A Beautiful, Terrible Thing

by Jen Waite

  “OK, that’s really good to know.” I immediately feel better.

  “But let me ask you something else. What is it you’re looking for exactly when you check Marco’s profile? You already have a ton of proof of his affair.”

  “Good question.” I sit back against the couch and ponder her question for a moment. “You know, I think there’s still a large part of my brain that wants to actually see an interaction between the two of them, because he’s still denying that it’s a relationship. He’s basically at this point like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, saying, ‘Huh? I’m not taking a cookie, I swear.’ Even though the broker called me, and I know he had and is almost certainly still having this affair, it’s like the mere fact that he won’t actually own up to it is driving me crazy. Which is probably half the fun for him in continuing to deny it,” I say.

  “No, that makes sense,” Lisa says. “Most men who have affairs either end the affair, or, if they get caught but continue it, they are forced to admit its existence. Marco is seemingly continuing it but still not owning up. He seems adamant in directing attention toward his so-called mental breakdown. So it’s like this elephant in the room. You know the affair happened and is still happening, but he’s acting like it’s all in your imagination. Or that you don’t have a right to focus on it because everyone should be focusing on his mental health.”

  “Right, exactly. If I can just see some actual physical evidence, like a picture or a message between the two of them . . .” My voice trails off. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how that would make me feel,” I admit.

  “Right, well, that’s why I asked in the first place. Because I really do think that you should be heading toward absolutely no contact with Marco. Any contact with him has a negative effect on you and messes with your perception of reality and what you know to be true. He’s living in Crazy Land, and I don’t want you to get dragged there, too.”

  I leave Lisa’s office determined to break contact with Marco once and for all. For two weeks, I try not to respond to his texts—and for two weeks, I fail. They come in every day, dozens of them, and ping-pong between hurtful and cruel and intense love bombing. I am so exhausted that finally, I make a firm decision. I will have no contact with Marco for one week. If I make it through the next week, then I’ll take it from there. One week. I can do this. I send Marco a one-line text: “I’m not going to talk to you for a while.” His response comes in a few minutes later: “Whatever, Jen.”

  The first twenty-four hours of no contact I almost don’t make it. I didn’t realize that the dosing out of negative and positive communication with him was giving me just enough of a high to make it through the day. I have been withdrawing slowly for months now, but having no contact makes me feel like I have gone cold turkey. I feel physically ill; I break into cold sweats. I shake. I have to retreat to my bedroom several times to lay down and cry. The next twenty-four hours are just as bad. I stare at my phone. I take deep breaths. I nurse Louisa as I reread days’ worth of texts from Marco. I look at pictures from our wedding, our honeymoon, my pregnancy. I kiss Louisa’s head over and over, but she is blurry, always blurry. I look at Louisa and I try to see her, to really see her, but instead I see everything that we have lost. I take walks with my mom. I don’t know how to tell her that I am withdrawing from a potent drug, so I say numbly, “This is really hard.” On the third day, on my way to see Lisa, I receive a text from Marco. My adrenaline surges, my eyes focus. “Jennifer, please send me pictures of Louisa. I don’t want to have to take you to court but I will. Thank you.” I bite my nails. I feel sick. I feel guilty. I ask Lisa what to do.

  “You don’t owe him a goddamned thing,” she says immediately. “If you really feel that guilty, send a couple pictures to his parents. If he wants to get a divorce, then fine, let him get a divorce. Let him take you to court.” Her eyes flash. She is angrier than I am.

  “I wish I could be angry. Instead of sad and guilty and heartbroken,” I say.

  “It will come,” Lisa says. “Trust me.”

  —

  THE same night, I get another text from Marco. My hands shake as I unlock my home screen. I am equal parts fearful and eager, like a crack addict picking up a pipe from the sidewalk and sniffing the tip. I brace myself for anger, or worse, something curt and indifferent. Instead, I see a picture of his left hand. His wedding band shines front and center. Underneath the picture is a long paragraph: “I have been doing a lot of thinking lately. I want you to know that I am slowly finding the man that you fell in love with once. I also want you to know that I am never, ever taking off my wedding band. I broke one promise to you and this is a promise that I will not break. I will carry it with me wherever I go. I hope you are doing better than me. Don’t reply. I just wanted you to know.” I read the message five times and then copy and paste the text to Nat.

  “Wow, this must mean that Croella broke up with him, huh?” Nat replies right away.

  I ponder her assumption. Everything I have read about psychopaths so far would indicate that Marco love bombing me in no way means that he has stopped pursuing his other targets. My fingers itch to reply, to connect again. Instead, I research more about psychopathy. I read more about the tactics that psychopaths use during the initial idealize phase, and, to a lesser extent, when they are trying to reel you back in after a discard. I come across an article that discusses at length a tactic called “the pity play.” Because psychopaths tend to target individuals who are especially empathetic and trusting, the best way to win a target is to appeal to her decency. The psychopath will weave an elaborate sob story, pouring his heart out to his target and making her feel not only sympathetic to the psychopath’s “bad luck” but also extremely flattered that the psychopath has chosen her to divulge his deepest secrets to. I think about all those nights spent in dark, musty bars. Marco lowering his eyes and revealing his broken family and living in the shadows illegally for all those years. Me, reaching across the table and touching his arm, so moved at his vulnerability, his raw emotions.

  I text Nat about my new research and the discovery of the pity play.

  Does Marco actually fit the sociopathic profile to a T, or am I seeing what I want to see? Picking and choosing the traits that match up and ignoring the loose ends. My heart seizes as I remember our day-to-day life together. Marco cooking his famous pork chops in our hot and sticky apartment in August. Placing the plates down on the table with a flourish as I mixed cranberry juice and seltzer into big glasses full of ice. Sipping coffee from oversize mugs on a Sunday morning. Jogging to Long Island City and then pressing our sweaty bodies together in a celebratory hug when we reached the boardwalk. No, Marco can’t be a psychopath. He is a sick man, and he had a mental breakdown. My mind spins in circles as I drift to sleep and try to answer the question that keeps popping up: If he was truly sick, then why aren’t we together right now?

  Over the next several days, Marco’s love bombing gets more and more desperate. When he texts me, my parents, and Nat that he has found a job in Maine and is looking for apartments in Portland, I Google “ignoring a sociopath.” Interesting. One article says to think of a sociopath as a three-year-old adult, since, developmentally, that is about right (toddlers have not yet developed self-control or empathy, so physiologically their brains are similar to the psychopathic adult). When you ignore a three-year-old, or let’s say, take away his favorite toy, what happens? Judging from my own extremely well-behaved nephew, there would be a short period of whining followed by an all-out temper tantrum. The same can be said for an adult sociopath. I realize that what I am witnessing is not Marco regaining his true feelings or recovering his love for me and Louisa; he is having an adult temper tantrum. I close the computer and try to ignore the tiny voice that whispers, “But maybe, just maybe he really is realizing what he lost. . . .”

  It has been a week now of not responding to Marco. I made it. I am still shaky, but I f
eel OK. Marco’s love bombing has continued, with intermittent threats of taking me to court, and I have not responded. I celebrate by asking my sister and Tim to babysit while I go to therapy and then get a pedicure. I have had a pedicure maybe four times in my life, but right now, luxuriating in the vibrating leather salon chair and soaking my feet in warm soapy water, I can’t imagine anything better in the world. While the chair rumbles against my neck, I think about Lisa’s response to Marco’s recent texts. I read her a particularly epic text that somehow combined love bombing, threatening court, and demanding a response to whether I wanted him to move to Maine all in one paragraph.

  “Wow. Well, first of all, that is so textbook sociopathic.”

  “What do you mean? How so?” I asked.

  “Him going on and on about how he’s made a ton of progress in his ‘recovery’ and that he’s looking for a job and apartments in Maine? That is classic sociopath. To say he’s jumped ahead to ‘recovery’ before he’s actually done any work. It would take him years, and I mean years, of serious, hard work to even have a chance at recovery. He would have to learn empathy and build a conscience. Even then, he wouldn’t actually feel empathy. To be honest, psychopathy isn’t actually curable. There’s no medication for it, and therapy doesn’t work. I try to keep the belief that with years and years of doing the really hard, deep work, a sociopath could maybe at least lessen, or become more aware of, their sociopathic attributes. But him saying he’s basically recovered is ridiculous.”

  The rest of the day unfolds without incident, but as I am nursing Louisa to sleep, my heart starts to throb, and I break into a cold sweat. Oh no, I think. No, stay strong. I place Louisa in her crib and ignore the tightness in my chest. I pace around the kitchen. I pour myself a glass of rosé. I feel it coming. I run to my bedroom and throw myself on the bed. I try to muffle the sounds of my cries with a pillow. I can’t breathe. I am going to suffocate. “Please call me, it’s an emergency,” I text to Marco. Five minutes later, my phone rings.

  “What’s wrong?” His voice fills my ear. It is the warm, concerned, sweet voice of my old husband. This was a bad idea.

  “I’m just not doing well,” I say. “I shouldn’t have asked you to call.”

  “Are you OK?” he asks. I can’t say anything. “Gin? I promise everything is going to be OK. I don’t know why this happened. I don’t know how I hurt the person that I love most in the world. But I promise you”—his tone oozes with earnestness—“I will make sure everything is OK.” I want to bury myself in his warm, sweet voice.

  “I have to go. I shouldn’t have asked you to call,” I say again numbly. I hang up and call Nat. I tell her about my panic attack.

  “Have you had lots of caffeine today? Or any alcohol?” she asks.

  I think about the two cups of coffee this morning and the wine after my pedicure. “Yes. Does that cause anxiety?”

  “It definitely contributes. Drink a glass of water.”

  Before we hang up, she says, “At least it sounds like he is starting to realize what a shithead he is and how horrible and stupid he’s been.”

  I walk downstairs and pour myself a glass of water. I focus on the cool liquid gliding down my throat. There is a nagging in my stomach. I grab my phone and bring up Gmail. My fingers tremble as I type in Marco’s e-mail and then his usual password. This isn’t going to work. He had to have changed his password. “Oh my God,” I mutter as the screen redirects me to Marco’s in-box. The first e-mail I see is an OpenTable reservation reminder. For tonight. I open the e-mail. Mercer Kitchen. The reservation is for 8:30 P.M. I glance at the clock. It is 9:30 P.M. He must have been out to dinner when he called me. Before my brain fully registers what this means, I am bringing up Croella’s Instagram profile. The last picture uploaded is of a large bouquet of white flowers. “Birthday flowers” is the caption, with an emoticon of a monkey hiding his face.

  My stomach plummets and my mind races back to three years ago, my twenty-eighth birthday . . . “Welcome to Mercer Kitchen.”

  “That fucker,” I say out loud. My birthday restaurant. He took her to our restaurant. For her twenty-third birthday. A strangled sound bubbles out of my throat. I bring up the forum I have found for people recovering from psychopathic relationships and click on the thread that caught my eye a few days ago. It is titled “Why do P’s lack imagination?” I read message after message of people recounting similar incidents. “He took the other woman to the same place we went for our honeymoon. How can he be so awful?” one woman writes. I scan the thread and finally see that a moderator has chimed in near the end, providing an explanation: “It’s not that P’s are trying to be intentionally cruel, though they could care less about that since they have no conscience. Rather, since P’s lack an identity, they spend their lives collecting data and analyzing situations. They merely see that something ‘works’ and so store it away for future use on another target.”

  I tiptoe upstairs and into the bathroom. I sit on the toilet and text Nat that Marco is currently with Croella at the restaurant he took me to three years ago for my birthday.

  “Are you FUCKING kidding me?” she replies.

  “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” I write back.

  “Well, I actually started laughing when I first read your text and now I’m crying for you because . . . WTF.”

  When I read Nat’s text, I start laughing, too. My laughter becomes hysterical and soon I am doubled over, tears running down my face. Marco’s face pops into my head. The face that smiled at me in wonder as we danced to “Happy” with Seb. I chant “he’s dead” through my hysteria, and now my head is in between my knees and snot and tears run together. I wipe my face with toilet paper, stand up, and look in the mirror. “He’s dead,” I say one more time before splashing cold water into my eyes.

  —

  AS much as I try to direct my thoughts away from Marco and Croella, I find myself getting stuck on how Marco convinced her to fall for him. I don’t understand what he could have said. I try to think about this as objectively as possible. I force myself to go back to the early days of our relationship. He told me that he had been miserable for years and that I was an “angel” sent down from heaven. Could he have told her the same thing? That he was in a loveless, unhappy marriage? But he plastered Facebook and Instagram with the two of us. A couple of months before Louisa’s birth he posted a picture of the two of us with the caption “My love. My life.” How could he have said he was unhappy? How could she have believed him?

  “He couldn’t have said the same things,” I say to my mom that afternoon as we stroll with Louisa, repeating what has been circulating in my head for months. “He told me that he had been miserable for years, and it lined up with what Nat and his family said later. And they had no pictures together for the past three years. Zero. I know social media is a strange thing to consider, but when Marco and Viktorija became Facebook friends in November his profile picture was from our maternity photo shoot. And Tania and him weren’t married and expecting a baby. It was a completely different situation.” I think about if, five years ago, I had known that Marco and Tania were married and that she was eight months pregnant, could he have somehow still convinced me? My stomach turns at the thought.

  “You’re right, it was a very different situation. But it might not have taken much convincing. Maybe he said it was all an act, that he was pretending to be the adoring husband because he wanted his green card. Maybe he really said he was having a mental breakdown. Most likely, we’ll never understand.”

  Nevertheless, I find myself morbidly fixated on trying to understand.

  “But why? Why did she want to be with a man who would do that to his wife and baby?” I find myself asking my best friends. Their responses range from “She’s one in a million. There are not many women who could be convinced, no matter what the guy said, to do what she did,” to “Marco sniffs out insecurities like a bl
oodhound. I’m sure all he had to do was tell her she was special and she was flat on her back.” I ask Lisa at our next session, and she says, “There are millions of things he could have said. My guess is that he told her your pregnancy was unplanned and he felt trapped.”

  “But, by the time they met, he had already posted dozens of pictures of me pregnant with cute little captions and statuses about the baby and how excited he was. I mean, I know he could have said he was lying on social media for whatever reason, but that seems a little thin, don’t you think?”

  Lisa is quiet for a minute. “You may never be able to figure out exactly what he said. It could have been as simple as ‘I thought I was happy until I met you.’ He targeted her because she’s extremely insecure, and he figured out how to give her whatever validation she needed. For someone who has been looking to be validated her entire life, do you know how powerful it would be to hear ‘I’m giving up everything for you’?” I think back to the person I was when I met Marco. I was desperate for external validation. I needed someone to tell me I was special so that I could believe it myself. I decided that Marco was my missing piece and because of his love, I would finally be whole. I wanted so badly to feel the “magic” of love, to be adored, to find my fairy-tale ending, to be complete. Even when I found out that Tania was still in the picture, I convinced myself that Marco and I were soul mates, that we were destined to be together, and that Tania was just an obstacle we had to overcome. Rather than seeing Marco’s bad behavior as a major character flaw, I justified Marco’s cheating and lying as a means to an end—the “end” being us together forever, happily ever after.