In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  When I returned, we moved in together, but my manic kinesis intensified. Cal’s career, in my view, was stagnating. He was still working at the same place, still vaguely interested in it but admittedly not passionate about it. He still did not seem to care much about his career, and while his relative inertia was alien to me as ever, I had come, in a way, to rely on it because I did care. I cared about work in the way the lone figure adrift on the life raft cares about not being eaten by sharks or dying of dehydration. Throughout my twenties, I lived in a sustained state of panic, some of it ostensibly work-related, all of it insidiously self-absorbed. Like the hapless protagonist in some form of Sex and the City–style Greek tragedy, I had left New York because I hated writing about technology only to return to write about it again, but this time for a major newsweekly. So I just went on torture rampages.

  Was I going to make my deadline? Had I interviewed everyone I could have interviewed? Did I get that iffy part of the fifth paragraph right? Did I file the right caption with the right picture or the left picture? I hate myself. I hate every little thing: how self-absorbed, how empty and small I am. My mother was right: I’m a “miserable failure,” an “evil child.” Guess what? I was promoted! The youngest senior editor at U.S. News & World Report! Check me the fuck out! Now I’m all over TV! Uh-oh, now there’s a new editor boss, and he hates me. Is he out to get me, or just impervious and grumpy? Why does he hate me? Do you think I’ll ever be promoted again? I am an incompetent, a fraud, a pathetic fucking joke. Everyone can see it. The boss can see it. I don’t know why you’re with me; I don’t know why anyone would be with me. My father is gone. Gone. But I can be funny! Can’t I be kind of funny? I can be funny, right? Why was I writing about technology? I hated technology! I want to be writing for the theater! Now I’m writing about technology and I’m writing a play. My play isn’t finished yet. My play sucks. But now I’ve been offered my own TV show! My editor is mad at me because I’m writing a play and have my own TV show, even though I’m still getting my work done for the magazine. I am terrified because everyone hates me, and you are going to leave me because I’m such a lunatic. Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t anybody? My father left me. Left me. Was my editor going to fire me because, even though he didn’t say it, he obviously felt that there was no way I could write a play, have my own TV show, and get my work done? I can’t believe I just spent three hundred dollars on a pair of shoes. I spend money on clothes because I hate myself. But don’t they look kind of good?

  Much of this is the boilerplate raving of any neurotic writer living in New York. It was accompanied by a consuming sense of incompetence, fraudulence, plain badness. I was sure that I wasn’t the person I’d advertised myself to be. Deadliest: I was my father. I panicked, suffered, and often drank late into the night with Cal talking me down. And he did, he always talked me down. Because perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Cal was his ability to step back, out, above, and zero in on what was extraordinary about virtually anything. He zeroed in on facets of me that I did not perceive, that perhaps were not even there but for his perception of them. I was, he said, the most amazing person he had ever known. I cared, he said, I wanted to do better, and no matter what had happened to me, I never gave up, I kept moving. Look, he said, at what you have made, what you have always made, out of nothing. Magic, he told me. You are magic, Susie.

  In college, I had taken an astrophysics class, harboring the small, ultimately fatuous ambition that the night sky might open itself up to me again, and while the results were catastrophic, I did grasp a few things. One of them was that there is a force called inertial force, also known as fictitious force or pseudo force. It appears to be a force, and it can even be treated mathematically like one. But it is not a real force. It is produced by the reaction of a body to an accelerating force, lasting only as long as the accelerating force does.

  I kept moving.

  For the first several years that Cal and I were together, my father was so poisonously alcoholic that he was not really a person. In that period, he went through three harrowing rehabs. I had attended each one, crippled after each of his failures. Cal could not understand why I wanted anything to do with him; he certainly didn’t. You sit there freaking out every day, expecting to get a call that he’s either blown his head off or killed someone? When you work up the nerve to call him, the guy can hardly ever be bothered to talk to you—and when he does, you’re crying for a week afterward because he’s pounded you into the pavement?

  I had a recurring dream in which my dad had killed The Edge of U2; I had to find Bono and beg his forgiveness. I would tell Cal about these dreams, weeping. Jesus, he would say, shaking his head. But you’d really like him if you met him sober, I would say; he really is great. What can you say? Alcoholism.

  There was a period after the third rehab during which my dad did stay sober. I told myself not to hope for too much, but of course I did. It didn’t last. But in that period of about two years when he was in between wives, Dad was back. He had moved into a fishing cottage on the coast of Massachusetts that sat perched atop a cliff abutting the ocean. It was perfect for my dad: all that roil outside, the coziness inside, the solitude. And he was great. He was himself: contemplative, sparky, full of ideas, so funny it made you cry. The first time he invited us up to visit him in his cottage, my prediction materialized: Cal and Dad were instant comrades.

  They were both into cryptozoology, UFOs, and conspiracy theories, and they stirred each other into a froth, trading reports and specious factoids about all kinds of crackpot bullshit. My job was to appear disdainfully amused, chime in from time to time about how ludicrous such interests were, be swatted down, and ultimately be praised for indulging their foolishness (and pitied for being a nonbeliever). Then the conversation turned to football. It was definitely a classic piece of sexist theater, but I didn’t mind. I was just so happy that Dad was Dad again and that Cal could finally see what I’d been talking about.

  But perhaps the most revelatory moment during the visit was Dad’s introducing us to the “Carlin Room.” When we arrived, Dad gave us a tour of his place, which, though small compared to the house we’d lived in outside Philadelphia or the McMansion he and his second wife had remodeled in the Boston suburbs, still could easily have accommodated a family of five. Dad wanted nothing to do with that. The master bedroom was taken, of course; the bedroom with the best light he made his painting studio; the one downstairs was his home office. But the remaining one, the largest one, he called the Carlin Room. The thing was actually padlocked, and, Dad forewarned us—with one raised, bushy red eyebrow—dead-bolted on the inside.

  The Carlin Room was so named for an old bit from the young George Carlin in which he proclaimed that the chief function of one’s room is to protect your “stuff,” that one’s “stuff”—and keeping everyone’s grubby hands off it—ranked chief among the most primal of human needs. Carlin went on further to expound on the paradox of “shit” and “stuff,” explaining (and I paraphrase): “Have you ever noticed that whenever you go to other people’s houses their stuff is shit, and your shit is stuff?” The Carlin Room, my dad explained, was the only room in the entire house that was exclusively his. No one was allowed in it; no one was allowed to look into it; no one was even allowed to think about looking in it. It was, he grouched, “where I keep my stuff, man.”

  It would have been folly to point out to my dad that he lived alone and rarely had visitors, and even if he had, there was no guest room where they might stay because he had claimed the entire house as exclusively his already. Not that I didn’t point this out anyway. If there was ever a man who required a good-hearted roasting to a crisp on a spit, it was Dugal Thomas. I saw it as my duty to stand and deliver it, mostly because, so far as I know, no one else would. But while he mostly enjoyed my skewerings, if he was in the right frame of mind, I was only able to sear the surface; his insides always remained raw. If the Carlin Room could talk, which it did via my dad’s every gesture, it
would have bawled the state motto of New Hampshire: Live Free or Die! I didn’t bat an eye when he actually did move to New Hampshire two years later, holed up by a lake with an arsenal of shotguns and handguns and his third wife. (My brother and I cracked up when, in the mid-nineties—when Dad was still living alone in Massachusetts—the FBI started closing in on the identity and whereabouts of the Unabomber. Thank God Dad is dyslexic, we said, because that Unabomber guy is doing it on a manual typewriter, and he’s a good speller. If spell-check was involved in any one of those communiqués, Dad’d be in a lockdown at Quantico.)

  As Cal and I were driving home from the trip, I was hyperfocused on the great time I’d had and greedily probed Cal for a report on what a great time he’d had. Cal was quiet. Then he said, “Dugal is a great guy—I can see why you thought I’d like him.” The “but” dangled from its precipice. I pushed it. “That ‘Carlin Room’ says a lot,” he said. “There’s a fundamental selfishness about your dad. He’ll always be alone because of it.”

  That Dad was an alcoholic, a charming bastard, a self-absorbed prick, a dilettante, the tragic hero in the story of his own life (and mine) were all facts that had been as firmly established as my social security number or the city of my birth. But they were the kinds of character assignments one makes to establish a cast list to which you can refer when you forget why certain people are acting in certain ways. They are useful name tags, but they don’t do much to describe emotional reality. Cal had done it. He had absorbed my father’s essence: alone.

  That was not going to be me.

  What can anyone say that the Greeks haven’t said in three dozen ways already? Did I end up strong-arming Cal into becoming a sexless caregiver? I foam with remorse and self-loathing at the thought.

  I did not enter marriage with such intentions. In one way, my expectations were coincident with everyone else’s. According to research, Generation X does, by an overwhelming majority—94 percent—look first for a “soulmate” in marriage, and 86 percent expect to find theirs.* I had found mine. Like my peers from divorced households, I entered marriage with the presumption that Cal and I were going to outdo my parents altogether. After all, we’d already been together for nearly eight years before getting married—even though divorce rates are up to 48 percent higher for those who have lived together first than for those who haven’t.† There was no question in my mind that we would beat those odds. Part of the reason this happens, I think, is that many people our age consider it old-fashioned and naïve to think that marriage fundamentally changes a person, especially if you lived with your spouse out of wedlock beforehand; the essential dynamic is entrenched, and there seems little reason to expect innovation. Moreover, while everyone acknowledges that even though the big bridey moment is exhilarating, fabulous, swelling with feeling, it also represents something of a media marketing benchmark and therefore has the patina of a sham. The X subtext on the wedding day celebration is, be clear-eyed; enjoy the moment, but remember that it’s only a day; after that, you go back to the relationship.

  The Relationship. By all accounts, no American generation has been more devoted to attending to the every nuance of The Relationship than X. We are, say sociologists, anthropologists, and other manner of cultural observers, more emotionally invested in our spouses than previous generations were in theirs; our marriages are deep friendships and genuine partnerships. We depend on each other and work together. Because of all these things, adultery, for example, is far more devastating for us than it was for our parents or grandparents. Indeed, it’s fascinating to look at studies of this, because the generational attitudes toward sex and commitment are so profoundly different that some researchers muse that they may suggest that an evolutionary change is taking place in male and female brains under our very noses. In a 2003 study, the late Baltimore psychologist Shirley Glass, Ph.D., a specialist in infidelity research (and also the mom of the awesome Ira Glass, host of public radio’s This American Life), found that the mores of sexual infidelity were metamorphosing, in epic proportions. The traditional standard for men—love is love and sex is sex—is essentially dying out. Increasingly, men and women are developing serious emotional attachments long before they commit adultery.

  “The sex differences in infidelity are disappearing,” reported Glass in a 2003 Psychology Today interview. “In my original 1980 study, there was a high proportion of men who had intercourse with almost no emotional involvement at all—nonrelational sex. Today, more men are getting emotionally involved.” Historically, the strictly sexual tryst didn’t have any effect on men’s marital satisfaction. “You could be in a good marriage and still cheat,” explained Glass. But the new adultery, she found, was not just disruptive but more likely catastrophic, ending in divorce. The betrayal is simply so profound that it destroys everything. Moreover, what was fascinating from an anthropological point of view was that this new pattern constituted a major hit to a long-standing male code. “The double standard for adultery is disappearing,” declared Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D., in the same Psychology Today article. “It’s been around for 5,000 years and it’s changing in our lifetime. It’s quite striking. Men used to feel that they had the right. They don’t feel that anymore.”

  One can only wonder if this change has been brought about by X’s fundamentally different view of romantic relationships. That is, it seems clear that we don’t have the old-school sense of “Oh, well—men will be men” or “Coo-coo-ka-choo, Mrs. Robinson,” but rather: You’re my best friend, my It—how could you even have thought about doing this to me? So, is it any surprise that 94 percent of Generation Xers expect to marry our soulmates? Given that, how could we stand to think that our relationships with our partners are temporal, potentially dissoluble? I couldn’t—any more than I can grasp the mortality of our own solar system.

  But after observing Cal’s parents, I wanted something else. I wanted what they had. I wanted to be transformed. Within a few months of our getting married, I stopped drinking. Drinking had made me a self-revolving twister, and I realized that if I continued I would never be able to approach having a real marriage but would persist in ripping everything up and heaving it around the countryside. People say that you should make such epic changes for yourself, not for others, but I was, frankly, tired of myself. I wanted Cal to have his turn having problems, if he wanted to have some, and I wanted to be there to help him with them. I wanted him to have his turn at a career to which he could devote himself. He had already gotten seed money to launch an online investment advising company and was working passionately, for the first time in his life, to get it off the ground. I was excited for him, I was proud of him. I wanted him to know that I was actually there, as his wife, not as a messy, rebellious child. I wanted to be a wife.

  * Pamela Paul, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony (New York: Villard Books, 2002).

  † Ibid.

  FOUR

  ALIVE AND KICKING:

  HAVING CHILDREN

  For our wedding, my stepsister had given Cal and me a curious gift: a joint astrological chart. She was a student of a big-deal astrologer in Boulder and had contracted with him to record on audiocassette his interpretations of our celestial intersection. It was easily the most awesome wedding present we got. Cal and I had elected to listen to these interpretations via the tape player of my father-in-law’s midlife-crisis red Porsche, screaming down I-95 to a friend’s wedding in Virginia. On the tape, the guy told us that our chart said that I liked to talk a lot (really?) and that after a long period of stagnation, Cal’s career was revving up. But what our joint stars had highlighted in yellow marker, he said, was not only that we were going to have children, but that we would feel that being parents together fulfilled our potential as human beings. Moreover, being parents together was the big cosmic purpose of our relationship.

  The big cosmic purpose! This was great news, to me, anyway. There had never been any question in my mind that in spite of everything,
I would have children. Certainly very little about my background and behavior indicated that I would be well suited to raising them; indeed, nothing did. I can’t say that I ever had fantasies about being The Mom, but for as long as I could remember, I had always feelings of rightness—of happy inevitability—whenever I thought about having children of my own. Had I been called on to articulate these impulses at the time, however, my answer would have been that I knew that Cal would be a perfect father—and that together, we would be able to right the karmic injustices of my own childhood. We would make other mistakes, for sure. But we would not do what my parents did.

  Cal, however, wasn’t so sure—not about whether we would do a good job, but whether he wanted to have kids at all. His chief concern, sweetly, was that he and I would drift apart, that our connection would erode consequent to the calcifying effects of daily domestic life. We didn’t know it then, but it was just before I got pregnant that Cal and I had a moment that I can still feel embedded in my gut like a little shard of shrapnel. We were on a walk in Prospect Park near our Park Slope, Brooklyn, apartment, and after a while of contented, silent strolling, Cal stopped. “This is what I mean,” he said, looking at me. “I don’t want everything to be so different that we lose this.” I took his hand. “It will be better,” I said. “It will be more than this.”

  Not long after listening to the astrological wedding tape, I was pregnant. And the planning began. Like most people who have never had children, I had pretty firm ideas about how to raise them. The plan was that I would take the standard American maternity leave of six weeks, Cal and I would find a good nanny or day-care center, and I would then resume my regular twelve-hour workday as a journalist. Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t anyone? My temperament is such that I emerged from the womb a feminist, hardly a rebellious genetic mutation in my clan. While all the women in my family would wish to be, and would be, described as “ladies”—with their unimpeachable style and manners—my mother always worked, as did her mother, and their mothers and aunties, all academics. I had always felt proud of them for it, felt that I had been given excellent examples of how work could not just support a woman but enrich her, too. Plus, not only did I like my work, I was also not sure that hanging out with a baby all day long would be my thing. Kids, yes; babies, don’t know. My mother had warned me that babies were mind-numbingly boring for anyone with a handful of brains; she urged me to line up a baby nurse at once. Finally, and ashamedly, during my pregnancy, I harbored the secret fear that Cal might love our baby more than he loved me. I ruminated on Cal’s and my walk in the park. Maybe he’d been fearful because he sensed that a switch would flip inside him on the baby’s arrival. I felt the constant pulse of a low-level dread, wondering what I would do if that turned out to be the case. He wouldn’t have to tell me. I would know. I would know the same way I knew when I first sniffed him out.