Married Sex (12 page)

Chapter 29

“Well, look at the bronze goddess!” I said, with a lightness that anyone else might have believed.

Victoria didn't. And didn't pretend to. So I didn't try to divert her with questions about what she'd been reading as she spent her afternoons wrapped in a blanket on a chaise on her lawn at the beach.

“How are you, David?”

“Fine. What brings you to town, V?”

“When they harvest the pumpkins, it's time.”

“Coffee?”

“I'll get it later. May I sit?”

I stood, thinking we'd take the couch. But she sat across the desk, like a client, which told me everything. If a hole appeared in the floor before me, even a hole leading somewhere deep and dark and crawling with snakes at the bottom, I would have jumped in.

“I'm okay, V,” I said. “Really. You don't have to worry about—”

“When someone is
worried
, David, it's usually too late. I am …
concerned
.”

“Why?”

“I talked to Blair,” she said. And, anticipating my question, she quickly added, “I called her.”

“Why?”

“Intuition.”

“She may have exaggerated what happened. It's not that heavy.”

There was kindness in V's voice. “There's nothing heavier than a broken heart.”

I knew then what it would be like to get a late-night phone call from the police.

V paused. She seemed to be fighting off an unruly idea, then gathered herself. “Let me speak first as a lawyer—as
your
lawyer. You and Blair had a verbal contract, binding for both of you: ‘If you're going to stray, bring that person home.'”

I blushed. I cringed. For Victoria, having to utter a sentence like that …

“Blair broke that agreement by not consulting you on the question of her moving out and living with …”

“Jean Coin.”

“Thank you. Given the care you took, over several years, to craft your original agreement, what Blair did was casual and reckless. She damaged the agreement and—much worse—she damaged your relationship.”

“She had some help,” I said. “Agreeing to see Jean a second time—that was my fault.”

“I was getting to that. You, as a lawyer, should have seen that a second encounter would establish a budding relationship—the very situation the contract was created to avoid. But you're lucky. Every day there are wives who leave their husbands for other women and never come back. Blair is coming home.”

V sat back and pressed a hand to her head. She looked her age and then some.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Water, please.”

I got a bottle from the side table and poured a glass. No ladylike sip for V—she gulped it down.

“Blair is coming home,” V said. “But not to the same marriage. She's different. You're different. You can't start over. You have to be where you are—wherever you are.”

V stood and faced me. She gestured for me to stand and come to her, and when I did, she put her hands on my shoulders. Looking at us, you'd think we were about to dance. But the image I had was of a very wise elder, near the end of her life, passing on the core truths.

“There is one thing you must do to rescue your marriage,” V said, her eyes locked on mine. “And that is to pretend none of this ever happened. Don't ask Blair any questions. Make no references to … that woman.”

“What if Blair—”

“Don't pick up the rope.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“If Blair brings it up, you can't respond with a smart remark. You can't disagree with her about it. You cannot have thirty seconds of dialogue about this … episode. If you must, make a brief apology, but say nothing more. It's this simple: Don't … pick … up … the rope. Because there is always someone at the other end. And once you have the rope in your hand, you're in a tug-of-war. And you'll lose. Even if you win, you'll lose.”

“Very difficult.”

“All but impossible,” V said. “But nothing else works.”

“I'll do anything that makes the pain go away.”

“I remember when my marriage ended, it was horrible. I was in the throes of such pure emotion, it was so … raw.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That's it.”

“But I was also strangely happy. It was
good
to feel something so raw. I was completely alive. Any of that happening in you?”

I hadn't considered the utility of pain, the glory of it.

“You're completely alive right now, David. It's rare and enviable. If you and Blair trade it for comfort, you're damn fools.”

Chapter 30

On October 26, in the middle of the night, Blair sent her first email:

FROM:
[email protected]

TO:
[email protected]

SUBJECT:
Overnight Lows

D—

I read that book by your friend Pema Chödrön.

I very much liked a story about the Native American grandfather who was speaking to his grandson about violence and cruelty in the world and how it comes about. He said it was as if two wolves were fighting in his heart.

One wolf was vengeful and angry, and the other wolf was understanding and kind. The young man asked his grandfather which wolf would win the fight in his heart. And the grandfather answered, “The one that wins will be the one I choose to feed.”

I am choosing to feed our marriage.

I'm having a hard time.

Bear with me.

Chapter 31

As a child, I wasn't ambitious; I was driven. The striving to do well in public school led to the scholarship to a private school. Once there, I moved faster. Always a hand raised in class, fast, like it was a quiz show and you won prizes for knowledge. I minored in after-school activities, piling up lines in the yearbook. The track team—sprinting events, of course. From fourteen on, summer jobs. And, always, clean shirts and neat hair and good manners.

At the same time, the little achiever was completely fixated on girls. Not good enough in sports for the beauty queens. Not musical, so no chance with the rebels in leotards. But I had a mouth, and I used it to debate, to edit the paper, to win small parts in the school plays. There are girls who like that boy, and if he is shrewd enough to ask them what they think and willing to spend the evening listening to them talk, his mouth will be rewarded.

What I learned in Shakespeare class: The hero is highly verbal and highly sexed.

Good deal. Happy to be that hero.

And now I'm not.

I can't make it right.

I've been silenced.

So I read. Too much. The sentences blurred. But there was a Seamus Heaney poem—he said it was one of his favorites—that I read again and again.

The title of the poem is “The Underground.” That's the London subway, of course. It's also a reference to the Orpheus myth. A snake bites his wife, and she dies. Broken by grief, Orpheus goes to the Underworld to rescue her. Hard-hearted Hades hears his music and tells him: “You can have her, but if you look back before you're in the upper world, you will lose her forever.” Just before they reach safety, Orpheus can't resist—he looks back.

In Heaney's poem, he and his wife are in London on their honeymoon. They're in the subway, late for a concert. She's running ahead of him, buttons popping off her coat, and he follows, like Hansel in the fairy tale, collecting the buttons.

This is how the poem ends:

I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones

Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station

After the trains have gone, the wet track

Bared and tensed as I am, all attention

For your step following and damned if I look back.

When Heaney taught at Harvard, his wife stayed in Ireland, raising their children. He flew home every six weeks. A good husband, a smart man—no scandal is attached to his name.

Seamus and Marie Heaney were married for forty-eight years.

Damned if I'll look back.

Chapter 32

Blair never changes her password: our daughter's name and date of birth. I hacked into her Barnard account, saw she had no morning appointments, and headed uptown. Only at her office door did I falter. Blair's decrees versus my need to talk to her: Think, or act? Confront and correct, or let it be?

In one motion, I knocked and entered.

Blair looked up. Not horrified. Not pleased. Stunned. Paralyzed.

“So I was in the neighborhood …” I said, and the line came out just as light and frothy as it did when I rehearsed it.

“You broke the rule. You're a …
violator
.”

“I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

“My, we are … jaunty for a man who's misplaced his wife.”

“I'm guided by an old blues line,” I said. “
My woman's gone but I don't worry, 'cause I'm sitting on top of the world.
”

When I scripted this conversation, Blair responded with something that would have led to more banter. And in my script, we'd continue playing verbal tennis until I said, “What the fuck are we doing? Let's call it Thanksgiving and break out the champagne,” or she said, “You big lug, get over here and kiss me.” But I'd apparently worn out what little welcome was available—Blair transitioned to a look of exasperation, the kind seen often in television commercials that depict husbands as well-meaning idiots: Men! Whadya gonna do with them!

“May I?”

Not waiting for an answer, I took the visitor's seat. And—I couldn't help it—gawked.

Blair at her desk, with a cardigan thrown over a buttoned-­­up blouse. My idea of a centerfold—well, if there were a magazine called
Smart
. There are many more conventionally beautiful women, but Blair has that rare appeal: alertness, a shine in the eye, what my mother would call “sparkle.” This is why, when we met, it wasn't difficult to pry Blair from her boyfriend. He didn't really care what she thought, read, wondered about. I did. I still do—all these years later, as much as Blair now seems to think that all I want to do is fuck her, I believe that's a distant second to wanting to lean over and press my head to hers, as if I could download her clarity.

The phone rang. Blair never had her ears pierced, so every phone call during business hours requires her to pluck a pearl clip-on from her right ear and set it on the desk. A gesture out of a 1930s movie. Intoxicating.

“Give me … ten minutes,” she said, and hung up.

“You look great,” I said. “As ever.”

Blair was having none of that. “Why are you here?”

“Ten minutes?”

“What, exactly, have you come here to say?” And she checked the time. She wasn't kidding. So be it.

I had an appeal both emotional and logical scribbled as talking points on a card in my pocket. I couldn't remember a word I'd written. My head was as empty as a banker's conscience.

“I am not making sense of the world,” I said, and then I lost it. “Things are out of control, except for the husbands of my clients, who have so much money they have—in their offices, anyway—the illusion of control, though of course if their personal lives were in control, I'd know about them only by reading about them in the business section, but of course their relationships are ridiculous and insane and in no way in anybody's control … and I—know-it-all lawyer who sees the absurdity of their lives so clearly and is nothing but wise about relationships—am living alone, ankle-deep in terror, and …”

“David, you're
babbling
!”

Was I? Apparently. And on the verge of veering further out of control.

Blair sat back. This short play performed for an audience of one was pushing her into herself. At any moment, she could withdraw from personal involvement and watch me as a critic.

I pressed my fingertips to my eyes. What did I see in the darkness? Random moments, a mash-up of people, in no chartable sequence. Clients. Blair and Ann. Childhood moments. And then faded, then brighter, an image of V, motherly, serene. Her voice, from afar, words I'd never heard her say: “You are loved more than you can ever know.” And I believed I was.

Precious seconds passed. I didn't care. I could say almost everything in a minute.

“Sorry. Just not used to being in a room with you,” I said. “Let me do this as a lawyer. One, I do wish to lose myself when I'm in bed with you, but forgive me, I thought that was the point, and not just for me. Two, I know you think the world's biggest drug problem is testosterone—and I agree; I make my living fighting it—but I am not some testosterone-crazed sex addict. Some women want houses and diamonds hanging on the Christmas tree—that's not you. So I've given you what I can. What I thought you valued. Myself. And one of the best ways to give myself to you—to show you how much I love you—is sex. Maybe I didn't present that love in the best form, maybe I've tracked you like a bloodhound, but I've held nothing back. How many husbands can say that? Three, I am feeling like shit. You are too. Shouldn't that tell you that we are deeply in love? And that we can work this out?”

Silence. Then Blair, in a whisper: “Please go.”

A knock at the door. “Dean Watkins?”

“Just a minute,” Blair called out.

“I thought we had more time,” I said.

“No, you thought you'd make me as miserable as you are.”

“Sorry if I hit a nerve,” I said.

From outside the door: “Dean Watkins, I can come back …”

Blair scribbled a note and pushed it across the desk:
5:00
.

I pocketed it without looking at it. Whatever worked for her.

The young woman outside Blair's door was texting madly. I wanted to tell her that her problems were the inconsequential troubles of youth and not worthy of the dean's attention, but she had a fresh face and a smile off a cereal box, and I saw laughter in Blair's immediate future. And I felt alone beyond alone.