It helped significantly when a new girl from New York City with freckles and a turned-up nose sat next to me in fifth grade. Winthrop Carter Winslow, a Mayflower descendant like Mom, was also from the Upper East Side. Winnie knew so many dirty words, I figured Manhattan must be the mecca of preteen sex education. This puzzled me, because growing up there hadn’t much helped Mom’s comfort with sex.
Winnie told me that a liquid besides pee could come out of a boy’s penis. For a long time, I didn’t believe her. She was also the first person to suggest that, in my own body, there was something else down there besides one hole for pee and one for poo. The day she told me this, I locked myself in the bathroom I shared with my sister, took off my panties, and bent over the toilet with a hand mirror. It was kinda dark and frightening down there, but sure enough, Winnie From New York City was right. There were three holes!
When I lost my virginity at fifteen with my first high school boyfriend, of course I didn’t tell Mom anything about it, including how appallingly, disappointingly unromantic it was. I didn’t even tell Winnie how much it hurt and how let down I felt afterward. Luckily, my mother’s discomfort with sex didn’t stick to me for good. However, I still have a hard time saying “tampon” without stuttering on the second syllable.
* * *
Mom got sick soon after Marty and I celebrated our eighteenth wedding anniversary. All she wanted was to watch golf on TV in the guest room where I’d parked her after her oncologist broke the news that the end was near. Marty set up the Golf Channel in Mom’s room, which meant the world to Mom. And to me, although the taste was bittersweet, because it had been years since he had done anything similarly thoughtful for me.
I came down to wake Mom that June morning while the kids and Marty were still asleep. I’ll never forget how still the room felt. I stood on tiptoe, looking at her under the peach guest-room comforter. Afraid to inhale, I willed her chest to rise. The room held the sacred hush of an empty chapel at ten o’clock on a weekday morning.
I called the hospice nurse from my cell phone outside Mom’s room.
“If you think she’s dead, she’s dead,” the nurse announced.
She was correct.
To my surprise, in the chaotic, grief-filled days that followed, flashes of relief lightened the inevitable shock and sadness. I felt gratitude that Mom had died without pain or drama, sure. But I also experienced waves of unexpected relief for . . . me. I’d be driving or loading the dishwasher, and I’d hear a quiet voice say, It’s okay to leave him now. I hadn’t known I’d stayed married to Marty in part to assuage Mom, to reassure her that I was taken care of by a good provider who loved me. Then, one night a few weeks after her interment in the family plot at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Marty asked me casually, “So, when are you going to be done with this grief thing?” as if my dead mother were something I needed to wash my hands of.
The last time Marty and I had sex was on a Friday night in July, a month after Mom died, two years before our marriage-ending fight in Southampton. Under the covers, our bodies performed the necessary functions, but emotionally, Barbie and Ken had a deeper connection. Of course, I had no idea it was the last time we’d have sex. Unfortunately, in real life, unlike in the swirling dark of the movie theatre or the pages of romance novels, there’s no narrator telling you This is the last time, sweetheart, enjoy it for all it’s worth.
The day after, I kissed Marty good-bye through the minivan window as the children and I left for almost a month in Southampton, a respite after Mom’s passing. I’d pleaded with Marty to come with us, even for a few days, but he said he had to stay in Philadelphia. His entire firm was prepping for a biotech IPO scheduled for the first week of September.
The kids and I got back to Philly on a stifling August afternoon around five o’clock, two days before school started. Working late again, Marty didn’t meet us. After I’d made the kids some fish sticks and tater tots in my typical supermom fashion, I went upstairs to unpack. Looking under my and Marty’s bed for one of the cats who always got spooked by the long car ride, I saw a small red pyramid that, at first, looked like a dust bunny. Gingerly, I reached for it. I stood up and looked in my hand: it was an unfamiliar red lace bra and skinny thong. The fabric was twisted, in the way of lingerie taken off in a hurry. At first, I was puzzled. When did I get red lingerie? Then the answer dawned on me: These are not mine. I dropped them like someone else’s used handkerchief, appalled that I had been cradling them in my palm. They landed on the wood floor, crumpled like tissue paper.
But then I picked them up, because I couldn’t resist looking at the sizes. The thong was one-size-fits-all. The bra was 36D, two sizes larger than what I wore.
That night, Marty got home around ten thirty. The kids were in bed. I shut our bedroom door gingerly, the way you do when you put down a sleeping baby and you’d sooner drink chlorine than startle her. Busy taking off his shoes in the chair by his side of the bed, Marty took a few seconds to notice me standing in front of him. His eyes widened when he saw me.
“Yes?” he said, as if I were a secretary who had disturbed the boss with an ignorant question. I could hear cicadas rattling outside the French doors of our bedroom balcony.
My body shook with that trembling feeling you get when you cradle the toilet right before you throw up. Had another woman been in my bed? Had Marty been inside another woman in my bed? The dread interlaced itself with treacly hope that made my mouth taste like Sweet’N Low. Surely Marty had a plausible explanation. He didn’t even like sex, anyway. So why would he have an affair? Maybe he’d failed to mention some houseguests?
“I found these under our bed,” I said, as steadily as I could, standing in front of him, feeling tears pooling in my eyes. “They are . . . not mine.”
Please, please have a good answer. I was desperate for a logical explanation, one that would still the queasy feeling in my stomach.
Marty looked back with the unflustered gaze of a crocodile motionless on a riverbank.
“I bought those for you, honey,” he said, looking straight into my eyes, his irises clear and dark, not a titch rattled or guilt-ridden. He imitated my trembling cadence. “You are . . . so paranoid.”
His mockery was like a chopstick thrust into my jugular notch. I was alarmed by how easily he lied. It sickened me as much as his infidelity. But this was marriage, to the father of my children, to a man I still loved, despite his betrayal. I needed time to figure out how to proceed, how much I could handle, how to protect myself. That night, we brushed our teeth together, standing in front of our his-and-hers sinks, as we had one hundred other nights before. Then we got into our bed as if nothing had changed.
It took me over an hour to fall asleep, my back to Marty, hugging my arms around my chest so I wouldn’t cry. I never slept in our bed again without wondering who had been there, and what she and Marty had done together. I started to question every woman in our lives who had bigger breasts than I did. Was his lover that pretty younger mom I’d seen him talking to at the school auction? An old girlfriend? A legal secretary from his office?
Obviously, it was someone who had wanted me to find her cast-off lingerie. Or maybe both she and Marty had wanted me to find it, laughing about how clueless I was. Otherwise, why would she have left my house without her underthings?
I never asked Marty about the red lingerie again.
Risking his lying to me would be like pulling out that chopstick in my throat; better to leave it. I couldn’t share my suspicions with anyone else, not even KC, or Winnie, who’d heard about nearly every diaper I’d changed. Speaking the words out loud felt too raw. Or worse: if I told anyone, it might make the truth, oddly, more true. If the red lingerie stayed inside my head, I could deny our problems and cherish the moments we were still a family. Thanksgiving dinner. Christmas Eve. Sunday mornings making blueberry pancakes. The kids blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes.
However, I couldn’t lie to myself forever. Cheating is not the worst t
hing you can do to a spouse. I came to the same truth while coping with abuse in my first marriage: emotional abandonment is as destructive as terror and bruises. Withdrawing and making a person feel invisible, the way Marty did with his contempt for my fears, did far more damage than my suspicions about his infidelity. After the way he reacted to my discovery of the red lingerie, I couldn’t contemplate sex with Marty without crying. Which, I promise, is not an aphrodisiac.
I didn’t know what to do. We’d been married for almost two decades. I still loved him. Did infidelity mean he didn’t love me? What else had he lied to me about? What on earth would we tell the children if we split? How was I going to pay for health insurance if we got divorced? Could we stay married if we never had sex again?
At the end of my weekly yoga class, I’d lie on my back in Savasana. The teacher always emphasized the pose as the most important time of practice, even though we were all just lying there. She said the posture signified rest and renewal, the end of one life and the beginning of another. My life made me feel like I was stuck in poured concrete. As badly as I’d ever craved anything in my life, I wanted someone to hold me and look in my eyes with love again. Most of all, I wanted Marty to. I let the tears roll down my cheeks onto my purple yoga mat because I knew he was never going to.
During the two years we stayed together after the lingerie discovery, there were other red flags in my and Marty’s marriage, of course, problems more subtle than our lack of sexual connection. Behind our shiny front doors, we became adept at compartmentalizing the petty bickering over who made the bed each day, or how long a delay was acceptable before returning a spouse’s phone call. (“Sometime before I die,” was what Marty once told me.) It was harder, for me, to dismiss years of his forgetting Mother’s Day, the business trips he scheduled on my birthday, the time he took the necklace he’d bought me for our anniversary and gave it to his mother because he’d forgotten her birthday.
As if I were swallowing gum, I sucked down my feelings on the nights he walked through our front door three hours late. Or when I took out the trash and found him sitting in his BMW, in our alley, finishing a call while I’d been waiting at the candlelit dinner table for an hour, wondering where the hell he was. How ironic that during this time I wrote a book, Mommy Wars, about work-family balance. Yet I showed up solo to Timmy’s baseball games, most kiddie birthday parties, and the annual parent-teacher conferences, and I got into bed each night next to a man who refused to come home before nine o’clock and never asked how my and the kids’ days had gone.
No one could see this from the outside. Our marriage appeared so idyllic that the Philadelphia Star featured us, and our redbrick town house, on the cover for a real estate broadsheet on the gentrification of Rittenhouse Square. The inside spread showed off the house’s inlaid floors and fireplaces. When the issue first came out, Marty plastered the reprints across the coffee table in his law firm waiting room. He also hung a framed copy in our entrance hall. I cringed at how matronly the woman in the photo looked. I wore a pink pseudo-Chanel top over a striped black and pink skirt, my makeup carefully applied, my hair styled in a conservative blonde bob. I looked like I was auditioning to be a politician’s wife. We had our arms draped lovingly around each other’s waists, but as the photographer clicked away I kept thinking how unfamiliar it felt to have Marty hold me, how long it had been since I’d smelled his neck.
Whenever I passed the Star cover Marty had hung in our hallway, which happened about twenty times a day, the worst part was looking at that woman’s face staring back at me: a plastic pink-lipstick grin forming a half-circle under mascaraed eyes. I appeared vaguely confused, like an Alzheimer’s patient thinking, How did I get here again? I felt baffled by the woman I saw. Whom was she trying to convince that this was the perfect life?
Then came the day the radiologist’s office called. I was washing the breakfast dishes after taking the kids to school.
“Ma’am, there’s a spot on your annual mammogram we need to check out,” the scheduler said in a practiced, kind voice she probably learned in cancer training school.
Instead of bursting into sobs as I held a wet sponge in one hand and the phone in the other, instead of feeling scared and horrified at the possibility that I had breast cancer like my dead mother and would die an ugly death leaving two motherless young children, I hung up and dialed Winnie, my voice giddy with . . . joy.
“Hey, Win, the radiologist says I have a mark on my left breast. If I have a double mastectomy, I’ll have a really good excuse to never have sex with Marty again, right? I’ll never have to have sex with anyone ever again!”
My voice cracked like I’d had too many glasses of champagne. There was a long moment of silence as Winnie took this in.
“Les,” she finally said. “Listen to yourself. You’d rather die than have sex with your own husband?”
She made a good point. What had happened to me that I could be glib about cancer?
The lab eventually confirmed the black spot on the film was a false positive. Of course, I was relieved. However, Winnie’s complete silence on the phone following my crazy no-sex-ever-again confession, her shock at what marriage had taken from me, made me cringe more than the mammogram contraption squeezing my flesh. Like a bell I couldn’t unring, it echoed inside me as months of fruitless couples therapy went by, and I realized I was never going to have sex with Marty again, because one day, when I mustered enough courage, I was going to ask him for a divorce.
* * *
“Found him!” I crowed triumphantly over the phone to KC the next morning, taking a sip of Citarella’s French roast from my Little Miss Sunshine mug. I was out on the slate deck with the Southampton rays warming my skin. KC was already at work. After leaving the Star, she’d become the CEO of an international save-the-world nonprofit with a long acronym like SFFRRAWNGO. I could never quite remember what it stood for.
“Congratulations, you cougar.” She pronounced it couga.
“His name is Dylan,” I crowed. “How old do you think he is?”
“Any American male named Dylan was born in the late eighties. He’s probably not even thirty. You got his number and address, I assume? A young explosives expert is exactly what you need. What are you going to do? Call him?”
Even with her southern accent, the girl could talk fast.
“No way,” I said. “I’m going to send him a card and tell him if he comes out to Long Island again, I’d love to take him for a boat ride. You know, to show him how nice the area is, since he only comes here for work. Totally innocent.”
Which is exactly what I did.
Later that day, I dropped the stamped note, handwritten on a watercolor reprint of an idyllic beach scene, in the Southampton Village mailbox next to the library on Sea Road.
Three days later, I was at the drugstore dropping off an allergy prescription for Bella, whom Marty was putting on a plane to fly up to the Hamptons the next day. Timmy would join us in a few weeks once baseball camp ended. In the bright red aisles, Manhattan teenagers who looked like swimsuit models in ninety-dollar Tory Burch flip-flops were buying sunscreen.
My phone rang. I froze when I saw an unfamiliar area code. Could it be . . . Dylan Smyth? I contemplated the screen, as dazed as a red-eyed stoner, as the call went to voice mail.
I abandoned my cart and hurried out to the car in a far corner of the parking lot. I sat there with the windows rolled up so no one but me could hear as I listened to the message on the rental car speakerphone.
“Hi Leslie, this is Dylan . . . Dylan Smyth.”
My heart did a somersault.
“Uh . . . hey . . . yeah. Of course I remember you.”
His voice, at first, sounded laid-back and sexy. Then he cleared his throat.
“I got your letter today. I really liked meeting you. I would like to take you up on that offer. The boat ride, I mean.”
He slowly counted out the ten digits of his cell phone number. Then he said, and spelled, his email
address. Twice. Each.
I listened to his message six times. My favorite part came a few seconds before he hung up, when he added one final note: “Please call me. Soon.” I loved the urgency of “soon” and the way his drawl cracked like that of an anxious teenaged boy. Which he practically was.
Although I was elated to hear from Dylan Smyth, I forced myself to wait twenty-four hours before returning his call. I didn’t want to come off as overeager. Plus I needed a full day and night to calm myself down.
The next day at sunset, after collecting Bella from the Islip airport and getting her settled at home, I drove to the Coopers Beach parking lot. The beach was deserted. Alone in my car watching the waves break, I picked up the phone. My hands shaking, I tapped the numbers Dylan left on my voice mail. It took me three tries to get the sequence right.
He answered after two rings. I had no idea what to say. I forced the words out.
“Dylan, uh, hi, this is . . . Leslie?”
I sounded like an ICU patient whose breathing tube had recently been removed.
“You know, Leslie Morgan. From the airport?”
I felt as if I had swallowed a tennis racket.
“Ahhh . . .” I heard on the line. It sounded like he was smiling over the phone. My chest unzipped. It seemed so unfamiliar, so nice, that a man who was not a relative, a waiter, or the plumber wanted to talk to me.
“Leslie, um, thanks for calling me back.”
He sounded as anxious as I felt.
“I was hoping I’d hear back from you. It was funny when I got your note. At first I thought it was an early birthday card . . . my birthday is coming up. Then I realized it was you.”
There was silence. I attempted to take a normal breath. The intensity of male energy, after a twenty-year absence, felt as revitalizing as inhaling smelling salts.
Then he said, “Wait a sec—I need to pull my truck over. I’m on my way to see my daughter.”
He spoke easily, like he’d already told me he had a child, as if we had a casual intimacy with the particulars of each other’s lives. I pictured Dylan, sitting in his truck, pulled over on the side of a Virginia country road, windows down, his tanned forearm hanging out the driver’s door.
The Naked Truth Page 4