Woman on Top (23 page)

Ben was obviously confused by everything going on. That night as I put him to bed, he held me very tightly.

“Did I die too?” he asked. “Will I be sick like Daddy?”

“I don’t want to go to the funeral,” Chloe told me the next day.

“Me either!” Ben mimicked.

“You don’t have to. Don’t worry about it. I’ll have someone stay with you and you’ll be fine,” I told them.

Chloe woke up the day of the funeral with spots on her face and back. Chicken pox. For fifteen months we had lived in fear whenever one of the kids was exposed to chickenpox at school. Now that the chicken pox couldn’t hurt her daddy anymore, Chloe seemed to have finally succumbed.

Jake’s brother announced it was time to go and held me tightly as we walked into the funeral home and saw the coffin for the first time. I froze. He whispered into my ear.

“That’s not Jake, that’s not Jake.”

“How long will this take?” I asked the Rabbi. I didn’t think I would last long.

“I’m not sure.”

“We have to cut it short.”

I was back at our wedding, Jake at my side, squeezing my hand.

The Rabbi began and the hundreds of people who had come to say goodbye quieted down. The Rabbi put my anger into words.

“Death, whenever it comes, leaves a trail of tears, of pain, of suffering. But the tragedy is searing beyond compare when someone so young, so good, so sweet, kind and saintly dies.”

The eulogy was given by a doctor with whom had Jake worked for years. He was shaking as he stood up and I wondered if he would make it.

“Jake taught me a great deal about being a doctor. Jake was called on to perform intrusive procedures on the most fragile of all patients, children. He did this in a gentle, extremely capable manner. His consummate skill and concern for families created a quiet revolution at the hospital where parents had never before been allowed to stay with their children. Many a parent made a point of telling me how Jake made a potentially traumatic test tolerable and the kids certainly remembered him not with fear but with fondness.

“Jake taught me the most at this bedside. He bore this excruciating illness with dignity and resoluteness. He never stopped fighting. I wanted him to go outside and scream at the heavens in unbridled anger at the injustice of it all. I will always miss Jake, but I will be a better physician, a better husband and father and a better person for having known him.”

He continued to speak and well before the time he finished, I had faded. More of Jake’s colleagues spoke, but I couldn’t listen anymore.

That morning we buried Jake in a peaceful, small cemetery in our town. I kissed the coffin goodbye and left. It was over. Jake’s pain ended, the full depth of mine was just beginning. I had done everything with Jake up until now but die with him. I felt very intimate with death now, it didn’t scare me any more.

SPRING 1997

CHAPTER 28

March

T
wo weeks after Len and I became engaged we arranged to have dinner at one of our favorite romantic restaurants in New York. But it had moved. Sonia Rose was an intimate, charming French restaurant that had relocated into a larger but soulless space. We walked to our table disappointed that one of our favorite restaurants for romance had been lost.

I finished my second glass of Pinot Noir and was feeling the effects when Len started.

“We need to do a pre-nuptial. My friends have advised me that since we’re living together we could have palimony issues.”

“Fine. I’ve told you all along that I would do a prenuptial,” I said. It wasn’t lost on me that Len had all the money in the relationship and that his kids deserved to inherit his estate.

“I’ve been reading some of the provisions that should go in.

I had drunk enough wine to not really care what Len was saying, yet.

“One provision is that if I die and you want to get remarried, you should move out of wherever you’re living. I assume I will have paid for it.”

The effects of the wine immediately wore off. Was Len attempting to control me from the grave?

“Don’t worry,” he said, “You’ll get money to buy another place and when you die the money will go back into my estate for my kids.”

“What if I want to remarry at sixty after living in my home for fifteen years? I will have to move from my home?”

“Yes,” Len said.

“I am a widow. What if Jake had told me to move out of my home?

“You are aware of what I went through during Jake’s illness. The doctor at the cancer center told me that in his fifteen years there he had never seen anyone care for a dying person the way I cared for Jake. And you’ve seen how I have behaved as a widow. It took me years to get over Jake. What do you care where I’m living? You’d be dead.”

“This is what I want. I don’t see what’s wrong with it. You get a certain amount of money to buy a place, maybe not as nice.”

“Don’t most men think about what they can do to make their widow’s life easier, not more difficult?” I asked.

“I saw other provisions that were much worse. Just be glad I don’t want those.”

“Maybe if you were more flexible, then I could be more trusting,” I responded.

We left the restaurant and drove back to New Jersey to Len’s house for the night. As we crossed the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson, I looked back at the glittering lights of the City wondering what price I would pay for more time spent in Len’s world.

As we walked into his home, Len headed towards his den.

“I have work to do,” he said.

“But it’s Saturday night.”

“You’ve had your two hours.”

The same two hours he allocated to Judy on Saturday nights. Not much had changed, I gathered.

The phone rang that night at 9:30.

Len was sprawled out on his brown leather chair, reading SEC filings and drafts of contracts, watching television and often dozing off. Some time around midnight he would make his way down the hall to the bedroom.

I rarely answered the phone in Len’s house, even after all this time, so I let it ring three times before assuming he had dozed off. It was my dear friend Rachel.

“Hey dudette. How are you?” she said.

In case the phone had awakened him, I carried the portable into the bathroom upstairs. I definitely didn’t want Len to hear this conversation.

“I’m okay.”

“I just got home from dinner and couldn’t stop thinking about you and Len. I hope this isn’t a bad time. Now tell the truth, how are you?” Rachel said.

“You really want to hear this? Len and I are in a tug of war interspersed with daily sex, extravagant presents, great trips and a few laughs.”

“Can’t either of you slack off the rope a little?”

“I think we’ve both tried. But we’re both too scared of the advantage the other one will gain.”

“You don’t trust each other?” Rachel said.

“I think we love each other - for whatever that’s worth. But trust, absolutely not.”

“This won’t work without trust. I do understand you think he’s rescued you from some of your responsibilities so you’ve forgiven him many times.”

I tried to explain to Rachel how much I wanted the relationship. Len was always taunting me that I’d been a widow for years, that I’d dated scores of men and would never do any better than him. He had said a hundred times that I didn’t appreciate what I had with him. But I knew what it felt like with Jake.

“I’m not sure I like Len’s insides - his soul, as corny as that sounds. Guess you could say I’d be settling after Jake.”

“You love everything about him but who he is,” Rachel said.

“Len’s the consummate concierge - get me tickets to anything, arrange whatever I want. But tune in to my feelings? Have my back no matter what happens? Hah.”

“Then why won’t you get out? Are you crazy? His universe is one of domination. That’s his work,” Rachel, who never gave relationship advice, was doing just that.

I thought about Len’s world, filled with relationships, with marriages like this. It was obvious that a deal had been struck. They didn’t care about being soul mates or best friends. The relationship was a deal and the perks made it worthwhile for each partner. The woman was younger and beautiful and the man was very wealthy and often got that way by being a bastard.

I put my ear to the door just to make sure Len wasn’t somewhere nearby.

“Are you ready to move on then, to date other men? You know it’s not Len or nothing,” Rachel asked.

“The thought of dating again is unbearable. You have to wonder how I’d go from someone like Jake to a Len.”

My mind wandered to all the times in the past year Len had asked me why would I want to be with him - he was older and I was too good for him. He had told me that he was never at peace except when he was with me. And that the only people that matter to him were his kids, his best friend Bill, and me. He made this so difficult because he wasn’t all bad.

“He actually told me he loves me more than he ever loved Judy.”

“I’m not surprised about that. I would love you more than Judy,” Rachel giggled.

I thought I heard a sound outside the bathroom.

“One second,” I said very quietly.

Silence.

“I need to whisper in case Len is around. This is like high school. Talking to your friends on the phone so your parents can’t hear.”

“That kind of says it all, doesn’t it?”

And then I remembered the strangest thing. A friend of Bill’s wife Heather called me about a surprise birthday party for Heather. I’d met this woman at various dinners and she seemed to relish gossip more than anyone I knew.

She must have heard from Heather about any troubles Len and I might be having because she confided in me that Bill and Heather didn’t really like Len all that much, and that their friendship was all about business relationships and keeping them in place. I was stunned. Was there anything real in his world?

“Kate, you’re losing your confidence, your sense of joy. You were always the one who lit up a room. Would anyone want this man without his money?” Rachel asked.

“But that’s who he is.”

“Is that who you are?” she said.

“He says that I make him very happy but he doesn’t think he can make me happy.”

“He’s right, Kate, because you probably want to be with a different kind of man.”

“I can’t start dating again. I never talk about this but the truth is, I have always lived with someone. My parents, then college roommates, Jake, my kids. I’m genuinely scared to live alone and I’m worried that if it doesn’t work out with Len and Ben leaves for college, it will be the first time I’ll have to be alone.”

Rachel was quiet for a moment. “You cannot change him and you cannot twist yourself into a pretzel to be someone he can control.”

“I have to try, Rachel. No man is perfect. You know that expression - a tickle and a slap? It pretty much sums up my time with Len. Wonder how many women in Manhattan are in the same boat.”

•  •  •

I rarely remembered my dreams but that night Jake appeared in one and I longed for him when I awoke. Looking over at Len, I missed being in Jake’s comforting and forgiving arms. And that’s what I had dreamed about, Jake holding me in his arms, because of Viola.

When I was six weeks old, my mother went back to work and she hired Viola to be the housekeeper and nanny. Viola landed as the conduit between my mother’s focus on her work and my needs.

She might have reached five feet tall and pictures show her just as round. She lived with us in our two-bedroom apartment for twelve years, sleeping on the pull out couch in the living room. Only when she met Jackson and moved to Pittsburgh to marry him, did she finally leave.

Viola had her own agenda of things she wanted to teach me, like the importance of being a lady. From an early age she made me practice sitting with my legs together. I couldn’t imagine at the time why that mattered. She held my hand when we walked somewhere, pushed me on the swings in the playground, asked me how school had gone that day, and hugged me if I cried.

For the ten hours each day that my mother worked, Viola reached out to me when it felt like I was on my own in the universe. I loved Viola and when she left us, the pain eased only because all of my attention at twelve shifted to boys.

Jake and I went to visit her once in Pittsburgh and she came with Jackson to my wedding. I called her every week. And then one night, a year after our wedding, Jake was on an overnight hour shift during his residency. Alone in our apartment, I dialed Viola’s number. A woman picked up but the voice didn’t sound familiar.

“Is Viola there?” I asked.

“She died today.”

“She what?”

“She had a heart attack and died.”

Whether it was the loss of Viola in my life or the shock of her sudden death, I became hysterical. Normally, I wouldn’t think of bothering Jake at the hospital and never had, but nothing felt normal. He must have heard the havoc in my voice.