The fact that he wanted to be with me even when I was plugged into headphones, typing away, filled me with comfort. And when I cried listening to the heartbreaking interviews—people sharing their experience of being biracial in America, telling wrenching stories of hate and displacement and the lurking cruelty in humanity—Chris would pat my hand and tell me it was okay, and say he loved me because of the way I loved the whole world. “You have so much love to give,” he said. Being able to live fully in the sad side of me, to be the woman who roots for the underdogs and believes that trying hard counts in the game of life, was deeply healing. I had spent years hiding behind being strong, but with Chris I could be weak and soft, too. I was starting to let go of the idea that marriage would hold me back, and to see that Chris’s love was building me a foundation and a sense of security I’d never known. From that stable, grounded place, I thought, we would be able to achieve anything.
One night, after we’d eaten a stir-fry I’d made on our tiny stove, I turned to Chris and said, “What are we waiting for?” We’d been a couple for two years, which felt like a lifetime to me then. I was wearing sweatpants and my hair was pulled back in a ponytail; this wasn’t exactly the moment for the Big Proposal, but I was tired of waiting, impatient as ever to make my plans a reality. He shrugged and said, “I thought you were waiting until 1997.”
It was true. When Chris and I first started talking about getting married, I told him we’d have to wait until 1997—first because I was trying to put it off to an age that seemed “old enough,” and second because I’m very superstitious about dates. My brothers and I were born on the twenty-seventh, seventeenth, and seventh of our respective birth months, in descending order; July for the boys, January for me, the girl. And my parents were married on December 17. I may be overconfident, but I’ve also always believed there’s no harm in doing what you can to keep the universe on your side, and 1997 was the first year October 17 fell on a Saturday. But that night I said, “I don’t want to wait that long anymore.” I snuggled up against Chris on our big sofa—the sofa we’d bought with all the money I’d made transcribing those interviews at night, with him at my side—and said, “Let’s pick a date.” I got out my calendar and started looking for an auspicious date in October, deciding that Saturday, October 1 of that year, 1994, sounded almost as good. We’d both be twenty-five when we married.
We called both sets of parents that night to announce our happy news. I had met Chris’s parents and spent some holidays with them, and I loved them like crazy. In fact, when I met his parents was when I became utterly certain I would marry him. His family was calm and grounded and Midwestern, with none of the hugely competitive spirit that drives mine, although everyone was accomplished in his or her own way. Chris had always said he felt really different from the rest of his family; he didn’t want a simple life, and he was always attracted to the fringes of things. But I was seduced by their big-hearted welcome and their warm manner—they seemed very clear and calm about the way they were a family, living in the quiet assumption of connection, without angst or turmoil. When I watched his parents, Cole and Barb, I felt a real sense of partnership between them; the link they shared was gracious and humble, polite and sweet. Instantly I said to myself, If Chris comes from this place of calm, of understated and understood love, then sign me up; he can lead the way.
And lead he did, especially when it came to laying down ground rules for our fights and disagreements. In my family you won bonus points for being clever, and you took home the prize if you drew blood by cutting to the emotional quick.
My habit when I got into an argument with Chris was to be haughty and mean and to turn up the volume until I was in a state I didn’t know how to come down from. Which meant that I only knew how to end our arguments by putting on my coat and flouncing out the door, walking the streets in our neighborhood until the adrenaline stopped flooding my circuits and fueling my indignant, unforgiving attitude. But because Chris didn’t fight me in that same way, when I came down I felt disgusted with myself. I would call from a pay phone, my head resting against the cold metal booth, my voice a whisper: “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I got so upset.” In one sense, I did know why I got so upset: I thought I put everything at risk by being vulnerable and soft. But the gentle way Chris reacted to the worst of me—hurt, but forgiving, wanting to understand—showed me I had everything to win. When I got home with my head hanging down and my lower lip trembling, he would hold me and calmly tell me that he really hated it when I left in the middle of an argument, and that it wasn’t fair to him or to us.
And so I learned to trust that he wasn’t trying to score points in a fight, and each argument was a baby step forward. There was the night I put on my coat, fled the apartment, and then stopped at the bottom of the stairs, leaning against the front door of the apartment building, trying not to open it and leave. “Stacy?” Chris called quietly. I stood there, not breathing, and said in a small voice, smaller than I recognized as being me, “Yes?” “Please come back,” he said. And so I did. And little by little, argument by argument, I stopped putting on my jacket, stopped trying to flee, learned to trust him even in our disagreements, and learned to find my strength in the work of being partners, not individuals at war.
I knew that for me marriage was going to be a daily choosing, not a destination. As I started working on the wedding plans with my mother, I kept pointing out to friends that the big day wasn’t marking the beginning of my relationship with Chris: it was a celebration of both what we’d already built and what was to come. This distinction seemed critical to me; it was my way of infusing the idea I’d been so afraid of with life and flexibility. As I was going through all the fun and exciting (and banal and endlessly anxiety-producing) motions of having a dress made, finding a photographer, choosing a menu, I was sure that I wanted to marry Chris. But I still couldn’t find the place where I was certain.
One day as I admitted all my anxiety to my mother on the phone, she said, “I think I’ve done you a disservice in letting you think you know anything about my relationship with your father.” I paused, dumbfounded. How could the years of her sharing all the intimate details with me—the good, the bad, and even the ugly, things no daughter should ever know—mean I knew nothing about their relationship? She went on to say that every couple meets in a place that no one else can see, and that as the years unfold there is more and more created there than the mere sum of life events. “As far as for you and Chris go, you are trying to answer a question you don’t get to know the answer to. You don’t get to know if you and Chris will make it. The two of you have looked as far into the future as you can and seem to agree about where you are going. That is all you get. And someday you may or may not have to face the question of whether you will stay together, and you won’t know that moment has come until it’s there.”
Well, I certainly didn’t like that answer at all. But I had to try to accept its wisdom.
After a few months of planning the wedding and pushing down all my anxieties about making this big step, I had a night where all I was trying not to think about broke through. Chris and I were home in our little apartment, with its casement windows lending it a sense of Parisian romance, and he was regaling me in his sweet way with all the reasons why we were destined to be together, and how he knew I had been put on the Earth just for him. I was sitting in the green Naugahyde office chair we’d bought from the local Salvation Army, the one that went with his desk, where he did his writing (and I played the video game Doom for hours on end). I felt my heart start to race and my hands go numb. I began to cry softly. Chris scooted over to me on his knees and took my hands and looked up into my face and asked me what was wrong.
I explained that I felt like a liar because I didn’t truly believe we were “meant” to be together. I explained through tears that I loved him so much, but it seemed like I was keeping some kind of terrible secret by not telling him that I wasn’t so sure about this seemingly magical “forever
” thing. I didn’t believe in fairy tales—not for anyone, but especially not for me. Being happy has always made me nervous, as if I’m inviting disaster. Walking down the aisle wasn’t going to erase my anxiety about all that lay ahead that we couldn’t predict. Of course I wanted, I intended, to do my best to love him forever, but I could not pretend that I was able to truly make that promise.
He gently gathered my hands into his and told me he understood. And then he said, “I promise if you ever want to leave me, I will let you go.” I know it sounds crazy, but those were the most beautiful words I had ever heard. I felt that with those words Chris really proposed to me. I knew then that he really knew me, and could accept the part of me that was always afraid. I wept with gratitude for his acceptance of all my anxieties and those parts of me that are broken, and for his confident, gentle way of guiding me through my storms of doubt. He knew what to do with me when I didn’t. How could I not entrust him with the rest of my life?
So on October 1, 1994, Chris and I were married in front of eighty-five friends and his parents, who had been high school sweethearts, and my parents, who had just reconciled after a six-month separation. To me, the two sets of parents together embodied all I believed and hoped was true about marriage: I was prepared for it to be both good and hard, complicated and simple. The wedding was a joyous and marvelous occasion, and I had never felt so loved in my life as I did in that roomful of people who knew us so well, standing along with us, their hearts and eyes filled with love.
The ceremony was supposed to take place in a lush, green spot enclosed by trees, but the sky was gray and overcast when I woke up that morning. I sat in my mother’s bedroom as she applied her makeup, and I pouted. She said simply, “There’s a Native American blessing that says, ‘Rain on your wedding day means there’ll be no tears in your marriage.’ ”
So the ceremony took place in front of a plate-glass window overlooking the garden as an early-fall shower rained down. Chris and I promised to love and trust and honor and respect and admire and support each other for all the days of our lives, and we believed it, taking that leap of faith into free space that somehow feels like solid ground, that mystery of marriage. But I’m pretty sure our feet didn’t touch the floor once as we walked back down the aisle after the ceremony.
In one of the photos from just seconds after we exchanged vows, Chris and I are standing together, he with his chin jutting out and up and a prideful look on his face, and I’m tucked under his arm, even though I’m wearing three-inch heels, gazing up at him with my eyes wide and filled with glee. I’m using my grandmother’s lace hankie to pat away the tears that spilled down my face during the big hug we had shared right after the ceremony. That photo captures everything that we were claiming as ours in our marriage: the mutual joy in discovering and protecting a person as your equal. But in that photo I can also see, just a little bit, how Chris was unafraid to be bigger than me.
With that newfound stability at my back, I threw myself equally into my social life and my career. Chris and I had a large group of friends and we went out a lot, to concerts and parties and bars and movies and just hanging around in a pack in the way that seems so necessary when you’re in your twenties. We also had Alix, my friend and fellow assistant at Mirabella, over for dinner every Tuesday night to watch Melrose Place. My specialties at the time were budget-conscious stir-fries and vegetarian curries, but once in a while I’d splurge and make a warm spinach-and-bacon salad with pears and Stilton. Alix and I would stand at the stove eating “frontier snacks” (the name was a way to glamorize the fact that we were using toast to scoop up bacon crumbs and fat from the bottom of the pan) and catching up on the dramas of the week before we settled, with Chris, onto the giant shabby-chic sofa.
One night when we were all three talking, during the commercials, about boys and couples and love and life, Alix said to us, “You two are the least-married married people I know.” Chris and I squeezed hands, smug about the way we were building our life to be a place where we could both flourish, separate and together.
I loved how getting married had changed nothing in our relationship, except that I felt calmer and more secure. The commitment Chris and I had made to each other had taken shape in my mind as a specific image: me and Chris, two separate people, divided by a space between us, but leaning toward each other, our heads resting together, our arms clasped, making an A-frame in which to weather the storms of life together. The divide was the place our conflicts lived, the places we didn’t mesh perfectly, the parts of us that belonged to each of us alone. For me, the marriage commitment was a promise to always reach across that divide, to never let go, to never be so wholly in the self that I would drop my hand from his, even in the moments when our disagreements might be so strong that one or both of us turned away. That image, of reaching out, our index fingers always touching, even if we were facing away from each other, made me feel safe. It was a position I felt I could hold forever, a forever I could believe in, because it perfectly captured how the partnership was carried by both of us at the same time. I didn’t have to be responsible for the whole thing. It wasn’t only up to me.
Fast-forward a decade or so: Deciding he wanted to leave me felt like the first decision Chris had made in our marriage for some time. Well, that’s not totally true: he regularly chose what kind of takeout we would order for dinner on the many nights in a row I came home from work too late or too tired to cook. I was so overstimulated from managing the cycle of deadlines involved in putting out a monthly magazine that I couldn’t make even that simple decision.
But it is also true that Chris had become a silent partner in the marriage. He was present and absent at the same time, at home in the house, but always secreting himself away into his office on the second floor, the door closed. Inside, he was working away on a screenplay and on film and Web business ideas that had been swirling in his head since I’d first starting dating him. I knew Chris was frustrated that he wasn’t where he wanted to be professionally, and so I tried to give him as much room as possible on that front—to not need him, to give him a lot of time alone—but I longed for him to be able to be satisfied with all that we had built together. We’d achieved so many of the dreams we’d talked about when we first met as broke twenty-one-year-olds, scrabbling for success in the pressure cooker of New York City life. We had one of the two children we’d always planned to have, some relative financial stability, and, at last, a house and a beautiful backyard. I wanted all that we shared together to be Enough. So for many, many months I had been learning to live with less and less of Chris, hoping that if he found his footing in the things he wanted for himself, he would once again be more fully present in the life we shared. But having the baby—something we had both wanted for years, and that I had kept delaying as I launched one magazine or another—pushed him further out of reach. He had become depressed after I got pregnant, barely able to stumble through his days at work, practically unable to talk to me and tell me what was happening. I was pulled back and forth between joy about being pregnant and fear about going through so much of it alone as Chris withdrew.
The birth of Zack seemed to draw Chris back out of his shell a bit, and he was in love with his new son. But the realities and demands of life with a newborn were taking their toll on him and I felt like I was on eggshells, trying to take care of as much as I could on my own.
One gray March morning, a few months before Chris pronounced the end of our marriage, I was sitting on the living room floor, playing with Zack as he leaped around in his ExerSaucer. We had just come back from our regular Saturday visit to the gym, where Zack played in the nursery, crawling around on the squishy wrestling mats, while I tried my best to beat down my new-mom anxiety by running on a treadmill. I was getting ready to dash upstairs and take a shower, leaving Chris to watch Zack for a few minutes in that eternal back-and-forth kid-shuffle that couples do, and making plans for the rest of the day.
I looked up at Chris and mentioned that may
be we needed to drive to Home Depot; we were still settling in to our house and the list of things we needed—shelves, dimmer switches, extra trash cans, lightbulbs—was still quite long. He was sitting on the sofa, just a few feet away, and I saw him stiffen at my words. Then he turned to me and unloaded.
“You are always filling up my time with errands, constantly making plans for me. I can’t stand it!”
He went on, raging against the way I saw his time as belonging to me. Stunned by his outburst—Chris wasn’t given to snit fits or petty anger—I simply sat there, speechless, as waves of shock pumped through my body, trying to gather my thoughts.
I saw clearly for the first time that Chris felt tormented by this new life: the house, the baby, the responsibilities, the demands, the sacrifices, and, worse, the real-live togetherness of it all. For the first ten years of our relationship, Chris and I had been a couple that spent a lot of time apart, pursuing our own work, interests, and friends, but we always reconnected at the end of every day on the sofa: watching TV, vegging, catching up. Now I wanted his help and his presence more. I wanted us to be a family.
I took a long breath. Then I said slowly, “You never want to come to the park with us. Or to the playground. Or even just go for a walk. You don’t want to do anything with us. Running errands together as a family is the only way I know to get you to spend time with us. What do you want to do with us? What? Can you name anything?” Tears started sliding down my cheeks.
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 3