That couldn’t be the reason! I wanted to shake my fists at him and say “No! No!” I know I wanted Chris to have his turn in our marriage. I had been trying to help him make his own dreams come true all along the way. But I was too afraid to say all that, now that every conversation we had felt like a game of Jenga, every word another small block of wood placed on top of the tower that’s leaning, threatening to topple over and come crashing down. Besides, I wasn’t allowed into the place where his dreams lived and hadn’t been for a long time.
Back in the days just after we were married, Mirabella folded. I didn’t find a magazine job before my severance pay ran out, so I took a job at the J.Crew catalog, which at the time loved to hire magazine editors. I was fascinated by the inner workings of the catalog—I’ve never met a glossy-paper product I didn’t like—and was hired to be the managing editor for the women’s pages during the busiest time of the year, when the fall and holiday catalogs pour forth in an endless stream. But since the catalog doesn’t have stories that need to be dreamed up or edited, the job didn’t demand the same amount of mental real estate that my magazine job had. So I had more time to enjoy myself. More time to be with friends, go to the gym, play video games, carouse. More time to focus on Chris.
One night, as Chris and I were having a conversation about his temp job, and I was suggesting other jobs he could try that might get him closer to his true love, film, he snapped and said, “I’m not your latest project. Don’t try to solve me.” He went on to say that since leaving Mirabella I’d had too much time on my hands and was spending too much time thinking about him, and that he was the one in charge of his life.
Oh. And ouch.
This was the beginning of Chris’s making clear to me that the part of his brain that focused on what Chris loved most (or at least needed most in his life)—his creative work, his ideas and plans for the future—belonged to him alone, and that I wasn’t allowed in. I spent the next nine years of our marriage longing to know that part of him, and at the same time trying to train myself not to ask questions, meddle, or offer suggestions, a mode that cut so deeply against the grain of my entire personality it was almost like asking me to hold my breath forever. I created a story that made it acceptable to me: Chris would share more about his plans when he was further along; he didn’t want to let me in until it was all more real. And I guess that this was the moment in our marriage—just a year after we’d married, in fact—that I started to put my head down and wait for him to want to be with me.
Three years later, when I became the editor in chief of Modern Bride, I suggested to Chris that he could stop working. His frustration at not working on his own projects full-time had turned into a deep hatred of his job; its politics and intractable communication challenges had become a central force in our lives together, a constant low-thrumming background noise, in the same way that the pace and stress of my jobs had. I told him it was all about choices for us at this time: we could move out of the city to New Jersey and get a place we could afford on one salary, or choose a totally different New York City neighborhood in one of the outer boroughs, or make other concessions, have children even later, although I was thirty-one, then thirty-two, then thirty-three and starting to hear the ticking of my clock. But his reaction was the same: “Stop managing my life.” But wait, wasn’t it our life, or our lives? Weren’t we committed to drawing the road map together, commingling dreams and goals, and practicing the act of compromise all along the way? Clearly Chris and I had very different ideas about how that shared path gets built (Reason #164); we were pretty far into a marriage for me to be discovering this now.
But the fault line didn’t feel obvious then. Even in hindsight it still doesn’t seem that clear. Every couple struggles; coupledom is a constant renegotiation of agreements and boundaries. How are you supposed to know which of the little emotional pebbles that trip you up is the one that’s actually the tip of an iceberg, something huge and immovable lurking beneath the surface of your relationship?
The pressure and excitement of almost having the Redbook job was starting to mount. Magazine publishing is a small world, so some chatter had started that the current editor of the magazine might be replaced, and my name was appearing on the gossip-generated “short list.” To everyone who asked I denied I was in the running but one day, my name made it into a published item in one of the trade newspapers that cover the publishing business; I flinched, hoping it wouldn’t hurt my chances.
My office phone rang, and I picked it up. It was Eliot Kaplan from Hearst, calling to ask me casually what my plans were for the upcoming Fourth of July holiday weekend. Where would I be? Would I have my cell phone with me? I had no plans, except to be home with Chris and Zack, enjoying the backyard and pretending we were doing fine. I assumed he was asking so that Cathie would be able to reach me, so I spent the entire weekend with my cell phone in my hand, staring at it and willing it to ring with what I hoped was an offer, not a letdown. Nothing. It went on like this for almost ten days, with me literally jumping every time the phone rang. Then, finally, I picked up my phone at my office on Wednesday morning the next week, and it was Cathie Black. I excused myself to stand up and close my office door, and then, after a few pleasantries (and me trying to stay calm and cool), she said, “So, you ready to have some fun?”
“Definitely,” I said.
And then she offered me the job. I was grinning so wide I thought my bottom jaw would drop off and clatter onto my desk, while I took furious notes on a scrap of paper as she explained when the announcement would be made, when she would introduce me to the team, and when I would start—which was essentially as soon as I could realistically wrap up my current work commitment, in less than two weeks.
I hung up the phone and leapt up out of my chair, punching my fists up into the air as I jumped up and down, silently hissing “Yesss! Yesss! Yesss!” Then I stopped. Who to call first? Chris? I felt sandbagged by the thought that he wouldn’t be coming along with me for this ride. I pushed it out of my head and dialed him. “That’s great. That’s so great. Good for you. Congratulations,” he said warmly, genuinely. When I got home that night he gave me a big hug. It felt so good, to be held by this man I trusted, who’d been with me through so much. Did we still have a chance?
I was a magazine editor who had revitalized a bridal magazine shortly after she herself got married—as the press release the company issued the day they announced my hiring said. And I was going to do the same thing for a magazine that was largely about marriage and the grown-up life that goes along with it. What it didn’t say, of course, was that my own grown-up life was falling to pieces.
* * *
Two weeks before I was named the editor in chief of Redbook, I had made an appointment for Chris and me to go talk to my shrink. I had seen Dr. Glassman when I started having panic attacks after my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, but when I got pregnant with Zack, I felt a lot of my issues fade into the background, and I stopped seeing her. But now I suggested to Chris that we go talk to her: that we couldn’t, just shouldn’t, consider breaking up without talking to someone to help us clarify what was coming between us.
Chris and I had tried marriage counseling before, when I was the one having doubts about where we were headed. After living mostly apart for the year that I worked in San Francisco, Chris and I had reunited in New York City in August 2001. We were already trying to adjust to coming back to New York—to living together full-time again, to Chris’s trying to find work after he’d lost his job in the AOL–Time Warner merger—when the 9/11 attacks happened and turned everything in the world (and especially in New York City) upside down. Chris was really angry at the world for all its stupidity, and I, as usual, was coping by trying to forge ahead and define the future; for me this translated to becoming obsessed with buying a house or an apartment. And we were arguing—a lot. We agreed that we wanted to buy a home and that we wanted to start a family, but everything else was up in the air.
&nbs
p; I wanted to buy a big place in a developing neighborhood: a brownstone in one of the neighborhoods “in transition” in Brooklyn, possibly in Clinton Hill, or a big, family-size apartment almost anywhere except the fancy neighborhoods we couldn’t afford. Chris didn’t want to live in a fringe neighborhood; he wanted to be somewhere central, but at the same time, he was insisting on an extra bedroom he could use as an office. I kept trying to explain that we couldn’t have both the nice neighborhood and an extra bedroom, but I failed at being nice about it (Reason #176). Chris told me I was a snob (Reason #177), that it mattered too much to me what the place looked like. I was confused by how I could be the snob in this scenario, and after another one of our circular arguments, I remember screaming at him—something about if he wanted to go back to the East Village and Dumpster-dive for his dinner because it was so bleeping glamorous to be poor and cool, then fine, he could go hang out there with his friends. I didn’t understand what was so bad about having Nice Things. What was so bad about having made some money and wanting to buy a nice apartment?
One night as Chris was heading down into the bedroom in our apartment after another real estate discussion, I said cautiously, “I think we want really different things. I think maybe this is a problem.”
He stopped dead on the stairs and spoke up at me, his voice rising in pitch. “What do you mean? You think we shouldn’t be together?”
I said I wasn’t sure, but that it seemed clear we were not in agreement about what was next. So I suggested counseling, and got a name from Dr. Glassman. In the first two sessions, Chris was practically silent, giving one-word answers to the therapist’s questions. He kept focusing on whether my unhappiness was his fault and what he had done to trigger it. I focused on telling him it wasn’t about whose “fault” it was, it was just that maybe we imagined such different lives for ourselves that we wouldn’t be able to find the middle ground. But after those two sessions, the therapist stopped plumbing our disagreements about our shared road map and started investigating my complicated relationship to my parents’ marriage. She said point-blank to me—as I tried to tell her that I was perfectly aware that my parents’ relationship had shaped my sense of the world, but that Chris and I didn’t think that that was at play in the dynamic between him and me right now—that until I was ready to be really married to Chris instead of my mother, she didn’t see how it was possible for the two of us to find a way to work things out.
I cried in Chris’s arms the whole way home on the subway as he comforted me, telling me that I was fine and she was wrong. I was mad and sad and angry and disbelieving that somehow the therapist had collected enough information in three sessions to decide that this was all my fault. I’d always feared that everything bad in my life was somehow my fault, my responsibility. I had spent a good piece of my adult life separating my sense of my own relationships from what I’d seen in my family when I was growing up. I had a lot of empathy for both of my parents for not getting what they needed, and for not being able to figure out a way to make their relationship more satisfying at that phase in their lives. I had prayed for them to break up and free each other when I was in high school and college, and beyond. But when they did break up, at my mother’s insistence, the year Chris and I got engaged, my mother was surprised to find that she slammed headfirst into a wall of grief. And my father, after a few short months of enjoying bachelor life and the quiet in his apartment, decided that maybe life was too quiet. My parents came back together because, it turns out, the life they’d built—a home they both loved, a shared appreciation for a good meal and the rewards of entertaining, a love of antiques, and a bottomless passion for exploring small inns up and down the East Coast—seemed bigger than the sum total of all the reasons they rubbed each other the wrong way. Because sometimes the marriage built over time is bigger and stronger than all the Why-Nots. I wanted this to be true for Chris and me now. As Chris kept rubbing my back and smoothing my hair on the subway, I felt the gentle “click” of why I was with him, of why I trusted him and loved him, and I felt him reconnect with me as well. It was because he took care of me when I needed it most, and I took care of him by running our life and making the plans. We went to the counseling session the following week and told the therapist that we were past our crisis and didn’t need to see her anymore.
So now, three years later, we were heading to counseling together again to try to come to an agreement about all our why-nots. When I met up with Chris in the reception area of Dr. Glassman’s office one night after work, he was brusque and short with me, clearly unhappy to be there. I felt a twinge of guilt that I was torturing him by insisting that we try to find ways to stay together. But when we got into the office, Chris didn’t need any prompting to get started. He had plenty to say, enumerating all the reasons I wasn’t a happy person: Nothing was ever enough. I had never been happy in any of my jobs. I was always looking for the next thing, the next opportunity, the next project, whether at home or at work. I didn’t know how to just be happy. I was always creating conflict. I didn’t get along with people. I just sat there, mute, stunned by his picture of me, and not really recognizing the person he was describing. I’ve always been known as a team builder. I’m a boss people like to work for because I don’t create drama. Yes, I’m a dramatic personality, but what I want is for people to focus on doing great work, not waste energy on office politics. Wasn’t this the man who knew me best? I got that strange, awful feeling again of having no idea who I was.
When Dr. G. asked me what I felt about all he was saying, I didn’t know how to respond. I started to cry. I said, “I don’t know who he’s talking about.” I talked about my sense of our marriage: how Chris had been disappearing from me, that he didn’t want to spend time together anymore, that he didn’t even seem engaged with Zack. Chris responded by sharing his total sense of fatigue at our life. He said that he felt overwhelmed by everything, and that he hated that I always knew what to do, as a mother, as a homeowner, “even though I know she doesn’t know any more than I do. She just does it.”
He hated me for being capable. For dealing. For buckling down and handling the stress of life. For being someone who attracted stress into our life. For being someone who liked challenges. For being the person who would step in when he had to step out.
I’d been feeling optimistic when we walked in—Okay! Here we are! Let’s face our problems together!—but now I was feeling the sick weight of something else. I was afraid. Afraid of Chris. Somewhere deep inside my brain, I’d been having this thought for a long time; it felt familiar, like a spot I’d rubbed shiny over the years, and yet it was the first time I had brought it out from behind the shoji screen where I stored the things I didn’t want to know, the feelings I didn’t want to have. I had been afraid that he was going to do exactly what he was doing now: walk away from the life we’d made together. I had felt his gathering unhappiness for many years, and I’d hunkered down and tried to wait him out. As I began to describe the fear that was engulfing me, Chris snorted in derision. He thought of me as the one in charge (Reason #225). But I had fallen in love with him because he had been bigger than me, and he had loved me in a way that made me feel small. It was why I believed I needed him if I were to get the job at Redbook: after days at work being the one in charge, I needed the balance of coming home to him and being a person with needs and uncertainties, being life-size.
At the end of this long, hard hour, Dr. G. summed up what she’d seen. “You two are pretty far apart,” she said. “And I’m not sure that joint counseling will really help you where you are right now.” I was stunned. Somehow Chris and I had ended up in two totally different countries, even though we had shared the same zip code, the same home, the same bed for more than thirteen years. And there were a hundred reasons that had led to that. Not just #1, or #2. Or even trusty old #102.
4
You Can Handle
More Than You Think
(But a Little Denial Helps)
At first
I told no one. Not even my closest friends, the ones who already knew everything about me, where the bodies from my past were buried. I was trying to keep the secret of what was happening even from myself.
I imagined the changing shape of my life in tiny, superficial slices, as if I were trying on the idea of being One of Those People Who Are Divorced. I let out a sigh of relief that I hadn’t changed my name, so I wouldn’t have to change it back and live with that public expression of my failure. Then I felt suddenly dismayed that my son didn’t have my last name. I made casual mental lists of what furniture Chris would want and what furniture I would fight for. I thought of myself as a statistic, and counted the number of divorced people I knew. I mused over the fact that I had been the first of my college friends to marry and now I was going to be first to divorce. This did not make me feel like a pioneer in a way that I liked. All these thoughts were a way of dipping my toe into the waters of change as if I were getting ready to slip into a warm bath.
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 7