After all that, I made a decision. A moment of clarity as the flight attendant handed me my snack box filled with dried fruit, crackers, cheese spread, and sliced salami. After the last couple weeks of confusion and indecision and humiliation and all manner of what if, I realized that one unfortunate night did not my marriage make. I would not simplify what he did by calling it a mistake, but in essence that’s really what it was. A really nasty mistake. And I saw personally, with Jake, how easy it was to make a mistake like that. I also realized that I have to give Darren a little credit for telling me about it. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him about Jake. Maybe we both needed a little pick-me-up, a little shot of espresso to get us through the rest of the marriage.
“Hey there,” Darren says, as I enter our bedroom. “Welcome home.”
I walk over to his side of the bed, sit on the edge, and bury my head in his neck, wrapping my arms around his back and starting to cry. Darren hugs me back, but when my crying gets heavier, he pulls away.
“Hey, hey, what’s wrong?” he asks me, gently wiping tears from my cheeks.
“I’m just happy to be home and happy to be with you, and I don’t want us to be apart,” I say, sobbing harder as I bury myself in Darren’s neck again.
“Oh, Gracie. I’m so happy to hear you say that.”
I pull away and look him straight in the eyes, “Just don’t ever do that again.”
“I won’t,” he says, hugging me. “I won’t. I love you so much.”
“I know,” I say sadly.
“You still can’t say it?” he asks.
I look at him. His eyes are smiling at me. I feel like I’m seeing him for the first time. “We still have a lot of work to do to get through this,” I say. “But for the first time since you told me, I can say with certainty that I’m willing to do that work. I don’t want the alternative.”
After a while of lying together quietly, I go into the bathroom to wash up and then return to bed.
“So how was your trip?” Darren asks, grinning at me and lying on his side. I can tell he is relieved that we’re moving on, that I’ve let him back in. Something light in his personality has been absent since he told me, actually since he cheated on me, and I’m happy to see the old Darren back.
“It was great, actually. I had a lot of fun with my mom and sister and such a nice time out with my friends last night.” I tell him more about the weekend and the dinner, leaving out any mention of Jake, his appearance at lunch and dinner completely deleted from the story.
“And what made you decide to forgive me?”
“I didn’t say I forgave you,” I say sarcastically with a half smile.
“Okay, fair enough. Let me rephrase. What made you decide to allow me to retain the position of your lucky husband?” he asks, returning the half smile.
“I don’t know. It was a lot of things, I guess. I just realized that I can allow what you did to be just small enough not to ruin us. I decided to not let your mistake—which I do believe didn’t mean anything however much it hurts—destroy us. All that’s good about you and me, our history, our relationship, our family, is so much bigger than that night. It may not be bigger than one more night though, so don’t get any ideas!” I say punching him lightly in the arm.
“No ideas. None.”
“It’s like a crack in a really great vase. The crack is there and it’s not going away, but you can kind of turn the vase around and after a while you might even forget the crack is there. And it’s worth trying to forget about the crack, because the vase is so beautiful.”
Darren kisses me gently, hesitantly.
“And,” I continue, not one to be of few words when it comes to explaining how I feel, “I also appreciate very much the fact that you told me. You could have kept it secret. If you hadn’t told me, I think it would have shown that you didn’t think it was a big deal, that you could live with it. By telling me, I almost think you showed more respect to me. That our marriage was worth the honesty.”
“That’s why I told you,” he says, holding both of my hands in his. “I don’t understand how men do those things and keep it a secret. I don’t know how they live with themselves. I was dishonest in what I did, and I realized the only way I could attempt to make that up to you was by being honest and telling you. But when I did tell you, I wasn’t so sure I had made the right decision. Now that I see how this whole process has made us stronger, I know I needed to have told you. I’m glad I did. No secrets, Grace. I promise, no secrets.”
“Me neither,” I say. “No secrets.”
Darren pulls me in and kisses me, still holding my hands. My stomach lurches. At first, I think it’s because Darren’s kiss is so pure. It reminds me of the way he used to kiss me when we kissed to kiss, before kisses became just one prerequisite in a night’s journey to sex. But then I realize that my stomach is lurching because of Jake. How can I give all this weight to honesty and tell Darren no secrets when I did what I did in L.A. with Jake? No, I didn’t have sex with Jake, I barely even kissed him. But I wanted to. And I engaged in secretive emails with him. And flirted with him. And did all manner of things that I would have been furious at Darren for doing. “Our marriage was worth the honesty,” I replay Darren saying as his kiss gets deeper, more urgent. No secrets, Grace? Really?
“I have to tell you something,” I say, pulling away from his embrace. I can’t believe I’m about to do this, but something has overtaken my brain and I just start talking. “No secrets, right?”
“Right,” Darren says, looking a bit worried. “What’s going on, Grace?”
I sit up against the backboard and begin. “About the time when you told me about the cocktail waitress, I got an email from an old friend (no secrets), well, actually, a guy I used to have a crush on in high school named Jake. Over the past couple weeks, we’ve been emailing back and forth, and it’s been a little flirty. It wasn’t like I was interested in him or anything, it was just because we were old friends and we used to like each other and all that. He was at the dinner Saturday night.” I realize I’m sweating and Darren has repositioned himself so that he’s sitting up now, too. I’m staring straight ahead. He’s staring straight at me.
“Did you tell him about us?” Darren asks, his brow furrowing deeply.
“Well, yeah, I told him,” I say, trying to sound calm, but actually sounding a bit defensive. “We’re friends.”
“If you’re such good friends, why don’t I know him? Did you tell Kiki and Arden?”
“Well, no. I didn’t get a chance.”
“Okay, so you don’t tell your best friends, but you tell some guy named Jake? Jake? Really, Grace?” Darren asks, sounding mad.
“It wasn’t like that, Darren,” I say, and I start to cry because I can’t believe how badly this is going and how much Darren is misunderstanding what happened.
“Did you sleep with him?” he asks, now standing on the floor next to his side of the bed.
“No! I didn’t sleep with him,” I say angrily.
“Did you do anything with him?”
“I could have,” I say, getting angrier because he’s the one who slept with a fucking cocktail waitress. “He started to kiss me, but I stopped him. And, unlike you, I kept my pants on, too.”
“So you kissed him?” Darren asks angrily.
“No!”
“But you just said he started to kiss you, so clearly there was a kiss!”
“No. (No secrets.) Well, yes, for like a second, but then I realized what I was doing and I stopped him,” I say, starting to feel desperate.
“Were you alone with him?”
“No.”
“Then when did he try to kiss you?” Darren asks, his hands gesturing wildly, his face turning red. “At the dinner table with all your friends?”
“No. It was outside the bathroom,” I say, as the story gets ripped out of proportion.
“He went to the bathroom with you?” Darren asks incredulously.
“No! Stop
. Darren, please stop. Let me tell you what happened,” I implore. He sits down again in the bed.
“I can’t believe you were with some guy,” he says, shaking his head.
“I wasn’t with some guy. All I did was talk to a friend,” I say calmly. Coldly.
“If all you did was talk to a friend, why are you making such a big deal about telling me?” he asks bitterly, looking at me for the first time since I started.
“I don’t know,” I say, curling my legs up and putting a pillow over my lap.
“You do know, Grace.”
“I guess because I realize that I hid it from you. That I didn’t want you to know I was talking flirtatiously to a man. That I didn’t want you to know that even though I stopped the kiss, I did let it happen for a second,” I say, deciding that I have nothing to lose now. I have to be honest. No secrets.
“When that friend of yours, I forget her name, had that relationship with that guy on Facebook, you told me that you thought that a married woman having an emotional relationship with another man was worse than a married man having a sexual relationship with another woman. Isn’t that what you just did?” he asks, on his feet again.
“Absolutely not. This was in no way a relationship!”
“I can’t believe you did this, Grace. I can’t believe you can be so fucking hypocritical. That you could say the things you’ve said to me as we try to figure out what I did and at the same time you’re doing the same fucking thing yourself. What? This Jake decided he didn’t want a forty-year-old woman with two kids so that’s what made you decide to come running back to me?”
“Darren! Stop!” I say firmly. “You are completely twisting my words and blowing this out of proportion.” Darren quickly walks to his closet and starts collecting things. “What are you doing?” I ask, slightly panicked.
“I’m going into the city.”
“Now?”
“I have an early meeting tomorrow anyway. I’ll sleep at a hotel.”
“Seriously? Don’t go, we need to discuss this.”
Darren looks at me with an expression I’ve never seen on him before. I realize it’s disgust. The face you give a vagrant who flashes you on a subway. The face you give a frat boy in a bar who floats a highly offensive pick-up line. The face you give your wife when you believe she might be capable of something even worse than you are.
chapter nineteen
Perspective is important. When Danielle died, I was too young to put it in perspective realistically. My sister was dead, my parents were destroyed, all sense of normalcy in my life was completely eradicated. That being said, if I did have the ability to properly put that event in perspective when it happened, I probably would have synthesized it exactly as I did later. There are few things worse than losing a sister in a tragic car accident.
Now, as I brush my teeth, I try to put what happened with Darren and me last night—what has been happening with Darren and me over the past thirteen days—in perspective. And what I come up with is still a pretty lousy situation, but one, I argue with myself silently in the mirror, that could be a lot worse. Despite the lurching in my stomach and the haunting memory of Darren’s disgusted face last night, I do believe, somewhere in the recesses of my brain, that we’re going to be okay.
I do not regret telling Darren about Jake. I do not regret my interaction with Jake. I do not, surprisingly, regret any of it. Last night after Darren left, during the hours when I ached and searched for the sleep that evaded me, I came to the conclusion that the Jake stuff, including my admission of it to Darren, had to happen for Darren and me to be okay eventually. And if I really dig deep, I can even convince myself that the cocktail waitress had to happen for Darren and me to be really okay. Sometimes a marriage needs to be put into a cocktail shaker with sharp pieces of ice, sour limes, and some cheap liquor (in not-too-sensible black heels) in order to be mixed up and come out on the other end whole. Add some sweet apologies to the drink and some top-shelf makeup sex, and you’ve got yourself a keeper.
I know many people might tell me I should never have told him, that I could have kept that little gem to myself, that he never would have found out, that we gained nothing by my admission. But at that moment, amidst all the talk of honesty, it seemed like the right thing to do. I just had no idea he’d react the way he did. And if we’re going to move forward in a healthy, honest relationship, then I needed, for my own conscience, to have told him. So fuck everyone else and their opinions.
Darren likes to think of himself as a bit of a rebel. Once in a while he’ll even bust out his black motorcycle jacket from college or his old cowboy boots and fancy himself a real hip dude. He likes to think that he keeps me guessing, that I find him a bit unpredictable, footloose, and fancy-free. In reality, Darren is more like a chameleon in a tank at the zoo: he may change his appearance once in a while, but you know you’ll always find him lounging under the same rock when you come home, waiting for a meal. I know Darren needs to be away from me to understand what I’ve done and get over the bruised ego. I don’t blame him. But I also know that he will forgive me. That he will come home. That eventually the leather jacket and cowboy boots will find their way back to a corner of the closet so he can curl up on the couch with me in his Under Armour sweats and business school T-shirt once again.
And because I know fundamentally that we’re going to be okay, I’m not allowing myself to be too upset about what has been going on. I finally feel free of the anger I feel toward Darren, because where I am now is in a place of proper perspective. My family is alive and healthy, and, truthfully, that is all that really matters. When you’ve been presented with a loved one’s death in your life, like I was with Danielle, most other things tend to pale.
So as I get dressed and prepare to get the boys off to the bus, I smile, knowing that my family is intact, my marriage will survive, and the world will go on. It just might take a few days to get Darren to agree.
“Good morning, sunshine,” I sing as I open the shades in Henry’s room.
“Mommy! You’re back!” he says in a sleepy voice, and the “Mommy,” from a boy who switched to “Mom” a few months ago, does not go unnoticed by me.
“You knew I’d come back,” I say laughing, thinking of Owl Babies.
“How was your trip?” he asks sitting up, rubbing his eyes.
“It was really great, Hen, thanks for asking,” I say, picking up more dirty clothes from his floor than could possibly have been worn in one weekend. I’m pleasantly surprised I’m not annoyed that his clothes aren’t in the hamper. I guess the time away really did recharge my batteries. All about perspective.
“Okay, buddy. Get dressed, brush your teeth, and come down. Daddy said you guys earned those chocolate-chip pancakes so I better get cookin’,” I say.
“Hooray! Chocolate-chip pancakes! Pancakes in my tummy/very, very yummy/love my dear ol’ mummy!” he raps his way to the bathroom.
I sit on the side of James’s bed and wake him up.
“Did Henry just say chocolate-chip pancakes?” he asks me, opening his eyes wide.
“He did. Would you like some?” I ask.
He nods and reaches his arms out to hug me.
“I missed you,” I say, my eyes starting to well up. “I missed our family.”
“Our family missed you, too, Mommy,” he says, hugging me tightly.
“Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath, shaking myself off, and rising from his embrace. “School day,” I say loudly for both boys to hear. “Get dressed and come downstairs, rápido, rápido!”
After the boys are satisfyingly full of chocolate-chip pancakes, I get them out the door and onto the bus. I call Darren on his cell. No answer. I leave a voicemail. I call Cameron to find out about Maine, see how she’s doing, and fill her in on the latest chapter in the Darren-Grace saga. No answer. I leave her a voicemail, too. After a quick run to the supermarket to restock the house, I spend the next few hours unpacking, cleaning the house, and settling in. I realiz
e that since I officially didn’t get the job at Well in Westchester, I officially have nothing to do. I grab a cup of coffee and sit down with a pad and paper to start making a list of all my options when the phone rings and I see it’s Cameron’s cell.
“Hey,” I say cheerfully, curling my legs underneath me on the sofa. “How was Maine?”
“Oh, Grace,” Cameron says sadly.
“That bad? What happened?” I ask.
“No, Maine was fine,” she says in a small voice. “Excellent, actually. But—” she stops and takes a breath. “I can’t even believe I’m going to tell you what I’m about to tell you.” Her voice sounds contorted.
“What?” I ask, suddenly unsure of where this conversation is going, my stomach immediately starting to turn.
“Oh, Grace.”
“What, Cam? Tell me. What’s going on? Where are you? It sounds like you’re on a street in the city.”
“I am.” Another deep breath. “Okay. I went to my OB this morning just to get everything checked out and see if there are any tests he recommends. He was examining me, and . . .” she stops. I hear a crackle in her voice and then she continues, more in her Dr. Stevens voice than her Cameron voice. “He felt a lump in my left breast.”
“Oh, Cam,” I say, exhaling, finally.
“Yeah, he said it’s probably not a big deal but he didn’t want to take any chances so he suggested I schedule a mammogram. Meanwhile, I’m a little freaked out because ‘not a big deal’ could be a big deal and why should I wait around and wonder about it? So I called Shannon Kramer, remember my friend from med school? Anyway, she’s a radiologist at Mount Sinai. She took my call right away and told me to come in and that she’d fit me in. So, I walked over there, and long story short, the mammogram showed a spiculated mass. She then ordered an ultrasound and that showed a nodule with irregular borders, which is basically doctor-speak for breast cancer. So, I might have breast cancer.” She sounds resigned. And deeply sad. “She’s doing a needle biopsy this afternoon on me, and she said she’d try to get the results for me tomorrow.”
On Grace Page 18