Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

  I had a dream that we got locked in the café overnight, and he made me a grilled cheese sandwich, and then we had sex for hours before falling asleep in the armchairs. “I dreamed we got locked in the café!” I texted him. “You made me a sandwich and then we fell asleep in the red chairs.” I couldn’t mention the sex, but by then I suspected he would know.

  Ordinary moments between us took on an unacknowledged intensity. In the café, I sometimes caught myself staring at his hands around his coffee cup. Or he’d say something banal like “I’m going to grab a lid, you want one?” “No thanks,” I’d say and then we would stare helplessly at each other for an awkwardly erotic number of seconds. It was mortifying. It was wonderful. So were our hugs—especially the goodbye hugs, which were long and close enough for me to notice that if I wore three-inch heels, our torsos lined up perfectly. A better woman would have stopped wearing three-inch heels to coffee, but I had no interest in being a better woman.

  Well, almost none. I knew that all the time I spent with or thinking about Noah was supposed to be a symptom of problems in my marriage, so I spent a lot of my downtime trying to diagnose them. But I couldn’t come up with much. I was having a wonderful life with John, and John seemed to be having a wonderful life with me. True, I never asked John if he had enough art in his life, or how he felt about his parents’ marriage, but only because I already knew. I didn’t know these things about Noah, and it seemed important to find out, and I didn’t see why I shouldn’t have this little excavation project on the side.

  “I know this is supposed to mean I need to work on my marriage, but I think I just need to work on myself,” I told my friend Claire.

  “When married women have feelings for someone else, they’re always told it means they need to do more work,” Claire said. “Maybe nothing’s wrong. Maybe you’re just having a human experience.”

  * * *

  “I’m about to ask an awkward question,” I told Noah a few weeks later. It was late April, and for once the sun was out. We’d taken our coffees to a small park where two homeless men bickered about cigarette money a few feet away. “Do you think we might be having, like, a human experience with each other?” I’d asked because I had to. The stares were getting longer, the hugs closer. Without conscious thought, I’d found my hand in his hair during the last one, and he didn’t act as if there were anything strange about that. Plus, we’d begun to complain (mildly, but still) about our spouses and to opine about how marriage—not our marriages, you understand, but the Institution—was too limiting to contain a person’s whole self. It was time for someone to pull the Band-Aid off.

  I thought he would know what I meant by “human experience,” and I was right. “Yes,” he said, and we both exhaled audibly.

  “I thought it might just be me,” I said, partly to say something and partly because I really had thought there was a 10 percent chance that this was some delusional-old-lady Death in Venice deal.

  “No,” Noah said, and we lapsed into a comfortable silence. We kept staring at each other, but even the staring felt softer now that it had an acknowledged cause. After a minute or two we began trading fragmented thoughts back and forth:

  I don’t want to fuck up your life.

  That one day. I sat there and thought, What is happening to us?

  I don’t want to fuck up your life, either.

  Any bit of myself I give to you, I’d be taking from my marriage.

  It could never end well. Even if it started well.

  Are hearts that zero-sum? Never mind. It doesn’t matter.

  And it would definitely start well.

  She already suspects something’s up.

  If we were single, this would make so much sense.

  He has no idea I’m even capable of this.

  I think I have to be careful around you.

  That’s what hurts. That it makes so much sense.

  And yet you fascinate me. I’m fascinated by you.

  From the outside it probably sounded as coherent as the chatter from the homeless guys. From the inside, only a little more. Finally, we fell silent again, and then he leaned in toward me and said, “Do you think you could stay in control of this? Because I don’t. I have no illusions that I could have an affair with you and keep it under any kind of control.”

  Oh, God, I wanted to say yes. I thought of all the men I could say yes to and mean it. I knew I had it in me, the ability to take a lovely, funny, good man and keep him in a compartment for alternate Wednesdays only. Shamelessly, even joyfully. A few of the men I could say yes to flashed in my mind as I looked at him.

  “No,” I said. “I couldn’t control it. I would fall in love with you.”

  When we parted, we hugged as if our lives depended on it, as usual, and then backed off until it was something different: two people standing very still with their arms around each other. I could feel his belly against mine. I rested my forehead on his chest.

  “I don’t want to be this kind of person,” I said.

  “You’re not any kind of person,” he said. “You’re just Kristi.”

  For a month we met for long conversations about why we obviously could not have an affair, interspersed with long looks and occasional tears. There was the chance of greater hurt. There was the decade-plus age difference, though I was the only one who cared about that. There was the fact that we worked together. There was the knowledge that pain was bound to follow. And then there were our marriages. His was in a rough patch, but he could see a path back to happiness. Mine was happy, which hadn’t stopped me from marching into this thing. But neither one of us was looking for an exit.

  There were all these great reasons to walk away. And then there was the love. That’s how we talked about it, as a thing. We didn’t say we loved each other. We’d bought houses and had lives with other people; we weren’t dumb enough to think a few months of sneaking around like teenagers could be talked about in the same way. But love was in the room like an end table or umbrella stand, and we let it be. “I have strong feelings of love when I sit here with you” was how he put it once. He had them. We had them.

  The day Noah told me definitively that he needed to focus on his marriage, I decided I hated want and desire and love. They were as painful as a side stitch, and no more special or noble. “I want to give everything back,” I told him. “I don’t want this potential to feel stuff anymore.”

  “Yes you do,” Noah said.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve had enough new love for one life. I’m deciding that now. No more.”

  He leaned into me and smiled. “But that’s not the kind of life we’re going for, remember?”

  He was one of the most authentically optimistic people I’d ever known; just the way he said the word “future” could float a gold haze over me. “I’m so optimistic I get blindsided by the obvious,” he’d said early in our friendship. I remembered that now. I wondered what would blindside him next, now that it wasn’t going to be me.

  * * *

  Afterward I walked to the Olympic Sculpture Park and sat by the water. I’d long assumed that if I wandered outside our marriage, I’d keep it to myself unless there was some greater good from telling John. But that was in a hypothetical zipless-fuck scenario, where I had my fun and danced away. I knew that kind of dalliance was still a possibility for me, but I also realized now that it might not be as zipless as I’d assumed, because as much as I wanted to be purely rapacious, my heart might insist on butting in. I had fallen in love with Noah, and I might fall in love again someday; in fact, I probably would, unless I arranged my life so that falling in love was impossible.

  And Noah was right. A life where falling in love was impossible was not what I was going for, not after the effort of dragging myself from addiction back to the land of the living and feeling.

  * * *

  That weekend I sat in our living room watching John read the paper. “Can I tell you something that scares me?” I blurted.

  “Of cours
e,” John said, and waited to hear one of my usual fears: cancer or earthquakes or the total illegalization of women by the U.S. government.

  “I’m feeling sad that the part of my life that included falling in love is just over,” I said, with a sense of diving into rapids.

  He smiled. I hadn’t expected that. “What makes you think it is?”

  “I mean the part where I could fall in love even a little bit without it being a catastrophe. Because of, you know, this.” I waved my hands around to indicate “marriage.”

  John put his paper down. “Well, ‘catastrophe’ is a strong word,” he said. “Things aren’t that black-and-white.”

  He wasn’t getting it. Time to be more direct. “The thing is, someone has feelings for me.” He nodded and waited. “And I like it. I really, really like it.” I’d intended to give him the broader context, to tell him about the part where I gazed back, where I did more than just enjoy being desired, but I started to cry before I could get there.

  Later, I’d tell him a lot more. About the flirting and trying to have X-ray penis vision. About how it felt to finally know how to want. About my feelings for Noah. I told him all (okay, many) of the secret thoughts I’d been keeping so he would never have to know his wife thought about anyone else. Or, rather, so I’d never have to face him knowing it. So I could stay in the box he’d never asked me to live in. And in and around this conversation we laughed a lot and cried a little and had tons of sex, and I emerged both dizzy with new freedom and more in love with him than ever. And more ready for a future where I would have to make decisions and be accountable for them, with no booze or hangovers to take the blame.

  But in that moment, all I had was “I really, really like it” and trembling hands.

  John came to sit by me on the sofa, and I made myself look him in the eye.

  “Do you hate me?” I asked.

  He smiled, his eyes made a slightly paler blue with tears in them. “You’re asking if I hate you for being a woman with a fuckload of unruly feelings?”

  I nodded.

  “No, I don’t hate you,” he said. “Jesus, baby. Why would I want anything else?” And I stared at him, enthralled.

  Elephant Gray

  It was my fiftieth day without a drink, and I thought I deserved a congratulatory treat. A cupcake, maybe. I bought one with Neapolitan icing and a cherry on top and ate it while tentatively marveling at my own awesomeness. Then, heading back to the car, I passed Barneys. I didn’t need anything from Barneys, but I figured I should go in anyway and just, you know, make sure everything was all right. I started my inspection just inside the front door, in Handbags. My eye fell on a pebbled-leather Belstaff bag in an unusual brownish-gray color. I picked it up, put it back, picked it up again, and stood in front of a mirror checking it out against my body. A salesman walked over. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” he said. “A perfect elephant gray.”

  I looked in the mirror again, turned to the side and back. The bag was heavy, beautifully made, and like no other I owned. It was also seventeen hundred dollars. But it was my fiftieth day without a drink, and I deserved a congratulatory treat. I smiled at the salesman. “I’ll take it,” I said.

  This could be a story about how I recovered from alcoholism by transferring my addiction to spending, ruining my financial life in the process. But it isn’t, because I had the money to spend on a seventeen-hundred-dollar bag. I got sober as what most people would call “rich,” a word that I can’t quite own. But “wealthy,” or “affluent,” or just “privileged”? Yes. I drank that way, too, and it’s true: money changes everything.

  * * *

  I grew up middle-class, a professor’s kid. We always had decent cars and new shoes and trips to Disney World. I always knew I would go to college and assumed I would get some kind of job and earn a decent living. But I was never supposed to make this much money. I don’t mean that in an existential, I-don’t-deserve-it way. I mean that my employer literally never intended to pay me this much money. The company’s compensation model involves a smallish salary rounded out with stock shares that together are supposed to add up to a competitive package. And that was true for the first few years, before the value of those shares started to go, as the finance world would put it, batshit. The shares I own today are twenty-two times as valuable as the ones I was given when I was hired, making me significantly overpaid for what would still be a high-earning job elsewhere. “You do realize that no other company will pay you this much money,” my financial adviser reminds me, eyebrows raised, every time I make noises about quitting over the stress or because I’m sick of tech bros or because I just want a change. And though I roll my eyes when he says it, telling him of course I know that, in truth it’s always a surprise. After a decade like this, I’ve forgotten it isn’t normal. I feel as if I deserve every penny.

  * * *

  In some ways my drinking escalated in parallel to my affluence, because my affluence escalated in parallel to my misery at work. Before Seattle, I worked at a sleepy company in Ann Arbor that paid me decently and promoted me every couple of years. Seven years in, I was bored. So when I was recruited by my current employer, I was ripe for the picking. I asked some blunt questions first, of course, because even in 2006 the company culture was associated with unpleasant phrases like “meat grinder.” “I’m not looking to get divorced,” I told my future boss during the interview, and he quickly assured me that the company’s reputation as a destroyer of lives and marriages was exaggerated. In years to come, I saw co-workers vote not to hire a candidate who even mentioned the concept of work-life balance, so I guess I got lucky.

  For a couple of years I existed in a state of controlled panic as I tried to master my new job. I was surrounded by smart, warm, kind colleagues in varying states of collapse. One woman frequently broke out in hives. Another was losing her hair. My office mate came back to our tiny, windowless space from meetings with the senior vice president shaking with nerves and fury, telling me how the SVP had demanded to know where another team member had gotten his M.B.A. and then said, “Stanford? I don’t believe it. You’re too stupid.” We all felt stupid, whether anyone was calling us that or not. We were lifelong overachievers who’d landed in a place where it was nearly impossible to overachieve, dredging up whatever childhood issues had made us so desperate to impress in the first place. If you looked closely, you could see our preteen selves trembling beneath our skin. I was already a daily drinker when I moved to Seattle, but my two glasses of wine became three within months of starting my job.

  But it was a genuinely exciting place to work. We were there to solve big problems, the CEO told us, and it was true. At my old company my job stayed largely the same year to year, and when I asked for more, I was mildly chided for being too ambitious. Now I was swimming in more opportunities than even a few thousand overachievers could tackle at once. And we were expected to tackle all of them.

  And then there was the money. For the first couple of years, it wasn’t such a big deal. I’d gotten a comfortable bump in salary when I left Michigan, but Seattle was also much more expensive than Ann Arbor. And Michigan was apparently the canary in the housing-bust coal mine, so John and I were stuck paying rent and a mortgage for the year it took our house to sell at a loss. But when the stock vests started to kick in, the stress and pain and generally grim work conditions paid for Italian vacations and shoe sprees and all the new hardcover books my heart desired, with money left over for retirement, or what some people called a “walking away” fund. I called it the “fuck you” fund, which says something about the kind of angry rich person I was starting to become.

  Because as my net worth grew, my worldview shrank. I’d worked my way into bigger responsibilities and more exposure to senior leadership, where I, too, had the envied opportunity to have VPs fling the word “stupid” at me. My next big milestone would be promotion to the executive ranks. But the company’s promotion process was largely secret, and no one could really tell me what I needed to d
o to be worthy. One boss said my job performance was already there, but my role wasn’t big enough. The next said my role was big enough, but I needed to be better at it. As years passed and I didn’t get the tap on the shoulder, I became obsessed with what I saw as my own overwhelming failure to achieve. Every decision I made hinged on whether it could get me promoted. Every time I walked into a room of executives, I imagined them thinking what a disappointment I had turned out to be. Finally, when I’d landed in the biggest role of my career and nailed it, I used the temporary halo to cue up one more discussion with my VP about what I needed to do to make the leap. He smiled benevolently. “Just change the world,” he said, opening his hands wide, “and it will be an easy sell.”

  Just change the world. My three glasses of wine a night became four.

  And I stayed. Because I wanted excitement and the hunt for approval more than I wanted peace or comfort or self-confidence. I stayed because I was convinced by that point that no other company would want me. And I stayed because of money. Because I liked the things it bought. Because the things it bought helped me lie to myself about my drinking and, you know, my soul. Nearly everyone I worked with drank a lot, and we drank well—rare scotches, fancy liqueurs, excellent northwestern wines that helped us pass off boozing as being locavores. I joined a local wine club that delivered four curated bottles directly to my desk every month. On business trips, I sought out fancy hotel bars as peaceful places to catch up on e-mail while steadily getting lit. As my drinking and my unhappiness escalated, I threw money at anything that would ease the burdens of daily living. Housecleaning, gardening, grocery delivery, first-class flights: I became an expert at spotting and removing any source of friction in my life. And once I’d begun drinking enough to scare myself, I started to spend money on anything that I thought might help me dial it back without requiring me to actually quit: yoga retreats, hypnotherapy, Reiki, craniosacral work, psychic readings. All of these things were enjoyable, and had their small benefits, but they didn’t fix me as I wanted them to, and the practical middle-class girl inside me was embarrassed to be spending thousands of dollars on solutions that were ephemeral at best. But it also made sense, because the problem I was trying to solve was my soul, which I believed had broken down for mysterious reasons that had nothing to do with my drinking. If I could only buy the right goods or services to put my soul back together, then I might reach a state of serenity where work and life would feel manageable. And then, as a side benefit, I would also get my drinking back under control.