Smacked

by Eilene Zimmerman

  At this moment, though, I’m more worried about Anna and Evan than anything else. How will it impact them if we separate? Sure, Peter isn’t exactly a model of involved parenting, but he does play an important role in his children’s lives. My mind goes back to last summer, when Evan was fascinated by cars and had been building his own collection of them out of Legos. One Saturday morning, he and I decided to try and build a ramp for racing those cars. I was going to cut down the legs of a small table we didn’t use and see if I could somehow create a ramp with it. Peter walked out of the garage office to refill his coffee and saw Evan and me hunched over the table, a little saw in my hand. “What’s that?” he asked. “What are you doing with the saw?” I told him my plan. He looked at Evan, then back at me.

  “You can’t build a ramp that way,” he said. “It’ll never work.” And with that, he took Evan to Home Depot, got a bunch of wood and the two of them, along with Anna, built a ramp for racing toy cars. Peter used it as an opportunity to teach them about the Pythagorean theorem, which I knew had something to do with right angles. It took most of the day. I brought a tray of sandwiches and lemonade out to the three of them at lunchtime, but stayed back, watching them laugh and chat around the picnic table. I took photos so they would remember this special day with their dad. A day he didn’t work, didn’t even try. And after the ramp was built I painted it, each lane a different color, and in black along its side the words Built By The World’s Greatest Dad. Good god, I think, we can’t split up. I can’t bear the thought of it, can’t even begin to face all the attendant fear and guilt. I’m already thinking about how it will kill me for this woman he’s seeing to be my kids’ stepmother. I’m a thousand steps ahead of what’s actually occurring at this moment.

  “Can you tell me, at least, who it is?” I ask Peter. He pauses and says, “You don’t know her. It’s someone I went to law school with.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting a paralegal or a secretary or an associate. Or a client. Or a client’s wife. But not a law school classmate. “What?” I say, dumbfounded.

  Law school feels like it happened a lifetime ago, but in reality, it’s been twelve years since Peter graduated. I remember it vaguely, a three-year blur of cold New Hampshire winters, a small apartment a few blocks from Franklin Pierce Law Center and its intellectual property law program. I had a four-hour-a-day round-trip commute to my job at Harvard Business School, where I was the secretary for three professors (we were given the generous title of “faculty assistant”) until being promoted to research assistant. Peter’s commute was a mere four blocks to school, but he was never home between classes. Instead he was studying, or working at the law review office, or at his various part-time jobs. He was an on-campus LexisNexis representative, a clerk for a while at the office of a divorce attorney, and a barista several mornings a week at a local coffee shop.

  On weekends, while he continued his fifteen-to-eighteen-hour days of studying, attending classes, and working, I was alone. My friends were a five-hour drive away, in New York and New Jersey, and all my new friends were really Peter’s—other law students and their spouses. So I went hiking, visited cider mills, pumpkin fields, bookstores, antiques shops, and small towns in New Hampshire and Vermont. I learned how Shaker furniture was made, peered at hand-blown glass pitchers through the window of the Simon Pearce glass factory, and taught myself to bake all kinds of bread, kneading it by hand. I tried to write, but I was too lonely and depressed to do more than vent in my journal.

  Peter’s life was different. He had a purpose—he was here to attend law school. And he had a social life. He was back in graduate school again and, even at the ripe age of thirty, easily slipped back into that world: the intense studying and obsessing over exams and grades but also parties and booze and weed to combat the stress. He went to parties I didn’t attend because I didn’t feel welcome (and didn’t want to spend the night listening to them complain about professors and classes and applying for summer jobs). Peter put together a cover band, Blackacre (which is, actually, a legal term), composed of students—with him on bass—that performed at house parties and a local bar. Remembering that now suddenly brings me back to the night we told his law school friends that I was pregnant. It was between sets at a bar where Blackacre was playing. Peter and I sat in a booth with a group of his classmates, everyone drinking beer but me; I was nursing a ginger ale. After Peter said we were having a baby, our little crowd cheered and whooped and toasted us. And I remember Peter’s broad smile, his arm around my shoulders giving me a proud squeeze. I felt lucky and loved and happy.

  And at that memory my mind goes back to another night, one a few months earlier. It was Valentine’s Day, the best one I ever had or will ever have, I imagine. That morning—with my period nine days late—I decided to do a pregnancy test. I had miscarried a few months earlier and I wanted this test to be positive, wanted it so badly that my legs were shaking. I had to leave the bathroom while the little test strip did its work. When I walked back in and saw the result was positive, I started jumping up and down, silently, so I wouldn’t wake Peter. It was only five-thirty A.M. and I had a long commute into Boston ahead of me. But later in the evening, when he finally got home from school and slid into bed next to me, I rolled to face him. “Guess what,” I said, without waiting for a reply. “I’m pregnant! Happy Valentine’s Day!”

  Peter smiled, slowly, and at that moment, I believed I could read his mind, feel his pleasure at seeing our intention take shape. It worked—sex really worked!—we were pregnant. “Wow, really?” he asked. “You did a test?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Can you believe it?” I was so happy I couldn’t lie still, couldn’t contain my excitement. Peter hugged me from behind, scooping me up inside his solid frame and laughing at me as I wriggled around, squealing with joy. “I love you,” he said, and kissed my head. “I love you too,” I’d answered. And I meant it. Our daughter was born the following autumn.

  We left New Hampshire within days of his May 1997 graduation—Peter was number one in his law school class, editor of the intellectual property law review and he gave an excellent valedictory speech at the ceremony—and that was the end of law school. We moved to San Diego with our baby girl. I hardly thought about law school again.

  “Is it Melissa? Todd’s wife?” I ask, still not looking at him but wanting to know the name of my nemesis. She had her second child a few weeks before I had Anna, although she was ten years my junior.

  No, Peter says, it’s not Melissa. “What made you think of her?”

  “I don’t know. You used to say she was cute. And she and Todd split up after law school, don’t you remember?”

  “Oh yeah,” Peter says. “But no, it’s not someone you know.”

  “What’s her name?” I ask.

  Peter is pained. “Eilene, it doesn’t matter. You don’t know her. I don’t want to tell you her name.” But I need her name to make her real.

  “She’s out here then? In San Diego or L.A.?” I’ve been a reporter for twenty-some-odd years, I’m going to keep pushing until I get some information.

  “No. She’s in New York City,” Peter says.

  Oh, the beauty of business trips, I think. You can have a girlfriend on the East Coast and a wife on the west one. Now I’m crying in addition to shaking.

  “Eilene,” Peter says, “I thought you hated being married to me. You hate living with me. You’re miserable. I thought you wanted a way out.”

  The fact is, he’s right. I do hate being married to him. I do want a way out. I just wanted the way out to be through a door we opened together, not this. We have two wonderful children and I believe they deserve to have their parents together while they are growing up. Sure, divorce is common, but that doesn’t mean many divorced parents don’t feel guilty about changing the game for their kids. And then there is the economics of a divorce and how the disparity in our respective
incomes—I’m not even sure at this point exactly how much Peter earns each month—will play out.

  These days I work about twenty-five to thirty hours a week. Last year my income was about one-tenth what Peter says he earned. My best year as a writer I earned $60,000. It was during the dot-com boom, when business magazines were three hundred pages thick and webzines that would last six months were paying two dollars a word. I wrote constantly, every second my kids were either in preschool or asleep. I wound up in physical therapy to treat carpal tunnel and a frozen shoulder. That’s what a financially great year looks like for me.

  Still, Peter expects me to earn my keep and pay a certain portion of the household bills, which I do. At the same time, he reminds me regularly how hard he works and how many of the bills he pays. On weekends, Peter doesn’t participate much in family life, whether that’s making a meal or handling a playdate. He usually just holes up in his garage office—a converted laundry room—where he is ostensibly working, but in reality, he’s more apt to be listening to music, shopping for tech stuff, or watching porn. Last year Anna walked into his office on a Sunday morning without knocking and caught her first glimpse of a blow job, happening in living color on her father’s computer screen. He later told me he was getting rid of junk mail while doing other work, and he likes to make sure it’s junk before he deletes it. (My hunch is the subject line probably made clear what it was.) He’ll walk in from the garage when we’re having lunch and if I ask him, “Can you spend some time with the kids?” he’ll say, “I’m working. Someone’s got to pay the mortgage.”

  Our mutual resentment (I call it our “suffering contest”) has been snowballing for the past five or six years, each of us now living largely separate lives, sharing less. We can be in the same room and not speak or look at each other, and it isn’t the kind of comfortable silence that comes from years of mutual love and friendship. It is a brooding silence, wrought of anger and hurt and exhaustion. Our marriage has become a business partnership—we are raising our kids and managing a household, but we don’t love each other anymore.

  This year on Peter’s forty-sixth birthday I took him out to dinner at George’s, a restaurant in La Jolla with spectacular views of the coast. He was tired so I kept making conversation, talking about Anna and Evan, other people we knew, an article I’d just read in the New Yorker. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you say something? I am doing all the talking.” I hadn’t yet learned to be okay with silence, so I always filled in the spaces. Peter said he preferred when I did the talking. “All I’m going to do is complain about work,” he said. He seemed sad. I didn’t know it then, but he had just begun his affair.

  It’s nearly six A.M. and the morning light is starting to seep in through the blinds; the kids are stirring in their rooms. Peter gets up and throws on a T-shirt and some sweats. He almost never gets up with our children, even on the weekends, so we decide to tell them I was up all night with a stomach bug, and I’m resting before we go to the beach, which was my plan for the day. I hadn’t known if Peter would join us or not.

  He stands at the edge of the bed, his hands on the wooden footboard as if it’s a ship’s railing, leaning over slightly to look at the ocean—rather than the rug beneath our bed—before he sails away.

  I’m still curled into a ball, wanting to sleep and pretend this isn’t happening. “Why didn’t you go in-house? Why wouldn’t you try to work for a company instead of a firm? If you’d worked less, maybe we would have stood a chance,” I say. Peter leans forward, still holding on to the footboard.

  “That’s one thing that’s true,” he says. “You did ask me to go in-house, I know, but I didn’t want to be an in-house counsel. I wanted to be a partner, a partner in a law firm.” He pauses. “I’m more ambitious than I thought I was.”

  I can hear our son moving around his room. “Why did you start sleeping with someone else? Why didn’t you tell me? We could go to counseling, we could at least try again,” I say.

  Peter takes a breath and purses his lips in the way he always does when he is thinking about what to say next. “Because we were stuck and we were miserable and I couldn’t see any way to change things. I didn’t know how we were going to get out of it. So I pulled the trigger,” he says.

  Starting a relationship with someone else while still coming home to your wife, your dinner waiting for you, your kids bathed and in their pajamas, ready for you to lie down next to them and smell their shampooed hair and tuck them in, that’s called “pulling a trigger”? It’s not called lying anymore? When did the names of things become so easy to change? I’m so angry and yet so brokenhearted that I will spend the next two months in bed, crying.

  “I knew if I pulled it,” Peter says, “we couldn’t go back.”

  ■ THREE

  October 2011

  I’M DRIVING TO PICK up Anna and Evan from Peter’s new house, which I haven’t seen yet, in Del Mar, a posh beach town off U.S. Highway 101. It’s a twenty-five-minute drive from my neighborhood, Del Cerro, where Peter and I lived together before our divorce. We separated in 2009 and officially divorced five months ago, in May. I stayed married so I could remain on Peter’s health insurance but also because he didn’t want us to rush into divorce. Who knew how we might feel after a year of separation? he said many times. In the end, though, I decided I didn’t want to be married any longer, found health insurance I could afford, and filed the papers. By that time Peter was house shopping, and this was the one he wanted. He knew it the second he set eyes on it, in June. Two million dollars’ worth of wood, glass, concrete, and steel overlooking the state beach and a pristine lagoon down the hill. Peter negotiated for a while with the owners, who were asking more than he could afford. I’m not sure he could afford what he wound up paying, which I only know because my kids have told me, and why they know, I’m not sure.

  In fact, somehow they know how much everything in Peter’s new house costs, from the dining room table fashioned out of a single piece of wood ($7,000), to the direct-from-Italy espresso maker ($900). Peter waited out the owners of the house, anxious about losing it but willing to gamble, and in the end, he won, borrowing money from his retirement savings to make the down payment.

  The sale closed in late September, and for the last six weeks, Anna and Evan have been staying there on the nights they spend with Peter. Tonight, Anna asked me to pick her and Evan up so I could come inside, see their bedrooms, and get a grand tour.

  I’ve got the car windows open to the early October air and I’m thinking about birthdays. Soon Evan and Anna will turn fourteen and sixteen—their birthdays are two days apart. It’s hard to believe Peter and I, who’ve known each other since we were twenty-three, are now forty-eight and forty-nine years old. The night before each child’s birthday I usually decorate the dining room in some theme: fairies, Harry Potter, race cars, sports. I hang streamers, make a big Happy Birthday sign and attach cutouts to fishing wire hung from the ceiling, so that the football players or fairies seem to be floating in the air. I love to watch my kids’ faces when they come into the dining room before school. Then I let them have a slice of cake with breakfast.

  As I drive, I’m figuring out whether or not Anna and Evan will be at my house the day before their birthdays, and I realize Anna won’t be and my heart sinks. I don’t want to miss that morning with her, when she wakes up as a sixteen-year-old. I can’t think of how to be there if she’s at Peter’s, but I push it out of my mind and focus on the road, turning to parallel the ocean and the setting sun.

  The house where I live became mine as part of our divorce settlement. One Saturday morning about a year ago, though, Peter came by to drop off something one of our kids left at his place. At that point he was living in a rented two-bedroom condo in Solana Beach, another town a few miles north of where he is now. He arrived aggravated and angry about having to spend an hour driving back and forth when he had other things to do. I walked
him to his car as he was leaving so we could talk out of earshot of the kids and he stopped by the side gate to light a cigarette. He wanted to calm down and needed the forced deep breaths that smoking necessitated to do that. It didn’t seem to be working.

  He was furious that I had insisted he knock on the front door and allow us to let him in, rather than using his “emergency” key. “You want me to knock on my own fucking door?” he said. “You’ve got to be kidding.” He took another drag. “You know how much equity I put into that house for you?” he asked, pointing the hand with the cigarette toward the front door.

  Over time he got used to knocking and now has a house again, his dream house, the one that has just come into view. It is imposing, made of squares and rectangles, a gray, speckled cinderblock wall hiding the big yard from view, except for a very small, cinderblock-size window. The way to the front door is through a locked gate.

  Fortunately I have rehearsed these first moments in my mind. I will be impressed, for the sake of my kids (and also genuinely, in all likelihood). I have a cup of jasmine green tea in my travel mug to give me something to sip if I feel like crying (or screaming). I remind myself why I’m doing this tour—my kids live here some of the time and they are proud of it, and they want me to be part of that.

  I can already hear Anna and Evan yelling at me from above, so I get out of the car, close the door, and look up. They are on the roof with Peter; they’re waving and yelling to me. “Mom! Mommy! We’ll be right down! We’ll let you in!” I know the gate code, but I wait for them to open it from the other side.