“Do you ever want to talk dirty?” I asked.
“Not really. But you should say anything you want.”
The ruptures to our intimacy showed most in oral sex. Scott lost interest in my going down on him, and he rarely did so for me.
“Why don’t you go down on me anymore?” I asked one night in May.
He looked pained. After many moments of silence he said, “I don’t know.”
More silence. “Oral sex is more intimate than intercourse,” he finally said.
“And you don’t want to be that intimate with me?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did you go down on Charly?”
“Robin…”
“So you can be intimate with a woman you’ve known for six months but not with me.”
“I’ve done bad things,” he said, suddenly looking up at me.
“Like what,” I mouthed, keeping my eyes on his.
Half a minute passed. No one spoke.
“Like what,” I repeated.
“One Tuesday a few months ago, you were sick and you wanted to come home. I told you I had a writing group that night, but I didn’t. I had a date with Charly.”
I surprised myself by saying, “I’ve done worse than that.” I saw myself flying off to Denver before the project even began, Paul entering me without a condom, Alden doing the same. I shivered, recalling the emotional attachment that ensued once the condom came off, immediate and irrevocable. And then it hit me.
“Oh my god,” I said, almost laughing at myself. “You took the condom off with her. Of course you did.”
“Yes.”
A black wind began to spiral inside my skull like a twister gathering speed on a barren plain.
“You’ve been having sex with Charly for half a year with no condom.”
He nodded, avoiding my eyes.
“Please tell me she’s been tested.”
“She’s clean,” he said. “She doesn’t have anything.”
“How do you know that?” The doctor’s appointment, the angst I suffered over just a few condomless weeks, the terrible fight with Alden, the test he finally mailed, my own follow-up blood test all tumbled through my mind chaotically.
“She told me so.”
“She told you so. And you believe her enough to risk my health on it.”
“Yes,” he said, looking up at me defiantly. “I trust her.”
My brain went dark. Suddenly I was punching his arms. I could feel my fists land on thick muscle with each thrust, and though I pushed with everything in me, I couldn’t make them land hard enough. I heard myself grunting with the effort. I flailed at his head. When he grabbed my shoulders and held them fast, I bit down on his hand. I wanted to crack the bones under my teeth, but something stopped me.
This was the bare reality between us. A frightened girl working to break out of a cage. A bad man working to cage himself. Remove the constraints and see what happened. How easily he could do what it killed me to do. How free he was at his core compared with me. Free to snip his own balls just to keep them from me.
So as not to crush his hand, I turned from him and toward the dresser. My feet and legs ground firm to the floor while my upper body fanned out to everything within reach, an unstoppable engine of wrath. I wiped the framed photos and trinkets and a bowl of coins from the bureau with one sweep of my arms. I pulled racks of clothes down from the closet and tossed shoes into the middle of the room. When there was nothing left to smash in the bedroom, I picked up my heavy wooden jewelry box, barreled into the bathroom, and tossed it through the shower door, shattering it into hundreds of jagged pieces. It was only when I felt glass under my bare feet that I began to regain something like regular consciousness. I stood amid the rubble, panting like a dog, and looked around. Scott was gone.
I pulled on shoes, bolted out the front door, and ran to the corner of Market Street. It was past midnight and few people were out. I could see his large frame about three blocks away, walking quickly toward downtown. I ran after him on weak legs. By the time I caught up he was half a mile from the house, standing at a red light just across the street from a cheap motel. Breathless, I grabbed the tail of his coat and he whipped around.
“Please come home,” I said. “Please.” I wanted to die.
He exhaled deeply and we began walking back toward the house in silence. When we got there, we went to the ruined bedroom. The sight of it shocked me nearly to terror. I hadn’t seen a room in that condition since I was a teenager.
Still in his coat, Scott walked over broken glass and sat down on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees and head in hands.
“Are you going to leave me?” I asked.
He looked up from the floor briefly, then back down. “I think so,” he said.
The next day I got home before Scott so I could clean everything up. I cried as I shoveled pile after pile of broken glass into a dustbin, pulled shards of glass from every corner, lifted scratched family photos from the rubble, recovered the pieces of a statuette I’d bought him in New Orleans. The fact that I had caused so much destruction dumbfounded me.
By the time Scott got home, the room was restored, though the bureau was empty of decoration and the shower door was gone. He asked me to come sit down at the kitchen table.
“If you ever hit me again, I’m leaving you. No discussion. What happened last night can never happen again. Do you understand?”
I couldn’t believe it. My spouse was threatening to divorce me for hitting him. If that happened, I’d not only lose him and the marriage, I’d have absolutely no idea who I was. I’d be left to live out the rest of my days as a person I didn’t recognize and couldn’t accept.
“I’m so sorry, Scott. I swear it won’t happen again.” I heard those words and thought, That’s what all perpetrators say. “I’ve already made an appointment with Delphyne.” There. Real perpetrators didn’t make their own therapy appointments hours after the incident, did they? The master manipulators probably did.
In the days following, I entered a dark space much like depression except less powerless and more appalling, brought on as it was by my own volition. My arms and legs dragged the way they do in bad dreams. My thoughts walked a tightrope, alternating between wincing remorse toward Scott and ghostly images of my father: not the usual ones of him screaming or threatening, but silent ones in which he appeared alone at the kitchen table after chasing us out, crashed in the darkened bedroom, hungover on the couch with the TV blaring. I’d spent most of my life ensuring I didn’t end up an abused woman. It had never occurred to me that I might become the abuser instead.
28
The Aftermath
THE PAINTING OF PELE the fire goddess above Delphyne’s door was still there. Her blazing eyes had witnessed me parsing out my maternal longing, Scott announcing his decision to get a vasectomy, me concluding that I couldn’t carry on with the status quo. Pele might be revered for her transformative powers of destruction, but here on earth I had to abide by the laws of human decency. I related the details of the bedroom blackout to Delphyne and told her Scott would divorce me if it happened again.
“What was so infuriating about knowing he didn’t use condoms?” she asked. “Because he broke a rule?”
“No. I broke it, too. But when I did, I agonized. He was almost proud of it. The way he said, ‘I trust her,’ it floored me.”
“I think you two are going to have to deal with Scott’s anger about the project.”
“Scott’s anger? I’m the one who just destroyed our bedroom.”
“You’re over-expressing it. He’s doing it passively.”
The following week, Scott and I went to see the San Francisco Opera and ran into Tara and Jackie, two friends we hadn’t seen in months. Afterward, we went for drinks. “I’m so glad you two are back together,” Tara said, leaning in to sip her margarita. “You’re my favorite couple.” Jackie was unaware of the project, so Tara briefly explained it.
“Are you kidd
ing?” Jackie said. “And you’re still married?”
“You’re amazing,” Tara said. “Half the married people I know want to do this, but they’re too afraid. And you made it through! That’s love.”
Scott and I glanced at each other cautiously. Jackie launched into a disclosure about her boyfriend, who had left his marriage for her two years back. She’d recently found on his laptop a batch of Craigslist emails between him and several other women. When confronted, he admitted to flirting with the women as a distraction, but insisted he hadn’t even met any of them in person. Scott and Tara analyzed the merits of Jackie forgiving versus leaving him. It was a toss-up.
“Jackie, how’s the sex?” I interrupted.
She sat back and put both palms on the table. “Incredible,” she said. “It’s the best sex of my life.”
“Then let it ride. If and when you need to leave him, you’ll know.”
“Let it ride,” she repeated. “That’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”
As Scott and I walked home, he said, “You really think she should stay with that guy?”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s not going to leave him if they’re having great sex. She might as well accept it and just move forward.”
“Sex isn’t everything,” he said.
“Oh, come on. We just went through the wringer for a whole year over sex. Sex and kids. Or maybe it wasn’t even kids, maybe it was just…”
Suddenly I was up against the brick wall of a building to my right, Scott’s hands pinned around the collar of my coat, lifting me to my toes. He was baring the pointy tips of his bicuspids, screaming, “Do you know how many nights I cried myself to sleep when you moved out!? Do you care about anyone’s feelings but your own!?”
I was too stunned to reply. I could feel my hair bunched up against the cold brick. A car pulled over to the curb. The passenger rolled down his window. “You okay, ma’am?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said as Scott took his hands from me. “Really, it’s okay, thanks.” We watched the car slowly pull away.
“I had no idea you cried yourself to sleep,” I said. “My god, Scott, why didn’t you ever call me?”
He looked at me and shook his head. “Call my wife crying after she moves out to sleep with other guys,” he said flatly. “I grew up in the Midwest. You think I don’t know what masculine means?” He had me there.
I wanted to encourage him to say more if he needed to. “Delphyne said it’s good for you to get your anger out.”
“Delphyne’s a new-age gong-banger who made a buck fifty an hour watching us drive our marriage into a ditch.”
I didn’t even mind him throwing me against a wall. It actually felt like progress.
* * *
Delphyne did in fact have gongs in her office, though she didn’t bang them. I was relieved to tell her about Scott’s outburst. She told me Scott was right; it was going to take time to readjust, and we both needed to be patient as we integrated what we’d experienced over the past year. By the end of the session, she somehow wound the conversation around to a discussion of what I’d learned during the project.
“Think back to the day you took the positive pregnancy test,” she said. “Do you remember how it felt?”
I easily called up the winter skirt I’d been wearing, the December chill as I walked toward the train, the mauve tint of the morning sky.
“Why were you so happy that day? What did you imagine it would bring you?”
“A lot. A second chance at family life. A new connection to Scott. A life path that everyone respects and celebrates. Something to commit to.”
“Yes, but go a little deeper. Sum it up in one word.”
“Purpose.”
“And now sum up the project the same way. What did it bring you?”
“Feminine energy,” I said. “It taught me how to act from my body.”
“Purpose, and your essential feminine energy,” she repeated. “You know that a child and lovers aren’t the only means of getting those things, right?”
“Now I do, yes. I can access my feminine energy in Sabrina’s circle like that.” I snapped my fingers. “It’s like I’ve learned how to recognize it. I feel it in yoga. At the ocean. When I listen to music.”
I waited. She leveled her eyes at me.
“What is your purpose, Robin?”
“Writing. Even if I’d had kids, they would have come second to writing. No, actually, that’s not true. I would have probably put the writing aside for eighteen more years, and that would have been a huge mistake.”
She nodded.
“But writing is so agonizing. I wanted to create something with my body. Something I didn’t have to think about.”
“Creation is never easy, whatever form it takes.”
I suddenly felt dizzy, as if I were being led blindfolded into a bramble.
“So write, and do yoga and go to the ocean and listen to music. And surround yourself with women who are doing the same.”
“Wait. Is that why you were always asking me about my female friendships?”
She smiled and raised her eyebrows as if to say, finally.
* * *
My voice mail showed my father’s number. He called maybe twice a year.
“Hi, honey, it’s Daddy. I just wanted to give you a call because I was thinking about you. I hope everything’s okay there. I don’t know … I got a feeling. I’m here if you need anything. All right? You let me know. I could be out there in five hours. I love you, honey, and I think about you every day. Okay, just give me a call when you have time. I love you, ’bye.”
Since the day I moved out, whenever we talked either in person or on the phone, he spent half the time asking if I was okay and if I needed anything. As a teenager, I’d pass through the kitchen quickly, trying to ignore him sitting there in his underwear, leg bouncing involuntarily, a Lucky Strike between his fingers hovering above an ashtray piled with butts. Next to the ashtray sat a cup of black coffee laced with vodka.
“Is everything okay?” he’d ask as I ate my cereal.
“Yeah.” You’re a maniacal bookie and my mother hates you and her life, but we’re all alive, and I’m headed out to see my friends.
“You know I’m always here for you. You can always talk to me.”
I’d look at him in disbelief. There was nothing to say except “I know.” Life in this house was a cruel joke, but luckily, this wasn’t my real life. It was just the starting line. Once that gun went off and that gate opened, just wait. Just watch how far and fast I run. That’s what I’d be thinking as I tossed my cereal bowl into the sink.
The old wisdom says that time heals and the new wisdom says it takes time plus awareness. All told, I’d spent at least fifteen of the twenty-five years since I left home in therapy, so if anyone could heal her childhood, it should be me. I went to therapy not knowing what combination of trauma, genetics, and collective realities was at play. Fifteen years later I felt a lot better, but still not knowing exactly why. Because I’d learned how to identify emotions and make boundaries? I mostly failed when I tried to tie any present-day pain to a singular long-past event. After the first few years, the way my parents treated me in the past became much less important than the way I treated myself in the present. Enumerating their faults began to feel naïve and useless, as did the hope that someday I’d get over my childhood and be made new, never to feel the old abandonment or panic or despair again.
Therapy gave me skills; only time and living began to yield answers. My difficult childhood no longer felt like a mistake or a failing. If I imagined all the childhoods taking place around the world—in war zones, in places of dire poverty, in repressed families who never showed affection, in happy homes where a parent simply died too soon—I felt like mine fell somewhere in the middle.
Likewise, the accumulating years helped me gradually come to understand my father. The compromises, deferred dreams, wrenching decisions, and inexorable ticking clock of adulthood proved much
more harrowing than I could have imagined when I tossed my cereal bowl into the sink and left him to his morning vodka, certain that when I had my chance, I would do it all so differently. I wasn’t sure when it had happened, but even the angst I’d long felt about him being a bookie had evolved into a sense of pride. When I was small, all I wanted was for him to join the other dads at the offices and factories Monday to Friday instead of poring over odds, threatening deadbeats on the phone, hiding wads of cash in drawers. But after sitting in twelve-step meetings listening to the children of insurance salesmen and house painters describe the same alcoholic rage, and after spending twenty-five years in cubicles myself, I came to admire his refusal to go the quiet, numbing way of the masses.
Now that I’d explored my own appetites, indulged my own selfishness, and even slipped over the edge into violence, my dad seemed to have shrunk a size and I seemed to have grown until at last we looked something like equals. The voice on the answering machine sounded less like a patriarch’s and more like that of one more struggling human being.
It was the timing of his call, the fact that he got a feeling about something being wrong, that jarred me. I especially wondered how such a sharp intuition could reach him if—as I suspected after listening more closely to his voice mail—he was drinking again. He’d had long bouts of sobriety punctuated every four or five years by a relapse, and sober he was a completely different person, the father I remembered from my preschool days who took me out for egg sandwiches every morning and sang along to The Music Man whenever it was on TV. His longest stretch lasted about a decade and coincided with my own twelve-step years, so he was sober when he read my angry letters outlining all his misdeeds and when I started going home again for Christmas after a five-year absence. He was sober when he met Scott and immediately asked, “What are your intentions with my daughter?” He was sober when he walked me down the aisle and for all that, I was grateful.
I made a mental note to call him back in a few days. I needed a little distance on more recent memories—Scott’s arm bruises, the broken shower door, the scene after the opera—before I could handle talking to him.
The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost Page 21