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[...] The real magic surrounding Angie is the way she is respected rather than teased by the boys—the way even adult men speak of her admiringly as “tough” and a “tomboy.” She can hit a ball over the fence and do more chin-ups than most of the boys on the block, and when she takes to wearing a jean jacket over a white T-shirt most days, instead of making fun of her the other kids start calling her Fonzie. Angie doesn’t spend her time covertly writing books about other people, inadequate in her own skin—she is out there living the kind of life you imagine for your characters. Even her father is like a Bad Man from one of your games, always yelling and using his belt, and for reasons you will never fully understand, this thrills you and makes Angie seem still more special, glamorous and important.
When you pretend to be Karen, and write about her, she appears to be your polar opposite, based on someone else entirely. But the longer you write about her, the more you act as her no matter where you are, the more things begin to click into a certain kind of place: you feel yourself becoming someone else. Not Angie, of course, but a facsimile of Angie by another name, the symbiotic Angie of your desires. Your shy insecurity morphs into a sarcastic bravado; you become class president; you lose thirty-two pounds even though your mother has never been able to manage it. You stop crying.
It seems important to stipulate this as a key element of your pretenses: for more than a decade you stop crying, even when alone.
What you know now: There are ways to cheat without cheating. There are signs you are not living the right life for you, even if your life looks almost unfathomably pretty and privileged compared to where you come from or in other people’s eyes. There are ways the body screams truths when the voice lies. [...]
“Why can’t you ever support me?” he sometimes screams when he is angry. You moved east to live with him; dropped out of your PhD program to follow him to Europe and then raise your children; you do almost all the child-rearing, cooking, coordination with teachers, doctors, parents of other children. If anyone in your household is sick, you cancel out-of-town trips for your writing, push back deadlines, stay home in deference to the fact that your husband is the one earning the money. You attend his business dinners and holiday parties, make peace with his difficult mother and drive frequently to Iowa during her illness. During the years he spends shouting this at you, you don’t understand what he means—it feels genuinely, at that time, as though your and your children’s lives all revolve to a significant extent around your husband’s career, your husband’s moods, your husband’s needs.
It does not occur to you until later that what he was really screaming was Why aren’t you genuinely interested in anything I care about? You are going through the motions of being an almost Stepfordly devoted wife, but something unsettled and bored has set in. You rarely fail to have dinner waiting for him, but when he talks about his work, about the men’s group he has joined, with their “warrior names,” your eyes are, more with each passing year and without your even knowing it, already on the door.
The year you turn forty, your pretending escalates for the first time in more than a decade of slippage, and you find yourself splintering off occasionally—usually when you are alone, but sometimes with your husband too—fragmenting into your latest novel’s protagonist, Mary. It is the mania, you tell yourself, of finishing a draft; this often happens when you are in the throes of a book’s completion and know you will have to leave your characters’ world soon. But at the age of forty-two, on a bucket-list dream trip in Kenya with your family, you are still pretending to be Mary, dividing your attention between what is real and what is not, that old equator you cannot seem to stop straddling. Why has this escalated again, here in middle age? You are old enough to know that at this point you are exercising choice—that you are volitionally participating when you could just stop. But you do not stop. Instead, you breathe in the familiar air of escape while your husband screams at you on Manda’s Diamond Beach, a flank of jaded islanders standing by nonplussed at seeing a woman put in her place—while your husband waves his arms and shouts and then stalks off away from you into the sand, you remember this safe house inside your head and let it in on purpose, fuck it, fuck him. Inside the confines of another fictional woman’s skin, you cannot be hurt; you cannot be disappointed; you cannot wonder why you are putting up with behavior you orchestrated your entire life in an attempt to flee. Yes, you remember this: the oblivion, more soothing than rum and gingers, better than any drug you’ve ever tried. The water is always warm in here. Come in.
By the end of February, when my Not Yet Lover came to Chicago for a conference and I picked him up at O’Hare, I got out of the car to greet him even though it was freezing, because I didn’t want to miss the chance to hug him. He was staying in our basement, which my husband and I had dubbed “The Visiting Writer’s Suite,” and through which many touring or conference-going writers before him had passed. This time, no one was dead thousands of miles away so that I was stranded with only him as comfort; there was no longer any acceptable reason for us to hold each other all night, or really for any period at all beyond hello and goodbye hugs. So I took off my red mitten and—for reasons I couldn’t explain—swept the woolly, flap-eared hat off his head to touch his newly short hair while he stood holding his guitar case and luggage in the cold. I opened the trunk of my family’s SUV to put his things inside, and there in the Arrivals lane in front of bleary people waiting for shuttles and rides, he backed me up to the edge of the car and kissed me so hard that we half-fell together into the trunk.
Then we got into the car and, my mitten still off, I held his delicately ruined hand, conscious of every centimeter of our touching skin—my skin, his skin, only ours—and steered the car back toward the city.
My lover’s wife is sick with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and the reason he doesn’t want to come clean is that he does not want to “cause her more pain,” which is obviously not consistent with the fact that he is fucking another woman, but there it is. That is who we are—my lover and I, and of course much of the human race—capable of both compassion and cruelty. We did not invent infidelity, even though when you are in the midst of it, it feels like you did. We did not invent shadow selves or double lives or Neruda’s “dark things” loved in secret, “between the shadow and the soul.” Much of the literary canon to which we have both devoted our lives revolves around forbidden love and its consequences. “Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional,” as Nabokov said.
There is the Angry Man narrative, the Bad Mother narrative, even the Cheating Whore and They Were Never Compatible to Begin With narratives, but there is also this:
1) The time in our twenties, when I was claustrophobic while getting an MRI and my husband came and sat at a chair next to my feet and held my toes, one by one, each for one minute, to signal to me how much time was passing and how soon I would get out, and how at that moment, he seemed like the kindest person I had ever met, and I believed that no one could ever know me better or care for me as he did.
[...] I remember the way he dropped to sleep in my arms, every single time we shared a bed, as though he had never had insomnia in his life. I remember how we used to laugh until our bodies convulsed, like the bad kids in the back of a classroom. I remember the way he could recite entire pages of Fitzgerald, and how the night we drove back from his cabin to Los Angeles, still sweaty and gritty under our regular street clothes, the hot wind blowing in my already wild hair, I felt alive to every molecule of air, the heights and depths of every sensation I had ever known. [...]
That day at the cabin, the embers of us still sparking in the skin across my lover’s veins, he’d exhaled smoke and said, “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” and we laughed because few things feel so good as to be beyond one’s control—because I’d spent my entire life believing that with pain came darkness, that with unconventional desires came shame, but between us there was none of that nonsense, no role-playing or repetitive compulsion of old wounds; no embarrassment or hackneyed artifice. Only this bottomless sense of adventure, the body our Mount Everest to climb while learning to breathe a different air, our intimacy a place of joyful safety and trust that made me question everything I ever understood regarding how to be Normal, how to be Good.