Life on the Ramona Coaster (19 page)

I wanted to gauge her state of mind without saying anything that would influence her thinking, so I said, “Avery, what do
you
think of all this? Do
you
think Dad had an affair?”

Without hesitation, she answered, “Obviously, it’s ridiculous. That would
never
happen. You and Daddy have one of the best marriages I have ever seen, out of all your friends and my friends’ parents. Daddy would never have an affair. You would never have an affair.”

I felt my best shot at getting through to Mario at that point was if he heard how unconditionally our daughter trusted us, how much she believed in our marriage, so I said to her, “Okay, when we go back out there, I want you to tell your father that.”

When we sat back down at the table, she said to Mario, “Daddy, I saw the article. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe people are attacking you like this. You and Mommy have the best marriage. If I had to choose which one of you would have an affair, literally, gun to my head, I couldn’t choose. I know you both love each other too much to do something like that.”

I hoped that if Mario heard Avery saying that the father she knew would never do that to her mother, it would resonate with him. I felt that his behavior had been so far off from the man that I knew, he must be having some kind of midlife crisis. I truly believed that if he looked into his daughter’s eyes and saw how much he had to lose, his love for her would put him back on the right track. I think she did get through to him, because when we got back home we went back into therapy and attempted to resume our normal lives. I even threw a dinner party for twelve at our house in Southampton.

For a little while, things seemed to be getting back to normal. In November, Mario took me to Charleston. He bought me a Chanel bag for my birthday and we had a beautiful time. But, just two weeks later, things seemed to shift again and I began to feel Mario pulling away. It was like Jekyll and Hyde again. I remember our therapist said to me, “Ramona, it’s like he’s bludgeoning you for whatever he thinks you did to him in the marriage.” In December, right before Avery was about to come home for winter break, we took a trip to Naples because Mario was thinking about retiring and wanted to check out what it would be like to live there. The last thing I wanted to do was sell everything off and move to Florida, but I was trying to be a supportive and loving wife and I hoped it would help salvage our marriage for us to get away together. We did make love that weekend, but he seemed distant and detached. We weren’t connecting. Everything felt forced. At one point, we were watching the sun set together and I remember Mario pulled out his phone and took a picture of it. Something about it felt wrong to me, like he wasn’t really in that moment with me. I felt a deep longing for the sense of connection I had felt just one year earlier while we were watching the sun setting in Anguilla.

The day after we got home from Naples, I was busy preparing for Avery’s arrival home for winter break. I remember being annoyed with Mario because he was late getting home from work. I was in Avery’s room, making sure it was all set up for her return, when I started receiving texts from a woman telling me, in crude and explicit language, that she had just
been
with my husband in the apartment he was paying for. The text said that Mario loved me and she couldn’t be with him because she knew he loved me. She also forwarded me dozens of screenshots of texts and photos that she claimed Mario had sent to her. Among them was the photo Mario had taken with his phone of that sunset he and I had watched together in Naples. I felt like someone had ripped my heart from my chest. When Mario finally got home, he found me in Avery’s room, visibly upset. He asked what was wrong and I told him about the texts. Tears stung my eyes and then began streaming down my face.

At that moment, we heard Avery’s voice calling, “Hi, I’m home,” as she walked through the front door. I remember Mario saying to me, “Ramona, straighten yourself up fast. Avery’s here. We don’t want her to know anything.” I froze, numb with shock. I knew she must have heard us fighting and I didn’t know what to do or say. It must have seemed to Avery like she had stepped into a twilight zone. Instead of being greeted at the door by her loving parents, she walked into this very tense situation. It was literally the very first time in her entire life she had ever heard us fight. Of course, sometimes we would snap or be petty, but it was always little things like, “Mario, you’re not ready” or “Ramona, you didn’t clean up,” but never anything like the scene that she had just walked in on.

My maternal instincts kicked in and I did my best to pull myself together and put on a happy front. I said to myself,
I must protect Avery,
no matter what
. I walked out of her bedroom, and Avery was standing in the living room with this look on her face that was equal parts confusion and fear. In the six weeks since she had seen me at the end of October, I had lost fifteen pounds. I was emaciated. She kept asking me, “Mommy, what’s wrong, you look like a skeleton?” but there was no way I could tell her what was really was going on.

After that, Mario promised to end it. I felt like he could see how much pain I was in and was truly remorseful. The week after Christmas, the three of us drove out to Southampton, stopping to pick up food from La Parmigiana, our favorite restaurant in town, just like we always had after a long drive in from the city. I kept telling myself,
we are the Singers. We are a trifecta. We will get through this and things will be like they always were.

But we would never be the same again.

A few days later, Mario got a voicemail from a woman saying that if he didn’t give her money she was going to go to the press. At that point there had been only one article, which had been damaging enough. The last thing we needed while we were trying to salvage our marriage was a full-blown media firestorm. Just the threat of it was so stressful that we got into a huge fight. Avery was in her room on the other end of the house, but she heard us screaming at one another. She told me later that it felt like something out of a movie. She described hearing me yell something like, “What are you going to do? We need to protect Avery,” and her father answer, “I don’t know. It’s your problem, Ramona. Deal with it.” She couldn’t make out a lot of what we were saying, so she crept down the staircase and stood listening at the bottom. That’s when she heard her father say, “Ramona, I am one step away from walking out that door,” and me scream back, “Why don’t you just go fuck her!”

It kills me to think how painful it must have been for Avery to hear us say those things. She told me later that at that moment, she felt as if her world had shattered into a million jagged little pieces. She snapped and just ran. She ran out the door, into a torrential rainstorm, and collapsed onto the ground. She pulled out her cell phone, and did what any teenage girl would do when she realizes her life is falling apart; she called her best friend. That’s when Mario must have heard her outside. Avery was screaming and hysterically crying and, not realizing that she had overheard us arguing, he thought she was in physical pain. He ran out after her into the pouring rain, but when he tried to approach her she screamed, “Don’t come near me. You cheated on Mommy. Fuck you. I hate you. Don’t come closer. Get away from me.” Mario came to get me and eventually we got Avery to calm down enough to come back inside. Later, Avery told me that she had asked Mario not to tell me what she had heard, because she didn’t want to upset me, but I think he didn’t know what else to do so he told me anyway.

I remember being panicked, thinking,
what do I do? What do I tell her?
I was crying. Avery was crying. It was awful. I couldn’t stand seeing my daughter in such pain, so I made a decision to take control of the situation and find a way to convince my daughter that she had misunderstood. I remember the three of us sitting down in our finished basement, where we have this long L-shaped couch. Avery and I were sitting next to one another on one end of the couch and Mario was way over on the far end. I remember looking at him, just sitting there, staring down at the floor, quiet as a mouse. He might as well have been a thousand miles away.

I needed to assess what she thought she knew, so I asked, “Avery, what did you hear?”

“I heard that there’s a woman or someone who’s threatening us. I heard Daddy say he was one step from walking out the door. And I heard you say something like, ‘why don’t you go fuck her.’”

The most convincing lies are steeped in truth, so I very delicately spun a web using threads of what she had heard and what I knew she wanted to believe.

“Avery, you misunderstood what we were saying. There is a woman who is
stalking
your father. She wants our money. She’s the one who published the fake article in the press. When I said, ‘Go fuck her,’ I didn’t mean physically. I meant, ‘Screw her. Who cares what she does? She can’t hurt us.’”

I looked into my daughter’s eyes and what I saw there in that moment was pure relief. Avery is not a naive person. She is a very intelligent and savvy young woman who can smell bullshit from a mile away. She believed my lie because for most of her life, we were the perfect family. We raised her with a very strong sense of morality. She idolized her father. Mario was always a moral, Christian, god-fearing man. Every Sunday, until she was thirteen years old, he dragged her out of bed to go to church. It was so much easier to believe the lie I told her than what she had heard with her own ears.

Meanwhile, I was deteriorating physically and emotionally. I was disappearing into myself. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I knew once Avery went back to college, I would be alone with Mario and I was beginning to realize that I couldn’t be around him anymore. It felt like no matter what I did, he seemed to be getting angrier and angrier with me. I think he was, in fact, angry with himself for being unfaithful, but he turned his rage on me because he couldn’t handle the guilt. He never laid a hand on me, but he would get this white rage in his eyes and I began to feel very threatened and afraid. The stress of everything became unmanageable and it began to wreak havoc on my mind, body, and spirit. There were times when I was so low that I almost felt like throwing myself in front of a subway train. I was so anxious and depressed that my doctor put me on anxiety medication.

I think it was at this point that Mario finally began to see how much of a toll everything we were going through had taken on me. In January, we took Avery to see
Kinky Boots
and I kept nodding off because I was taking too much anxiety medication. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was overmedicating myself to combat depression. I remember Mario taking my hand to nudge me awake, and when I looked at him, for the first time I thought I could see a sign that he wanted my forgiveness. But, at that point, I was so emotionally broken that I couldn’t find it in myself to forgive. In order to forgive him, I needed to heal and, in order to heal, I needed time on my own, away from Mario. I was so distraught that I was having terrible diarrhea. My stomach was tied up in knots from stress and it had gotten to the point that whenever I was around him I would lose my stool. I had to get my health back on track.

A week or so before Avery went back to college I took her to lunch and asked her how she would feel if I asked her father to move out.

“Why?” she asked, warily.

“Because things are strained among us right now; we need to have a break. Your father is full of anger towards me, as you have witnessed, and I’m nervous around him.” She hugged me and said, “Mommy, I support you. I don’t really understand, but I support you.”

That last week Avery was home, I basically avoided Mario as much as I could. For the first time
I
was the one pulling away and I think Mario felt it. In fact, Avery told me he kept asking her,
have you heard from your mom, where is your mom?
Then one night I came home and Avery told me that Mario had come into her room. He was very distraught, and was questioning her about me in a very intense and aggressive way.

“Daddy’s looking for you. He said he needs to talk to you. He kept pushing me to tell him if you had said anything about what’s wrong with you. I kept saying that I didn’t feel it was my place. I was like, ‘Daddy, I don’t want to get in the middle of this. All I can say is that Mom’s really not okay.’ But he kept pushing, ‘Your mom is going to ask me to move out, isn’t she? Tell me your mom told you she wants me out.’ He was freaking out, so I told him you said you were going to ask him to move out after I go back to school. He just broke down and started crying. Dad
never
cries. He was saying, ‘I know. I’ve been awful. I’ve been pushing her away, Avery, and I think I pushed her too far. I love her so much. I’m sorry. I’ve done some awful things. I haven’t been the man that I was.’ He was acting so weird. I said, ‘Dad,
did
you have an affair?’ He just kind of stared down at his hands and didn’t say anything, so I said, ‘Well, Dad, you’re not jumping to say no, here, so I’m gonna assume that’s a yes.’ You guys can stop lying to me now, Mommy. I
know
Daddy had an affair.”

What I did next, I will regret for the rest of my life. I said to Avery, “Don’t say anything to your father about any of this. Don’t get angry. Just play it cool.” At the time, I felt that Mario was in a fragile state and I didn’t want to deal with any kind of white rage from him after Avery had gone back to school. I just wanted to contain the situation because I felt like his behavior was so erratic. I was scared and I was weak. So I basically asked my daughter, who had just told me that she had found out that her father was not the man she thought he was, not to feel what she had a right to feel and not to express what she had a right to express. I remember right before Avery left for school, we all went out for her last dinner in the city. The three of us sat there making small talk and she had to pretend that was everything okay, because that’s what I asked her to do. She hadn’t spoken to Mario since their conversation in her room. No one addressed the elephant in the room and, because she loves me and she loves her father, Avery agreed to play along. She was never allowed to lose it and be angry, which wasn’t healthy for her. After that, Avery actually put herself in therapy because I would call her crying and she told me Mario would call her crying. She was only seventeen years old, and she was playing mediator to her parents. I am so grateful that she has a strong sense of self and that she has come through this without becoming jaded or bitter.