On the phone, Peter explains to him that my Jewish relatives aren’t comfortable with the word Jesus. “You can use the word God, you just can’t use the word Jesus, okay? So no Jesus. God is fine. As much God as you want. Okay Pops? But no Jesus.” As long as the reverend can invoke the name of the Lord in some way, he’s good with it.
On my lunch hour in Baltimore, I duck into a store that sells Crane’s stationery and buy fancy cards with a border of blue flowers on which I handwrite invitations to fifty-one people. I order a chocolate wedding cake (I figure if we’re going to do it “our way,” I want an all-chocolate cake).
The day of our wedding, we’re up early. Some of our friends will come back to the loft after brunch, for drinks and snacks. I’ve stocked up on beer, wine, vodka, mixers, and Maker’s Mark bourbon, a favorite of Peter’s pals from Ithaca. That morning, after his shower, he walks out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and shaving cream on his face. Holding the razor in his hand, he says suddenly, “Right now all these people we know are getting up and getting dressed and preparing to come here to Philly, just for us.” It’s the closest to beaming I’ve ever seen him. “Yeah,” I say. “It is kind of cool.” Peter leaves the house first, taking a cab, as I am coming a bit later and driving myself. It’s our one nod to tradition—the bride walking in last.
My wedding dress, which is not actually a wedding dress, is a gift from Carol. It’s a cocktail-length, cream-colored linen dress with a macramé top, long sleeves, and shoulder pads. I bought it, alone, at a Lord & Taylor department store in New Jersey. Carol gave me the money for the dress but didn’t actually go shopping with me; neither did my mother. A couple of weeks later, I take the dress to my mom’s apartment, to model it for her. When I express my hatred for the shoulder pads and a determination to remove them, my mother says, “No, no, leave them in! Without those pads,” she sighs, “you’ll look like there’s nothing to you.”
I keep them in and hate that the white pads look like gauze bandages under the shoulders of the macramé sleeves. For years, I will look at my wedding photos and wish I had done what I wanted and snipped the pads out, but at that point in my life, and for decades afterward, I wasn’t confident enough to follow my own intuition. I was always asking other people what I should do and giving their thoughts and feelings far more weight than my own. If things went wrong, it wasn’t my fault, and if they went right, it only proved that I should trust other people’s instincts before my own.
My entrance at the hotel, into the room where I will be married, is unceremonious. I am uncomfortable being the center of attention, so I start talking to whoever is in front of me, taking photos with them, and then find my way over to my grandmother and mother. Peter is making the rounds too. His hair is at a difficult length—he cut it as he neared the end of graduate school and was interviewing for jobs but after he was hired as a chemist, decided to grow it long again—and this middle stage is a little incoherent. He is wearing a black leather jacket and a tie we chose together, the tie being the most expensive piece of clothing he has ever owned, $60, hand-painted with blue and green flowers. My mother takes one look at him and whispers to me, “Why isn’t he wearing a suit?”
“He didn’t want to,” I say. She just stares at me.
“He’s wearing a tie,” I offer. My mother wrinkles her nose and shakes her head as if there is a nasty smell in the room. “He has no respect for you,” she says. “I’m very disappointed in him.”
The ceremony hasn’t even started yet and my mother is already disappointed. “Mom, please, can you just let it go? I’m about to get married. This is who he is, it’s fine. It’s a jacket. Who cares?’
“Do you care?” she asks.
I shrug my padded shoulders. Yes, I care. I care a great deal, actually. I tried to convince Peter to wear a sports jacket and tie—forget about a suit but at least a proper jacket. And he pushed back, hard. He was not about to let “all that traditional wedding bullshit” force him to wear something he didn’t want to wear and would never wear again (or so he thought). He wanted to be the guy that got married in a leather jacket and flowered tie, and I didn’t want to have a showdown over it. But underneath, I agree, just a little, with my mother. I wanted to be marrying a man who would wear a suit to his wedding, but that man is not Peter. Instead I asked myself, “Do you want to risk a huge argument and potentially having to call off the wedding because you don’t agree with Peter’s fashion tastes? Because you want him to wear a suit to his wedding, something he finds repugnant and ordinary?” Of course not.
I leave my mother (silently fuming over the leather jacket) and find Peter, in a corner laughing with my girlfriends. He is shy and they are easy for him, chatty and funny. I walk over and whisper that we need to get started. A hotel employee stands guard over a corner table covered in fluted glasses. I begin moving toward the front of the room and see my old college friend John and his wife, Dina. He is holding their four-month-old daughter, so small and adorable she looks like a toy. I hadn’t seen them come in, so I hug them. “Congratulations,” Dina says, smiling.
“Thank you,” I say, and I can feel my eyes starting to tear up. The anxiety I’ve been feeling all morning is beginning to overtake me. When I was alone in our loft getting ready, after Peter had left for the hotel, I told myself it was completely natural to have some pre-wedding jitters. My married friends were all a bit of a wreck before their ceremonies; one good friend was on Xanax the whole time. But why, I wonder, if we all claim to want this, are we so panicked beforehand?
And now, with Dina, my doubt is bubbling up again, threatening my composure. I’m starting to look for the exit, a panic attack barely at bay. Dina asks, “Are you okay?”
Peter is waiting at the front of the room, talking to his sister, his father looking over his notes, and the roar of conversation is dulling. “It’s just…” I say, and I am afraid I might cry. “Do you think I’m making a mistake?” I blurt out. “Being married is good, right? I should do this, right?” Dina, still postpartum, her blood coursing with a broth of maternal hormones, is tearing up too. She puts a hand to her chest and says, “Oh god, you’re breaking my heart,” and wipes at her own eyes. “Yes, yes, of course! Being married is work, but it’s good,” she says, giving me another hug and looking me in the eye. “It’s good.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding and giving Dina’s hand a squeeze. Don’t worry about me, the squeeze says. I’m being crazy.
I take a deep breath and exhale slowly, as if I am preparing to jump out of an airplane with a parachute I am not convinced will open. “Okay,” I say again, mostly to myself this time. And then I walk to join Peter at the front of the room.
■ TWO
August 2008
IT IS A HOT night in San Diego and Peter and I are lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling fan. It’s late and our kids are asleep. Anna, now twelve years old, is in the bedroom next door and her ten-year-old brother Evan is just down the hall. Peter and I have been married for eighteen years. We’ve got a house in the suburbs and own a minivan and two cars; our children are about to start their first year at private school. My husband isn’t a scientist anymore. He left the profession after four years, deciding that he didn’t want to be stuck at a lab table breathing in chemicals for the rest of his life. Instead, he headed to law school in New Hampshire and after that, began a new career as an intellectual property attorney at a midsize law firm in San Diego. We had lived in San Diego for two years in the early 1990s, when Peter worked for a pharmaceutical company there, and he had fallen in love with Southern California. At the end of law school he received offers from firms in San Diego and New York City; he chose the sun and surf. It was 1997, we had an eight-month-old daughter, and I figured I could freelance from anywhere. Now, eleven years and four law firms later, Peter is edging into his third year as a partner at the firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Tonig
ht, the plan was supposed to be dinner and a movie. It is our monthly stab at propping up a relationship that seems so steeped in dysfunction it is hard to imagine how food and passive entertainment will make it better. Yet we feel we owe it to each other and, of course, to our children to try. As Peter often reminded me when our daughter was a baby, crying and needy and not sleeping (and as a result I, too, was crying and needy and not sleeping): “She didn’t ask to be here. We wanted her.” True. And because we had, indeed, wanted both Anna and Evan, we feel an obligation to try and make our marriage better. Hence, these monthly weekend date nights.
Peter, though, isn’t in the mood to go out. When we did this last month, he nearly fell asleep during the movie, and when we got home, he went straight to his office in the garage to work. What should have been a night where we reconnected emotionally and physically ended with him in his office and me going to bed. And now here we are, the start of Labor Day weekend, both of us lying in bed and awake at the same time—a rarity. Peter tends to stay up until midnight or later; I am in bed by ten-thirty.
The air-conditioning in the house creates a low insulating hum and feeling of privacy, even though our bedroom shares a wall with Anna’s. “Why didn’t you want to go out tonight? I thought we were trying to do date night once a month,” I say, thinking of the effort it took to get a babysitter. Peter says nothing.
“Is it work?” I ask.
I’m frustrated and angry and hurt. We rarely have a conversation lasting more than ten minutes and now, I’m thinking, he’s giving up on monthly dates.
There follows such a long pause that for a second, I think Peter might have fallen asleep. But then, without looking at me, he says, “No, it’s not work. It’s something else.” I feel a stab of panic in my stomach. I say, “What? What is it?” Because I am who I am—part of a long line of anxious Jewish women who always assume the worst, and the worst is usually cancer—I assume something is physically wrong with Peter and he’s been afraid to tell me, so my stance softens. “What, Peter? What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I have something to tell you,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “It’s okay, you can tell me.”
And then he says it. “I slept with someone else.” He’s still not looking at me.
At first, I’m not sure I heard right. He slept with someone else? Someone who? We’ve been together for nearly twenty years and I know—I think—everything about this man, from the sound of his heartbeat to his hatred of raw tomatoes to his favorite authors.
“What?” I say, confused. “You mean, you had sex with someone else?”
“Yes,” Peter says. “Three or four times.”
“You? You are having an affair?” I’m incredulous. This is a man who told me he couldn’t be unfaithful because he would feel too guilty and he was a terrible liar. And anyway, women never even gave him a second glance.
“Aren’t you?” he asks, turning toward me. “I just assumed you were too.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not.”
My body starts to shake. It starts in my stomach and just spreads through my body, like tree roots growing in a time-lapse video. It’s a cross between shaking and shivering, because suddenly I feel cold, so cold. “Oh my god,” Peter says, sitting up. I’ve rolled over onto my side. “I’m sorry this is making you so upset. Eilene, god…look at you. Christ. You said that if things didn’t change, you were going to be with other guys.”
Not exactly. Once, a few years ago, I told Peter that if we didn’t do something to make our relationship better, I could not stay married to him after our kids left for college. I said we needed to spend time together, have sex more than once a month, get into counseling. We were standing halfway inside the hall linen closet, whispering. “Do whatever you need to do,” he said, his mouth clenched, eyes closed for a second, as if the sight of me disgusted him. “I’m doing the best I can.”
There was a time, not so far in the past, when Peter and I would go to bed at the same time in order to read to each other, usually poetry—e. e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Rilke, Jane Kenyon. During that period in our lives we often drove in the car together for long stretches to get out into the wilderness, like the summer we drove the Alaska Highway for sixteen days, starting in Seattle and ending at the Arctic Circle, where Peter carried me like a new bride over its threshold. “Welcome to the Arctic!” he had said, laughing, and we camped under a midnight sun. Or the time we walked to Tijuana with a co-worker of Peter’s to see the band Living Color, feeling daring as we crossed the border into Mexico, partied at the bars on Avenida Revolución, and ate street tacos from a tiny roadside shack. We were enthralled by the lights, sounds, and smells, people hawking Mexican blankets, cheap silver jewelry, and knockoff designer clothes; we gave money to the little kids lining the road back to the border crossing, selling packages of Chiclets.
That night in the linen closet years later, when Peter made me feel like nothing more than a needy nuisance, I wanted to scream, “You used to like me! You wanted to spend fifteen hours a day in the car with me, driving winding roads, walking to Mexico. You wanted to sleep with me. Remember? Do you remember?”
Now I just try to set the record straight. “I said if things didn’t change I would leave when Evan went to college.” My words are coming out in bursts, between shakes. “I have never been with anyone else.” Peter puts his head in his hands. I can’t imagine who he’s fucking. Or when he does it. Every day he gets home from work and can’t even eat dinner until he takes a nap, he’s so exhausted.
“Is it someone I know?” I ask. I am facing away from him, my head cradled in the crook of my left arm, and I’m in the throes of a full-blown panic attack, worse than any I’ve ever had. My body is actually shaking the bed. “No, it’s not anyone you know,” he says as gently as possible. “Eilene, what can I do to help? What do you want me to do?”
He hugs me from behind, trying to calm me down, but it’s like I’m under water. It’s two in the morning and pitch-black except for slivers of moonlight that peek through slats in the window blinds. Everything in the house is quiet, our kids deep in sleep, our old bed indented and softened in all the right places, fitted to our bodies after so many years. None of what is happening right now feels real. My husband is having an affair. My marriage is about to end, and I had no idea. But Peter did.
I feel duped, deceived, humiliated. Peter went and got what he needed—love, attention, intimacy—when I did without. Sure, we are miserable, I used to think, but at least we’re miserable together.
Marriage has made me feel lonelier and more invisible than I have at any other time in my life. I think I could walk into our kitchen any weekday morning naked wearing an elephant mask and stand right in front of Peter, and he would just ask me to move aside so he could reach the coffee maker. I want, so badly, to have someone look at me as more than just the mother/maid/cook. In my mind, right now, Peter is having an affair with a voluptuous blonde ten years younger than I am with a bikini wax and underwear from the Victoria’s Secret window display.
“Eilene,” he says again, gingerly. “Do you want me to leave?” I don’t want him to leave. I’m scared to death. I’m about to beg him to stay. “No,” I say. “No, no. It’s okay, I understand. I know you’re very unhappy. I am too.” And I really do understand. I know he doesn’t think I love him, or love him enough. I am certainly not perfect. I have kissed someone else.
I told our marriage counselor about it eighteen months ago, after hastily arranging an “emergency” session. “I made out, for like, two minutes, with a friend last night in a car after an event. What should I do? Should I tell Peter?” Arlene, the therapist, knows my marriage. Peter and I have been in counseling with her for a year. Well, I have been in counseling for a year; Peter makes it about half the time. I arrange our appointments after clearing the date with him and remind him a couple of days before, then the day before,
and finally the morning of the appointment. Sometimes Peter calls me as I am pulling into the parking spot by Arlene’s office to say he isn’t going to make it, that something has come up at the office and he can’t get away. Or sometimes I am already sitting in Arlene’s office, on her neutral-colored love seat with the tissue box thoughtfully resting within arm’s reach, and Peter just doesn’t show up.
“Do you love him?” Arlene asked eighteen months ago about the man I kissed in the car. “No, no,” I said, laughing. “We’re just friends. It’s just…I am so lonely. But it’s not going to happen again.” Arlene’s advice, essentially, is that sometimes a kiss really is just a kiss. “I think it’s fine to just let it go. It happens. You’re in couples counseling, you’re working on these issues.”
But we aren’t working on them, I thought then, and now I am angry and resentful and increasingly nasty and dismissive. I have wanted to end my marriage for years, but it feels—and has always felt—impossible. And terrifying. I am almost completely dependent on my husband financially and, at the same time, I’m almost completely responsible for raising our children and maintaining our domestic life. I am a freelance writer and (as much as I despise the word I also know it’s true) a housewife; Peter is a partner in a law firm. The difference in our salaries is astronomical. How will I survive financially in such an expensive city without him? I don’t even know where our money actually is, in what bank accounts or in which investments. I have never paid the mortgage. I don’t even know how to pay a mortgage. I’m a business writer and a feminist, and yet I don’t know a thing about our money, which I find shameful and embarrassing. The truth is, I don’t even consider it our money. It’s Peter’s.
All these years as Peter pursued a coveted law partnership, spending most of his time working and sleeping, I was doing the domestic work so many wives do: taking care of the kids, grocery shopping, housecleaning, preparing meals, supervising homework, arranging playdates, and picking up dry cleaning. I trust Peter, so let him focus on money—saving, spending, investing—and I will focus on kids, home, and my freelance work. Only after our divorce will I see how this arrangement—and my own consequent ignorance—hurt me in so many ways, including negotiating my divorce settlement.
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