Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

  The wedding was scheduled for Sunday, and by Saturday night what was done was done as far as the Redbook event was concerned. So Chris, Zack, and I went off to the rehearsal dinner, which was being held in a barn. I was genuinely happy for Tina and Matt, but also filled with sadness, remembering my own wedding day, when I was surrounded by many of these same friends I love so much. I had felt so confident that Chris and I would clear life’s obstacles together. Trying to put a good face on things between Chris and me exhausted me more than I would have guessed. I was desperate to have my friends’ comfort about what I was going through, but I simply couldn’t tell them yet. I couldn’t afford the luxury of falling apart because I was taking care of Zack, and taking care of Chris, too.

  Chris hates social gatherings like these. He’s a world-class talker; get him started, especially on the topics of film, TV, and underground humor, and he is an incredibly detailed conversationalist, and a hard one to stop once he gets going, but he’s a little shy. He is also harshly judgmental of most social conventions, because he considers them fake. For years I’d been scooting to his side at parties to introduce topics of mutual interest to help grease the wheels when he was meeting friends and acquaintances of mine. And so much small talk in New York City, a town in love with achievement above all else, inevitably starts with the question “And so what do you do?” That is the question Chris hates above all, not wanting to be defined by someone else’s idea of success, not wanting to be defined by the jobs he’s held simply to make money and not because they were his passion. One time I saw Chris talking to Tina at a party, not looking at her, but staring down at the ground. I approached just in time to hear Chris saying, “I sleep, I eat, I work. Then I eat and then sleep and then work. Eat. Sleep. Work. Eatsleepwork. That’s what I do.” Uh-oh.

  So I had my radar on high alert, especially because Chris had been prickly and unhappy for most of the weekend, annoyed that I was busy with preparing for the Redbook event. I worked hard at the rehearsal dinner, checking in on him often, to save him from people or conversations that might annoy him, to give him a break from Zack when he needed it, or to hand Zack off to him when he needed the distraction from the party around him. When we got back to the guest house that night, he and Z went right to bed, and I sat downstairs with Eric for a late-night catch-up. I confided in Eric that trying to keep Chris in a good frame of mind while also running the event back in New York was stressing me in the extreme, but that I didn’t know how not to feel responsible for making Chris happy. I thanked Eric for being willing to help Chris get Zack home, but in my heart I knew the trip was going to be a nightmare, no matter how much help Chris had, because he was so angry that he was at the wedding, surrounded with exactly the kinds of things he doesn’t like and tries to avoid. For the ten-thousandth time since all this had started, I felt guilty for being me.

  The next day, the wedding was beautiful, despite the fact that a steady drizzle dampened the proceedings. Tina and Matt exchanged vows by the marina, small craft bobbing in the water in front of them. The bride and groom were beaming as if the sun were shining, even though I could see the tiny drops of water plink-plink-plinking off the end of Tina’s nose from where I stood at her side, clutching my bouquet. I was going to miss all the fun and festivities after the ceremony; as soon as we got to the restaurant where the reception was being held—by which time the sun had broken through the clouds, offering its glorious benediction—a car arrived to pick me up for the long drive back to the airport. It’s decidedly unfun to have to leave a party that hasn’t started and know that everyone will have a blast without you—in this case, of course, everyone except my husband. I got into the car, feeling sick again that I had no judgment, and that clearly this whole uncomfortable weekend was my fault. But after a few minutes on that nauseating train of thought, I just slid the shoji screen shut—shhhhhhp—and snapped into gear, thinking about what lay ahead the next day.

  When I pulled up at my house six hours later, I was exhausted. I dragged my suitcase into the front hallway, picked up the mail off the floor, and turned on the living room lights. I walked over to the door to the basement, opened the door, and flicked on the light. My stomach dropped. Water was up to the third riser of the staircase, higher than I’d ever seen it. Worse, it wasn’t even raining outside. That meant the drains hadn’t drained and the pump hadn’t pumped. I crept down a few steps and peered into the room: the sofa was floating several feet away from the wall it had once stood against; the downstairs refrigerator was pitched sideways and bobbing on the black water, its door wide open; leaves and gunk clung to the walls four feet from the floor, marking the height the water had reached in the three days of storms. The pilot lights for the furnace and water heater would have been extinguished, and there was no way to get them relit with two feet of filthy rainwater still in the room.

  I padded up the stairs, turned off the light, and gently closed the door, deciding that I would think about all that another day. I was learning that I could handle the truth of my life, the bigness of it all and the disaster unfolding within it, only in small pieces. Getting the water out of the basement tonight was not going to solve the larger problem, and so it would have to wait. You can handle more than you think, I told myself. You can handle more than you think by not thinking about things all the time, by not thinking about things all at once, by not being all-or-nothing—which had been my favorite way to be until all this had started to unfold.

  I didn’t love having to learn a new way to be, but it looked like I didn’t have a choice.

  I crawled into bed in the dark alone, the crib in the room next door empty for the first time since Zack was born, and I felt that emptiness in my heart and throat. I was spending my first night away from my son, except I was home and he was not. Everything in my life was backward. I let out a long sigh and willed myself to sleep.

  The next day I got out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and woke myself up with a cold shower, since there was no hot water to be had. I got in a car, carrying my outfit in a garment bag, and was driven into Manhattan in the dark, to kick off the final hours of prep for the event—hair and makeup, speech run-through, microphone checks, place card adjustments—while a team of caterers and florists put everything into place. Two celebrities didn’t show at the last minute, but John Kerry’s presence in the room was electric. I spoke, telling the crowd that some of the grandest victories and achievements in life—rebounding from rape to become a spokesperson for sex crime victims; extending a helping hand to terminally ill children in hospitals—start with the smallest steps.

  That speech was for the room, of course, and to honor the brave actions our honorees had taken. But there was a message in it for me, too: Take small steps. Do one thing at a time. Be a hundred percent where you are when you are there. That afternoon, I was fully in that room, and very proud of what we were celebrating. At that moment I was also proud of me, and all I’d done to get here. The next morning, the front page of the New York Times carried a huge photo of John Kerry at Lincoln Center, standing in front of the magenta backdrop at our event, arms outstretched.

  Chris and Zack came back from Maine that night, Chris exhausted and undone by the trip, as if he’d had to fly Zack home on his back. He basically handed Zack into my arms and stomped up the stairs, leaving a trail of dissatisfaction and blame that I could tell had my name all over it as he disappeared into his office. I’d known this is how this trip would turn out. When would I stop waiting for Chris to become somebody he wasn’t? When would I stop failing as a human being?

  I was slowly learning the truth that would get me through the process of having my life and house fall apart around me: I could keep two opposing thoughts about myself in my head at the same time and know they were both true.

  I am a Mess. I am Fine.

  I didn’t have to choose one idea and dwell in it. When I tried, I would only find myself seesawing wildly between the two, anyway, as I collected evidence for the alternative. I came to work c
rying today; that means I am a Mess and I should quit my job before someone discovers what I wreck I am. Or Wow! I actually really just had a fun two hours playing with Zack in the park even though we are surrounded by two-parent families that make my heart ache. I can do this; I can be a single mother and figure out how to live on my own and be Fine! Since I didn’t know what to believe anymore, I decided I would just give myself permission to believe it all, and try to learn to live in the quiet balancing point of In Between.

  The only problem was that resting in the In Between felt like slowing to a halt. I just hated feeling stuck, not knowing where Chris and I were going, as if I were a butterfly whose wings had been pinned. I tried to remind myself that the calm of not moving, of being in the balance, was the reward, and that trying to flap my wings against all I didn’t know didn’t get me anywhere. I had to find a way to set aside my most trusted coping skill—charging into tomorrow by sheer force of will—and learn how to be still.

  It doesn’t matter how many times we hear the aphorism “Want to make God laugh? Make plans” and knowingly chuckle at its bittersweet truth, because making plans is what we humans do. Now the plans Chris and I had made as a couple were being undone as Chris pulled away from me. I felt every single withdrawal, like an octopus releasing its grasp, one suction cup at a time—pop! pop! pop!—leaving dents in my spirit, signs of what once was there.

  Especially because Chris was still there, eating dinner with me most nights, spending weekends with Zack and me, sleeping in our bed. We didn’t talk about breaking up every day, and sometimes we didn’t talk about it for two or three weeks; it was easy to be lulled back into the normalcy of day-to-day life.

  October 1, our tenth wedding anniversary, was looming large on the calendar. I couldn’t stand the thought of limping across the finish line, making it to ten years of marriage and not acknowledging it, even if we didn’t ultimately stay together. I cautiously asked Chris after dinner one night if he thought maybe we should go away and try to celebrate the anniversary, since not everyone makes it to ten, even though we didn’t know what was going to happen with us; my voice rose at the end of every phrase like a teenager’s. As I asked the question, I felt like I was standing there naked, covered in Sterno, and Chris had a lit match. I said we could take off one day from work, have the nanny stay for the weekend, and go up to the mountains somewhere, be alone together for the first time since Zack was born. “Okay,” he said. I couldn’t read what was in that “okay,” but it seemed straightforward enough.

  And so I hit the Internet in a whirlwind of research and tried to find the perfect place for us to go. Most places within easy driving distance were booked already, so I ended up choosing a breathtakingly beautiful hotel in the Berkshires that still had rooms available—probably because the rooms were breathtakingly expensive. For me, rationalizing the cost was easy. If the weekend away gave Chris and me a chance to reconnect and remember all the reasons—heck, even some of the reasons—that we’d married, then it would be worth it. And if it failed, then at least I’d tried, and hadn’t let this opportunity slip through our fingers.

  I made the reservations and had my assistant send out an e-mail to the staff letting them know I’d be out of the office next Friday “celebrating my tenth wedding anniversary.” It looked good on e-mail, I thought. I could almost will myself to believe that we were going under circumstances as happy as they seemed. I leaned a little bit more into my denial and crossed my fingers. Kim, who’d left Marie Claire and joined me at Redbook, came into my office later that day and said, “That e-mail was weird.” I was too embarrassed to tell Kim that the wording was mine. Sometimes it still felt good to pretend.

  My denial manifested itself in other ways as well. I kept buying tickets for Chris and me for theater and concert events that were months in the future, unable to stop myself from living in the Maybe. Maybe we’ll still be together by then, and wouldn’t we be sad if we didn’t have tickets. I also stopped writing in my journal, in which I usually jotted brief updates about what was happening in my life and in my head. In the two years leading up to the divorce, I made only one entry, just days after that first conversation with Chris on the sofa. The entry is written in a whisper, in light pencil, and my handwriting is this small. Now that’s denial. Everything that was happening seemed so big I didn’t even attempt to write about it. How could I have made sense of it in a journal entry? Especially since circumstances kept getting more and more challenging. After Chris and I had made our plans to go away for our anniversary and I’d made arrangements with the nanny to stay for the weekend, suddenly she asked me for a cash loan, intimating a complicated personal problem. This tipped my personal-crisis scale into overload: I can handle a lot of pressure, but to be uncertain about my son’s daily care? It was unsettling beyond words. So maybe a diary entry for that moment would have looked like this:

  Dear Diary,

  My life is a sick joke. I am living a literary allegory, having the foundation of my house give way at the same time that the foundation of my very life is crumbling. Chris is leaving me and the house is falling apart, taking in sewer water in the basement and leaking tears from the roof. Boo-hoo-hoo. And just when it seems things can’t possibly get any worse, they do! To wit: I had to fire my nanny today, after giving her an envelope stuffed with cash. Cash I need to fix my messed-up house, but oh well. This nanny loved my son like crazy, but I think she hated me. She was late every single day, no matter how I begged and pleaded and bribed her to be on time. And then she asked me if she could borrow a large sum of money to help her with a personal problem. Very uncomfortable. So I decided to just cut my losses and move on. Yes, dear Diary, I did.

  Unfortunately, I had to fire her the day before Chris and I intended to go away to “celebrate” our “tenth” “wedding anniversary,” so now I don’t have anyone to take care of Zack. Of course, that’s how these things go. I called my parents to help me, but that meant that I was subject to my engineer father’s running me through seventeen alternate scenarios in which (1) the nanny would not have needed the money, (2) she would not have needed it by today so that I wouldn’t have had to let her go today, and (3) my wedding anniversary would not have been October 1, this weekend, so that (4) I would not be asking them to step in and take care of Zack so Chris and I can go away. It’s not that Dad doesn’t want to do it; it’s just that he would have liked a few more days to mentally prepare for taking care of my son in my house (my father likes surprises even less than Chris, but that’s an engineer for you). Right, I should have gotten married October 8. I’ll get right on that, revise history. That will fix everything.

  Oh, and did I tell you, dear Diary, that I’m running a magazine all about women and love and marriage and stuff? Isn’t it rich?

  My parents did come to the rescue, along with a consortium of friends, and Chris and I did get to go away. We drove four hours without incident or traffic, and as we pulled into the crushed-stone driveway of the hotel, a grand mansion that had been refurbished by two modern architects, a fleet of bellmen descended upon the car, greeted me by name, and whisked away our bags. I was entranced by the hotel and its manicured expanse of green lawn, but I tensed up. This place was too fancy for Chris; he had a hard time feeling like himself in posh surroundings. So before we even got into our beautiful room with its view of the lake and the trees starting to don their fall colors, I was on guard. We managed to drink the champagne that was waiting for us in our room and lavish some sexual attention on each other and eat our gourmet dinner. The next day, we took in the view from our stone balcony overlooking the lake and walked through picturesque towns, but the undercurrent of tension was impossible to ignore. It wasn’t miserable, it wasn’t awful, we didn’t fight. In the end, I thought it had been a good thing to do.

  But just a few weeks later, after another night of my cooking dinner and Chris’s putting the dishes in the dishwasher, and the two of us settling down into our evening routine after I put Zack to bed—TV
and the sofa for Chris, reading manuscripts at the kitchen table for me—I tried to start a conversation with Chris about where he thought we were as a couple. He was dismissive, and didn’t turn his attention away from the television. It was clear I was annoying him. I started to get upset and snapped at him, “If we are supposed to be trying to work on our marriage, do you think you could take part in this conversation?”

  He whipped his head around to face me. “I’m not trying. I am done trying. I am waiting for you to be finished trying.” And then he turned back toward the television, raising the volume to erase whatever I might say next.

  It was as if he had slapped me across my face.

  “You are still coming home and eating dinners I cook for you?” I gasped, as I stood up from the kitchen table. “And sleeping next to me in our bed? When did you decide you were finished trying? When were you planning on telling me?” I backed away toward the stairs, my old habits of self-protection kicking in now that I knew for sure I was sleeping with the enemy. Why did we go away for our anniversary if we weren’t still trying? Why had he agreed to take the trip? Why had he made love to me all those days?

  “It was goodbye,” he said simply.