by Colleen Sell
But there was more to my future husband than a mild temperament. The first time I met him, with a girlfriend of mine, he leaned against his dorm-room bunk bed and pronounced to us, “Yeah, I’m a virgin.” (We had not asked.) “I think that’s cool,” he added.
He was a freshman then, and I was a slightly more experienced sophomore, so I raised my eyebrows and smirked. Secretly, though, I admired his courage in putting it out there.
His folks pressured him relentlessly to become a doctor, so he started out pre-med. But in art classes he found expression painting cartoon-like characters oozing color, humor, and vulnerability. When he switched his major to art, he received no end of grief from his parents. But he stuck to his guns. So I began to see him as a person willing to be himself — his goofy, creative, vulnerable self — no matter what others thought. And that is what attracted me.
He and I started dating my senior year. After five years we got married in a white-steepled country chapel with artful black and white photos to prove it.
But he and I looked mismatched. Commuting on the train together to our separate jobs with different dress codes, I would be in a blouse and slacks, he in a T-shirt and jeans. I looked like the grownup, he the kid. People often seemed to think we were not a couple. Sometimes they walked right between us. At a fast-food restaurant, I would have to interject, “I’m with him,” even though he had just ordered for both of us.
At home, if the furnace broke, I was the one to call for repairs. I was the one to find the best deal, show the workers what to do, argue when the work was not done right. He was afraid to offend, to make demands.
Before our daughter was born, we were at a party with a girlfriend of mine. My husband sat off to the side as my friend and I chatted. Two guys approached us, drinks in hand, and began to chat. They were bores. It was clear they thought I was single. I threw a “rescue me” look to my husband. I did not expect him to make threats or start a fight. I thought he would come stand beside me, put his arm around my waist, give the nonverbal “back off” cues. He did nothing but smirk, amused at my predicament.
During this time period I got pregnant, accidentally. There was a miscarriage, then a difference of reactions. I was bereft; he was relieved. A year later, he reluctantly agreed to a second pregnancy. I became pregnant with our daughter. But during that year, things changed. He had stopped looking at me. He had stopped ogling me in his trademark adolescent way. He would walk out of a room I was in and turn out the light, forgetting I was there.
It continued this way until our daughter was two years old. One night he and I were lying in bed together. He was facing the wall, and I was stretched out next to him looking at the back of his head. He had talked a lot about a woman at work when I was pregnant, then not at all afterward.
“Don’t worry, she’s married,” he had said. “She’s just a friend.”
I had not wanted to ask about her this night, but I knew I had to.
I was surprised to hear of the woman’s divorce and her new boyfriend. I had not known everything then, so I am not sure how I knew to ask, but I did. “Are you jealous of her new boyfriend?”
He whispered to the wall, “I think so.”
I attempt one of the adult water slides while my husband holds the baby. Moving in line step by step up a wet staircase to the top of the slide, the outside landscape slowly reveals itself through the tall windows. A solid rain falls into a pond with ducks, circled by prairie grass. It is calm and scenic. But the higher I move, the more I see. The pond is tucked into the elbow of a highway on-ramp, where cars glide past construction equipment, piles of dirt, and a dump truck.
The water slides protrude outside of the building from the top and curl back inside at the ground level, like plastic noodles dripping rain onto the concrete below. Inside the building, I hurl myself down the dark plastic tube, where I get twirled and twisted and dropped.
One night in the weeks after discovering the affair I was driving home from a far suburb with my daughter. She was two years old. Snow blanketed street signs on the unlit road so I could not tell where I was going. Visions of my husband and the other woman tumbled over and over in my brain.
My daughter began to whimper. Strapped into her car seat behind me, she wanted out. But I could not stop the car. It was too dark, the streets too isolated.
Another vision of my husband and the woman accosted me. A tangle of arms, legs, and . . . Stop! Stop! Stop! I silently admonished myself, repeatedly, futilely. I could not stop my torturous thoughts. My skin crawled. My daughter started screaming. I fought a rising panic.
I made a wrong turn, then another. I could not catch my breath. As I approached a railroad track, I saw the train and had a flash — just a flash — of a vision of me driving the two of us into it.
At the bottom of the waterslide, I slosh around in the catch pool, where it is bright and noisy and exuberant. I see my husband standing on the side, waiting, watching, smiling. The baby is balanced on his hip; our daughter is holding his hand. “There’s Mom!” he says to her. He is looking at, not past, me. His stance is wide, his feet anchored, his shoulders broad.
Together, we make our way to a lukewarm hot tub, lit turquoise from below.
We worked to recover our marriage. We went to counseling once a week. We read books about affairs. We looked at the patterns of our behavior and deliberately changed them.
There was no magic moment when I said, “I am so in love with you that I forgive you.” There was no scene where he ran after me in slow motion with a fistful of wildflowers. His affair was like a fulcrum in our lives, a prism where the light comes in imperceptibly and comes out split, defined, divided into its separate parts.
Over the course of several months, he became more like a grownup. And I became less of one.
The next day when we are leaving the hotel, the sky is a steel drizzle. I stand outside with the kids waiting for my husband to get the car. A balding man in a sleeveless shirt is smoking nearby. He is shivering, hugging himself against the chill. My husband pulls our car up to the curb. As I am about to get in, the guy suddenly becomes animated. He makes conversation with me about the model of our car, a battered station wagon. I wonder about the guy’s enthusiasm.
Once I am in the car, my husband says, “That guy’s a creep. I saw him lurking around the hot tub.”
“Hmmph,” I say as we drive away.
Later that night, at home with the kids asleep, my husband and I sneak into our bedroom to do what we had not been able to do with the kids in the hotel room: make love. With his arms around me and his skin warm, he says again, “You looked naked in that swimsuit,” with a smile.
“What do you mean naked? It wasn’t like you could see through the fabric,” I say.
“But I could see the outline of your nipples,” he explains. “And that guy was looking at you in the hot tub.”
“Oh, the ‘creep!’”
I nestle into the normalcy of his jealousy, his irritation, his desire to hold me and make love to me and find me sexy in a mom swimsuit.
— Stephanie Springsteen
A Gift for Women
I was about to walk around the side of our house, but stopped when I heard my husband, Eric, talking to our neighbor’s sixteen-year-old son.
“Women are not like us,” he said. “And nowhere is that more clear than when you have to buy them a gift. Forget logic and practicality, and think useless and a waste of money.”
“I don’t even know why she gave me a present, it’s not my birthday!” young Steve pointed out.
“That’s the whole point! They only give you things because then you have to buy them something back. They don’t limit themselves to rational events, like birthdays and Christmas. They dream up anniversaries, like the day we first kissed and the first time you said you loved me. Most of the time, you won’t remember any of these things, but there is nothing you can do to stop them,” Eric said in his “expert” voice.
With my own birthda
y coming up, I smiled and kept listening.
“My father once gave my mother an electric blanket. They had no central heating, and their bed was always freezing. Did she appreciate a suitable present like that? Of course not! She would have preferred a bunch of roses, a great asset when your feet are freezing all night long!” I could tell Eric was well into his subject now and enjoying himself.
“Well, I was going to get Carrie a book token because she has to pay a fortune for a lot of her study books,” young Steve ventured.
“A book token,” Eric repeated in a voice close to alarm. “Don’t even think about it! Any book is a pretty risky thing to buy them. They might love cooking, but if you give them a book on it, they will take it as a criticism of their cooking. They can be into a particular sport, but they don’t want to read a book on how to improve at it.”
“So what kind of book can you buy then?” Steven asked.
“Some rubbish on their secret heartthrob, like how George Clooney came to be an actor or David Beckham’s views on women’s fashion. I would just forget a book; it’s too risky,” Eric advised.
“You are still thinking logically,” he went on. “You said Carrie shares a flat with some friends and it costs a fortune for electricity as they study into the early hours. Now, we might think a decent reading light with one of those new ‘eco’ bulbs that burns forever would be a good idea. But no! A woman would rather have a multicolored candle that gives off the scent of lotus blossoms and as much light as the moon on a cloudy night!”
I heard Steve laugh. “Her mum gave Carrie one of those for her birthday, and she loved it. You are spot on, Mr. Stark!”
“Perfume never goes wrong. They aren’t happy until they have a row of bottles of all shapes and sizes,” Eric offered. “The thing to do is pick something with the name of someone famous in a really fancy bottle. It is not so much the using of it but the showing it off to friends that pleases them. You can always say you chose it because you think it is very seductive; they like that even more.”
“Jewelry is probably the best bet; it’s the most useless thing around. Try to see what kind of things she wears. The best thing is to say, ‘I just felt like it was you!’ It panders to their egos, and they will love it even though they hate it.”
Eric went on with his sage advice. “Whatever you choose, you have to remember the wrapping. Wrapping is absolutely one of the most important issues when buying gifts for a woman. It is best to find one of those shops that will do the wrapping for you; if not, then get your sister to help. You need whatever new shiny paper they like at the moment and one of those totally useless rosette things that matches. If you can get coils of stuff to stick on as well, you are home and dry before they even open it.”
“I am so glad I spoke to you; you really know women,” Steve said.
I went back into the house and studied a number of things that Eric had given me for birthdays and anniversaries. Perfumes named after famous stars in weirdshaped bottles, a book about Tom Cruise, and three different earring and pendant sets in my favorite colors of red and purple. I smiled as a plan came to me.
The next day I casually said to my husband, “I am going along to Donna’s church sale. I have a number of nice things I can donate.”
“What kind of things?” Eric asked.
“Oh, perfumes; I can never go through them all. And some books I have read. And some of my jewelry; I can only wear so much. We don’t go out much these days, so I don’t have the same call for these things.”
I could see Eric visibly taking stock; that ruled out three of his first choices for my upcoming birthday.
On my birthday morning, I went down to breakfast, prepared by Eric, who was waiting for me at the table. I found a card sitting at my place and next to it another little envelope tied up with red ribbon. I opened the smaller envelope carefully. It read: “Confirmation of dinner for two at The Old Castle Restaurant.”
I looked up at Eric, eagerly watching me. I beamed at him. Old Castle was the best restaurant in the whole area, small and romantic, with a coal fire burning in the corner and candles on the table. “It’s fantastic! What on earth made you think of that?” I asked him.
“Oh, well, I thought it would give you a chance to wear your fancy perfumes and your jewelry,” he said. “I’m not daft; I recognize a hint when I get one.”
As I got up and went into his arms to hug him, I smiled to myself. It was never meant as a hint to go out somewhere, but I’d never tell him that.
His views on women probably had some truth in them; it was the all-knowing tone that had annoyed me. On the other hand, I knew that Eric did not particularly like having meals out; he just wanted to please me. He had missed out on the most important point for Steve: Everything he gave me was out of love, and that’s what made the gifts special. That’s what made me love him so much.
— Joyce Stark
The First Thing about Love
“Love? . . . She didn’t know the first thing about love!”
This scornful verdict from Ira, in the novel Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler, is aimed at his son Jesse and at Fiona, the teenage mother of Jesse’s child. Ira’s timid wife, Maggie, would love nothing more than to see her son happily married, and she desperately wants a relationship with her granddaughter. She contends that Jesse and Fiona still love each other and that love can prevail over their messy history. Ira’s contemptuous response leaves Maggie perplexed.
She asks hesitantly, “What is the first thing about love?”
Good question. In its early stages, my relationship with the love of my life certainly appeared less than promising.
We met during a training session for a theater company in Los Angeles, California. I had been in a rehearsal until 4:00 a.m. and was comatose on the floor of a classroom. That is, until I was rudely awakened at the crack of dawn by the sound of some completely insensitive, and apparently blind, Canadian hick singing a twangy folk song at the top of his lungs and strumming his guitar with great gusto.
Hello? I thought. Can this moron not see that I’m sleeping here?
That was our introduction. If someone would have told me then that this would be the man I would marry and with whom I would create two amazing little individuals, I probably would have asked them to suffocate me with my own pillow then and there. For one thing, at that first meeting, I was wearing a large diamond ring from someone else. Someone different, very different, from Calvin.
Michael, my fiancé at the time, was in medical school. Let me just say now that the qualities that make a great doctor aren’t always as appealing in a romantic partner. I’ve always believed that a man’s closet defines him. Michael’s closet was a three-sided walk-in affair. The left side was all shirts, from his most casual T-shirt to his most highly starched and properly labeled dress shirt, all on brown plastic hangers arranged in a precise order, one inch apart. Straight ahead were pants — jeans to khakis to suit trousers — all stiffly creased, also on brown plastic hangers, exactly one inch apart. Jackets were to the right. Shoes were on the floor in plastic boxes, computer labeled, and in order from athletic shoes to dress shoes.
I once left a wet towel on the floor at Michael’s apartment for a minute or two while I dried my hair, and the incident nearly became a deal-breaker. I once helped him hang a Van Gogh print over his dresser. It took us an hour and a half, the use of two tape measures and a level, and the need to rearrange the two items on the dresser sixty-four times to create the right visual effect. I’m actually surprised that Michael liked Van Gogh, Vincent being such an artistically and emotionally messy guy.
Calvin’s closet was . . . well, not even a closet. It was a suitcase. A suitcase from Goodwill with a broken handle held on by duct tape. Inside the suitcase were holey underwear, a couple of T-shirts with the sleeves cut off and printed with some slogan about pickin’ and grinnin’, and a brown double knit polyester suit, also from Goodwill. His other possessions consisted of a fringed suede jacket, a sleeve
garter from which the fabric had disintegrated, a worn Bible, and a guitar named Spanky. He made the curious fashion statement of wearing the sleeve garter with his sleeveless T-shirts.
Out of the more than 150 teams assembled for five-month performance tours to various regions of North America, Calvin and I ended up assigned to the same one. A married couple led our team, which also included another single woman, Gigi. We headed off to wow the Midwest with our dramatic and musical talents, which pleased me greatly since Michael was in his second year of medical school in Illinois.
About two seconds into the tour, Gigi fell madly in love with Calvin. We later learned that this was a habit of hers toward anyone with testosterone and breath in his lungs; actually, breathing was optional. We were all somewhat grateful that she fell for Calvin instead of Lanin, since Lanin was married to Jeannie. But it made things only slightly less complicated because, although I didn’t know it then, Calvin promptly fell in love with me. And I, naturally, was in love with Michael. If we could’ve convinced Michael to fall in love with Gigi, we would’ve had the perfect square. I know Gigi would’ve been game.
When I remember that tour, I often picture myself as Rose, in the movie Titanic, faced with the choice between the neurotic control freak and the freespirited drifter. I would get off the phone after a late-night argument with Michael, and there would be Calvin, ready to listen and tell me I’m wonderful and oh-so-misunderstood. There he would be, charming everyone with his guitar, or running everywhere with the eagerness of a puppy, or dropping everything to skip rocks with a five-year-old playmate.