I am the queen of Why. I have lived my whole life looking closely at people’s actions, searching for the little clues that they can’t help but put out, like fine threads sticking up from their clothing. I tug on those loose filaments and follow them until I can suss out the motivation each is attached to. I don’t think people do inexplicable things. I think they do things with reasons and rewards attached that I can’t immediately see, because I am not living their lives, their fears, their dreams. I started following the whys when I was growing up in my family full of drama and personalities, and riven with quiet currents of discontent. I refined that skill as a magazine editor, imagining the complexities of my readers’ lives and defining their core emotional desires to direct how each magazine I’ve worked for connects with them, those millions of people I’ll never have the pleasure of meeting. How is it that we become who we are? How do we know what we want? This is my daily daydreaming.
As I sat at my desk and thought about Chris and our marriage, I felt as though I were staring into a washing machine, watching all the events of our life whirling around, my eyes straining to pick out a single detail from the churn. I felt the thrum of anxiety somewhere behind my breastbone. If I thought about it all too long, it felt like I was in the washer myself, flipping over and over, no way to know which way was up or how to get my feet back on solid ground. I kept trying to slow my thoughts so that I could wrap my head around the situation and come up with the exact reasons why Chris was feeling like he had no choice but to leave our marriage. If I could do that, I could sort out this mess and get our relationship back on track.
After having to admit to myself that it wasn’t just the barbecue that had brought us here, I clung to the notion that Chris was having an extended panic attack in response to all the new responsibilities in our life. Everyone has some post-baby panic, right? That explanation seemed logical. More important, it made the problem seem solvable. It meant I could alleviate the pressure on him, I could make room for him in whatever way he needed. I might not be the smartest or the luckiest woman I know, but I have always been willing to work harder than anyone else. I could do more, I could learn to live with less, even though I’d already been learning to live with less for so long: less help, less partner, less love, less him.
And so for weeks after the conversation on the couch, for weeks after my first subway ride trying to figure out Why, I tiptoed around in my life, trying to be the perfect wife and mother and to protect Chris. I tried to show him that this life could be good (not yet accepting that it was exactly this life that he didn’t want, even though he had told me that quite clearly). I cooked dinner almost every night that summer, standing at the grill. I did as much of the child care on my own as I could, taking just two or three hours on weekends to run errands without Zack. I gardened and grew five kinds of heirloom tomatoes in our backyard. I mowed the lawn and cut back the grapevines that were engulfing our pergola. I prepped all of Zack’s weekday meals and did our laundry and ran the nanny schedule. I kept working on little details in the house, making it more comfortable and more beautiful, without asking for his help. I was always suggesting to Chris that he go upstairs and into his office after dinner, to work for a while, to be with just himself, to see how that could fit into our family life.
But even amid this wifely martyrdom, I failed: I forgot to water the lawn (all six-by-ten feet of it), creating a dust bowl in our backyard—and yet another time-consuming task (reseeding the lawn) that I would need Chris’s help with. I threw a big family party for Zack’s first birthday and, apparently not having internalized the lesson of the barbecue (although I did order absolutely every single other scrap of food for the party), I decided to make a birthday cake, in the shape of four baby blocks that spelled out Z-A-C-K. My mother had always made the most amazing cakes for me and I wanted to do the same for my son. I took shortcuts to simplify the process, but it still took the better part of two days to make the cake, and I was ashamed of my bad judgment. As I frosted the cake, Zack whined at my feet, wanting some of my attention, and my mother-in-law, who’d come into town for the party, wondered aloud why I was making the cake because all Zack really wanted was me. Chris sat stonily silent next to her. I knew what he was thinking. I could feel it all the way across the room. He was hating me. I wondered how it was possible for Barb not to feel the force of it, too, as she sat smack dab in the middle of the psychic pathway running between Chris and me.
The last thing I wanted to be doing was giving him new reasons to hate me.
At night, I could feel other reasons sneaking into my head. I caught glimpses of where Chris and I didn’t see eye to eye, the parts of me that I didn’t necessarily even like myself, the instances in our marriage in which I had been selfish or mean or ungenerous, the moments when I had doubted our relationship. Maybe I was a bad person. Maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was. Maybe I was unlovable.
It turns out that the first weeks and months (and, let’s be honest, even years) of breaking up are about unearthing all the whys that might have paved the hidden path that has led to the end of your marriage. First you dwell in the whys you create for your husband. And then on those that he serves up, which you instantly try to bat away. The whys offered up by friends and neighbors and coworkers, which come at you unbidden before you are strong enough to hear them. And even the whys of strangers you run into in your daily life, the curbside prophets and checkout-line shrinks, people to whom you blurt your story, in that strange intimacy that being strangers affords. Because such people know nothing about me, I find it easy to bestow upon them the power of oracles, as if their insights into my situation had been handed down from the heavens.
The whys are like hats: deep down, I know I don’t look good in one, but I can’t resist trying them on, seduced by their power to flatter and conceal. I was hoping that maybe one of those reasons would reveal the best and nicest and prettiest me. I was looking for the hat that would sit just so, and would hide some of the scars and ugliness I knew were hidden in the story of my marriage, stories I didn’t want anyone else to know, that I myself wasn’t ready to see.
At first I was afraid of what my friends might say to me, of what their insights might reveal to me about my relationship. If I hadn’t had any sense that my marriage was falling apart, then how did I know I knew anything about anything? Maybe I really was an overbearing, miserable, unhappy shrew that no one could love. Maybe Chris was some kind of freak and we should never have married. (But that would be my fault, too, for choosing him.) What if my friends had, for years, been quietly commiserating and wondering just when the hell Chris and I were finally going to admit we were a bad match?
It was upsetting enough that I apparently hadn’t known what Chris was thinking. But if there were people all around me who had a more accurate sense of my life—of me—than I did, I was definitely going to fall apart for good, because my sense of self has always been based on being able to read a room right, to know what people are going through. And to read myself correctly, too. I’m fanatically dedicated to the idea of striving to be honest with myself, to be fearless about knowing and voicing my motivations, desires, complaints, fears, to be in touch with the whole of me. The habit makes it easy to be forgiving of people’s failures, your own included. I’ve always believed it’s the only way to have half a chance of achieving happiness in this complicated world.
Now I could feel that there was actually something worse than watching my happy life disappear, something worse than getting up and going to my freelance job and trying to be the happy-happy wife, trying to cajole and comfort Chris out of what I was sure was just a momentary insanity. It was the empty, sinking feeling of watching my entire sense of self break into a thousand pieces, in the same way that the spaceship breaks up in the Asteroids video game, four little tiny lines just . . . drifting . . . away . . . from one another, disappearing into outer space, becoming so much cosmic junk.
I’ve always thought I was a loving person. But I can rem
ember dozens of times I wasn’t as loving as I could have been with Chris, starting with that moment at the sink when I was washing the arugula. I believe I have a generous spirit, and I can be generous to a fault, always lending people money or an ear and my time when they’re in need. But had I been generous with Chris in the last few years as he started to disappear from me? No, not always. Sometimes I was short with him, and sometimes I was just flat-out pissed that he didn’t want to do what I wanted to do, be where I wanted to be. Direct, honest, truthful, even about the hard stuff in life? My friends have always said that I am the bravest person they know, because of the ways in which I am unafraid to see who people really are, and not judge them. Or that had been me, before I started to feel threatened by Chris’s impatience with me, and began folding into myself, turning away from him as he turned away from me. Simple exchanges and misunderstandings Chris and I had had in our years together seemed suddenly, ominously important. Every single piece of who I thought I was was being called into question as I sifted through our shared history, looking for my answers.
But that sifting only awakened more agony because so much of what I knew about myself I had learned with Chris. I had found my way into a career I’d wanted since I was a child. I had realized that it wasn’t my job to be in charge of my family’s happiness and that I couldn’t fix every crisis that hit my parents or my siblings, whether it was my mother’s colon cancer or my older brother’s nihilistic worldview. I had learned that my way of getting angry took more from me than it helped me. I had started to accept Chris’s version of me, that I did have “so much love to give” to the world, that I really loved people, all people, and wanted them to love themselves, too. I was learning to live in my own quiet spaces, take deep breaths, and slowly accept that even if every dream I ever had didn’t come true, I would be fine; that it didn’t mean I was a failure. Chris had helped me take those lessons in, and now I was going to have to give it all back.
At one point when Chris and I were talking about the logistics of breaking up, I couldn’t stand the exhausting pressure on my brain anymore. I stood up and screamed at him: “How are you just going to get up and go? You have half of me in your brain! How is it possible that you get to just walk out the door and take that part of me with you?” He had shared ownership of so many of my memories. He got to live my youth with me. He was the person who—besides me—knew my family best, and who could read its underground tremors almost as well as I could. He had been with me as my older brother careened through a crisis that started with the high-risk birth of his daughter, Anna, and ended years later when her mother passed away suddenly, leaving Gregg and his girlfriend, Melissa, to become full-time parents to a grieving child. He could do a perfect imitation of my father. He knew that my younger brother, Scott, was a real softie with a big heart. He was the person who knew the scared, sad girl who lived inside me that I didn’t let anyone see. He was the only person in my family who could out-talk and out-argue my mother as the two of them lamented the fallibility of the world’s politicians and business leaders. He was the man I had a secret language with, the weird half-words we’d made up that meant “I love you” only to us.
I was going to have to start over and remake myself from scratch. The very thought of it gave me a tingling sensation that fizzled somewhere deep in my chest and right out to my fingers and toes, as if someone were taking an eraser and starting to blur my edges. Whenever I felt that zing creep into my consciousness, I would get up and dance, shaking my arms and jumping up and down to keep myself from disappearing into fears that were so big I couldn’t even name them.
For a woman who has lived her life in words—in endless conversations with myself and anyone around me, in dreaming up my own big, minutely detailed plans for life, and in decoding and predicting people’s motivations and actions—the big, blank, indescribable blackness of the fears I was feeling was worst of all. I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to strain to see into the dark, into the things I didn’t want to know, to find out the Why of my divorce. But I didn’t have a choice. The why was the only thing I could try to understand in a world where everything I had come to trust and thought I knew had been torn from my grasp and ripped to shreds.
In June, Chris and I were invited to go out to Amagansett on Long Island for a weekend at our friends Rose and Scott’s beach house. Four couples would be there, all the people with whom we’d spent much of our time before marriage and babies had pulled us into different orbits. Two of the husbands, Charlie and Paul, had been my very best friends for my first decade in New York, and we’d spent many long-winded evenings at the Old Town Bar, eating chicken wings, downing pitchers of beer, and generally amusing ourselves. I missed those days: having a baby had separated the boys from the girls, and I didn’t really see Paul or Charlie that much anymore.
I was very excited to get Rose’s e-mail. A weekend at the beach sounded great. It would be a small, sunny reprieve from the grind of what we were trying to live through. I told Chris when I got home from work and he shrugged and made a face. “I don’t like the beach,” he said.
My stomach sank in disappointment. “I know, but it would be so fun for Zack. And to get to see all the other babies . . .” I trailed off, embarrassed to be caught in thinking that we had been doing kind of okay, sailing along even though we had a cannonball hole gaping in our prow. I had thought it might be good for Chris and me to be with old friends. I said so to Chris.
“They’re not my friends, they’re your friends,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, surprised and confused. I dug back into the memory banks: I’d met Charlie when I started working at Mirabella, and Chris and I started dating just six months later. Chris was already my boyfriend when I met everyone else. He’d spent plenty of nights at Old Town with all the guys and me, and then later with the girlfriends who became wives: Rose and Lisa and Marnie and our friend Steffi. We’d shared a summer house in upstate New York for two or three summers with different combinations of the couples. The whole extended group of us had vacationed together in the South of France one summer, renting a farmhouse and sharing big, communal meals of foods we’d bought at the markets. These friends made up most of our social life, so of course I thought they were “our friends.” Chris’s comment made me see that he was already shrugging off pieces of the life we’d shared, like a snake shedding a skin, revealing the new him.
Then I thought about all our other friends, and realized that yes, there was a group of them I would have called “Chris’s friends.” They were his best friends and roommates from his NYU college days: Matt, who’d been the best man at our wedding; red-haired Bill; and Eric Voelker, whom we always referred to by his last name only. Those were the guys we spent all our time with when we first started going out, trolling the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side for cheap bands and cheap beer. But we saw them less and less together, because I didn’t want to go see cheap bands and drink cheap beer anymore, although we still had homemade dinners and movie nights at our place with the three guys from time to time. Usually I’d go out to dinner with Alix or Eric, and Chris would go out for beers with Bill and Voelker. It seemed like a good, smart way to maximize our time apart; it hadn’t occurred to me to think of that division as a fault line in our relationship. I wondered how it is that you live a life and don’t see it clearly until a threat brings it all into focus.
So I let idea of the weekend at the beach drop, confused by all it had brought up between us. But the next day Chris told me he’d changed his mind and thought that it would be great for Zack to get to see the beach and that we should go. Zack was at this point a chunky ten-month-old, but it’s amazing how much personality can fit into a baby of that size. He was a fast crawler and an avid explorer, and was really gregarious and outgoing. Every morning as I sat on the sofa and put on my makeup, he would pull himself up by holding on to the windowsill and wait for the garbagemen to come down our street. The days they did he waved furiously at them, slapping his fat
hand on the window to get their attention; they rewarded him with funny faces and waves of their own. Zack’s happy spirit made the after-work hours in the house bearable. Chris and I had a ray of light to focus on together. It was only after Zack went to bed that I felt the discomfort between Chris and me flood back into the room.
The eternal optimist in me thought it would be good to be away, to be in a group of friends who all had babies the same age: four kids under a year old. We would share the hassles and hilarities of parenting, be unified in having to troop back to the house from the beach for naps, and be able to tolerate the occasional tantrum, because we’d all been there. I thought it might help Chris see that our life wasn’t any different from anyone else’s, that this is what the first year with a baby is like. So we took a Friday off from work, packed up our swimsuits and sun hats, and headed out to the Hamptons—immediately finding ourselves in slow-moving traffic along with thousands of other New Yorkers who’d had the same idea.
I’ve always been the driver in our relationship, because Chris doesn’t like to drive, and doesn’t particularly like or trust cars. (Well, actually, what he doesn’t trust is the other drivers.) Chris had to drive us all home from the hospital after the baby was born, and the stress of that trip alone—as Chris negotiated packed Manhattan streets, painfully aware of the precious cargo in the rear—aged us all. As the daughter of two avid car fans, and a sister of not one but two mechanics, I know and love driving. Unless there’s a lot of traffic. Unless I get lost. Unless Chris is sitting in the seat next to me, stewing because he knows I’m tense, tense because he knows I’m stewing.
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 5