Cleaving (41 page)

Before getting out of bed I unplug my BlackBerry and scroll through e-mails, as is my habit, leaning up against Eric's bare
back. In the past month or so, since returning from my trip, I've gotten used to the touch of Eric's skin again, am no longer
afraid of him or his expectations. It helps that he has ceased to demand. Maybe he feels me slowly coming back to him, or
pulling away, or whatever it is that's happening to me. Perhaps I seem to be doing both at once. But we are, for the first
time in a long while, relatively content.

My in-box contains a message from iTunes. I think it's just a receipt for one of our latest purchases, a TV show or an album,
but no. This is something else.

"You've received an iTunes gift."

I click to open. And have to will myself not to stiffen as I read what's inside.

Julie

I shouldn't be writing you, but I've listened to this song 230 times in the last week and it reminds me of you for some reason.

Happy new year.

Damian

So, yes. This program has been brought to you by the letter D, but of course he has a name. It's a name that has often struck
through me like lightning. But for the last year and more, in my phone, in my distraught e-mails, in my journals and letters,
in my heart, he's been reduced to D. A reduction that has perversely seemed to make his power over me even more entire--symbolic,
abstract. Godlike, in point of fact, the similarity underlined not least by his extreme absence, nor by the fact that the
past few months have seen me beginning at last to add my ex-lover to the list of things I no longer believe in.

So to see his name there, unaccompanied but entire, at the bottom of an e-mail, is to be suddenly shocked into remembering:
this is a man. Not some kind of sinister force, irresistible and fatal. I once looked up the meaning of his name. It is from
the Greek, and it means "to tame." I took this much to heart. But this is just a guy. A guy who's weak too sometimes, a guy
who's just said he shouldn't be doing something, but is going ahead and doing it anyway.

It's a little dizzying. I can't tell if I'm ecstatic or terrified or pissed to the eyeballs.

Yes, I can. I'm all those things.

The song is "Willin' " by Little Feat.

First of all: What the fuck?! Second: What. The.
Fuck? "Willin' "?
I know the song "Willin.' " It's a song about hopped-up truckers. What in the
hell
is that supposed to mean?

Also?
What the fuck?!!!!

I get up and, while Eric is still in bed, download the song and listen to it several times with my earphones on, laughing
sometimes, rolling my eyes, tearing up once or twice, letting my heartbeat slowly back off its hysterical beat.

It's a great song, one I know well. But it's a song about a fucking trucker. A trucker who sees his Alice in every headlight.
A trucker who's been from Tucson to Tucumcari. A trucker who's willing. Willing to be moving. What does it
mean?

So, yes, I microanalyze. The strange thing is, though, that by the time Eric arises and we begin discussing our plans for
the day--a shopping trip for me, a bit of work and a run for him--I'm actually something close to calm. I wait several hours
to respond to this strange missive. (That in itself a once unheard-of accomplishment.) Shortly before I leave to go into the
city, I shoot out a quick e-mail:

Damian

I'm assuming that the song you've sent me was just a New Year's-related moment of weakness/douchebaggery. If not, though,
and you want to talk, I will be at Union Square, at the greenmarket, at one o'clock.

Julie

I don't expect him to show. I don't really dare to hope for it, am not even absolutely sure that I want it. I remember well
the breakdown that seeing him once before inspired. And I have too much to do today for histrionics.

In summer, the greenmarket is an explosion of color and noise and crowds, a city of foodies descending like plagues upon bright
piles of broad beans and bins of corn and glorious, knottily shaped tomatoes. In the winter, however, it's a tiny, quiet,
gray affair. I don't have to wait in line at the bakery booth for a couple of baguettes, nor at the tent where a Korean woman
I am on a smiling-basis with sells homemade kimchee and microgreens.

I spot him as I'm bagging up some salad. I've been trying not to look around for him, but when I glance up briefly from the
Igloo cooler full of mesclun, he's right there, maybe twenty feet away, loitering at the corner of 17th and Union Square West.
Standing there in his same old coat, same old hat, earbuds in his ears, head ducked in that same old way. I know he's determined
that I see him before he sees me, that I be the one to approach.

My heart is pounding hard in my ears, I know I'm blushing, but I finish paying for my purchase, make myself go slowly, continue
to breathe, count out exact change, and wish the woman behind the plastic folding table a happy new year. Make myself walk
steadily, though I'm tempted to either rush at him or run in the other direction. I can feel the tiny smirk on my face, the
smirk we both always used together. I come to a stop in front of him, perhaps a foot and a half away. He glances up at me,
his head still tucked down. Those eyes.

You can say many things about what happened between Damian and me. But the look that passes between us now is a look full
of history and ambivalence and knowingness and regret and, even, humor, even--could it be?--a muted sort of happiness. That
exchange, whatever it all means, and it means too many things for me to immediately understand, is not to be faked. Why would
we?

He slips his earbuds from his ears, slips his iPhone out of his coat pocket (of
course
he has an iPhone: if there is one thing I could bet my life on with confidence it would be that Damian would buy an iPhone
instantly
), wraps the white cord methodically around the shiny gadget, slides it back into his coat. With his head still bowed, he
looks up at me again, that complicated look, somehow naked and questioning and sardonic and guarded all at once, and I know
I look just the same. "Have you had lunch?"

"No."

"Good. Let's go."

I
ARRIVE
back at our apartment at around four thirty, hurried--late for starting dinner preparations--and loaded down, flushed. I greet
Eric, who's sitting at his desk hunched over his laptop, with a kiss on the forehead before beginning to unload groceries.
"If we're going to get this gumbo done before Paul and Amanda get here I'm going to have to get chopping."

"I'll help."

I pull out the celery, bell pepper, onion, my boning knife (I use it for everything, probably shouldn't but it fits so well
in my hand, is a sort of comfort to me somehow), and I take a cutting board from behind the sink. I'm singing under my breath.

Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made, driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed.

"I wish you wouldn't do that."

"Do what?"

Eric's come up to the kitchen sink to grab another board and a knife. As I roll the onion over to him, I look up and realize
instantly that he knows--or thinks he does--just what has happened.

Well. Good.

"That song. I know he gave it to you. I didn't even have to go looking. It was right there in our iTunes file."

I set down my knife, rest my knuckles on the counter. Make myself look him in the eye. He's doing the same. For the second
time in one day, one of those complex, gorgeous exchanges. "That's right."

I'm shocked to notice that I don't tear up, or cringe, though there's anger in my husband's look, and hurt. All I do is take
a deep breath, blow it out through pursed lips.

"I had lunch with him today. Needed to."

It occurs to me that I am happy. That sounds horrible, but I am, about many things. I'm happy about the unexpected civility
and calm of the lunch today, at the same Indian restaurant where Damian seduced me so long ago. It was not an easy conversation.
He had quite a grocery list of my hurtful and unacceptable behaviors of the last year and more, of all the ways I had raged
and pled and bargained and, frankly, lied, all those ways you speak to a God you don't really believe can hear you but still
hope will surprise you. What I'd not realized, because I'd not credited him with the humanity to feel hurt or weakness or
sympathy, was the toll these constant demands took on him, or how desperately he had to push against that suck of my need,
how legitimately afraid he was, how legitimately angry that I kept trying to pull him to me. But even as I cringed as he pointed
out each tyrannical, manipulative text and e-mail and late-night call, I also felt a strange equilibrium returning. I'd misused
a power I didn't even know I had.

And with that realization, I find I'm also happy about both the still-present physical pull of him and my remarkable ability
to resist it, about the hug and kiss on the cheek he gave me when we parted and the unbelievable truth that I didn't fall
apart when he left.

I'm happy that I'm now about to open my mouth and speak with perfect honesty to my husband, from whom I've so often tried
to hide.

But perhaps I'm most happy because I've suddenly realized just this. I can
see
these men, these dear, flawed men, my partners and lovers and friends. And they can see me. And none of us are going to die
because of it.

I've steeled myself for Eric's response, for rage or guilt or tears. But he surprises me. He nods. "Okay." He doesn't look
away, and he asks no probing questions. But I'm going to offer up something more. No gut-wrenching confessions of guilt. I
don't feel any, for one thing--my God, I really don't. It's like getting a therapeutic massage for the first time and standing
up afterward and realizing that I've spent my entire life with a knot in my back, or a tense neck. And now, just being human,
just walking around the earth, feels entirely different. Except that analogy isn't quite right. Because let us be clear here.
Damian is not the person who made me whole and well, just by swooping down from Jupiter and entering my life again like some
glorious extraterrestrial masseur. No. All his return did was make me realize I'm somehow managing to heal myself. So, no
guilt. Only what he, Eric, my husband, deserves.

"It was good to see him. We talked a lot. He's unhappy about how we left things, and obviously I have been too."

"I really don't need to know."

"Okay." I didn't say it was going to be easy. "I can't cut him out of me. Don't want to. I don't mean that he'll... or that
I'll... I just need to accept it. He's in there. Buried in. Part of my... my experience, I guess. Like a tattoo. A scar."

Eric nods again. "I know."

"And you know you are too. Buried in, I mean."

"I know." His lower lip curls as it always has, for the sixteen years I have known him, when he is about to weep. His eyes
are a sparkling blue when he cries. A hard thing to see, something I've always shied from seeing, but I don't look away now.
"I love you, Julie. So, so much."

And I have tears in my eyes too. "I know." And I am happy. I am, in fact, overjoyed, filled with love--not love like a drug
or a sickness or a hideous hidden thing or a painfully faraway one. Love like air. Like a dream of sand between my toes.

"I will probably see him again. I know I will. We have a lot to talk about. I won't be sleeping with him."

"You don't have to promise--"

"It's not for you. I'm not going to do it because I don't even know if he wants it, or if I do, and because it would be messy
and--"

The embrace Eric encircles me in then is full and deep and both familiar and strange. I lean my head against his shoulder.
I can feel his tears when they fall on my cheek, but he isn't racked with sobs, he isn't pulling me so tightly to him that
it's like he wants me to slip back inside his skin. "You know what? I'm so fucking tired of being scared," he says.

"I don't want to scare you, I just need to--"

"That's not what I mean." He takes me lightly by the shoulders and pulls away to look at me. Our faces are wet, but we don't
attempt to dry each other. "Life
is
messy. I'm tired of being scared of that. We'll deal with it. Things are going to happen, or not happen, and life is going
to change, one way or the other, and I'm tired of being terrified, angry that I can't keep everything the same, the way it
was. You know? I don't
want
everything to be the way it was. So this is what we're going to do. We're just going to
see
. It's uncertain, and it's probably going to hurt, and we just don't know, and you know what? I'm
fine
with that. I love you."

"I love you."

"And everything? It's going to be okay. It's going to be great. We're just going to see."

"Yes."

We kiss, for the first time in months really. And then we make gumbo. Eric chops, I devein shrimp, he looks over my shoulder
with glee, as he always does, when I make the roux the Paul Prudhomme way, with fantastic heat and smoke and finesse. We know
how to move around in the kitchen together. After all, we've been doing it our entire lives.