I look back at my silence in the living room as one of the profound mistakes in my life. I see it as one of the wrong turns I made in our relationship.
In that one little game of cards, the trained eye of a seasoned gambler could have marked the psychological “tells” in the ways Beth and I both dealt with life. It demonstrated Beth’s desire to knock down barriers, and it showed my reluctance to deal with unpleasant truth. My weapon of choice was silence. Just like lying, silence is a form of altering reality.
It’s easy to tell this story and portray myself as the victim, but a true reading of events will reveal that we both cheated. People cheat in two main ways. They cheat to try to make themselves look better. Or they cheat to make themselves look worse. Make no mistake about it; both are driven by ego and the desire to control the way you are viewed by the world. There are clearly more disadvantages to the first, cheating to make yourself look better. If you cheat to win, people will expect more of you than you can deliver. You will always feel their disappointment and the pressure to continue cheating to succeed.
When you cheat to make yourself appear worse than you are, you may feel the rush of amazement and surprise from others when you do well, but it becomes irritating when people think you are always lucky when you succeed, and not talented. The only compensation is that feigning incompetence is often confused with courtesy.
I don’t want to offend any atheist readers, so feel free to substitute any noun here, but I think people want to show that in their life somehow, in some way, they are touched by God. They cheat because they’re afraid that they’re not. The one common tragedy I have seen woven throughout my life and the lives of others is that we can’t feel the miracle of our own lives.
It was the summer of 1976. Beth and I were finishing our first and only year as graduate students at the University of Illinois. John Ahart, the head of the directing program, offered Beth and me acting jobs for the summer working in Springfield writing and performing a show on the life of Lincoln. Beth accepted. I declined. The obvious reason was that I had just broken my toe and was in a gigantic plaster-of-paris cast. I thought it would be a little anachronistic for me to portray Ulysses S. Grant in a walking cast with autographs on it. I had already provided the theatergoers of Central Illinois with enough unintentional comedy that season.
Another reason, and probably the real reason I turned the Lincoln show down, was that I was done with act one. The act one of my life. Act two had to begin, becoming an actor and making movies. I told Beth I would head out to L.A. and get a place for us, try to lay the groundwork, get a job, get an agent, or whatever a life in show business required.
I could tell Beth was reticent, but I never asked why. We never had a discussion about it. It was another unfortunate use of silence. I could never see any life for myself other than a life with Beth. Likewise, I could never see any other path for myself than one that led to Los Angeles or New York. I was determined. Determination is often mistaken for purpose. Usually it is only a sign of a lack of imagination.
I packed up my Oldsmobile with books and clothes and various odds and ends I collected during the school year. It’s amazing how many keepsakes one can gather from a part of life considered merely a detour. The oddest things I packed up for transport were three rocks I found in front of our house. I had kicked them down to Green Street on my walk home from the Theater Department one day. When I saw that they were still on the curb a couple of days later, I picked them up. I liked the way they fit into my hand. “What if I kept these rocks for the rest of my life?” I said to myself. I thought just the act of possession might make them magical. Maybe like my relationship with Beth. Maybe that’s why I was determined to stay silent. I didn’t want to break any accidental spell that had been cast to grace us.
I headed south for Dallas for a few weeks of recovery and to have my cast removed before my journey west began. Beth packed up her car and headed for Springfield. We were still a couple. We still talked about the future. And it’s true we had more adventures ahead of us than we ever could have imagined.
The three rocks are still on my shelf. If they became magical in the past decades, I haven’t been aware of the transformation.
My first prayer of knowing when I was lost has never been answered. Fortunately the second one has been. I was found. And as for my many varied memories of my final years with Beth, they were also like that sunny afternoon on the mountain when, without a path, I saw the beautiful bridge to nowhere.
AS I HAVE gotten older, I have recognized that there is a difference between an event and a process. An event is like turning on a light. You do it and it’s done. A process is not so easy to describe. It has a beginning, middle, and an end, if you’re lucky.
Among the greatest wrongs movies have perpetrated on us is the false impression that relationships are some kind of event. There are movies where people fall in love and kiss, there’s music, and—it’s over. Or the girl runs out to the bad boy in his Mustang. They drive off—and it’s over. Or even more to my point, someone says, “It’s over,” and—it’s over. To quote Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
A broken heart is not an event. It is a process. The reason is that a relationship is not a singular thing. It is a multiheaded beast. It’s like playing football—completely different at different times in your life.
I started to play tackle football in the sixth grade. My position was the kid on the bottom of the pile. Back then, all of the plays were runs up the middle followed by the inevitable, ineffectual punt. The games were usually decided by fumbles, or when too many players on one side were crying and couldn’t tackle the runner on the other team. As you get older, the game evolves. It becomes trickier. There are buttonhook passes and double reverses. There are pulling guards and stunts on the line of scrimmage. Plays up the middle become more rare. Plays down the sidelines become more frequent. Both sides test the boundary lines for the big gains.
In a long relationship it is simple to end up with one person still playing by peewee rules on a sixty-yard field while the other person decides to switch over to Canadian football on a business trip to New York. The boundaries aren’t the same. The invisible agreement has changed from love, honor, and cherish to pretending we’re still playing by the same rules.
One of the first symptoms of a broken heart usually happens before a relationship ends. The therapists call it “drawing a line in the sand.” One partner tells the other partner that things have to change. Translation: the other partner has to go back to the way they were when you thought you were happy. But the line in the sand is just as symbolic as the punts in peewee football. They’re just a gesture to say the game will continue even though no one knows how to play.
The brokenhearted draw lines in the sand over many things, from the obvious (money, drugs, infidelity) to the obscure (cats, coffee, dry cleaning). I talked to one woman who said she got a divorce because she couldn’t stand the way her husband made eggs for her.
The partner who is “drawing a line” is really saying: “We need to change things to protect what is mutually valuable.”
The brokenhearted often focus on the first part of that phrase, “We need to change things.” But the real heartbreak rests in the last few words: “to protect what is mutually valuable.” At the end of a relationship, as much as people want to have discussions on changing the behavior of their partner, the hard truth is understanding that the relationship, the thing you felt was constant, is no longer mutually valuable.
This is a hard truth to accept. It requires awareness, self-reflection, and the courage to own your part of the breakup. Since no one can do this, we generally try to get through the pain by alternating varying amounts of tequila and psychiatry. The results are often that we end up just as miserable but with a new appreciation for country music.
I had never been to a psychiatrist before I broke up with Beth. It’s hard to find a good one. There are so many bad ones, and to get the name of
a good one you have to ask friends who go to psychiatrists and they’re usually crazy.
I got the name of Joan from a theater friend of mine who had been subsidizing the mental health industry in Southern California for years. I asked if she was good. He started laughing and exclaimed that he was still “mad as a hatter,” but he gave Joan credit for keeping him from “flying off into space.” See, that’s what I mean. It’s hard to tell if that is a good recommendation.
I decided to pay $160 for fifty minutes and see what this psychiatry thing was all about. I sat in Joan’s waiting room as her assistant gave me a mountain of paperwork to fill out on my personal history. It was like the SAT, but all of the questions were about me. I was terrified I wouldn’t pass.
I walked into Joan’s inner sanctum and my first impression was that she collected clocks. But then I realized from their unusual placement in the room that they were all functioning and set strategically to allow Joan to appear to be deep in thought while she fixated on how many more minutes were in my session.
She slid a box of Kleenex in my direction before we started. I found this intimidating. I wasn’t going to cry. I don’t think she thought I was going to cry. I think she just thought, “If he’s paying full fare, I have to give him the whole show.” I began to talk. I focused on the first year of my relationship with Beth and the last year, hoping to show the juxtaposition of love and loss, hope and despair. Joan called time at forty-nine minutes and fifty-three seconds.
The next day she called me up and told me that she didn’t think she wanted me as a patient anymore, but she asked for Beth’s phone number. She gave me a recommendation to talk to her colleague Jack over in the Wilshire district. She said a man would be better suited for me. I wasn’t sure if she was a sexist or had just slept through the sixties, but I agreed to move on to Jack. The next day I sat in Jack’s waiting room. His assistant gave me a huge mountain of paperwork to fill out. Another SAT. Therapy, I realized, was as bad as dating. You always had to tell the same story over and over again. When they called my name I walked into the private office. Jack was lying on a couch smoking a pipe. An empty metal folding chair awaited me in the middle of the room.
Jack languidly blew pipe smoke in my direction, explaining he needed the couch. I would be in and out in an hour, but he had to listen to people all day long. I told Jack he should spring for two couches. We could pretend we were bunkmates at YMCA summer camp. He was not amused. I noticed Jack had four clocks positioned around the room. Multiple clocks were just part of the cost of doing business.
I got through session one with Jack where I retold the stories of Van Cliburn and looking at the stars at night, followed by an angry Lifetime channel version of the Go Fish card game and a laundry list of the abuses I suffered in the last few years.
Jack refilled his pipe and told me that I needed a lot of help. He recommended I come twice a week for the next few months. I don’t think Jack thought I was coming unhinged. I think he just realized he hit the mother lode: someone who could tell stories for an hour straight and didn’t care if he smoked.
I went back to Jack later that week. I hit him with episode two of my life story: “Beth and I Start Living Together.” Jack never said a word until the end of the session. He then gave me his first piece of advice. He said, “Stephen, I think you’re going to find that being a single, heterosexual man, being tall, in your thirties, with a good income, is a good thing. I think you’ll find that women will be throwing themselves at you. I want you to play the field, Stephen. Go out and have as many varied experiences as you can and come back and tell me about them.”
I was shocked. I said, “Jack, maybe I should be charging you. What are you talking about? I can’t go on a date. I’m heartbroken. And what do you mean ‘play the field,’ have you seen the field lately? There are a lot of broken bottles and old tires in the field these days. The field ain’t what it used to be, Jack. Every woman I’m going to meet in their thirties is either single for a reason or has been dumped and hates men.”
“Angry sex isn’t necessarily bad sex,” Jack said.
“Jack! That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I feel like I’m dying every minute of every day. I can’t see tomorrow. It hurts to breathe. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat.”
“Well, that’s normal. That’s just how you’re going to feel. Can’t do anything about that. That’s how people feel after a breakup.”
Wow. In that one moment, Jack earned his money. “That’s just how you’re gonna feel.” And my mind went back to the first time I rode a horse at Claire Richards’s birthday party in fourth grade. My horse, Big Gray, wouldn’t move. The other kids wandered down the trail, but I was still outside the barn furiously jumping around in the saddle, kicking him in the sides saying “Hiya! Giddyup! Go! Go! Go, Big Gray!” No dice. Big Gray had been down that road around the barn too many times. He wasn’t going to go this morning. The skinny, mean man in the blue jeans who saddled us up came over to me and said, “What? He ain’t a-goin’?”
“No, sir.”
The skinny man picked up a fallen tree branch from the ground and walloped Big Gray in the head. Big Gray took off as though he were in the Kentucky Derby. Skinny Man laughed, calling out to me, “Well, he’s a-goin’ now.” The simplicity of Skinny Man’s methodology impressed me. That’s what I needed now. I didn’t need Jack or any other psychiatrist. I needed to be my own Skinny Man and wallop myself in the head.
I decided I would change my life. I moved out of the house and rented another place. I needed furniture. A bachelor friend of mine winked at me and said the first item I needed was a bed. And make sure it’s a soft bed but a strong bed, if you know what I mean.
That afternoon I bought the first bed I had ever bought as a single man. It was a futon. And my friend was right. The bed was so important. It was much better having a soft place to cry. In the previous few weeks I would cry unexpectedly. I would lose strength in my knees and fall on the floor. It not only hurt, but you realize floors are a lot dirtier than you imagined—even if you’re a relatively clean person. When you’re crying facedown on a floor you see all sorts of clumps of dust, and bits of food, and ballpoint pens under the tables and chairs.
If I started crying, I found it better to go outside before collapsing. The ground was much softer than the kitchen floor. But it was dirty, too. It was actual dirt. Having a soft but strong bed to cry on was a revelation. It was clean and usually a remote control was nearby.
Several of my guy friends saw my being single as a green light to party. My rented house had a swimming pool, and it was Los Angeles. They suggested I throw a pool party where they could introduce me to some of the women they knew. My buddy Mike assured me I wouldn’t be rejected. These women not only set the bar low, several of them had no bar at all. I thanked him for his help, but I told him I was not in a party mood. I preferred to be alone. If I needed company, I could always buy a cheesecake.
Another friend of mine, Jeff, who was a road manager for rock bands, called me up and asked me how I was doing. I told him that I recognized that being heartbroken was just about the same as being jet-lagged except for the suicidal tendencies. I couldn’t eat at mealtimes, but then I would wake up at three in the morning and have a king-sized bag of Fritos. I lay awake all night and would sleep during the day, except for watching Unsolved Mysteries.
Unexpected events made me cry uncontrollably. I went to the movies and broke down at the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. An usher told me if I couldn’t control myself, I would have to leave the theater. To this day, I can’t think of Spock’s death without tearing up. Another night, I stopped by Greenblatt’s Delicatessen to get a sandwich. I noticed a lone roasted chicken turning on a rotisserie. I broke down in sobs and had to leave.
I explained to Jeff that when a rotating chicken brings you to tears, you know you’re not operating on all cylinders. He said I needed a normal night out. He invited me over for dinner and then to hear some m
usic afterward. I thought that sounded safe.
I showed up that night with a bottle of wine. Jeff and his girlfriend were there. The table was set for four. Oh dear.
I heard his bathroom door open and the sound of high heels on the hardwood floor. It had to be a woman. It was a single, very attractive woman in her late thirties. She had her black hair up in a sophisticated twist. She wore a crisp white blouse and a tight black skirt. She reminded me of one of those movies where a mannequin in a department store comes to life and you end up dating her. The first sign of danger was that her blouse was unbuttoned to reveal the top of her bra.
Jeff jumped in and made introductions. Janet was an old friend of his girlfriend’s. She needed a mental health break, too. She had just gotten divorced after a long marriage.
I smiled at Janet and extended my hand. She smiled at me as her eyes made a quick Terminator scan of the weaknesses in my DNA: balding, double chin, belt not matching shoes. A slam-dunk no-go from the start.
We sat down. Jeff asked if I wanted wine. There are several good things about saying yes to wine when you are heartbroken. When you hold a wine glass you always look like a coping adult. Also, scientifically, I’m not sure if it is the color of the wine or the shape of the glass, but it’s harder for people to track your refills.
At dinner Janet looked at me and said, “I heard you’re single again. So how long were you together?”
“Sixteen years or so.”
“Oh, that’s awful. That’s like forever. And Jeff said you were never married?”
“No,” I said. “She didn’t believe in marriage. She said she didn’t want to wake up when she was forty and realize she wasn’t in love and tied down by a piece of paper. She wanted to be able to walk away. No strings.”
“So she walked away?”
“No. I guess I did. I moved out. But there are still strings. The strings are killing me. I think it would have been easier if we were married. Then you have a judge say, ‘It’s over.’ There’s paperwork involved. It’s more clear. I can’t imagine an actual divorce would hurt more than this.”
The Dangerous Animals Club Page 29