He looked out at the forty-foot pines that held our hammock, and blinked uncomfortably. For him, this was a big reaction. At moments like this, I knew to blow air on the embers, to inflame the emotional flicker into something strong enough to get him talking, before he could figure out how to squelch his reaction.
“Come on, we haven’t had sex in two years. Two years?”
I tried to lock on to those gray-green eyes that I had stared into lovingly more times than I could remember.
Tell me I still matter to you, I thought, examining his face as if I held an invisible magnifying glass.
“Honey, no matter how much I love the kids and our life together, I can’t stay if I’m not still the most important woman in the world to you.”
I felt as if I was begging him to respond. I was begging him to respond. Marty’s Adam’s apple clenched and he looked away again, this time at Timmy’s baseball pitch at the bottom of the gravel driveway.
I went to put my arms around my husband. I wanted to pull him close, to feel the warmth from his body, to smell his sweat and sunscreen. But it felt more like I was grabbing him, pleading with him to react to me. To care.
“Please, honey! If you say I’m one in a million, I’ll do anything to make this work. But don’t you see I can’t do this alone, with you ignoring me?”
He stood stiff as a corpse, refusing eye contact. His arms hung at his sides. Despite his shiny forehead, his body felt as if it’d been stored in a refrigerated meat locker. I pulled away.
Then, finally, he spoke.
“I don’t like the way . . .”
Another jet thundered overhead. I held my breath. I was ready for whatever he had to unveil.
He started again. “I don’t like . . . the way . . .”
He froze, as if surprised by the sound of his own voice.
“The way you hug me.”
My head jerked up. Something burst in my chest. Maybe it was what was left of my heart. Sweet Jesus. That was his emotional breakthrough? His daring risk that would revive our connection? Like a pot boiling over, I unexpectedly became so furiously angry, I could hardly stop to inhale.
“We’ve been married for twenty years.” The fury I’d squelched over a decade of Marty ignoring me made me so enraged, I was actually spitting the words at him. “The last time we had sex is a long-lost memory. And you say you don’t like the way I hug you?”
Marty looked down at the hairs on his bare toes. The skin was translucent from years trapped in the custom-crafted wing tips every law firm partner in Philadelphia seemed to wear.
I had not planned to end our marriage that afternoon. But I couldn’t bear one more talk like this. Ever. I had tried my damnedest to reach Marty, opening my psyche to him in the therapist’s office, and giving him every drop of love in my body over our years together. In return, he’d kept his hopes, dreams, and body to himself, ignoring me on my birthday, Mother’s Day, and our wedding anniversary. And I’d sunk to that level and repaid him with unrelenting anger and resentment. Suddenly, it was crystal clear to me: I never, ever wanted to be in a therapist’s office, our car, our beach house, or anywhere else with this man, much less naked in a bed in his arms. And he didn’t want me there either. Which obviously would make it tricky to stay married.
Heart racing, blood pounding in my temples, I realized in a rush that this wasn’t a talk. It was the talk. Now I was the one with the poker face, even as the hollow of my stomach clenched.
“I think we have to admit that our marriage is dead, Marty. It died on its own. I’m not sure we can revive it, no matter what we do.”
I searched my husband’s face for heartbreak. Or fear, or even anger. Instead, what I saw was worst of all: relief.
Tears came to my eyes as I tried to pinpoint the exact moment our marriage had died. Maybe years before, when he first refused to kiss me on the lips when I had bronchitis, claiming he couldn’t afford to get sick at work then. Months later he still averted his mouth every time I went in for a smooch. I should have known it was over then. Isn’t the way a man kisses you a clarion bell for how he really feels?
Now he was talking again. His words made my head spin as if I’d stood up too quickly.
“Obviously, I haven’t been in love with you for several years.”
The “obviously” and “several” burned as if he were holding my palms to a hot stove. As did his blithe, matter-of-fact tone, as if everyone in Southampton and Philadelphia knew he hadn’t cared for me in years. Maybe they did and I was a fool.
“It would be better, for me, if you moved out of the Rittenhouse place.”
His voice rang toneless and rehearsed, as if he were explaining cash flows at an investors briefing, not asking me to move out of the home I’d raised our kids in. We’d fallen in love with it almost eighteen years before, an 1800s three-story redbrick town house with six sandstone steps leading up from the sidewalk to glossy black double doors with a brass knocker in the shape of a pineapple. We faced the southwest corner of Rittenhouse Square, a manicured oasis built in the 1680s, with flower beds surrounded by wrought iron fences and old-fashioned streetlamps, halfway between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. The famous bronze Duck Girl statue in the reflecting pool looked like she was walking on water, holding a mallard under her left arm. Timmy was born a few months after we moved in. We’d cried together the day we brought him home from the hospital, tucked like a doll in his immaculate new car seat, a yellow duck pattern on his baby blanket, so placid he didn’t even cry when he woke up to nurse.
I wasn’t sure Marty had thought of where the kids and I would go. He was acting as if the critical factor was how inconvenient it would be to move his suits. I was too stunned to respond. Unfazed, he carried on.
“And, ah, have you given any thought to how soon we can start seeing other people?”
I stared at his face through my tears, which were drying up pretty fast. Marty paused as the neighbor fired up his buzz cutter to trim the hedges between our properties. Then he leaned in so close to me, I could see the saliva in the corners of his lips.
“I’ll start working on your severance,” he announced, to my amazement, looking at the blue sky and clapping his hands as if we were executives at a board meeting finally getting down to business.
“My . . . severance?” I whispered. My voice, and all my faculties, threatened to fail in the shock of the moment. “Because, after two decades together, I’m fired? As your wife?”
“That’s not what I said!” He took a step backward and held up both palms. “That’s not what I meant! I meant . . . your . . . you know, your settlement.”
“Fuck you, Marty.”
It was hard to keep my voice low now.
“You and the horse you rode in on. I’ve tried so fucking hard to be a good wife to you. Despite the way you’ve ignored me. Despite that lingerie I found under our bed. There is no goddamn way I’m leaving our house and I don’t give two fucks when you start seeing her openly. Keep the kids out of it, motherfucker.”
The sound of a splash came from the pool, followed by Bella shrieking “Mom, heeeeelp!” as the kids roughhoused, oblivious to the fracture between us. I stood frozen for a long moment. I didn’t feel anything. I stared at Marty, hard, one last time. Did he notice, or care, that I’d finally had enough? I couldn’t hear the birds in the trees or the jets overhead any longer. I willed myself to walk to the pool to make sure the kids were okay.
Our marriage was over. For good.
* * *
In fairness, Marty did one nice thing. A week after that marriage-ending fight, when he was back in Philadelphia for work, late one night, my phone lit up with a three-word text from him. I miss us.
It was so damn sweet, two tears popped out of the corners of my eyes. But only two. I put my phone away without replying. One three-word text did not come close to making up for years of neglect and condescension. I was done.
The next day, Marty conceded, via email, that he’d move out of our house once the
children went back to school.
Two weeks later, we told the kids we were splitting up. Marty drove out from his office to Southampton for one night, so we could break the news together. With a kid on either side, all holding hands, we clustered around the glass-topped table where we’d spent many summer evenings playing I Doubt It and Tunk and other absurd card games. I felt as if I’d swallowed Drano, but both kids looked at me, tears dripping down their cheeks, with a surprising measure of relief. With that intuitive kid sense, Timmy and Bella may have already realized, probably even before we did, that our problems weren’t fixable.
Back in Philly in September for the first day of school, I took pictures of the children with their squeaky clean, carefully brushed hair, new backpacks, and first-day-back outfits. For Timmy, back-to-school meant a fresh buzz cut, shorts, and a T-shirt. Bella had spent days Snapchatting different ensembles to her friends. She’d finally settled on short-shorts and a loose white V-neck over a gray camisole. To me, their clothes looked exactly like every single thing they’d worn all summer. But fine. The pictures I snapped were in the top 10 percent of cuteness.
As I watched the kids trudge out the double front doors, I could smell the water the doorman from the apartment building next door had sprayed on the sidewalk with his hose. The water made the sidewalk smell clean and fresh, even though it did little more than wash away the top layer of grit. I slid the brass lock on the doors as Marty came downstairs lugging his Hartmann suitcase. He looked exactly like he had a hundred times before, taking off for yet another business trip. No emotion on his face, no reluctant body language to mark the fact that this wasn’t just any old good-bye, this was the good-bye.
The kids didn’t know Marty was moving out today, that this crisp morning marked our last occasion as an intact family. He planned to break the news once he’d settled into the house he’d rented a few blocks away. I did not object, although it felt like subterfuge, because now it was Marty’s subterfuge, not mine.
I stood in the kitchen next to the butcher-block island, motionless. He headed toward the back door. I remembered him half carrying me, in labor with Bella, out that same door to the hospital. If you’d told me, at that moment, that Marty would be leaving me and our kids behind in a mere dozen years, and that I’d be relieved to see him go, I would have said you had us confused with another less committed, less in love, less hopeful young couple. Divorce was never going to happen to us.
Marty paused to grab the suitcase handle. Without looking at me, in a chillingly nonchalant tone, he said:
“I thought I’d be married to you forever.”
With that, he turned his back and walked through the sunroom filled with early-morning September light. He paused to get a better grip on the taupe suitcase handle. I held my breath. I waited for the words that would capture—and maybe set free—the sadness, the relief, the uncertainty, the love we’d felt together in this place.
In our sun-dappled living room, if he’d asked me to try again, if he’d taken my hand or broken down and told me I was one in a million, he’d do anything to fix what was wrong between us, told me he wanted to be married to me forever, I would have hugged him—if I could figure out the way he liked—and never let go. But I’d begged enough. Words had made no difference.
Instead he offered a weak wave. His left hand looked naked, his fingers oddly bare. I realized he had already removed his wedding ring. His back was still to me. He didn’t turn around.
“See ya,” he said.
He walked out the back door.
I stayed there for a few moments, listening to his luggage wheels squeaking. I crept to the French doors and watched him walk across the flagstone deck and past the cedar hot tub where we’d spent many evenings catching up at the end of long days, past my mermaid sculpture. I’d spotted the mermaid ten years before outside an antique store on Route 27 between Sagaponack and East Hampton. She was made from copper, gone to green with gold highlights. Her head was bowed over her gracefully curled tail. Her naked breasts were spectacular. I’d found the perfect spot for her, on the brick wall by the hot tub, under a red-leafed Japanese maple my mom had planted while she was still strong enough to garden. As I watched, Marty went down the steps and through our garden, surrounded by ten-foot-high, ivy-covered brick walls. I heard the back gate clang shut, and then the chirp of his BMW unlocking. The opposite of love is not hate, my mother once told me. It is indifference. I felt like my heart was out in the alley, packed inside my husband’s suitcase. My future spread before me like the slate-gray Atlantic Ocean at the end of summer. Were there mermaids or sharks under the surface? I didn’t know. All I was sure of was that I was done with indifference in my life.
Safe to say, the next several months sucked. As you might imagine—though I never did until it was my daily reality—separating my life, and my financial future, from a control-oriented lawyer with an ambiguous relationship to the truth was hell. I actually think, now that I’m on the other side, that all divorces are hell, no matter what anyone tells you. Amicable ex-spouses are urban legends, on par with boa constrictors coming out of bathtub drains. But at the time, I thought our split would be straightforward. Rather laughably, I actually said to my girlfriend KC that I thought Marty would make a great ex-husband, because he was unemotional and rational, and had always forgotten our marital spats quickly. Instead, I was surprised by how excruciating the transition was for the kids and me, and probably for Marty, too, although it was hard to tell since he openly started dating another woman six weeks after moving out. Paradoxically, those months were also boring, like a predictable but occasionally amusing sitcom about a lawyer divorcing his wife, hopefully played by Jennifer Aniston or Reese Witherspoon. If you could measure months in money, the transition was also astronomically costly, because, like wedding planners, divorce lawyers maniacally add zeros to their bills, knowing clients will pay without a peep.
But we survived. Somehow. Barely. And then, to my relief, it was finally summer again.
* * *
Now we can go back to that June afternoon in the Philadelphia Airport. It was early summer, that brief window between the breezy last day of school and Philly’s dog days of hellish humidity. I’d put Timmy on a bus to baseball camp at six in the morning, and then Bella and I drove to sleepaway camp in rural Pennsylvania. It was the first time the kids and I would be apart for more than a few nights since the August day Marty and I had broken the news to them that we were getting a divorce.
Bella and I stopped at a McDonald’s off the highway to get French fries and vanilla shakes. When I restarted our Honda Odyssey, I realized I couldn’t get the air-conditioning to work. Another thing for me to fix on my own. So we drove the rest of the way with the windows rolled down and the smell of fresh-cut hay filling the car.
In the cool, pine-scented Pennsylvania woods, I unpacked Bella’s trunk. As she picked her cuticles, anxious and adorable in Daisy Dukes and One Direction T-shirt, I fluffed her pillow and sleeping bag.
“You’re going to have another great two weeks here, honey,” I told her as I smoothed the extra blanket at the foot of her cot. “Thank God this year is over. We both need a break. If I can make the last flight, I’m going straight to the beach. I need to get some writing done.”
I kissed the part dividing her silky brown hair, taking in one last breath of her coconut shampoo, and said good-bye.
Then I drove to the airport. And knocked over that coffee. And tried to flirt. And hoped that a perfect stranger would be waiting for me when we both got off the plane on Long Island.
And found out he wasn’t.
* * *
After leaving the Long Island airport in my maroon Kia Soul rental car, zipping east on Montauk Highway in the end-of-day traffic, I called my friend KC. In addition to being a former colleague from the Philadelphia Star, she was my divorce sounding board and impromptu dating coach. As the traffic thinned out, replaced by summer fireflies and giant sunflowers like fence posts lining the
highway, I told her everything without taking a breath.
“KC, he was so, so, so cute! Do you think he was flirting with me? Can you believe he works in drilling and blasting?”
KC was a working mom, too, a few years younger than me, a blunt, no-nonsense, brainy South Carolina belle with a drawl more commonly heard offering iced tea in a Broad Street mansion drawing room than plotting circulation strategy in an urban newsroom. We started out as colleagues a few years before, when my kids were in middle school and I was still a full-time manager at the Star, dreaming of becoming a full-time writer. We collided trying to save a failing division that corporate later unloaded. The day we met, she had on a brown giraffe print wrap dress, her blonde hair skimmed her shoulders, and her glossy peach-pink nails matched her lipstick. I trusted her as soon as we shook hands.
About two years before I left Marty, KC abruptly left her husband, Nick. He was a ruggedly handsome, smart, frustrated, subterraneously angry and deeply troubled Philadelphia detective she’d met the year after she graduated from Clemson with a degree in business. When he started getting physical—kicking their dog, grabbing KC’s arm hard enough to leave purple bruises she showed me in the office supply closet—that was it. Overnight.
“My daddy always said he’d kill any man who laid a finger on me,” she told me one day in her southern accent as we washed our hands in the women’s restroom. “I’d kill Nick myself, but divorce and alimony are better than murder and prison.”
A year after they split, she started dating online, which intimidated the hell out of me. I flatly refused despite her exhortations; I couldn’t handle the frank inspection and rejection she faced every time she logged on. Plus, from my view, online dating seemed limited to the two narrow objectives society gave women: finding someone to screw once, or someone to marry and screw forever. KC was open to both. These days, I didn’t know if I wanted either.
As I flicked on the rental car’s cruise control, KC snickered into the phone.
The Naked Truth Page 2