“Before that last time I came to see you? Well, actually a while before that. While we were in Tulum. When I was jealous about the helicopter pilot? You left your computer behind when you went hiking. I did a terrible thing. I’m not proud of it.”
I tried to keep breathing.
“Okay, Jake, it’s okay. Go ahead and tell me.”
I went onto your Facebook account and your text message history. To look for something about the helicopter guy. And . . . um . . .”
What reason would anyone have to spy on me? Why hadn’t he told me at the time? When I got back to our beach hut, we’d made love, divvied up entrées at dinner, and slept with our arms wrapped around each other in the same bed. Jake had never said anything.
He paused, like Simon Cowell on American Idol, about to deliver the big reveal.
“And, uh, I found all those messages to Chris Bailey.”
All those messages? What was he talking about? He failed to mention he’d found nothing about the helicopter pilot or anyone else. Because there was nothing to find.
“Chris Bailey? My friend who’s in Marine Special Operations Command? The one who’s been in Afghanistan for the past six months?”
“Yeah. The one you said you wanted to give a big hug to the next time you see him. The one you kissed. And lied to me about. I found it all in your text history.”
“Jake, I’ve seen Chris Bailey two times in my life. Not once since last summer. I kissed him once or twice. What are you talking about?”
“Don’t laugh at me, Leslie! Are you laughing?”
“No, Jake. I’m stunned. I was kind of snorting. Not laughing.”
Fresh tears slid down my cheeks. Sure, I got all flirty with guys whom I’d kissed once. I loved that, too—since first grade, I’d been a boy chaser. Jake knew that about me. He liked that about me.
“This is why we broke up?” I asked.
A warning snaked through my swollen brain. Wait a cotton-picking minute. My fifty-year-old boyfriend had dug into my Facebook account, broken up with me without telling me the real reason, let me suffer for six motherfucking weeks without knowing why he’d bolted, and now he was mad at me? How could he not feel guilty for hurting me, for concealing his insecurity and jealous paranoia, or for making me feel invisible? I’d never lied to Jake, or hidden anything from him, or even looked at his phone. Because if you respect someone, you respect their boundaries. In my world, at least. Jake sounded like my possessive, abusive first husband. Jake’s lack of introspection took my breath away. How could a grown man be this irrational? Suddenly, KC’s words hit me like a baseball bat: no baggage equals no empathy. How had I fallen for this, despite years of therapy?
“We broke up because I kissed a man who is practically a stranger, someone who means nothing to me? Bullshit, Jake. You broke up with me because you were terrified of how close we were getting. Because you don’t want to admit that I love you. Goddamn you, Jake.”
The phone was slick with tears. It felt supergoddamnfantastic to let him know how much he’d hurt me. To be furious with him for destroying us.
“I hate how insecure I am, Leslie,” he said with venom. “How jealous I get.”
His voice dropped to a whisper; he sounded like a six-year-old boy. “I’m completely unlovable, Leslie. You don’t want to be with me.”
He said it like a warning, as if he were pleading with me not to get too close to the septic tank of his soul.
“Jake. I love you.” With two fingers, I wiped away a deluge of snot. “Let me show you how lovable you are. No one is perfect. Why couldn’t you talk to me about this?”
I was begging. It felt humiliating. I couldn’t stop myself.
“Well.” His voice hardened, despite the emotion of what I was saying, of how vulnerable I was making myself to him. Or maybe because of it.
“It’s not only what I found on your computer. There are other reasons, too. You make me feel so insecure, so jealous all the time. It’s not just the helicopter pilot. Or the Special Ops guy. I felt like I could never leave you alone.” Jake made it sound as if I were independent specifically to torture him. “When I went to Canada. When I went to South Africa. I worried the whole time about you cheating on me. You were always so hard to hold on to.”
Jake sounded as insecure as a shy, nerdy ninth grader. He was so wrong about me. In both my marriages, even at their nadir, I’d never once stepped out on either husband. As far as I could tell, my personality ran pretty much the opposite of cold, unfaithful, and controlling. My therapist, my kids, and probably even Marty would tell you I was too open, too loving, too passionate, too truthful. None of Jake’s accusations described who I really was.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before, Jake? We could have gotten through it. Together. You always told me you liked it that other men found me attractive. Why didn’t you talk to me about feeling jealous?”
“Well, I guess I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to be that guy. That jealous guy. That insecure boyfriend.”
The cats had crept back onto the edge of my bed. Anger and grief coursed through me like alternating ocean waves. Jake sounded like a teenager, not an adult.
“But Jake, sabotaging our trust, ending our relationship, breaking my fucking heart, was better than that? Better than working it out with me? Because you didn’t want to admit to being ‘that guy’ who was paranoid and insecure? You let me twist for the past six weeks, torturing myself over why you ended things, with my therapist and friends on speed dial, wondering how I could have been in love with someone who one day turned off all his feelings for me like a faucet?”
Silence. He still had not said anything approaching an apology. There had been no I’m sorry I hurt you, Leslie. I’m sorry I went onto your computer and spied on your life and destroyed a great relationship with the woman of my dreams.
I deserved all of those words, and more.
“Well, uh, there are a few other things, too,” he said.
Fuck.
“Like what?” I asked anxiously.
Jake hesitated. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to tell me. Had he stolen money from me? Installed a GPS tracker on the TT?
“Well, you always pour the first cup of coffee for yourself.”
Oh my God. Was he ten years old? His hostility gutted me. How could the man who in January had written Is it OK if I love you in some way for the rest of my life? now be angry about the first coffee pour-over? Did Jake want to sabotage what we had? Did he expect me to never get angry, to never disappoint him, to never let him down in any way?
I squeezed my phone tight. An ambulance siren howled down the street out front. I tried to make my voice sound normal.
“Okay, thanks for telling me all this, Jake. Your honesty is really . . . helpful. I love you.”
It was true. Maybe it always would be. No matter how much he hurt me. God, sometimes I hated being a heterosexual female.
“I have more to tell you, Leslie. You’re not going to like it.”
Well, it wasn’t as if I’d liked what he’d told me already.
“I feel badly about how things ended,” he said, with a hint of a question mark in his voice, as if he wanted me to ask what he meant. I stayed quiet. I was devastated by the fact that things ended, but not by how they ended. What did he mean?
“Ah, I was seeing someone else while we were together. Hannah. I feel bad about that.”
I dropped the phone as if I’d grabbed a hornet’s nest with my bare hand. Did he think this information would help me somehow? No. His goal was to hurt me and to salve his guilt-ridden conscience. I couldn’t speak. I knew he was telling the truth; I remembered the sneaky smile on Hannah’s face at the Halloween party, the times Jake wouldn’t answer my texts for days when he was in New York working. As part of my shock, all I could think of was the many diseases he’d possibly exposed me to via Hannah and her Calvin Klein boyfriend and all the women that guy slept with. I heard Jake’s voice coming from the phone on the floor, sayin
g “Leslie? Leslie?” increasingly angrily, until the phone finally went silent.
I’d worked so damn hard, in therapy and other places, to become an adult. That meant being honest, and transparent, and vulnerable with the people I loved, my kids, my friends, my editors, everyone in my life whom I cared about. I needed the man—or men—in my life to be the best version of themselves as well. The whole time I’d been with Jake, I’d been waiting for the grown-up version to arrive, the mature, forgiving, communicative man, that guy I thought I loved and trusted.
There was clearly no grown-up version of Jake on his way to me.
There never had been.
My heart cracked open.
I started to cry again. Knowing what Jake had kept from me, how damaged he must be inside, how unkind he could be, how naive I’d been about a man once more, stung even more now that I knew the truth. Our intense sexual connection, the passion of his love letters, our entire relationship together, had been nothing more than a mirage of shimmering palm trees and sapphire-blue water that evaporated when I got too close to him. We’d never truly been a We.
I fell asleep in bed with the lights on. When I woke up in the middle of the night to turn them off, my pillow was still wet. I had a considerable measure of salty Jake tears left in me, but I knew one thing for certain: Jake Bryant never deserved me. Any part of me. The spell was broken. “We” were done forever.
* * *
In my tear-stained bed the next morning, I texted a recap of Jake’s confessions to KC. There was too much for me to figure out alone. How could KC have seen, more clearly and far earlier than I had, that I was letting myself down again, falling for a man who couldn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved, who couldn’t even be honest with me or faithful? I would never let myself be blinded like that again.
I was down in the kitchen, dismally making coffee for one instead of two, when my phone lit up with her response. I loved/hated it when, in reaction to one of my three-hundred-word soul-searching missives, KC shot back the perfect breezy retort in fewer words than my opening sentence.
Hey girl!
KC was probably dodging traffic into her office and dictating to Siri.
You never really know a guy until he breaks up with you. Your computer??? Cheating the whole time on you when he was accusing you of cheating?!? Classic cheater profile. Good riddance. I promise, you will survive!
I threw down the phone on the couch. Losing Jake—or whomever I had thought he was—felt like heroin withdrawal. If I had ever used heroin. Which I haven’t, thank Holy God.
What was KC talking about when she wrote “classic cheater profile”? Even though I suspected Marty had stepped out, I’d never been especially curious about infidelity, since our other problems dwarfed it. I turned once again to the online universe. What I found wasn’t pretty. A psychology magazine explained that cheaters were narcissists, unable to get enough attention in one relationship. Cheaters constantly questioned partners and frequently accused them of infidelity, because being unfaithful makes them paranoid, and they assume their partner must be betraying them also. I had felt sorry for Jake, because he was so insecure and unable to see how deeply I loved him. I felt like a fool.
Then I realized, like biting down on a rock: Jake was the fool here. He had told me his past two relationships ended because both girlfriends had been unfaithful, one allegedly with a colleague, the other with a waiter at the bar near his building. Now I wondered: did those women actually cheat on him? Maybe their betrayals had been as illusory as mine. Maybe Jake had, in some way, wanted to believe we were all cheating on him, because he was cheating on us. You know a relationship is over when you start sympathizing with the exes.
Sara was even more blunt. “This is the behavior of a sociopath,” she said during our emergency session that afternoon. “I don’t normally allow myself to get this angry in my professional sphere, Leslie. But cheating on you, while accusing you of cheating on him, and now sharing the infidelity as if he’s proud that he hurt you? That is using infidelity as a weapon to annihilate you. He’s not merely troubled. I worry that he could be toxic to you and all women who cross his path. This is emotional abuse, Leslie, potentially as serious as the physical abuse you endured. The manipulation, the betrayal, the withholding of facts, then springing it on you, is among the most puzzling postbreakup tactics I’ve come across in my thirty years of psychotherapy.”
I crawled through the afternoon. I made myself go for a neighborhood walk, pondering what she said. I waited in a daze at two different traffic lights that had turned green. Isn’t it surprising, looking back after a relationship ends, how you can see the red flags you ignored at the beginning? Memories of Jake’s paranoid possessiveness and strange preoccupation with infidelity flooded back like shower water suddenly turned ice cold. In one of the first letters he’d written me, the night after our Atlantic City tryst, he’d told me the truth himself, writing, I’m probably being an incredible hypocrite because I spend time with other women, and you’ve been very clear about your feelings, which is all that should matter. The first present he’d given me was a copy of Junot Díaz’s book This Is How You Lose Her, which included a short story about a man who cheated on his fiancée with over fifty women and then got discovered when she broke into his computer and read his emails.
Why hadn’t I paid attention? This was part of what Sara and KC were trying to get me to see. My instincts about men were good. I just had to listen more assiduously.
I looked up, lost in thought. I was in front of my own front doors. Tigger and all three cats were looking woefully out the kitchen window, as if they’d survived without food for a week when I’d been gone for less than an hour.
Later that night, when I thought I was crying quietly in my bedroom, I heard a knock on my door.
“Come in,” I said, wiping my face on a corner of my sheet.
Timmy walked in, followed by Bella.
“Hi, guys,” I said. “What’s up?”
I patted the bed. They stood there, afraid of my sadness.
“Mom,” Tim said. “We know you’re upset about Jake. We can hear you. You don’t have to hide the fact that you are crying from us.”
Which, of course, made me burst into fresh tears.
“Oh, you two are so sweet,” I managed to say.
They climbed under the covers on either side of me. Bella looked at Timmy expectantly, like they’d discussed what to say.
“Mom, he wasn’t good enough for you,” Timmy said. “He wasn’t . . . nice to you. Bell and I never really liked him, anyway. Don’t worry. You’ll fall in love again.”
There are few things as profound as getting a pep talk about love from your own teenaged kids. I took each of their warm, soft hands.
“Thank you both. I know you’re right. I’m just sad now. I miss Jake so much.”
Bella finally spoke up. “Mom, someone great is going to find you and love you the way we do.”
God, I hoped she was right.
After walking Tim and Bell back to their rooms and tucking in each one, I lay under the covers in my own soft bed. My own kids could see my value. KC and Sara could, too. At times, I still couldn’t. Part of this journey was, obviously, that I had to learn and relearn that the way I allowed men to treat me was up to me, and only me. I had to thread a particularly challenging needle: to find validation from men while not allowing them to steal my self-confidence. The tricky part was finding the right balance, to open up to the men in my life without completely giving myself over to them. Men could be healers, as well as destroyers, and it was at times surprisingly hard to tell the difference between the two.
The truth is, despite the heartbreak he wrought, I got what I needed most from Jake. Hope that I could love deeply again. More fabulous sex in six months than I’d had in the thirty years prior. Hope and great sex? Who wouldn’t be grateful for that, at fifty or at any age? I’d taken what I wanted from Jake and the other men in my life. And, as Sara had prophesiz
ed, I’d paid for it.
I may have gotten unlucky with the men in my life, but Jesus, I had the world’s best girlfriends, a brilliant therapist, and the most compassionate kids. Which all felt far more dear than five boyfriends right then.
* * *
Jennie finally died on a Sunday in May. I was leaving for a domestic violence conference in western Canada the next day, but after seeing the news on Jake’s Facebook page, I decided to send a care package, to take the high road despite his betrayal. I rushed around buying his favorite coffee from La Colombe. I took his favorite framed photo of the two of them and wrapped it in teal-blue tissue paper. I added a glossy pack of Crane’s note cards embossed with the silhouette of a coonhound. Lastly, I stopped at the liquor store and bought the most expensive bottle of tequila they had. I packed it all up in a small mountain of blue tissue and trucked it to the post office early Monday morning before catching my flight to Vancouver.
The conference fascinated me, especially a long, intense dinner with two Canadian police detectives and the chairman, addressing the latest technological tools to prevent stalking, trafficking, sexual assault, and relationship abuse. When I returned home Friday, Jake still hadn’t mentioned the box. I knew he was probably heartbroken, so I let it go. But eventually, I texted him to find out if he had gotten it. Maybe it had been lost somehow, or confiscated by an overzealous postal employee because I’d snuck in booze.
This was Jake’s reply:
Yes, thanks for the package, Leslie. Hannah has actually been great to me during these sad days. We’re getting along wonderfully and she’s seeing me through.
Nice touch, Jake. Thanks so fucking much.
* * *
Hey Leslie!
Marc’s text, one night when I was home alone in bed with three purring cats and Tigger sprawled across my bedroom threshold, felt like a gift from the God of Younger Men.
The Naked Truth Page 25