by Ariella Papa
I felt like the worst person in the world. I looked around at all the people on the subway and wondered if any of them had ever felt so bad. I wanted to apologize to them for poorly representing what a member of society should be.
I needed to be around someone who didn’t know me that well. Keith of course, that’s what it all had been. Being with Keith was perfect because he wasn’t holding up a mirror. He didn’t know me. He wasn’t in love with me. He made my body feel good. He distracted me from everything I worried about. But I no longer knew if I could handle his distraction.
So I got off a few subway stops early. I went to Kirsten’s apartment. I think I had this feeling about Kirsten that her whole flaky thing meant she didn’t see anyone really. I think I was looking forward to that. I wanted to be distracted by all the chaos she had around her.
I had never popped in on someone, but neither Ruth nor Kirsten acted like it was a big deal so I decided to try it.
But it turned out to be a big deal. When Kirsten took those pictures of me, I felt free. I was starting to have a whole different relationship with my body. I was starting to feel connected to myself. It was no longer as if I was running on a treadmill to get away from myself; I was starting to feel within myself.
And, then, after those pictures, I knew I had to be truthful.
I went home and sat at our custom kitchen island and looked at Peter. He was doing work on his laptop. He glanced up at me and smiled, but went right back to whatever work he was doing. The kids were already in bed. He didn’t question why I had missed their bedtime. He handled it. I wondered how much he could handle.
“Good day at work today, honey,” he said. It was more of a statement than a question. It was more of a line reading than an actual attempt to communicate.
“Not particularly,” I said, ad-libbing. His eyes rose over the screen momentarily again, and he looked back down.
“One of those days, huh?” he said. He was only vaguely interested. I wondered at what point would he tune in.
“Actually, it wasn’t really like any other day I’ve ever had.”
It took him a few seconds to finish whatever sentence he was working on, but he did look up at me. He didn’t shut his computer, but this was a first step. I took a deep breath.
“I’m on disciplinary probation.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What happened?”
Like everything, the hardest part was getting started. But once I did the words flowed. And I didn’t cry. I told him the whole thing. I told him about the affair and how unhappy I had been with my whole life. I said I was sorry for hurting him and sorry for the fact that I had deviated from what we planned. If the shoe had been on the other foot, that is what I would have been the most upset about.
He put his head in his hands and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he sat up shook his head, got up and walked out the door.
I didn’t know what to do. I sat there for the longest time, waiting for him to come back. After forty-five minutes, I got the idea that he wasn’t coming back. The weirdest thing was that he didn’t take his laptop. I couldn’t understand how he could live without his laptop. That was really troubling.
For once I started to see Peter as someone who had nothing to do with me. This whole time, this whole marriage, I kept thinking of him in relation to me, a soldier following my marching orders, a satellite revolving around my sun. But he wasn’t. He was independent in all of this.
Without him, with the children asleep, the house was so quiet. I wasn’t about to check email. Even if I wanted to, I wasn’t sure that I could. Security may have frozen my account. Without work, there didn’t seem to be anything to do except clean, but even I had to admit that the place was immaculate, save for the stains on the carpet that weren’t coming out. I thought about turning on the TV. But there was nothing I wanted to watch. So I sat, listening to the stillness.
After a while I went to bed. And I slept. I think it was because I didn’t have any secrets. I didn’t know what Peter was feeling and I really wanted to, but everything I had hidden was out. Except I hadn’t told my mother, but that was ok for now. Eventually you have to get old enough to keep some things from your mother.
In the morning, Peter still wasn’t home. I didn’t move his laptop. It sat sadly on the island. I had the kids eat breakfast at the dining room table. I no longer needed the charade of going to work, so I wasn’t on a schedule. I didn’t have to rush the kids, and because of that I could relax and enjoy them. We laughed together. It was freeing to not be trying to beat the clock.
When I walked them to day care, I responded to each thing they pointed out. I felt tuned in. I felt I was going to be honest and open with everyone.
I got a coffee, a bagel and a paper and sat in the park. At last, I had time. I had a little bit of time. I didn’t even read the paper. I watched the world going by. It was amazing to me that there were so many people out. They weren’t at jobs like mine.
Keith. I looked down at my phone. He hadn’t called me, and I hadn’t called him. I hadn’t really thought about him since I heard those words on the soap. There was no way he hadn’t lifted it from a script. And somehow knowing that broke the spell. I doubted that any of it had meant that much to him. I could fade from his life without much of an impact, but he had left his mark on mine.
We weren’t in love. We were fucking. It was naïve to think it was anything else. People did these things all the time. But I didn’t. So for me it had seemed to be more.
I knew that what I had done was hurtful and wrong. Peter didn’t deserve this and for that I felt awful. I closed my eyes in the park for a few minutes and tried to imagine how I could make it up to him. I wondered if the situation were reversed if I would ever forgive him.
But if he had done it I think I would have been a little relieved. I opened my eyes. Maybe there was a part of him that was relieved too. Maybe he knew that we weren’t working anymore. We didn’t have that passion for each other, and I could have lived with that. I had always accepted that in our relationship. I didn’t know any better. But we didn’t even really have a friendship. What we did have, I guess, was a mutual respect and more importantly, we had children. And for both those things, we needed to figure out how to move forward. There had to be a way to organize this mess, even if it meant accepting that it was over.
I really had to go home.
And when I got home Peter was there. He had called in to work. He was sitting on the love seat. It was so weird to see him sitting there in the middle of the day.
“Hi,” I said. He nodded. I was going to apologize again, but I wasn’t sure that I really was sorry for anything except hurting him and the potential pain to our kids. He deserved honesty. So I tried that. “I know you are probably feeling a lot of things right now, but for whatever it’s worth, I hope you believe that I never meant to hurt you.”
He nodded. I could tell by his expression that though this had surprised him, he wasn’t completely shocked.
“We had all these plans,” he said. “We had everything so set up. And you decided to ruin it.”
I didn’t think I had made a decision to do this. This was something I hadn’t planned, even though I still had to take responsibility. But he needed to talk so I didn’t say anything. I sat down on the floor and looked up at him.
“For a long time now, I felt you were checked out of this relationship. We had a to-do list for every day and everything was fine as long as we checked everything off. My life, our life, has become a series of tasks to accomplish. And I’ve done it in my sleep. I’ve been asleep. I want to be angrier with you. I feel like I should be and maybe I will be, but you know what, Claudia? I don’t really feel anything but shock. I feel like I am about to wake up and I am glad. I’m tired of this. I want something more too.”
“And I think you deserve more. Maybe we both do. The kids definitely do.”
Neither of us said anything for a little while. We sat in our carefully appoin
ted living room and waited. Then I got up and went to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. I brought two mugs back for us and we sat again with coffees. I thought we might have sat that way forever, but we didn’t.
Eventually, we did what we do best. We worried and we planned. With truth and some tears, we figured out how to end our marriage
That weekend, we took turns with the kids. On Saturday I had them and Sunday Peter did. We both did pretty much the same thing with them. We ran them ragged in the park. We didn’t tell them anything. We decided it was too soon.
Sunday when it was Peter’s turn I slept in. I called Ruth after I read the paper. I knew she was starting work in a week and I thought she might want to do some shopping.
“Oh, my goodness, I really do need a few things.”
We casually strolled down Fifth Avenue in Park Slope and took advantage of some late-summer sales. I wasn’t really sure if I was going to need to start getting interview clothes, but I bought some in case.
I filled her in on what was going on. I didn’t tell her about the affair. I told her that my marriage was ending. She didn’t ask a lot of questions. But she did offer to babysit, which was thoughtful. And she offered to help me find an apartment. The show that she worked on was all about New York real estate, so sometimes she heard about things before they became public.
We were friends, I realized. She was offering to help me for no reason. I guess because she cared. It wasn’t that we were fellow moms. We didn’t have to be friends; it’s not as if our kids were even the same age. We just were. I felt chosen. It was something that actually made me feel good.
“Oh, I have something for you,” she said. She reached into her bag. She pulled out a heavy piece of paper. “I saw this the other day and thought of you.”
It was a fake award with a giant gold star and it said “One of the best mothers ever.”
“I know you love awards and rewards and I hope you appreciate the generalness of it,” she said, still seeming a little unsure.
“I love it,” I said. I really did. “I am going to frame it and put it in my new place or office or whatever. It will remind me not to be so hell-bent on achievement. One of the best is probably more satisfying than the best.”
“Probably less stress,” Ruth said.
“Definitely less.”
On Monday I got dressed as if I were going into work and then I sat by the phone as instructed and waited. It was dehumanizing, but I deserved penance. At 11:40, Deanna’s assistant, Kate called and asked that I come in for a meeting with Deanna at one. Luckily, I was already dressed. I took it as a positive sign that she was actually having me come in. Would someone call you into work to fire you? Maybe. But Deanna seemed to be above that type of thing.
When the train went over the Manhattan Bridge, I looked out at the view of the city. I didn’t have any emails to get back to, so I stared out the window the entire time. I was surprisingly not worried about work. There was nothing I could do. I had made my bed. It was freeing to not always be in control. To finally just go with it.
I walked to work and wondered if it would be the last time I would. I tried to think of a ceremony I could do to commemorate it. But there was nothing, so instead I enjoyed the rare August breeze.
Kate ushered me right into Deanna’s office. She was looking at her computer and typing when I walked in. She glanced up at me.
“I’ll be right with you, Claudia,” she said.
“Take your time,” I said, out of habit. But this time, I actually meant it. I wasn’t in a rush. For once I wasn’t playing beat the clock.
“Ok,” she said, turning to me. She had a slight smile. I wasn’t going to be fired. I felt it. “You’re not losing your job.”
“Thank you,” I said. With so much uncertain, I was glad I would have one less new thing to worry about.
“Claudia, what you did was a serious offense. You are lucky, as we said, that you didn’t work with Keith, but the fact that you did this on company property was a big deal.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “It was completely irresponsible.”
“That it was. You should know that it put us in an unfortunate position. Keith threatened to sue us,” she said, waiting for the words to sink in. I couldn’t believe it. What an asshole. “He can’t now. He signed a contract. Be he used this as leverage. He wanted to be a writer, I guess. So we transferred him to L.A. He’s going to work for Dragon Circle, probably thinks he can parlay something into the movie deal the show is going to get. He has it all figured out, I’m sure. He has landed on his feet as men like him so often do.”
I remembered the day he came into my office that first time to ask me about a sexual discrimination lawsuit. Was this some weird plan all along? Had he preyed on me because I looked that desperate? It was humiliating.
I looked down into my lap. This was way worse than I expected.
“We all make mistakes, Claudia,” Deanna said after a minute. I looked up at her and she smiled. “This is life. These bad parts make us more grateful for the good, don’t they? This stuff happens, you know. I’ve done stupid things in the past. You live. You learn. I wasn’t going to lose you over this. I reminded the top brass about how crucial you are to this operation. I believe you’ve saved us millions over the years. To me, your job was worth going to the mat for.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Just don’t make me regret it,” she said. I realized that Deanna hadn’t really done this for me because of my personality. She didn’t actually see me as a person. I understood that because up until recently I put everyone into categories. People were either cogs in the wheel of helping me complete my tasks or obstacles preventing me from getting there.
“I won’t,” I said. I hesitated and then— What the hell?—She had gone to bat for me. It was high time I loosened up. “Thank you, D.”
And that was it. I was back to work. I was keeping my job because of my own merits and because the right person believed in them. All that overachieving had saved me in this case. But maybe I could do things differently this time. Maybe not all of those uptight parts of me were bad. There had to be a way to reconcile all of it. I owed myself something. Maybe a little pride. Perhaps the me I was and the newish me could somehow combine and be a super me a better me. Or maybe that was still too much pressure. Maybe I could lay off the hyper achievement and simply try to be one of the best mes ever.
So in the end, I guess it was me who saved me. And though I was still worried about a lot of things, maybe I did learn a little something from the grasshoppers.
But I was still sort of proud to be an ant.
Chapter 19
Kirsten Becomes an Honest Woman
I wasn’t the one wearing the long white dress. That was an honor reserved for Julissa and Sage. Jules said she knew all about brides, and somewhere along the way, she began to think she was the bride and this was all about her and then she roped Sage in and so they were both the brides. And not being the bride was fine with me. But I was really happy to be getting married in a bread shop that wasn’t fully finished.
This ceremony was only for our families and some old friends that came from far away. There were new friends too, like Claudia and Ruth.
Kim was also there. Once I thought she was my rival, and now I realized she was a quite nice person. I was happy that David was in business with her because she seemed honest and ethical. And I was more than a little relieved when she came with her partner . . . a woman.
The wedding had been typical of our style, spur of the moment without much thought about logistics. We planned to have it in David’s parents’ backyard. We called our guests a week and a half before and couldn’t believe that everyone we spoke to wanted to come. Apparently every one in our lives thought they would never see the day we married and wanted to be there to witness it for real.
What we thought was going to be a small wedding of maybe thirty soon grew into a wedding of sixty-five. It was too large to h
ave at David’s parents’ house, so David decided we should have it at the green market. The next thing I knew he totally dove into making the plans. A few of the guys he worked with were in a mariachi band, and he got them to play. He also started working with a florist who was going to have a shop in the farmers’ market and he got Kim to let us have access to two of the vacant sales apartments in the building so our guests could have bathrooms to use and I would have a place to get ready.
A place to get ready? I didn’t think I needed all that. I would have been fine with a legal ceremony, but David was way into this. So I guess I needed a dress. But wearing white seemed to be a big joke after three children and years of living in sin. I could make do with a summer dress I had in my closet.
“But you need a wedding dress. Even if it isn’t lily-white,” Ruth said over drinks at Claudia’s new apartment, a small one bedroom in the South Slope. They kept calling it my bachelorette party. They had purchased feather boas and various penis-shaped propaganda. They were way more into it than I was. Though every once in awhile I found myself getting a little caught up in it all and I wanted to let my voice get a few octaves higher and scream, “I’m getting married!” But I didn’t.
“Why do I need a wedding dress?” I asked Ruth when Claudia was in the kitchen mixing more mojitos.
Claudia and her husband were separating, but they were doing something different. Instead of making the children shuttle from place to place, they were going to trade off nights here and the new apartment. Claudia explained their elaborate system of rules and regulations and computer-application calendars so as not to infringe on each other’s privacy. It all started to confuse me after a while, but I believed it was going to work for them.
“Because you’re getting married,” Claudia said, coming back into the living room.