This was when I began to see that he had been struggling with everything in our married life, not just his own dreams and desires. I hadn’t realized that I’d been trying to “trick” Chris into spending time together as a family. I had no idea that I was terrified by the way in which he was disappearing from me, and had been disappearing for some time. For years I had been standing to the side and waiting for him to be happy, at the same time willing myself to ignore the many signals that he wasn’t. To actually begin to speak the truth of that into the room and have it become a real thing between us, instead of a constant presence that we both tacitly agreed to ignore, was deeply unsettling.
Chris didn’t—couldn’t—answer my question. He mumbled and paused, said something that sounded like “No.” And then he said, “You’re right.” He looked at me, openly surprised and chastened, and admitted that he didn’t know the answer. He didn’t know what he would enjoy all of us doing together.
The shared realization of the distance opening up between us did not bring us closer. I did not start to connect the dots regarding the struggle we were in as a couple, because I wasn’t looking for dots—and because of the ways in which marriage is the triumph of faith over circumstance. That moment declared its importance and snapped into bold relief only after Chris had gathered enough strength to tell me he wanted out three months later.
But the dots had been there, and, yes, I could see them now as we sat on the sofa and he told me our marriage was over. I had grappled with fleeting feelings of hating Chris when he launched into his frequent rants about the irredeemable horror of stupid people, which threatened my own I-love-humanity worldview. We had struggled for months with the every-other-night-sex my ob-gyn had recommended when I didn’t get pregnant after six months of trying. He had been miserable during the pregnancy, threatened by the way our son would underline all he’d failed to achieve, undermine all he still hoped to do—and he hadn’t even been able to talk to me and express those fears. As I sat on the sofa listening to Chris telling me he was done, I could see that I’d been coiled into myself for a long time, waiting, waiting, waiting for Chris to be happy, for him to want to join me in our lovely life—or, at least, a life that I thought was lovely. We’d faced down some demons and the hard stuff of life, standing together as my mother battled cancer and beat it, and then as his father fought cancer and lost. We’d survived the Internet bubble (during which we both lost our jobs), and six months of living apart as I flew coast-to-coast for a job. And we’d been through a round of marriage counseling in 2001 after we’d started living in the same city again. For thirteen years, we’d been learning together, and finding our way together.
So how were we supposed to find our way apart?
I sobbed to Chris, trying to make sense of the fact that he wasn’t telling me we were having problems, that we should go to couples counseling, that he thought we weren’t getting along anymore. Hell, tell me you hate me! But no, he was telling me that our marriage was over. He had decided. Alone.
Along with my panic, I felt disgust. How could I not have understood that this could happen? I had years of experience creating magazine contracts for contributing editors and partnerships, in which pages of legalese explained the commitment being entered into and which “party” (the magazine or the writer) owned what under which circumstances. I knew that buried deep within each contract was a “get-out clause” that gives either party the power to end the partnership with thirty days’ written notice, no matter how many pages of expressed legal togetherness came before it.
I didn’t realize marriage had its own get-out clause, which could leave one partner standing there, dumbfounded.
I felt hoodwinked. Especially because, finally, our marriage had taken root in me. Just two or three weeks after Zack was born, I’d had my first taste of Ever After: lying in bed one morning with Chris, little Zackie between us, both of us exhausted from the all-night-long feedings, I’d felt the touch of grace, the immensity of what we’d created. My eyes filled with tears, and I looked at Chris and said, “I get it now. This is so forever.” I was in. All the way in. It had taken thirteen years of sharing a life with Chris for me to get there, to find the place where shooting for forever seemed possible. Little did I know that Chris was already long gone.
Forever can be undone in a second: once Chris chose to enact the get-out clause, the magic of that leap of faith we’d taken together instantly evanesced. Sitting there with Chris that night on the sofa—the sofa we’d chosen because it was the only one big enough for both of us to lie on at the same time, the one we’d had to have disassembled and rebuilt three times because it didn’t fit through the doorways of three different apartments, the sofa I’d had recovered in red fabric for the price of a new sofa when we moved back to New York after our year in San Francisco because it was worn but I couldn’t bear to get rid of it—it was utterly impossible not to feel like a fool for having been caught believing in that leap of faith.
3
You Don’t Get to Know
Why, But Ask Anyway
The world did not come to an end the night Chris told me he was “done.” Somehow I moved through the evening’s regular paces: dinner was cooked and eaten, dishes were washed, Zack was carried upstairs and put to bed. Somehow, I came back downstairs to finish a conversation I’d never wanted to start, a conversation I had never even had the foresight to dread. I sat on the sofa next to Chris, not touching him and barely even looking at him because I was so afraid, and I cried. He talked, and I talked. I reasoned and begged and pleaded and sobbed and wailed. I tried to manipulate. I tried to convince him I would die That Very Second if he didn’t realize the total wrongness of his thoughts. I didn’t yet understand that these tactics would no longer work, that I was already out of the equation.
At first I blamed the whole incident on the Memorial Day barbecue I’d thrown the weekend before. I knew Chris hated it when I threw parties. (Was that why he was leaving me?) He thought that they were too much work, that I wore myself out, that I was miserable in the days of busywork before the big event. The truth is actually that I am never happier than when I am in a swirl of creating anything (Reason #2 that he was leaving me?). He hated the way I needed him to help me: to run to the store to get a forgotten item; to watch and entertain Zack while I boiled the Red Bliss potatoes for the potato salad; to prep the asparagus for grilling, chop up apples and oranges for the sangria. But I had planned the party anyway, inviting twenty people to our beautiful backyard as a belated housewarming. I’ve always thought that having a house aswirl with all the people you love most is the only proper way to bless it (Reason #3?). The party was five months late, but with the baby, and then my getting fired from a job I loved just two months after we’d moved in, we’d been in no position to celebrate much of anything, worried as we were about paying our bills. We had been in survival mode.
For me a party isn’t just a party; it’s an opportunity to express hospitality and love to everyone who attends. I learned how to put together a party from my mother, a fantastic cook and even better hostess, whose approach to entertaining could be reduced to the simple motto “Too much is never enough!” And so for every party I’d ever thrown, I’d made everything from scratch. But too far into the planning for this party, I discovered I was in over my head. I had picked recipes that were overcomplicated. I was making too many dishes. I also had become consumed with decorating the pergola and the deck just so, seeking out new outdoor pillows and lanterns and strings of lights. I asked Chris to go to Home Depot to buy galvanized tubs to hold the sodas and beers the day before the party because I didn’t want to use the coolers we had in the basement. At some point, I realized that trying to do this much when I had an infant son was impossible; that the difference between eight for dinner and twenty for a barbecue was bigger than I had figured. I kept apologizing to Chris the day before the party as we worked nonstop to get everything ready, but he was beyond assuagement. Irritated, he marched around
the house, taking orders from me. I winced whenever I needed to ask him to head to the deli up the street to pick up another ingredient, and I breathed a sigh of relief anytime he left the house.
But the barbecue the next day was totally enjoyable. Friends and acquaintances from all different phases of our lives showed up, and they mixed and connected easily. Our green backyard was at its best. Zack, all beaming blondness and supersocial to the core, charmed all the guests, crawling on the lawn and the deck, raising his arms to ask people to pick him up. The food was delicious, and everyone was amazed that I’d made it all myself. Still, my closest friends, like Alix, could tell that Chris was withdrawn; they’d become used to his disappearances over the years, the way he would be in a room and yet somehow not be there, eyes cast down to the ground. But after some of the early guests had left and the grilling was done, Chris managed to relax, drinking beers with his friends and laughing under the stars and the twinkling metal lanterns I’d strung up among the pergola’s grapevines. The last man standing finally headed home around 11 p.m., ten hours after the festivities had started. As Chris and I cleaned up the dishes, sorted the bottles, and dumped the melting ice from the tubs, I apologized to him, with a formal, full-on admission that I had been wrong. We sat down on our red sofa and I agreed with him that the plans I had made were too big. That things were different now that we had a son. That I was sorry. Really sorry.
And here we were, just five days later, back on the sofa, with Chris telling me our marriage was over. It had to have been the barbecue, right? If I could just take that whole weekend back, this wouldn’t be happening.
Or maybe it was the stress of the new house? And having a baby? And the fact that I’d just been fired? And that we were in tight financial straits? Plus, there was the pressure I was feeling about trying to land this big new job, heading up Redbook (Reasons #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, and #9). I mean, Chris, think about it, I urged. Everything has changed in our lives in the past eight months. We wouldn’t be normal if we weren’t having some adjustment issues!
I was trying to tell him a story about why he was feeling this way, filling the air with my words because I was terrified to have Chris speak his reasons. What if Chris was getting ready to tell me some terrible truth about me that I couldn’t deny? What if the end of my marriage was really all my fault?
I don’t remember much of what Chris said to me that night on the sofa, other than that he was unhappy (Reason #10) and I was unhappy (Reason #11) and he thought that this had been true for both of us for years. No, he hadn’t fallen for another woman, but he admitted that a brewing crush he had at the office was one of the many signs that he knew he was done. I can’t recall many of his exact words, but I do remember the awful feeling of it all, of being sucked down a black hole, and the nausea in the pit of my stomach, and the vertigo. And I remember Chris trying to be gentle with the dozens of ways he must have said, “I don’t want this anymore.” I believed that his kindness surely meant there was enough love left that maybe I could fix things from here. I just needed to untangle the logic that had led us to where we now were and start the repair work. How could he mean we weren’t happy? I thought we were as close to happy as we’d ever been.
Yes, we had been through some hard times, and challenging times, and busy times. It was true that for the past ten years I had been more work than play. Shortly after we married, I had helped launch a new weekly magazine in a job where I worked literally around the clock—and it was my job, as managing editor, to make sure everyone else did, too. I was coordinating the work of thirty editors and writers who created the hundred or so pages that made up the magazine. For weeks the editor in chief and I left the office together on Wednesday nights at 5 or 6 a.m. the next morning after having spent the final hours of the night with our feet up on the table in her office, handing the last pages of the issue back and forth between us, her edits in red, mine in blue. We’d share a cab home, sleep for three or four hours, and then come back, bleary-eyed but not beaten. Saturdays and Sundays I went into the office to sign bills, figure out issue costs, finesse the coming issues’ article lineups. I logged in ninety hours a week at that job for the first six weeks, twice hallucinating from lack of sleep.
I thought it was the most thrilling thing I’d ever done in my life.
And so I did it again, joining another launch team and getting another magazine off the ground. And then a year later, I stepped into my first editor-in-chief job, at Modern Bride. An editor in chief! At twenty-nine years old! Ahead of plan! Three years later, I was asked to head up a general-interest magazine and Internet company all about design, an idea I’d been carrying around in my head and desperate to bring to life since I wrote the business plan and created the mock-up for it in college. Chris dared to say yes to my dream; he pulled up stakes and moved to San Francisco, and he telecommuted to the Internet programming job he’d worked in for the last few years but didn’t love. One year later, after the dot-com bubble burst, my company was out of business and Chris had been laid off.
The dot-com/magazine job had pushed me to my limits, both physically and mentally, with the constant travel between New York and San Francisco, and the pressure of trying to stay in business, close another round of financing, and persuade my team to work another week or two or three in very uncertain conditions, sometimes without pay. I was starting to understand that I’d been subjecting myself to these successive tests of will not just because I wanted to build my career, but also because I was trying to prove my worth, to find the safe place I’d always dreamed about since I was a little girl.
A colleague in the business who had been following my career called me up and asked, “Are you ready to calm down now?” Yes, I said, I was. He pointed me in the direction of the job of executive editor at Marie Claire. In just three days, I packed up our San Francisco apartment (Chris had already moved back to New York) and completed my proposal for the Marie Claire job—story ideas, marketing ideas, “big” ideas—as I sat on a single plastic chair in an empty apartment. I e-mailed the test and got in my car and drove across country, back home to Chris (who’d been rehired by the same company that had laid him off) and our new apartment in Brooklyn. I was totally thrilled when I was offered the job: happy to pull up a chair and see how it was done in the big leagues, happy to have a mentor, happy to give myself permission to focus a little bit on my whole life instead of just my career, and to think about having the baby Chris and I had talked about for years.
So Chris and I had the baby, and we bought the house, but then I got fired, and now I was sitting on the sofa and my husband was telling me he wanted to leave me.
After three hours of Chris’s talking and my crying—I got up from the sofa only to turn on the lights and draw the curtains closed when it got dark—nothing was any clearer to me about why this was happening. Once I had moved past the begging and the trying to give him easy reasons why we were having a hard time, I gave in, balled-up tissues all around me on the couch, on the coffee table, on the floor. I let it sink in that he had told me he wanted to leave. I flashed back to the flare-up we’d had the day I wanted him to come to Home Depot with the baby and me. I realized that Chris wanted to be anywhere but here, and worse, that my absence in those past years had suited him more than my presence. Our metaphorical little A-frame house, me leaning into him and him leaning into me, had ceased to be weatherproof. And what was worse, I had no idea when the rain had started coming in.
“Please help me understand,” I said. “If you really think this is over and you are done, I beg you to help me get it, to explain it to me enough so that I can see what you see—why we can’t be together—so I have half a chance of being able to move on and let go.” So I can breathe again someday. So I can be a good mother to your son. So the entirety of these years we shared is not thrown into doubt. So I don’t have to spend the rest of my life with a black spot on my heart, hating you for destroying everything we built together. I knew I might not ever agree with his reason
s about why we couldn’t be together anymore, but I also knew that without understanding at least part of it, I would spend the rest of my life asking the same questions, wondering what I could have done differently to avoid this terrible outcome.
Exhausted and finally empty of words, we went upstairs to sleep in the same bed we’d been sharing for years—in the bedroom across the hall from where our nine-month-old son was asleep in his crib. My heart was sick at the thought of Zack’s losing his family so young. I was sick for myself, too, and worried about Chris and what was happening to him: the man I married, the man I thought I knew so well, whom I still wanted to take care of and love and protect and honor. I lay curled into a ball, my back toward Chris, the way I’d always slept next to him, and wept silently into my pillow until I fell asleep.
The next morning, when I opened my eyes to the sounds of Zack’s cries, the room still gray with darkness, I felt a heavy thud land in my chest. I couldn’t imagine what I had done to make myself feel that way. Did I run over a cat with my car? Not hand in my college term paper? Then the events of the previous night registered, and a split-second later I shifted into the coping mode I know so well. Don’t think about the big picture, I told myself, swinging my bare feet out of bed and onto the bedroom floor, gently sliding shut the shoji screens in my mind so I could pad across the hall and greet my infant son with a smile on my face.
One thing at a time. Gotta get Zack up. Feed him. Spend some time playing on the carpet with him. Take a shower while Chris entertains him for a few minutes. Avoid meeting Chris’s eyes. No, meet his eyes and give a gentle, forgiving smile (which he returns). Okay. It could be worse. Feel the flutter of anxiety flapping in your chest, and will it to calm. Open the closet doors, pick out an outfit. Get ready for the nanny to show up. Hopefully she won’t be late today (the way she’s been late every day). Get out the door. Do you have your keys? Get on the subway, slide through the turnstile, fold into the masses of people who don’t know what’s happening to you. Get to the freelance job in the office tower you’re working in while you’re looking for another full-time job. (I was working with an editor to help inspire and direct her team to dream up the next evolution of her magazine, work that had come to me out of nowhere when I needed it most.) Those morning tasks completed, I could get my morning coffee, sit down at my desk in my temporary office, and then think about my problem, Chris’s unhappiness, and think about the Why. Why was he doing this? What was he trying to escape?
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 4