Highs in the Low Fifties

by Marion Winik

  Crispin’s mother Joyce is one of the coolest people I know—a tiny, birdlike woman in her eighties with bright blue eyes and soft white hair, and more intellectual, moral, and social vigor than most people half her age. Or any age, really. When my own mom was alive, I used to look at the two of them—independent, intelligent, full of zest, and doing exactly what they wanted to all the time—and think, When do I get to be an elderly widow?

  Every year in late fall, Joyce puts on an annual show—a performance where she and other residents of her rural Virginia area (many of whom are accomplished retirees from Washington, D.C.) do dramatic monologues about their lives. It is amazing how she can get everyone from the county clerk to a local horse rancher to the former ambassador to Nepal to do this, and she herself tells a story every year.

  Last year, I didn’t go to Joyce’s show. And I didn’t attend her birthday party or my stepdaughter Emma’s graduation either, largely because Crispin’s girlfriend the zoo volunteer went to all of these things. This year, I decided I didn’t care if the girlfriend went or not; I wasn’t going to miss the show. I made arrangements to stay with one of Joyce’s friends.

  At the last minute, Joyce called with two pieces of information: Her friend had broken her arm and couldn’t have a houseguest, and the girlfriend would not be coming down after all. “You’ll just stay with me,” Joyce announced. Father and daughters would be up in the loft and I would sleep with her, she said.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “If you think so.”

  So we caravanned down there, Crispin with Jane and Emma, I with the dog, and it went smoothly, except for a stop at the always-controversial Dinosaur Land gift shop, full of cheap tchotchkes with a half-life of three days, so beloved by him and the children, so despised and eschewed by me. Once we were at the farm, Joyce surrounded me with her usual love and good vibes as I stood in the kitchen, making her favorite Thai chicken with coconut milk. From an armchair behind her, her son was sparkling at me, too.

  I felt funny even being in the same room with him—we had not spent five minutes together in years. I kept thinking that he should have brought his girlfriend; if she wasn’t a part of this new era of getting along, she would surely feel jealous and left out.

  That night, after another glorious triumph for the storyteller-thespians of Rappahannock County, Crispin and the girls went up to bed and I crawled into bed with my ex-mother-in-law. We slept under an Amish quilt we had bought over a decade earlier for her and her husband Richard, who died in 2002. Exhausted from the day’s events, I passed out in minutes.

  In the early morning I was half-awake when I felt a little hand patting my shoulder. I opened my eyes and there was Joyce, lying in bed beside me, beaming.

  “Life is so strange, isn’t it, Marion?” she said.

  Yes it was, and it was about to get a whole lot stranger.

  That morning after breakfast Joyce explained that someone had to go back to the theater where the performance had been held and put away the chairs and risers. Without thinking much about it, I said to Crispin, “Come on, we’ll go. Let the girls get some time with your mom.”

  Really? everyone thought, including me. These two are going to get in a car and go do an errand together? Hope it goes all right.

  It did. We chatted about this and that as we worked, hurrying through the awkward situation even as it was turning out to be not so bad. Finally I said, “So why didn’t you bring your girlfriend?”

  “She wanted to come,” he said. “But I didn’t think I could handle it. Her, you, my mother, Emma, all in one little room. . . .”

  “Yes, but in the future you have to bring her,” I urged. “It’s the only way it’ll be all right for me to be included in stuff like this.”

  He didn’t say any more.

  A few minutes later we left the church, but both of us paused on the threshold, unwilling to leave this moment behind. Without looking at him I blurted, “Do you ever think about how sad it is that we completely destroyed that beautiful love we had?”

  “Of course I do,” he said, and when I turned and looked in his eyes, I saw not nostalgia but regret and anger and pain. He looked at his watch. “We should go,” he said hoarsely. We jumped in the car and headed back to his mom’s.

  About a week later, he sent me an e-mail saying he’d thought at first he wouldn’t tell me, but in fact he had just broken up with his girlfriend. Before I had any intellectual reaction to this news, I felt the blood drain out of my upper body.

  It turned out that our divorce, though intended to facilitate their moving in together, buying a house, and getting engaged, had ended up having the opposite effect. Apparently he had been trying to wriggle out of the situation for several months, and now, faced with the reality of having become fully available, he had called it quits.

  About a week after that I received an e-mail from him announcing that he loved me but he could never be with me again. It went on from there. “I think if we did try again it would consist of, you know, twelve hours of ecstasy, twelve of agony, and then right back to as profound as possible a separation, where I’d be working for months to find the sort of detachment I have now, however much that actually is. Meanwhile, your self-esteem would peak at hour six, and crash inexorably at hour sixteen, leaving you with the necessity of more therapy! It’s just not a promising direction.”

  I was not arguing. He was coming at me with that mixture of bricks and kisses that I knew so well—and had spent so much time recovering from, sitting in my Georgian airplane hangar, playing Stevie Nicks’s “Landslide” over and over on the guitar. I had put all that behind me now.

  Except maybe I hadn’t. Maybe inside me there was still a raging river of affection and attraction looking for a hole in the dike. Without actually deciding to do it, I found myself being a whole lot nicer to him.

  One weekend when I came to drop off Jane, I brought groceries to Crispin’s little hobbit house in the woods and cooked dinner there. The three of us spent a sweet evening together and Jane was glowing. When I left, Crispin followed me out to my car and tenderly kissed me good-bye. His hands were on my waist, his thumb pressing lightly into a spot near my hipbone that tingled for hours afterwards. All the hard work I had put into trying to forget the intensity of our physical connection crumbled in the face of that thumbprint.

  Afterwards, he told me later, he had apparently been staring goofily into space. “What are you thinking about, Daddy?” asked Jane.

  “Oh, nothing,” he replied.

  “I know what it is,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You’re thinking about Mommy.”

  Now the e-mails really kicked into high gear. On January 11, four days before Jane and I left for a ten-day visit to Judy and Lou, who had moved from D.C. to France, Crispin came to my house a few hours before he went to school to pick up Jane for their Wednesday-afternoon visit.

  It was like the first time, it was like the last time, it was what I had been living so gracelessly without, physically ecstatic and emotionally explosive. I was helpless before the primacy of my body and its urges and chemicals, which were smoothing the rough edges of this situation with an endorphin blaze that almost completely blocked rational thought. By the time we went downstairs and I began to sauté mushrooms for an omelet, I had an idiotic smile on my face that wouldn’t quit, and I could hardly put two words together to form a sentence.

  Which was good because we decided to keep our “reconciliation” (or whatever it was) a secret. There were many reasons for this. It was likely that people who had seen what Crispin and I did to each other in the first decade of this millennium would receive news of our reunion with about the same credibility afforded your average Holocaust denier. Among these potential naysayers were both of our oldest children, Emma and Hayes, who were particularly protective of each of us.

  Emma, wh
om I had for better or worse always treated more as a friend than as a daughter, had heard my “snow goose” rap. These birds are biologically driven to mate for life, sometimes as long as thirty years. I had felt since the day I met her father that despite the big and small incompatibilities between us—Apollonian loner / Dionysian extrovert—there was an interlock between us deeper than rhyme or reason. When I told myself in the last years of our marriage that we should stay together even though we were destroying each other, it was largely because I believed this. But Emma had seen it differently. She did not want to see her father drink himself to death as he nearly had back then, when she had felt so powerless, and she was pretty sure I wasn’t helping. Would things be different now? He had stopped drinking almost the very day he’d left me. Could he come back without stumbling?

  Hayes, too, had never recovered from the tensions of the last days and the terrible meltdown at the end. Since he was still living with me for another month, I was particularly anxious about his reaction. He had briefly encountered his former stepfather a few times since he’d moved home, while helping me drop off or retrieve Jane. He had behaved cordially yet coolly, and I was pretty sure this was as far as he was interested in going.

  I did tell Sandye almost immediately, my voice dreamy with happy brain chemicals. She said, Oh my. She hadn’t seen it coming but was not completely surprised, and warned me to be careful. I also told my friend Judy, too, a few days after Jane and I got to her house in France during winter break. She, too, said to be careful.

  I didn’t need to be told. I was being extremely careful, and my emotions did not defrost as fast as my body did. Through the early months of the rapprochement, each advance in closeness was followed by a backlash, usually in the form of an unexpectedly critical or chilly e-mail from Crispin. At first, we were unthinkingly drawn into our old ways, our harsh, obsessive, five-e-mails-per-hour arguments, and several times it seemed we would quickly go off the rails. But there was no point in this, and we knew it. So we’d just let it go, retreat to our separate lives, and cool off.

  In March, we told Jane we were dating, as if she needed to be told, and then we told everyone else. People were shocked, people were moved, some were kind of pissed, and just about every single one said “Be careful.” Hayes was more in the pissed group, but fortunately he had just moved out. He and a couple friends from high school had found a place three blocks from the Federal Hill party district and proceeded to unleash themselves on the bar scene. Paleolithic Man reminded me a lot of High School Man, except with more money.

  Joyce clipped an advice column from the Washington Post on Valentine’s Day and sent it to me. “Dear Amy,” read one of the letters, all from long-term couples who did not cohabit. “My husband and I have lived separately for 20 years because of financial/employment circumstances. We attribute our enduring marriage to this arrangement, since we are a somewhat mismatched couple.”

  Well, we were definitely in that category with her. So, it seemed, were others in my age group. “In the 40s and beyond, many women have that ‘been there, done that’ feeling, and are craving a different lifestyle option,” explained a Dr. Deb Castaldo in an article I ran into online. “The rules of the monogamy game have changed drastically. Many women are now consciously redefining exclusive relationships that are emotional, sexual, committed, and, best of all, part-time. This new way of dating is not driven by rigid moral expectations of traditional marriage, [but] rather by individual needs for both intimacy and independence.”

  So would Crispin and I end up in adjoining condos in the senior apartment complex? My friend Therese didn’t seem to think so. Having witnessed our dark days, she was shocked at first by the news of our accord. Then she told me she’d noticed that often couples with very brutal, hateful divorces would end up back in each other’s arms after a cooling-off period—not because they had really solved their problems and were getting back together, but because they had had enough time and space to remember what had brought them together in the first place (yes, the sex, but not just the sex). After a certain interval of kindness and connection, they would drift apart, this time leaving things in a better place.

  I was quiet when she said this, not sure she was wrong. Our incompatibilities and distrust and emotional crimes against each other were very real, and we bumped up against them more frequently as we tried to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Attempting to navigate around the danger zones was turning us into something more like friends with benefits than lovers.

  Then I started to lose interest in the benefits. Which was not like me at all, especially considering the fireworks that had occurred when the benefits first returned. But by the summer of 2011, I was feeling other things I had never felt before. I was so tired sometimes, crazy tired. I didn’t know if it was age, perimenopause, or low-grade depression, or maybe I was just turning lazy, but twice I had to leave my hot yoga class halfway through, which was unheard-of for me. Sometimes the exhaustion came so abruptly that I felt knocked to the couch, the lights in my head going out with a dizzy whoosh.

  Not so long ago, I had considered taking a nap almost humiliating. Naps were for pussies. Something was definitely going on.

  the decline and fall of the party people

  I am the opposite of those people who won’t take a sip from your glass or kiss you when you have a cold, who festoon the toilet seat with whorls of paper. I like to say I don’t believe in the germ theory of disease transmission, and if that’s not exactly true, I do believe that an ounce of prevention is not much better than an ounce of dirt. Once I heard part of a radio interview with a 107-year-old Russian woman who attributed her longevity to never peeling her vegetables, eating yogurt, and drinking vodka. She could have been my guru.

  I was the Impervious One. I never missed a day of school or work due to illness. I had tramped through Mexico with friends dropping left and right from turista and had nary a cramp. I never got the flu, rarely caught a cold, escaped herpes and AIDS—especially noteworthy since I was married to someone who died of it. My sister also failed to get AIDS in a similar situation, adding to my impression that I was from a race of half-Russian demigods.

  Not long after Tony died I went in for an annual checkup, and the blood work showed that my liver enzymes were elevated. This could have been because I’d had a few glasses of wine the night before, but further testing showed that I had antibodies to hepatitis C.

  A lot of people have hepatitis C—4 million in the United States, 170 million worldwide. Many of them don’t even know they have it because they have no symptoms. You can be symptom-free for decades, or for life. On the other hand, you can develop liver scarring, which leads to cirrhosis, which can cause liver cancer or just kill you all on its own.

  How did so many people get hepatitis C? While about half of those diagnosed have a history of injecting drugs, and transfusion was a possibility before they started screening the blood supply in 1992, many people can’t figure out how they could have contracted it. Getting a tattoo or piercing, sharing a razor or toothbrush, and snorting drugs (blood can get on the straw) are all possibilities.

  Anyway, I was not in the Don’t Know group. I knew, all right. When I didn’t get AIDS, I got this. Every demigod has that spot on his heel.

  No big deal; I wasn’t worried about it. I had no symptoms, and a biopsy showed that my liver was fine. I also didn’t worry about infecting other people, as heterosexual transmission is rare to nonexistent, and I was no longer partying with syringes or rolled-up dollar bills. These facts somewhat reassured Crispin during our ten years together, but every once in a while he would knit his brow and go in for a test. Each time it turned out that those faux pas with the toothbrush had left him unscathed.

  In utero transmission was harder to dismiss, so when I got pregnant in 1999, I visited a gastroenterologist, the specialty that covers the liver. The risk was pretty low, it turned out, and my daughter Jane
was born without the virus, as her older brothers Hayes and Vince had been.

  Once a year I repeated the blood tests; every five years, a biopsy. Each time they saw me, though my condition hadn’t changed, my doctor and his assistant urged me to get treatment—a form of chemotherapy that lasts from six months to a year. In the mid-2000s, the chance of cure was about fifty-fifty.

  The interferon treatment was infamous for its side effects—depression, fatigue, and flu-like symptoms (whatever they might be; don’t ask me, the Impervious One). One of my sister’s husbands had relapsed on drugs and died in the middle of treatment. The husband who followed him, one of the most even-tempered and physically fit people I know, also had to treat for hepatitis C. He became cranky, quit going to the gym, and sometimes didn’t make it into work. He was cured, though. Others I knew were not.

  Should I inject toxic drugs that would make me feel bad and might not work, when I felt just fine? I thought not. Well, my physician reminded me, the catch-22 was that if I waited until I didn’t feel fine, I would have less chance of a cure.

  Maybe I should quit drinking alcohol, he went on. The recommended limit for those with hepatitis C is one drink per year. I found this extremely amusing.

  The year I moved to Baltimore, I began to have occasional pains in my upper right abdomen. I remembered from experience with a boyfriend who was a heavy drinker of Bushmills Irish Whiskey (and often staggered around in the morning, clutching his right side) that this might be liver pain. I cut down my drinking, which dovetailed well with my rapprochement with Crispin. He had been sober since the day he’d moved out, and had very little interest in being around alcohol—still less in watching me drink it. Still, the pangs didn’t stop. I made an appointment with a new doctor in Baltimore.