Woman on Top (24 page)

“I’m coming home. On my way,” Jake said.

“How can you come home? Who’s going to cover for you?”

“I’ll find someone. Just hang in there, baby.”

Jake walked into our apartment within an hour. His friend Kevin immediately agreed to cover for him overnight. It was the first time Jake had done this, left his responsibilities at the hospital behind. He held me tightly while I cried. Being in his arms got me through the night. I had lost Viola, but I had Jake.

But I didn’t have Jake except in my dreams. Len, lying next to me, slowly opened his eyes and I braced myself for the day.

Driving back into the City from Len’s house the next day, as if an IV were pumping into my veins, life reappeared in the throngs of people walking the streets on the early spring afternoon. A car accident had completely stopped traffic on the Henry Hudson. Forced to make my way down Broadway and the side streets of the Upper West Side, the windows of the car open to the warm air, the sounds of the City revived me.

Sitting on the steps of the brownstones near Columbia University, hanging out on sidewalk cafes, playing ball, the energy of my fellow New Yorkers felt invigorating. The Upper West Side, an area allegedly filled with writers and artists, was well known to be less pretentious than the Upper East Side where Len and I lived.

Whether just a City girl or reeling from the tension with Len, I felt so grateful fleeing the isolation of that mansion. I wanted out of his big empty home. If only I could stop and tell each one of the folks sitting on the steps of their brownstones that you may not have Len’s money or his big beautiful mansion but it was okay. Believe me, it was okay.

CHAPTER 29

April

A
t dinner that night at Sonia Rose, Len led me down a slippery slope from which the climb back seemed daunting. The terms of the pre-nuptial were too much for me. Time to confront him with the Sisyphean nature of our relationship.

“It makes me sad that I love you and yet you repeatedly hurt me. Please name one time when I’ve hurt you,” I said at breakfast that weekend.

Len just sat there.

“This isn’t love like I had with Jake and it isn’t the love I wanted. You know what it will take to make this relationship work and you aren’t willing or maybe not able to do it.”

“Kate, I’m just plain weary at this point. I argue with people all day long and I don’t want to argue with you all night long. I need peace in my home. That’s what Judy gave me. Peace.”

“Hah.”

She had given him a Prozac induced peace.

“Ok, I understand your weariness. You are who you are and I can’t change you. You have to tell me if you’re willing to do this with me because I can’t survive in the type of relationship you had in your marriage,” I responded.

Len said nothing.

“I want someone who’s a best friend and a lover. We’ve had fun - dinners, trips - it’s all very nice but it doesn’t provide the glue. I feel like I live in fear of you. I just can’t relax around you.”

“I realize I am a deviation from perfection,” Len said.

“A deviation from perfection is one thing. Not being nice is something else.”

Len gave me a steely look. I sat there wondering how many people had confronted him over the years. Certainly not Judy.

“You can be kind but then …you lose your way. I love you and want this to work. Please think about what you want,” I said hoping to melt the steel.

“You have faults too. You know so little about so many things. Finance, opera, . I could go on, “ Len said.

“While you were sitting in your corner office on Wall Street, I was raising two children by myself and earning a living as a lawyer. I might have been a bit too busy to be worried about Adam Smith and Wagner,” I glared at him.

Twice a week at lunchtime I escaped to Carnegie Hall to attend a ballet class for amateurs, of course. Just walking into that storied building made me feel graceful. More importantly, ballet entailed focusing on the shaking in my hamstrings rather than from Len’s comments. And straining to remain on my toes, the pain began in my calves and seared my glutes rather than my heart.

“Push your chest forward, your butt back and squeeze your abs in. That will give you the strength to lift up and stay up,” Nicolas, the French instructor, said as he pushed us to repeatedly relevé.

Forcing myself to hold my abs as tightly as possible, my neophyte version of the strong, long, lean ballerina appeared in the countless floor to ceiling mirrors that lined the walls of the large room. The classical music, the grace, the challenge allowed me to pretend for two hours a week that I was someone other than the woman entangled in a mess with Len and bogged down in a stressful legal job. Grateful that I could lose myself in the beauty of ballet, I worked hard to impress Nicolas.

Little girls may dream of being a ballerina because of the pretty costumes, the beautiful movements. And though I wasn’t wearing anything other than leggings and a tight gym top, occasionally a movement worked and Nicolas would reward me with one word, “excellent”.

But today, he pushed us harder than usual to hold in our abs, to reach the needed core strength. Nicolas, often very strict with us, seemed more intent than ever on achieving his goals for the class. He obviously led by example. Just one look at the way he moved his very muscular, lean and elegant body about the room and through the moves he wanted us to repeat inspired me.

“When Juliet dies in the ballet
Romeo and Juliet,
you see as they carry her dead body that her abs are perfectly tight and her feet are perfectly pointed. Perfectly tight, perfectly pointed. It is essential, even in death. The appearance of perfect control,” he said.

Len. He returned to my consciousness as the consummate ballet dancer on Wall Street. Always in perfect control. And now desiring that perfect control even in the pre-nup, even in death.

•  •  •

We both hired lawyers to handle the pre-nuptial. The document consisted of twenty pages of provisions that reduced our relationship to legalese with timeframes for death and divorce. If we were together less than three years, between three and six years, six and ten years, at least fifteen years, Len would only pay the following sums.

Len appeared to approach this as if he were negotiating another one of his deals that he had to win. I would acquiesce and he’d be in charge. A most unlikely scenario. Or else he knew I’d never agree to the deal and two weeks after asking me to marry him in an elaborate trip to Paris, he’d presented me with his escape route. A no win situation for me in either case.

“My lawyer says I’m being cheap and unfair,” he relayed to me.

“And what did you say?”

“I said that nobody was going to tell me what do with my fucking money.

“Listen,” he continued. “I want you to sign this document no matter what it says. This is not a negotiation. You have to trust me.”

“Why would I just trust you?”

And he didn’t trust me. One provision in the pre-nuptial amused my friends to no end.

11. Kate and Len each acknowledge that privacy is important to each of them. In order to keep all information that Kate has learned or may learn about Len, or Len has learned or may learn about Kate, from becoming public, each agrees that any and all information that he or she acquires from any source concerning the other, the personal and business affairs of the other (the ‘Information’) shall be held in confidence. Kate and Len each agrees that she or he will not violate the confidentiality of their relationship and attempt to benefit from said relationship by engaging in any of the following; (a) writing, authoring, co-authoring, publishing or revealing Information for the writing of any books or articles or the selling of the rights to any books or articles to publishers or other involving the other; (b) conducting any interviews, press conferences or giving any press releases about the other or the relationship between the other; (c) selling any movie, television, theatre, documentary, or any other rights concerning the relationship.

“Who does he think he is? Warren Beatty? His ego has no bounds, does it? And what if you wanted to write a flattering book, hard as that is to imagine anyone doing,” Sarah said when I read it to her over the phone. And then she began to sing Carly Simon’s song “You’re So Vain” but she had changed “song” to “book” as she sang.

We couldn’t stop laughing.

“I’m never going to meet this guy, am I?” Sarah asked.

“I doubt it. You definitely wouldn’t approve of Len.”

“But you obviously don’t want to hear what I might say. I understand.”

“Sarah, what you don’t appreciate is how carefully constructed Len’s life is, and that I am certainly not going to be allowed to deconstruct it. Len told me that he wasn’t worried that I would write about him since he had the goods on me. What does that mean?” I asked.

“Don’t sign the pre-nuptial, but I think writing a book about him is dangerous. Remember Raskolnikov? But I wonder if Len is as confused as you are, Kate,” Sarah said.

“Len confused? About me? About what?”

“Because people underestimate you and you like that. You want them to underestimate you, don’t you?” she asked.

“You are so much stronger than people think you are,” Sarah continued, “you can be the consummate tease because of your infectious joy. You can be strong and smart. He’s probably wondering what hit him. And so he’s in deal mode. He needs to win this one. And something tells me you’re not going to roll over and play dead. You will not be another victim of his. It’s his loss,” Sarah said as she hung up the phone.

•  •  •

Len and I tried many things to salvage the relationship. We tried a couples therapist who met with me alone after several sessions together with Len.

“Kate, Len can give you diamonds and Paris and St. Bart’s but he won’t be there for you when you need him most. He doesn’t understand the vulnerability that you feel from losing Jake,” she said.

“But he lost his spouse.”

“Len saw Judy’s death as an opportunity, and seemed able to make the transition instantaneously between partners. You need to think about whether this is what you really want. Len seems to have a limited ability to be intimate, to love, to empathize. You two have a bad connection in that area. What you need most he is least able to give,” she cautioned.

“Therapy is bullshit and I’m not going to change for anyone. I’m not broke and there’s nothing to fix,” he said when I repeated her comments to him.

I looked at his stern, cold eyes, took off the diamond ring and put it on his bedside table.

“I don’t want this anymore.”

Stunned, Len gave me a withering look.

•  •  •

As the plane continued its steep climb into the sky, the tears streamed down my face. We left Chloe behind in Barcelona and were heading back to New York after a ten-day visit to see her and the Spanish family hosting her for the year. Chloe landed in a honey pot with the sweetest family and we received the warmest of welcomes from them. To see Chloe that happy, and her school experience so enriched because of a year abroad, allowed me to feel vindicated after our move from Connecticut.

But despite the hospitality of the family and Chloe’s successful year, Len and I spent the ten days in our continued state of misery. Now, even our lavish trips, staying in the best hotels and flying first class, provided no relief.

The jet flew out over the Mediterranean and then made a wide turn west to take us home. Chloe wouldn’t return for another two months, just in time for graduation from high school. As we passed over Barcelona, I looked down at the city knowing that somewhere far below was my daughter. I missed her enormously already.

Len, busy reading his papers for work paid no attention to my tears. When a certain calm returned, I turned to him.

“Why wouldn’t you comfort me when I’m missing my daughter?”

He looked up over his bifocals and with icy eyes glared at me. “What are you upset about now?”

“Leaving Chloe behind in Spain. She won’t return for another two months.”

“I wouldn’t feel sad if we were leaving Jennifer.”

“But this isn’t about you. I feel sad. I’d even comfort a stranger if he sat next to me on a plane.”

“Chloe is fine. What’s the big deal about leaving her?” he said.

Len went back to reading his papers.

Len and I sat far apart in the back seat as the car service drove us home from JFK. He looked straight ahead, his mind churning apparently, as always.

“I forgot to tell you Dale called. He met a girl in medical school and he thinks this is the one,” Len said.

I wondered if she knew she’d be swallowed up in Len’s world.

“Dale says she’s very close to her family, especially her mother. I worry that I’ll lose him. Girls do tend to stick to their moms.”

The car moved slowly in the traffic as I thought of Ben and whether he would drift away if he met the one.

“Her father’s a high school math teacher and her mother’s an administrative assistant. So they’re probably pretty middle class. I’ll just give her expensive jewelry, buy them a house, a car. Bring her on our vacations. Whatever it takes.”