by
Lucia Berlin
for/pq-maybe
Helen Garner,
Charlotte Shane,
Jenny Erpenbeck,
Vivian Gornick,
Lauren Elkin,
Clifford Odets,
Shirley Hazzard,
Ingmar Bergman,
Michael Ondaatje,
Lucia Berlin
“Don’t tell me,” Cheryl said. “That must be Peter Pan and his ma.” She said, “Jon’s personal Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Shut up.”
I had never said that to her before. She stared straight ahead, as if she hadn’t heard me. We went to the elegant restaurant with our elegant, articulate liberal friends. The food was excellent, the wines perfect. We talked about films and politics and law. Cheryl was charming; I was witty. Something terrible had happened between us.
Cheryl and I are divorced now. I think our marriage began to end because of those Friday nights, not because she began having an affair. She was furious because I never took her to meet them. I’m not sure why I didn’t want to, whether I was afraid she would dislike them, or they would dislike her. Something else … some part of me that I was ashamed to let her see.
Despite this wishful thinking, resentment constituted much of my reaction to the news. Roger’s progressively incoherent emails and the assertive, bitchy-feeling replies they warranted from me highlighted how siloed our lives were. I knew him well—maybe I knew more of him than his kids or his wife, or at least I knew him differently, because the version of him I knew was obscured from them and from everyone else. But I didn’t have his health history. I had his ATM card, but I didn’t have his home address. I couldn’t have arranged a doctor’s appointment for him no matter how badly he needed one. I couldn’t even visit him in the hospital. We’d played prominent roles in each other’s lives for almost a decade, but I couldn’t talk to anyone in his family. No one would recognize that I meant something to him excepting, maybe, the doorman at his condo building in DC.
:(
It was easier to obsess over concrete factors, like money, than to confront my existential and actual helplessness. I thought a lot about other mistresses during those days, the ones in positions more precarious than mine because they were in love with their married men or completely relied upon them financially. When you’re the other woman, there’s no dignified way to announce yourself. You blast into his larger life like a bomb, or you don’t enter at all. What radical loneliness those women must feel in these situations. So much loss, including the horrible finality of being closed out of his life and public record of the same.
In retrospect, it was laughable for me to entertain the possibility that he would want to leave her for me after the diagnosis, since that was when he needed the stability and support of his family more than ever. But he’d just threatened to leave her when he thought he had decades of life left. I thought the shortening of the timeline might make seizing the day imperative, but it must have had the opposite effect; because he had less time left, there was no point in change. Maybe he was relieved that he’d not followed through with his ultimatum. Maybe he imagined what it would be like if he’d been separated from his wife when he discovered the tumor—living alone in a furnished local rental, buried in divorce paperwork, his children angry and confused, me dismissed from my post. I’m sure that vision would be almost too bleak to contemplate.
I’d like to say that I didn’t want Roger to leave his wife, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. I’m a relatively impatient person, and I can be short-tempered. I hated the new limits imposed by his illness. His marriage was an inconvenience, and one he explicitly framed as a financial obstacle for me, so I resented it. But I wasn’t in love with Roger, and I didn’t want to marry him, so I didn’t want him to leave his wife for me. I wanted for him to be the man he seemed to want to be: decisive and confident, unafraid of other’s opinions and willing to prioritize what mattered most to him. But maybe that was exactly what he did by staying with her.
I SUGGESTED TO ROGER that he tell his brother about me, about us, because his brother was coming into town to visit while Roger’s wife would be away. Enlisting his brother as our ally could have helped us arrange a lot of time together, at least doubling the length of the afternoons we’d contented ourselves with so far—and any visit could be our last. I also thought it might be a relief for Roger to finally have someone to talk to about me because he’d lamented that inability for years. I thought his brother might also be able to help us keep in touch near the end. His brother had been in an affair that broke his first marriage, and even if he weren’t able to relate, surely he wouldn’t deny his dying sibling this request.
I explained this to Roger when he asked why I would propose such a thing. He was quiet for a beat. Then he told me that his many siblings had all been in marriages that failed. Only he had married just once and stayed married. As far as his Irish Catholic family was concerned, he was a paragon of marital virtue, and that was a source of great satisfaction for him. He wanted his family, his coworkers, and everyone who knew him to continue believing he was a faithful partner in a sterling union.
I saw an aspect of him then that I hadn’t before: his satisfaction at having gotten away with the biggest deception of his life. “I’m so looking forward to seeing you that it’s hard to bear,” he wrote of the few hours we’d steal under his brother’s ignorance. “It’s the one light in my dark universe.” But it wasn’t really the only light. He would die proud of having hidden me. I didn’t know that about him before he got sick. I don’t know if he’d known that about himself.
I don’t think Roger wronged me once. I have no grudges, and I don’t think anything about our arrangement was unfair. In fact, it was one of the most honest and equitable and respectful relationships I’ve had. But Roger took away one of the biggest decisions anyone has ever taken from me when he kept me from his death.
That was his right. Even if he hadn’t been paying me, or if he hadn’t been married, that would have been his right. I know he did the best he could, and that it was better than most people’s best would be. But we didn’t get to say goodbye. It’s a wound that will last forever.
I began leaving home at nineteen and kept leaving until I was married in the living room at twenty-four in a noisy act of faith that announced the matter accomplished. My husband was small (my size); blond (‘insignificant-looking’, as Mama put it); foreign (he couldn’t defend himself in English). We were drawn to each other by a common love of the arts, but he was a visionary painter and in me literature had aroused the critical faculty. He was wordless, I was all words. In him repression was demonic, in me explosive. Most of the time he brooded, twice a year he drank himself into a stupor. I remained sober and a scornful tongue was my constant companion. All the differences were negotiable except one: I talked better than he did and I used words like a weapon. That knocked us hopelessly off balance. I opened my mouth and power was mine: I could slice, cut, and pin; thrust, batter, and storm. He was helpless before the amazing siege. To the very largest degree that must have been how I wanted it, although certainly I could not then see this simple reality driving me on in all my attachments to men. The course I had followed to lead me to this man and this marriage was not difficult to trace (any child analyst could have delivered a creditable description of the psychological terrain), but I remained deep in the woods a quarter of a mile from the road.
We flew down to the Caribbean on a Tuesday afternoon. That night we ate dinner on a terrace that hung out over a blue-green bay and made love in a whitewashed room with the night air coming through open shutters, soft and sweet. Bliss. Tuesday night bliss. Wednesday all day bliss. Thursday also bliss. On Friday morning we prepared to leave for New York. We packed up, checked out, and drove our rented car out to the airport. Suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of going back. I laid my hand on Joe’s arm and pleaded, ‘Let’s stay over the weekend. Call your wife and tell her you need another day or two for the boat.’
Joe turned his head halfway toward me. I saw the frown forming on his forehead, and I saw his eyes narrow. ‘Sweetie, I’m not going back with you,’ he said. ‘My wife is coming down this evening.’
nooooo
The monolith of his marriage, and my own solitariness and flimsiness by comparison. I feel very small, slight, impermanent. It is not too late for me to save myself.