Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (37 page)

I stretched across his bed and talked him through his anxiety as he packed to go to a conference for work. But after he left for his business trip, the tempo of our lives suddenly changed. I was just finishing the book I'd started the previous fall. And I was hired to ghostwrite two other books and edit a third, starting immediately. I left for Las Vegas with a new client on the day I was supposed to pick Robert up from the airport. Her book was due in six weeks, and I had promised I could meet the deadline. The day I flew back from Las Vegas, I didn't have enough cash to take a cab from the airport, and only one of my credit cards had enough credit left to cover the fare. But I had a big check in my bag. I went immediately to the bank, feeling everything lighten. It was the first time I hadn't been worried about money in nearly two years. I drove back to the airport to pick up my friend Cathy, who'd flown in to celebrate my birthday, but really, she'd come to meet Robert.

“I've never heard you talk about a guy like this before,” she said.

The only problem was Robert was now sick with a bad cold and bowed out of all of my invitations to meet us for dinner or sightseeing. One night, on the verge of a meltdown, I dropped Cathy off at my house and drove up to see Robert, desperate just to be near him. It had been nearly two weeks since we'd seen each other. I climbed into bed with him and took off all of my clothes. Afterward, we lay together talking quietly, and it was if a great weight had been lifted from me, just like at the bank.

It seemed that Cathy might not meet Robert at all, until the last night she stayed with me, on the eve of my birthday, he joined us for
dinner and a show at the Magic Castle. The next morning when Robert and I woke up alone in my house, he immediately began secret birthday maneuverings. He'd snuck stuff into my refrigerator the night before, and he now got up and cooked me eggs with special steak he'd tracked down for me. At my place setting was an antique souvenir book from Niagara Falls inscribed with a beautiful, romantic letter, and a birthday card that echoed a vow he'd been making to me since we confessed our love, the promise of a forty-five-year honeymoon. Nothing scared me when I knew we were both in it for the long haul. This was how relationships got broken in, this was how people got to know each other, this was how families worked, right?

The day after my birthday, I went back to work, and I only saw Robert for a few hours here and there after that. When we were together, I was still fielding e-mails from my clients, whether it was two in the morning on a Wednesday or two in the afternoon on a Sunday. I could feel the chill emanate from him every time I picked up my BlackBerry. “I'm sorry,” I said. “Is it bothering you that I'm working so much?”

“No, no, it's your work, I get it.”

But his posture told a different story. By Valentine's Day, I was convinced we were going to break up, and was floored when I arrived that evening to find he'd lit candles throughout his apartment and yard and put on a suit jacket and greeted me with as much romance as ever. I was temporarily reassured and too busy and tapped out to really investigate beyond the surface. And when we did get to spend time together, it was still so easy for us to connect.

During a conversation with Robert about my dad's gambling and the books I'd bought him to help him master the racetrack, Robert paused and looked at me.

“Well, you know your dad is mentally ill, right?”

I was shocked. My dad wasn't mentally ill. He was cool, ­bohemian—eccentric, yes, but in a good way.

The possible truth of Robert's words bloomed in my mind: the
untreated gambling addiction, the depression, the narcissism that my new therapist had basically diagnosed when she'd recommended all of those books on narcissism to me. It wasn't that I cared, really, about any of this. I certainly had plenty of my own issues. What unsettled me was the possibility that my father had raised me in a complex fantasy where he was the infallible king, and I his most loyal subject. If I woke up from the enchantment, what would happen? Who would I be and in what world would I live?

I didn't ever make a conscious decision to change my behavior, but after that moment, I started to pull back from my dad. I didn't talk with him about Robert the way I had about previous relationships. Even though Robert and I were both having a difficult winter, as far as I was concerned, we were still moving toward getting married and starting a family, so maybe it was right for me to push my father off his pedestal and become an adult. My dad even seemed to agree. One day when we were discussing my life—Robert, my ghostwriting, my script—he paused.

“You're almost done,” my dad said, sounding a little sad that I might not need his support as I had during the early years of our reunion.

Even as blissed-out as I was in my surety that I'd finally found the one, work deadlines consumed me. I was distracted and exhausted. Robert protested up and down that everything was fine, but that did not stop him from growing more distant as the winter progressed, which only made me cling harder. When we did see each other, with booze in our bloodstream, we had sex like we had in the beginning. In the morning, I woke feeling bleary and bruised and went back to my computer, where I stayed for days at a time.

When I opened the file for the book I'd been hired to write, I lost myself in the story I'd been told by my client, whom I genuinely liked, and the sheer joy I felt when I got caught up in the puzzle of moving prose around on the page. It was a welcome respite from the seemingly bottomless longing I felt, which never seemed to alter in any measurable way, even if the men I was longing for changed.

In the first few months of our relationship, Robert had sent me his schedule every week, so I could go to events with him, and we could plan to hang out on his days off. Now, when I asked him about the week ahead, he ran through the plans he had already made for his free time. I sat, staring at him, frozen with fear and dread.

“So you're not going to see me at all next week,” I said.

“Well, you've been so busy,” he said.

At the end of one such exchange, he was sitting in a wingback chair at his house, impassive and closed off. I ended up kneeling by his chair, my arms around his waist. I knew I was clinging, literally, but if I didn't move toward him, there would be nothing left of our relationship for me to reconnect with after my deadline.

“We'll talk about it after your book is done,” he said.

“Talk about what?” I asked. “I don't understand what's going on.”

“Everything is fine,” he said. “Just get your book done.”

For the last week of my deadline, I slept six hours a night and spent literally every other waking moment working on the manuscript. When I handed it in, a week late because of the client's last-minute changes, Robert and I went to Malibu for a night away, which I'd planned carefully and then postponed. I wanted to have sex. He wanted to have adventures. When he reached for a napkin in my glove box, he found there were none.

“How do you expect to be a mom if you don't have paper towels in your glove box?” he asked.

Instead of defending myself, I made a mental note to get some napkins.

I'd bought a Frisbee and a kite for our weekend away, and as he tossed the white disc to me on the beach, he laughed.

“Maybe you'll be a good mom after all,” he said.

I stared at him in disbelief but held my tongue.

When we got back to his house, I was supposed to go to a friend's birthday party, and he wanted to bow out and spend the night at home. Even though we'd just spent twenty-four hours together on a supposedly
romantic getaway, I felt farther away from him than ever. I melted down, sobbing and shuddering on his bed.

He drove me to the party and remained cheerful throughout, but I didn't feel victorious. It hadn't been a battle or a point I'd been trying to prove. I regularly drove to Texas and Tennessee by myself and had no problem going to a party alone. What I was fighting for, clumsily, was something much deeper and harder to get at than that. I wanted closeness from him, and I did not feel it simply because he was standing in the same room with me, or sleeping in the same bed. Every good moment we spent together was evidence I stored up to ward off this feeling of lurking trouble, but the shadows persisted.

I
n mid-April, Robert came over on a Friday night. This was usually our date night. But he didn't ask me where I wanted to eat or grab his keys to head out the door. Instead, he sat heavily on my love seat, and he didn't move at all.

“Sarah, I have to tell you something. I haven't been honoring the contract.”

“Okay,” I said. I felt my mouth go dry.

“I haven't been honest with you,” he continued. “I've been feeling distant from you, and our relationship, and I have been for some time. I kept thinking it was me, but it's been a month, and so I have to assume that it's not.”

We talked for hours, with Robert getting up to bring me glasses of water, none of it enough to quench my thirst. We lay down on my bed, which he knew made it easier for me when I was emotionally stressed. He held me, and I cried. He was the man I was going to marry and have children with. He was the man who had promised me a forty-five-year honeymoon. But, as I told him almost immediately, if he needed to go, he had to go. He wouldn't say he wanted to leave. But he wouldn't let me back in, either.

A week later, I pushed him to admit he wanted out. Despite looming deadlines, I managed about four hours of work a day. Around one in the afternoon, I forced myself to get up and go into the kitchen to make tea and eat an apple with almond butter, one of the only things I could force down. I sat at my dining room table and looked at the postcard of Marilyn Monroe I'd hung there when I'd first moved in—before Robert had bought me all of those books about her, before I'd made us her stuffing for Thanksgiving—and I'd think about how unlucky in love she was, and how unhappy. She'd spent her whole life fearing she'd end up crazy like her mother, and I thought about whether or not Robert had been right about my dad. And how Robert had gone away, and now it was only my dad who had stayed.

I
was still on the outside of everything I wanted, feeling like it was other people who had the power to give me value—all of the lovers, editors, and experiences I had given myself over to for years, rather than owning myself. Never seeing that I had been at the center of my own big life all along.

I was sad because Robert and I had broken up; because my dear friend Marya had just been diagnosed with brain cancer; because the script my film agents had been sure would sell had not; because feeling like my life had fallen apart at thirty-five was that much worse than feeling like my life had fallen apart at thirty-four. There was one circumstance that was better now. For the first time ever, really, I had money.

This meant I actually had health insurance that wasn't given to me by the state (thank you, Oregon and Massachusetts!). I went to see a gynecologist and got another ultrasound. The good news was my PCOS was gone. The other news, which he announced just as matter-of-factly, was that I had five years of fertility left.

“I
think I probably have seven years left,” I said to the doctor.

“You have five,” he said. “Meet a nice guy and have a baby.”

He was lucky I didn't start crying right there. I waited until later in the day when I was home alone and my tea and wine were not far away.

The therapist I'd found in the last weeks of my relationship with Robert to help me save the relationship, and who was now helping me handle the breakup, encouraged me to maintain appropriate boundaries with my dad: not letting him talk to me about his porn habits or make me feel guilty for not enabling him. And to get angry: at him, at Robert, at Leo, at anyone who had made promises to me he hadn't kept. I wouldn't say I succeeded at getting angry. But I found I was different in moments that sometimes surprised me. When Robert began e-mailing and texting me to check in, I e-mailed back and said I wasn't ready to be his friend. It was a small but crucial step. Slowly, I began to feel better.

No matter how much I changed and grew, it seemed as if my father was capable of spinning out in the same few areas indefinitely. There were times when he disappeared for a week or two. When I eventually coaxed him onto the phone, he revealed it had struck him how much went into raising a kid—the cost of shoes, the constant need to teach and love—and how completely he had failed my sister and me. His bottomless regret had made him feel so lousy that he'd dodged my calls. We had already had this conversation many times, and as much as I wanted his patience during my healing, I was incredibly frustrated that his guilt about having been absent from my life in the past had caused him to be absent from my life again. Most of all, he seemed incapable of seeing the pattern. It was hard to stay mad at him, though. Sometimes he came out with the loveliest assessments of our relationship, like “Sarah, I'm sorry I couldn't be a better father to you, but I've had my own head so far up my own ass my entire life.” Other times, he'd been silent because he was worried about his health. He confessed that he'd been having trouble with his prostate and was obsessed with the fear that it was cancer. Eventually, he'd begin circling a topic that had become fraught between us.

“I
know we haven't talked about it in a while, but I was wondering if you'd given any more thought to me coming out there,” he said. “You used to want me to come.”

It wasn't that I didn't want him to move, it was that I had no idea whether I'd stay in Los Angeles, or for how long, and I didn't want him or anyone else to be reliant on me. Always, I feared hurting his feelings or driving him away. But I knew, this time, I had to be honest.

“I don't think it's a good idea right now,” I said. “I need to focus on my own life. I might want to have a kid. I need to put my energy there. I need to take care of myself.”