by Teri Emory
For a moment, I was touched that Jim would travel all the way uptown from his office on Wall Street to buy my Valentine’s Day present in a store that had sentimental meaning to us. And then I remembered: My beach robe and flip-flops had come in a box from Bloomingdale’s.
It didn’t take me long to find the sales slip from Le Boudoir amid the crumpled receipts that Jim routinely tossed from his billfold onto a leather tray he kept on his dresser. I pulled the tray onto my bed and rummaged through the heap of papers, finally extracting a credit card receipt with a pale yellow sheet stapled behind it. “Le Boudoir, Lingerie and Finery for the Discerning Woman,” the paper said across the top. Only one purchase was listed: Silk peignoir; color—hot pink; style—“Temptress”; size—small. Price—$198.00. Plus tax.
Maybe it’s for me. A surprise for another occasion. But I had just passed my birthday, and our anniversary was months away. Besides, even on my best days, I’m a size medium. I knew, I knew there was someone else. Someone better suited than I to a hot pink negligee. Apparently, I was more the terry cloth robe and flip-flops type.
Carmen heard me cry out. She came running up the stairs with a mop raised in the air as if she expected to have to use it as a weapon. Her eyes darted around and then fixed on me, sitting on the bed, surrounded by small mounds of crumpled paper.
“Miss Beth, you okay?” she said, still holding the mop aloft, her eyes continuing to search the room.
“It’s fine, Carmen. Except . . . except, I just found out something, um, about my husband.”
“Mr. Jim? Is he all right?”
“He’s fine,” I said sharply. “Just fine.”
Carmen dropped the mop. “Miss Beth,” she sighed sadly, “I’m so sorry. I can do something for you?”
“Thank you, Carmen, but there’s nothing you can do. I never should have screamed. I’m sorry I frightened you. You can go back downstairs. I promise, I’m all right.”
Carmen left, closing the door behind her. I walked to the window and saw the men from All-Green huddling over their clipboards, shuffling papers, condemning the shrubbery to doom. Let them take out every bush, every tree, every damn blade of grass. They can tear down the house, for all I care.
I sat down at the writing table, the one Jim referred to as the New Hope table—we had bought it in that small town in Pennsylvania . . . when? Five years before? Seven? A terse laugh escaped from my throat.
“New Hope,” I said aloud.
I pulled a legal pad and a pen from the drawer. I rolled the pen around in my hand. It was blue, with gold lettering on the cap: Gillian Investments. I unscrewed the cap of the pen and scrawled across the top of a sheet of lined yellow paper, “THERE MUST BE FIFTY WAYS TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER” and underlined it three times. I stared at what I had written and recited the lyrics in my head: Just walk out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. No need to be coy, Roy. Just set yourself free. A man’s list. Not right for me.
I couldn’t think straight enough to write anything that made sense. I moved the pen aimlessly across the sheet of paper, scribbling meaningless doodles on the page. My head was pounding. My breath was coming in short, shallow gasps. Random thoughts, irrational and angry, raced through my brain. Sell the house and everything in it before Jim returned to the states. Get Dr. Moros’s help in farming out my patients to other therapists. Empty bank accounts. Buy a co-op in Manhattan. Or take off for Italy. Call the American School in Rome to ask about immediate vacancies for Adam and Nicole. Call Sarah and Miriam, they’ll come to stay with me if I ask. Call my brother Bruce for the name of the vicious divorce attorney in his firm, the one they called “Jaws.” Hire a private detective; find out who Jim has been screwing and since when. Does he love her? Is this his first affair? Who else knows about this—his friend Harold? Other friends? His partners? Call them; demand to know what they know. Call Jim, remind him, You have two children. What about them?
I quickly calculated the time difference between Laurel Falls, Connecticut, and Tokyo, Japan. Fourteen hours. Perfect. Jim hates to be awakened by a ringing telephone.
“Hello?” His sleepy voice.
“Good morning, my love.”
“Beth! Is something wrong?”
“Why, no, Jim. Why do you ask?”
“What time is it? Jesus! It’s four in the morning here.”
“Really,” I said flatly.
“Beth, are you okay? The kids?”
“Everything’s just fine here. The landscapers are milling around the backyard, and I’m just lounging in our bedroom, yours and mine, thinking of you . . .”
“Beth! What the hell is going on?”
“Well, there is one tiny issue. I know how busy you are and how important this trip is to your business, but I did have one little question to ask. First of all, sweetheart, are you alone?”
“Of course I’m alone. It’s the middle of the night.”
“Just checking. You see, I was paying some bills, and I ran across a receipt for what I’m sure was a beautiful love-gift, except that it must have slipped your mind that I don’t wear a size small. And I look lousy in hot pink.”
Silence.
“You bastard. Who is she?”
Silence.
“Oh, maybe you can’t remember which one she is? Important man like you, it must be difficult to keep all your women straight.”
“I’m coming home, Beth. We need to talk in person.”
“You are in no position to tell me what we need to do. That’s what divorce attorneys are for. I’m hanging up now, Jim.”
Jim was back in Connecticut the next evening. I had spent most of the hours since our phone call in bed, crying, sleeping, hatching imaginary, vindictive plots for revenge. Carmen took care of the kids, told them I was coming down with a virus. I was just out of the shower when Jim’s taxi pulled into the driveway. I heard Nicole greet him. “Did you bring me a silk kimono, Daddy?”
“Where’s Mom?” Jim asked.
“Probably sleeping,” Adam said. “She has the flu or something.”
Or something.
__________
“Who is she?” I spoke softly. The kids were asleep in their rooms down the hall.
“She’s . . . she was . . . um . . . there’s nothing anymore. It’s over.”
I stared at him.
“Who was she?”
“Someone who worked with one of my clients. She left last week, went back to London. God, this is hard, Beth.”
“Hard for whom?”
“I hate myself for hurting you. It just happened once. I swear, it was the only time. She’s not coming back.”
“I see. And you bought her a two-hundred-dollar nightgown to say bon voyage? How thoughtful.”
Silence.
“What I can’t figure out is why you left clues for me to follow. I mean, charging her present to our American Express card? You know I write the checks to pay household bills. You’re not a stupid man—you deliberately let me find out this way. For maximum effect.”
“You give me too much credit, Beth. I was weak and stupid, but, honestly, I didn’t want to hurt you. I love
you . . .”
“Don’t you dare say that to me!” I said through clenched teeth. “I can’t trust you. I don’t believe anything you say. Don’t bother to unpack your bags. Stay in the city. Stay anywhere you like, for that matter, so long as you leave. I can’t stand to look at you.”
__________
Jim spent the rest of the week in the city. He called home every night. He spoke to the kids, but I didn’t get on the phone. Nicole, at the height of her adolescent self-absorption, didn’t take notice that anything was amiss. Adam was always our family’s emotional barometer, hypersensitive to changes in the atmosphere.
“How come Dad is sleeping in town so much?” he asked in a worried tone. “He’
ll be home this weekend, right?”
I called Miriam and Sarah every day. Sarah said, “I’m divorced—what advice can I give you? Jim is a good guy. You can’t keep avoiding him. You know he really loves you, even if he’s behaved like a complete shit. What is it with these middle-aged men? I want to tell them all: Go buy a red sports car, get your love handles liposuctioned, but leave that restless little thing of yours in your pants. Beth, you must know every shrink in Connecticut—surely you can find a great marriage counselor?”
And Miriam said, “I’ve never been married, what advice can I give you? Except this—you have to at least try to work things out with Jim. He’s usually a sweetheart, and I love him, but right now I’d like to slap him. Maybe a marriage counselor can talk some sense into him.”
At the end of the week, I called Jim at the office. “I’m ready to talk to you. The kids have a lot going on this weekend; they’ll be out of the house most of the time. We’ll have privacy.”
Jim came home that night. I was in bed, re-reading the notes I had taken at a recent lecture on depression. “Unexpressed anger is often at the root of neurosis,” I had written. “Depression equals anger turned inward.”
“It’s good to be home,” Jim said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I’d like to stay.”
“I have a few conditions. First, you’ve got to get tested for AIDS. Don’t look so surprised, and don’t say a single word. I’d rather not have to think about whether or not you wore a condom while you were screwing someone else. Just get the damn test. And then, we need to go to a marriage counselor. I’ll find us someone. You have to make time to go to the counseling sessions. I’ll set up appointments for early in the morning or in the evenings if possible, but you have to be there. Every time, without fail. I don’t want to hear that anything going on at your office is more important than showing up for marriage counseling. Agreed?”
“I’ll do anything you want, Beth. You can’t imagine how I feel. You know how much my family means to me.”
“I thought I did.”
“We’ll survive this, Beth.”
“That’s your goal, Jim? Survival? I’m looking for something more,” I said, as I took off my glasses and reached to turn off the reading lamp. “I won’t last in this marriage if the best we can do is survive it.”
Jim started to unbutton his shirt.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d sleep in the guest room tonight,” I said. I pulled the comforter around me and turned away from him. I heard the sounds of his undressing, and then his footsteps as he headed out of the room.
“Beth?” he called softly from the doorway.
“Mmm?”
“You know, you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.”
I stayed where I was, not responding, and in minutes I was asleep.
__________
Ingrid Ross, Ph.D., had once been a guest lecturer in a Marriage and Family Counseling class I took in grad school. She was in her early sixties, married for close to forty years, with grown children and grandchildren. She and her husband were both psychologists in practice together. Ingrid rolled her eyes and shook her head when she told this to the class, as if to evoke our sympathy. I remembered that look on her face—just the right combination of wisdom, humor, and experience—when I called her to make an appointment for Jim and me.
We met with her twice a week for almost six months. It took at least a month of sessions for her to get us beyond our cultivated facades. I’m a therapist, so I know this is not unusual, but I had to abandon my self-appointed role as co-shrink before I could yield to her counseling. Jim had to forsake his reliance on intellect, humor, and social grace before he could talk about what really mattered; he (who is uncomfortable being new at anything) had to learn, from scratch, an emotional vocabulary.
In Ingrid’s office, I discovered, first of all, the facts of Jim’s affair. Her name was Patricia Remlin. She was single, twenty-seven years old, a consultant brought to New York from London for a brief assignment at one of Jim’s client companies. They put her up at corporate housing in Battery Park City, where several people involved in the project would go after hours to have a drink and then work late into the evening. One night, she and Jim were alone in her apartment (I imagined the place, all brass-and-glass furnishings, a terrace facing the Statue of Liberty, cheaply framed New Yorker posters on the walls), and they “fell into bed.” It was, Jim admitted rather sheepishly, Patricia’s idea, though he accepted full responsibility for what happened. He confessed that he was flattered by the attention of a young woman. (A thin young woman, he neglected to say. I could hardly forget that the nightgown was a size small.) The reason he bought her the negligee was, he said, that she had joked about having brought only “utilitarian” sleepwear to New York because she assumed she’d be sleeping alone. He “honestly wasn’t thinking” when he paid for the nightgown with our joint American Express card. Nicole, Adam, and I were the world to him. He didn’t know what had possessed him.
As time went on, Ingrid helped us understand the truth, as opposed to the facts, about what had happened. Jim’s company had taken a major leap that year—opening branch offices in six countries; with a smile, Jim said he had imagined the prestige and obligations connected to Gillian Investments might finally turn him into a grownup. (Hearing him say this made me furious. Marrying me and having children didn’t make him a grownup?) The latest business deals had made Jim influential and prosperous, but with prestige and wealth came solemn responsibilities to an international coterie of associates, employees, and stockholders. Patricia, young and unmarried, represented youth and insouciance, Ingrid said. (“Not to mention, thighs that don’t jiggle,” I added.) All in all, Jim had a rather conventional case of midlife crisis. And though Ingrid agreed with me that Jim’s sleeping with another woman was a blatantly hostile act, she believed Jim’s assertion that anger at me wasn’t the force that drove him to infidelity.
However, Ingrid didn’t buy the it-was-an-accident explanation for charging the damn nightgown to our credit card. “Jim, you wanted Beth to find out,” she said. “You felt guilty, and you wanted Mother to punish you. You lost your own mother at a young age and married Beth soon after. In some ways, you depend on Beth to mother you.”
“He’s the one who rescued me when we met,” I insisted. “He helped me register for my classes even though I couldn’t pay for them. He led me to the job at the counseling center in Ithaca. And though I work, let’s face it, we live mostly on his money. If anyone’s a parent in this marriage, it’s Jim.”
“That depends on what you need a parent for,” Ingrid said. “Ask Jim. Ask him what you mean to him.”
Jim’s answer surprised me. “You make everyone around you feel loved and secure,” he said. “You’re the most natural nurturer I’ve ever known. Everyone in your sphere—me, the kids, Sarah and Miriam, Carmen—we all know that we can tell you anything, and that you’ll listen and understand. Maybe, on some level I’ve turned that into a ‘mother’ thing, but I don’t want you to take the place of my mother. I want a wife.”
“If I mean so much to you, how could you do this to me?” I said bitterly. “And how do I know you won’t need to go in search of your adolescence again any time soon? I’m capable of many things, Jim, but I can’t turn myself into a teenager.”
Jim’s voice rose. “How many ways can I say I’m sorry? That I was stupid and callous? That I don’t want anything to happen to our family? And just for the record, she wasn’t a teenager!”
I took a deep breath, about to explode. Before I made a sound, Ingrid caught my eye. “Tell him exactly how angry you are at him,” she said. “Don’t hold back. Tell him, so you can let go of the pain and move on.”
We spent the last of our sessions developing what Ingrid called a marriage renewal plan. “Like urban renewal, after a hurricane,” she said. “You’ve both been hurt but not ruined by this, the
way a storm can rock the foundation of a building without actually causing it to collapse. Still, the windows are shattered, some shingles were blown off the roof, and you’ve got water damage. And, though we’re hoping another storm doesn’t hit, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some insurance that will protect you, just in case.”
Ingrid made us agree to take a romantic vacation, for at least a week, to somewhere neither of us had ever been. We were just getting back to civil conversation with each other; romance was still a distant notion. She set out clear guidelines for the trip. Jim had to promise to remind me repeatedly that I was his top priority; while we were away, for example, he was to call his office no more than once a day, and speak for no more than fifteen minutes. I was to avoid my penchant for sarcasm as a way of expressing anger. Ingrid asked me to describe to her a time when I thought my heart “would burst with love for Jim.” I answered immediately, “When I told him I was pregnant. Both times.”
“Good,” Ingrid said. “Now, whenever you feel yourself thinking resentfully about him, I want you to force yourself to remember those moments.” And she charged us both to begin each day of our trip by asking ourselves, “What can I do to make him (her) happy today?”
Of course, it sounds superficial and silly; embarrassing, the way everything that goes on in therapy of any kind seems when you talk about it outside of therapy. I do this for a living, and still, talking about the modus operandi sometimes makes me cringe. Nevertheless, it worked for Jim and me. From the start, the trip was different from any we had ever taken. Jim didn’t simply ask his secretary to make arrangements through the company’s travel agency, the way he usually did when we traveled. Instead, he brought home brochures for us to examine together. We decided on Maui. The hotel where we stayed for ten days was exorbitant and private—a hideout for celebrities escaping paparazzi and secretly recovering from plastic surgery. We took hula lessons beside a noted media mogul, an aging soap opera diva, and a young man reputed to be the Crown Prince of Somewhere. Who else could afford the place? We drank champagne at every meal, bathed together in the heart-shaped marble tub, and pretended we didn’t notice the stubborn hesitancy in our lovemaking. We were still wounded and worried, although occasional flashes of a familiar intimacy gave us hope. We sent Ingrid a crate of pineapples and macadamias, with a note that said, “Aloha! Marriage renewal under way. So far, so good.”