Saturday's Child (73 page)

I trusted. I jumped. You may be less surprised than I was to learn that I hit the ground in a thousand pieces. Certainly there had never been a time in the entire by then fourteen-year stormy relationship totally free of susurrations intimating it wouldn't work. But if I'd had second sight, I'd have had it with double vision, needing two different prescriptions, since love invests everything it perceives with itself. So, for example, in the early years, Marilyn's impressive enjoyment of grass and wine had seemed to signify both her spontaneity and her self-discipline, especially since, unlike me, she could be totally stoned while functioning, driving, giving interviews, or delivering speeches—and frequently was. But now she was bombed before noon, and this time the substances helped her hide behind higher walls of silence instead of letting her break through, as they sometimes had previously. Fortunately, though I hardly saw it as fortunate at the time, my own state of weakness strengthened me, in that I was unable to put up with hurtful behavior of hers that I'd excused in the past.

There's a phenomenon in certain groups where one person can become what I call the “designated activist” emotionally. Once that person absents
her/himself, the others face a survival test: “Oh dear. We don't have her around to feel/think/do it for us anymore. Does that mean we have to do it for ourselves?” Until that moment she has functioned as the repository, oracle, and articulator of their politics, audacity, passion—all projected on to her. The same is true in some intimate relationships. I'd willingly assumed (possibly grabbed, even hoarded?) the role of designated activist in the partnership with Marilyn, egotistically thinking that my exhibitions of loving—from small gestures to large commitments, from journeying more to her shores than she did to mine, from vulnerably revealing my emotions and thoughts—would inspire hers. Yet now, when I was for the first time too weary to continue as the designated emotional communicator, she was unable to pick up the slack.

How long does it take for a lover to understand that the source wound in the beloved can be healed only by that person her/himself, and
not
by the lover, no matter how hard the lover tries? I had known for years that I was in love with a woman pulsing with conceded need, denied pain, and unacknowledged rage, but I arrogantly thought I could heal her. Queen of the codependents, I'd managed to change the sex and gender of the beloved this time, but the plot was dismally familiar.

It was a grim six months. Aware that I'd recently stopped smoking, she defiantly began smoking tobacco as well as grass. When I slipped a lumbar disk doing farm work and could barely sit because of sciatic nerve pain, she swept us off on a motoring vacation that consisted of days sitting in the car. Her verbal sniping could be cruel; she knew my weak spots and took accurate aim. It certainly seemed she was trying to tell me something, in a not very subtle emotionally sadistic manner. But when I said as much, she refused to discuss it and her silent treatment set in. I should have left. Instead, I wondered if my physical pain was making me oversensitive; I told myself she must be acting out her hurt that I wouldn't shift my whole life to New Zealand; I ached for her as I would for a needy child of two, which seemed the level of maturity to which her scarring childhood had stunted her. I did start packing, twice—only to relent after her tearful apologies. Though the prognosis was bad, quitting after so many years and miles of loving seemed an intolerable waste.

But at least this time I watched myself not stop.

In fairness, I believe that over the years Marilyn
tried to try
, that as she
herself said, she went further toward feeling and expressing emotion with me than she had done in her whole life. Her tragedy was in lacking the means. She'd joke bitterly that previous lovers had nicknamed her Ice Queen, and confessed she'd never been sexually faithful for so long as in our relationship—not that either of us had expressly required that. She tried to grasp my concern about being stranded at the farm—without a support system of my own or even a vehicle when she'd drive off after a fight—so for a combined Christmas and birthday gift she bought me a sweet little secondhand car. She did
try
, in her way. But what she gave she often qualified, regulated, or rescinded. Poetry notes it more accurately: “… you never meant to be ungenerous. This was your way / of giving: partial, controlled, revocable. As if you mistook yourself / for a jealous god …”
¹⁴
Any critique, no matter how mild, and anything less than effusive gratitude, for even her most minimal effort, made her furious: “Then why bother?”

Given the pattern in my marriage, I thought the substance abuse might be my fault, that I might've enabled it—until her oldest friends sadly told me her pattern predated me by years. Later I would realize my pattern was in being
drawn
to hers. Blake and my other friends had never quite cottoned to her, and some had been openly negative about the relationship, although they hadn't revealed the full extent of their dislike until it was over.
¹⁵
In retrospect, I think of Byron's inane lines “Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, / 'Tis woman's whole existence,” and I must admit that I let this love become for a while nearly my whole existence. It's maddening that the most sexist relationship I've ever had was with another woman, but I did deliberately lay down my power for the sake of this loving. No one should do that for any lover (as Kenneth should not have for me), since it leads to inevitable combustion. When I began to fight for my sense of self again, the relationship started to dissolve. If I wasn't doing 90 percent of the work to keep us together anymore, that work wouldn't get done.

Love takes a long while in its dying. We made it through the six months. I was relieved to return home to friends and laughter: people actually discussed their thoughts and feelings—what a concept! I wrote Marilyn a long letter saying we'd come to an impasse and suggesting she not take her planned spring trip to New York or, if she did, maybe consider not staying with me. She wrote, phoned, and faxed, appealing to come. I relented. She came, careful to be on her best behavior: witty, tender, mostly sober. I fell in love and in hope all over again, never having heard of a pernicious game called First One to Leave Wins.

When I saw her off at the airport in early June of 1994, it would be the last time we would see one another, although I didn't know that then. The definitive break wouldn't happen for another eight months. I went to Nepal for three weeks, did useful political work, felt pleased. Back home, I started on a new novel and cultivated my garden. But for the whole of that summer, fall, and winter, there were torturous phone calls. Marilyn suggested I cancel my September trip to the farm—which was to have been a celebration of our tenth anniversary as lovers—at least for a month or so, while she “processed” how she felt. But, she said, she loved me, and we were still partners, surely. My confusion grew with each call. True forgiveness is an illusion if the forgiven one somehow feels victimized by the forgiver. I believed I harbored no residue from her small cruelties and large detachments, but I was wrong. As for my sin, it was apparently a cornucopian generosity that its recipient found impossible to forgive, no matter how hungrily and deliberately she had invoked and accepted it.

She finally entered therapy. I rejoiced at the possibility of any imminent insight, even if it might widen the gulf between us, though naturally I hoped it wouldn't. I told her that since she'd been alienated from her own feelings for so long, it wouldn't be unusual if she found herself acting out and having an affair, and that I'd understand and stick by her—but I did want the truth. “
Just don't ever lie to me
,” I said. I dived back into therapy sessions myself, as her phone conversations and letters became more bewildering—one day warm and loving, the next day cold and strained.

Of course I was the last to know. She'd begun a flirtation back in June, directly on her return from New York—and with one of her students. It flowered into an affair and then a relationship. All this I learned in retrospect the following January, from one of her friends who assumed I'd
known and was horrified to have unwittingly spilled the beans. I then told Marilyn over the phone that I knew, and gently asked why she'd lied to me when I'd been so certain that by now we were way beyond such games. She stammered that she'd been afraid of losing my love and respect.

What a way to try to keep them! Politically courageous but an emotional coward, now this needy child didn't want me but didn't want to let me go either—except that we'd already danced that particular two-step in the beginning, back when
I'd
been the Other Woman.

As it began, so it ended. I got my just karmic deserts—but then isn't karma merely the spiritual version of irony? The denouement was conducted by phone, none of it eye-to-eye, which I found tasteless. I wanted nothing back of what I'd given to her or to the farm, asked her to donate the clothes I kept there to anyone needing them, and to sell my car for me—which became a moot point since she soon totaled it, walking away shaken but unscratched. Still, she begged to remain friends, and still, I was willing. Then, in one conversation she asked if I would read and edit her essays for a new book, as I'd done before—yet when I said I too would like to send her a new poem I'd written, she refused, murmuring it might be too upsetting for her to read. That was a familiar imbalance—old news I didn't want to hear but needed to know. I wished her well and told her not to call me again.

When something is finally over and ends sourly, its having continued for so long becomes a retroactive puzzle. But there are clues. Marilyn—who was at least an equal-opportunity liar in that she also withheld truth from herself—told mutual friends it was the distance that drove us apart. Poor dear, she got it wrong again. It was the distance that kept us going for so long. Had we ever really lived together, we never would've lasted beyond the second year. Lust, lovely lust, helped keep us going, too, and distance fed that lust. I sometimes teased her that she was the greatest lover in the world (another statement to which experience now lends startling perspective). Sex was indeed very good, until those miserable six months, and should not be dismissed lightly. Sometimes, with grief, I think about the millions of female human beings who regard sex as a boring or painful duty owed husbands or lovers, women who maybe once vaguely sensed their own sexual drive—what the late Audre Lorde called “the power of the erotic”—but who've had to trudge through their lives and die without ever experiencing it. Millions of women who've never
known sexual pleasure even
once
, not to speak of sexual
joy
—whether with a man or a woman. That calamity has been suffered by most women who ever lived. It should incense us as much as any other kind of starvation.

Whatever held Marilyn and me together for so long, what severed us was the ultimate inaccessibility of her poor, famished heart—plus eight months of ornate, soul-sickening lies. Certainly her affair pained me, but in truth not that much, since I'd expected it and was braced to transcend it (earth-mother style). It was her emotional withholding and her lying that raised fresh blood from my oldest wounds, breaking open scars left by an emotionally cold, inaccessible father—about whom a mother had lied consistently. After I'd managed to transform Kenneth and Iliana into versions of Faith, I'd been so on the alert not to repeat
that
pattern that
this
came in under the radar, recapitulating instead the pattern with Mates. Actually, once Marilyn started lying, she repeated both, a double whammy.

I was not on the alert for that. And the impact almost destroyed me.

Into the Abyss

Insight leaks from memory like light from a late autumn afternoon. If I see patterns in my life or the lives of others, it's because patterns interest me not only in psychological ways, but in aesthetic, archetypal ones.
¹⁶
Seeing
patterns is like being able to appreciate the black-robed shadows in Bunraku theater as the figures who really move the puppets, especially since the puppets are all we're meant to notice.

As it gradually bore in on me that this relationship, second in length only to my marriage, was definitively over, I crashed. I descended into a wilderness, a place of loss and chaos, where pride was so lacerated as to become indistinguishable from self-abasement, and where each viciously unforgettable detail of loving intimacy was flipped in an instant, as if in a parallel negative universe, into an artifact livid with grief. I lost all balance. I entered a void where reality flattened to two dimensions, and I felt like a feral child. That bleakness would be my habitat for years, during which time I plodded my hours in a state of nauseous grey despair, longing for each day to wane late enough so I could take a pill and sleep, hopefully not to dream.

I was grieving for the entirety of the past, for my life—not just for the relationship and the violation of trust, not just for the loss of a second country and home and family, animals I missed, gardens I'd nurtured, plans we'd shared. I was grieving all the losses I'd never had time to mourn. But what I knew then was only that this deep depression affected every aspect of my being, and that I might not emerge from it.

Physically, it was intensified by ill-being. With a sense of timing worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, menopause hit full force—taking vengeance on me for all those years when I'd snubbed it as being “socially constructed,” sniffing that if women only had the chance to lead self-fulfilling lives they'd
never
experience empty-nest syndrome
or
menopause. (Tell that to your body when it's betraying you with day flashes, night sweats, and the thousand natural shocks female flesh is specially heir to.) Worse, I was ill. The slipped disk had been misdiagnosed in New Zealand. It turned out I'd been limping around for months with two slipped disks plus a third, ruptured one, hairline fractures, spinal stenosis and growths, and additional medical complications, some of grave concern.