs.

  I had a few hours to contemplate my death, but did he know he was dying? The details that were parceled out over the next few days concluded no, he could not have known. It was instant. He felt a cramp in his neck, got out of bed, took a few steps and collapsed on the hardwood floor of a friend’s house.

  I imagined him having one of those out-of-body experiences, floating above his body, looking down and seeing himself lying unconscious on the floor, and saying, “What the fuck just happened?” This is a man who wanted to live. He had just invested in a new MacBook Pro and an iPhone. He had a pile of new books including The Passion Test, What Color is Your Parachute and What Should I Do With My Life? And he had bookmarked his favorite new website, “Zen Habits,” which was all about doing less to accomplish more. After years of my incessant nagging, he was actually exploring ways to trade in his corporate life for something more balanced. Back in Germany, he had also just bought a new road bike, a sleek and fast-looking LaPierre, which he had shown me via Skype. He sent me emails from his weekend bike rides in France, Italy and even Slovenia. This was a man with a lot of life left to live and big plans for the future. He was only getting started.