Liars, page 2
Hannah finally divorced him while I was in Greece. She knew so much more than I did about being with a man. Nothing I told her ever shocked her. The contours of her life lay beyond the outer limits of mine. She sublet my apartment while I was gone, and she reminded me constantly that my life with John was normal.
* * *
—
At lunch John trash-talked James Joyce, as he often did when he despaired that his work didn’t sufficiently represent him in the world. Then he walked into town with some of the other fellows. I didn’t want to go. We’re a team, he said, and then went without me.
Instead of calling me and telling me where to meet them for dinner, he emailed from a kiosk, but I didn’t have email that day because he’d used my IP address to download a movie and we’d been kicked off the server for using too much data. My screaming heart told me that John had pretended to try to reach me but really just wanted to hurt me. I spent three hours worried sick, and then the restaurants all closed and I had nothing for dinner.
I made up the foldout bed in my studio.
John woke me at two in the morning, and we fought in screaming whispers. At four I went back to the dorm, nauseated. John hugged onto me right away and fell asleep. In the morning he left without telling me where he was going. Treading water, awaiting death—how interesting, the future had disappeared. I wondered what would happen next.
* * *
—
On the night of my birthday I sat at a white-draped table at the Akadimía and thought, Maybe someone will stick a candle in my kassato. Then the lights dimmed. Everyone looked up. Into the dining room John and the chefs wheeled a trolley bearing a massive frosted cake. Six months into a ten-month fellowship, no one had ever had a birthday cake. Everyone sang. By morning we heard that the director was furious that John hadn’t asked permission to hijack the kitchen. It didn’t matter. Everyone in the kitchen loved him.
While we all ate the cake, the filmmaker said that he’d known he couldn’t afford a nice ring, so he’d just bought a cheap one and took his wife out to lunch after their courthouse wedding.
That night John and I sat in bed and wrote and sketched in our little books, having tuned out everything including each other, but just having him there, next to me, seemed to calm my autonomic nervous system. I loved it.
John said, We’ve had a lot of external validation this year that we work well as a couple.
I didn’t want to give up my apartment back home until we were really engaged, so John said, My beloved, will you marry me? And I said yes. And that I didn’t need an expensive ring.
He said we’d be engaged, for real, by Christmas. He said that the only reason we weren’t engaged was that he couldn’t afford a ring. Then he arranged to get six more shirts made.
* * *
—
On the day before we flew home, after a steamy walk back to the villa in the height of the Athenian summer, John and I quarreled. I accused him of contradicting everything I said just for the sake of it. As after every quarrel, we then examined and speculated on our friends’ relationships, describing lovingly to each other their myriad flaws.
Then I got into the fountain in my black dress and floated on my back and watched the fast clouds in the dark sky. John watched me swim and laugh. I prayed to remember the joy of that moment until the end of my life.
* * *
—
Back home in New York, we threw a party. John’s ex-girlfriend Naomi showed up in a backless evening gown and no bra. She stood much too close to John, gazing into his eyes and brushing against his body at every opportunity.
Just let this be her problem, John said later. She’s not going to stop until you set a boundary, I said. I love you, and I don’t want needless obstacles getting in the way of my love.
The next day he wrote me a note. I will actively work on this. Thank you for telling me. I don’t ever want you to doubt that you are my love. Because you are.
* * *
—
I grew up half crazy, living with people who were more than half crazy, and I left home and paid for ten years of psychotherapy and chose the wrong people, over and over, and if they were any good I left them because I thought I deserved only ruined people, and that to be alone was my destiny, and I never shared my home with a partner until I was thirty-four and moved in with a man who’d said he would propose to me by Christmas, and I believed him because we’d been together two years, and I loaned him eight thousand dollars for a film and he didn’t propose to me by Christmas, and then I turned thirty-five.
Still owing me eight thousand dollars, John asked for more. My shame felt like a fever. He said he’d ask his mother for some money. Then he ordered a two-hundred-dollar lamp.
Alone in a hotel in a faraway town for a poetry reading, I took a bath, rubbed one out, slept alone in a giant bed, and relaxed for the first time in weeks.
Then I realized that I liked to work when John wasn’t there.
Then I realized that without John, I had more fun at parties.
The night I got home, during sex John slapped my face playfully but too hard and I erupted, sobbing, as surprised as he looked. Afterward, almost asleep, I heard myself say, You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
In the morning I bought a used cream-colored silk dress for fifty-five dollars to get married in.
* * *
—
And then one night John made a reservation at the oyster bar for no discernible reason.
We took the train to the Village and climbed the stairs. It was so cold. We turned left onto a twisty street, and in front of my favorite haunted house, John stopped.
He said, Uh, I guess this is as good a moment as any to ask you to be my wife. But we’d already agreed that I’d become his wife. He wasn’t looking at me. He sounded detached and frightened. I was laughing, trying to encourage him. I was happy, grinning. I wanted this part of my life to be over already, and I was so glad that it finally was.
I looked down at the ring. The little diamond was gray and tear-shaped. I loved it. I put it on, and it was too big.
Then we walked the rest of the way to the restaurant and sat down and immediately ordered prosecco. John toasted, Here’s to every other day.
* * *
—
At last I was ready to give up my apartment. As we packed my things, a framed picture fell to the floor. The glass shattered. I went to the kitchen for a paper bag, dustpan, and brush. We swept up the broken glass. When we finished, John said, Being an adult is really annoying, trying for levity. Had he never swept a floor? I tucked away the little shard of the day because I couldn’t imagine that it could be true, that he would actually think what he appeared to be thinking.
I moved into John’s apartment and decided to tidy up. With his permission I sorted through the three drawers of his metal filing cabinet and gathered up all the old utility bills and brought them to the office supply store to be shredded.
I found the letter he’d written to the deans of his college after they’d declined his application to study abroad. I read their letters, too. I gave him the letters in a neat stack. I didn’t say I’d read them, and he never asked.
The filing cabinet had been his father’s. It was dotted with old labels and American flag stickers. When it was finally empty, we put it out on the street.
* * *
—
I cooked pork chops in garlic and red wine and cleaned the kitchen while John took phone calls. He’d started a production company with a meek, diligent graduate student. It had begun as a lark, but John’s childhood friends Felix and Victoria had somehow found money in Calgary, people who wanted to invest in a production company in New York with connections to Alberta. They called the company Cloudberry Productions. I’m a real wife, I thought, setting the table with cloth napkins. It felt like a parlor game.
John and Felix and Felix’s wife, Victoria, had all grown up together, and John and Felix acted like brothers. They insulted each other constantly, but they did it while laughing. John didn’t have any blood siblings. Neither did I.
After high school, they had all gone to college in Calgary, and after that, John had moved to New York, the only one in his whole class.
Victoria worked full-time as a legal secretary, and Felix was the primary parent to their three children. This made them strange. For their other high school friends, the women were always the wives.
* * *
—
John was still an artist, but now he was an entrepreneur, too. I practiced saying the word out loud so it sounded effortless, normal, not an aberration at all. Entrepreneur. The company would be easy to run, John had explained, and it would fund his art career. It was easy to be a writer—all I needed was time—but John needed to buy supplies and ship pieces and travel to shows and meet collectors. His career was more expensive and more difficult than mine, and the potential return was greater. Lucky for us, the production company would become profitable almost immediately. He showed me a spreadsheet that I didn’t understand. He explained that we would soon be rich.
John would make a lot of money, and I’d still be a writer, alone with my thoughts. It would be like having two lives. Instead of adding hot water to a cupful of dehydrated chili, I’d eat sushi with John. The dream money swirled around us. I was an island of thrift within it, but it still touched me. The money felt like dress-up. It was a costume. I didn’t need it, but it was good to have.
* * *
—
A waterfall of paper responsibilities flooded the house, books and manuscripts to address with polite enthusiasm while I gradually learned that John had never sent a thank-you note or deep-cleaned the house except for a party.
I needed him to share in the housekeeping, to have one date with me per week, to have two intimate sessions with me per week, to socialize with friends biweekly, and to pay me back the seven grand that he still owed me.
He’d started calling his photography installations art that moves. John said his phrase with a little hitch in his voice to suggest that he’d just thought of it that very moment, and also that he thought very highly of himself for thinking of it.
* * *
—
The night before John had to leave to install his first solo art show, the rotating platforms for his photographs were delivered. They were a half inch too short on each side. There was no way to fix them. It was a four-thousand-dollar mistake. We were sitting at the big blue table John had made out of police barriers, the table that would stand on our deck and fill with carpenter bees in a few years, after we moved to California and then back again.
I sat across from John and prepared to let the wave of shame wash over us. This was his first big show. I watched John to see what he would do. He sat and held his head in his hands, silent. No tears fell. I saw the shame pass by him like a specter.
He didn’t mention it to the curators, and he didn’t prepare for the lecture he had to give at the opening.
A week after he got home, the museum sent a note informing him that they were disappointed in his lecture and in the show. After that day he never spoke of it again.
* * *
—
The trouble with getting engaged is that the second you mention it to some people, they start screaming at you that if you haven’t already registered for gifts and planned your honeymoon, you’re mentally ill.
I asked John whether he was nervous about getting married and he just smiled and said, No.
I got drunk on white wine at a bar and dragged John home for a glorious session. Still feeling good, I scheduled a meeting with him to discuss our honeymoon. I asked him when he’d be able to buy the plane tickets with his credit card miles, and he got quiet. A sneer grew in his beautiful mouth.
Then he said, I get to not talk about money if I don’t want to, and I said, We aren’t ready to get married.
* * *
—
Walking on the beach during our honeymoon, we passed a gaggle of drunk women. One of them said, Look at their rings, how bright they are! They’re probably on their honeymoon!
John had ordered himself a custom-made hammered white gold ring. I’d ordered the most basic yellow gold band I could find online. Over the years it got scratched up and dulled, and I loved taking it off and looking at how smooth it was on the inside, how it seemed to glow, how it was perfect.
* * *
—
When I was young, all that fathers ever had to do was sit in offices, eat at restaurants for lunch, do whatever they wanted wherever they went, and then come home and appear hardworking and loyal. Loyal, just for coming home to eat food and enjoy a clean and well-run house that a woman maintained just so a father could do whatever he wanted inside and outside of it.
I wrote to Hannah, Tonight I learned why my mother always squealed and shrank away when my father tried to touch her: She was a fortress. And inside that fortress was rage, and in the center of that rage was the pain of the insult of being treated like a stupid maid. My fortress is the same, with smaller hips, surrounded by a corona of migraine.
John said he would do the dishes and be in bed by eleven to fuck. At eleven o’clock, alone in the house, I did the dishes.
When he got home he explained why he was late. It didn’t make sense. He taunted me, You can’t even follow a conversation, and then, unable to stop the torrent of his confusing explanation, I yelled, Quiet! and then he shoved me and said, Get out.
After that, I cried from the deepest part of the pain tank, took a tranquilizer, and slept until noon.
When I finally got out of bed, we agreed to do our best to take care of each other and forgive each other.
Then John said that he wouldn’t be able to put his share in the joint account that month, after all. I took a deep breath; at once my back seized up and I understood why people divorce.
I’d already asked John to email me his itinerary for Calgary, where he was going to meet with Felix’s uncle, a venture capitalist. Vibrating like a tuning fork, I sent him the same email for the fourth time. When he finally responded, I explained, Since I can’t control my personal life, my professional life, and my financial life right now, when I also lose control of my social calendar, it feels like the last straw.
John wrote back, I’m really sorry, I thought I’d sent this to you. I love you very much.
* * *
—
UPS lost track of yet another shipment of lights that John needed to finish his new film. He was on the phone for three days, impotent, filing complaints. I put on my boots and my warmest coat and went outside to look for the UPS truck. The snow was ankle-deep and made everything quiet. In ten minutes I was back with the shipment, my arms wrapped around its slippery wet cardboard box.
At our scheduled household budget meeting, John spent half an hour recalculating the expenses I’d calculated. At one point, when he said he didn’t have money to produce his art show and contribute to the household, I said, So basically you’re living in my house.
But John and his co-founder had landed an investment in their little film production company, and we would move to Los Angeles to staff it and build it in a cheap warehouse space. I feared that, after we moved west, John would divide his time between Cloudberry and his art, and I would be a lonely wife with no support system, maybe saddled with a baby, unable to write or teach—a real wife, the one thing I’d sworn to myself I’d never be.
* * *
—
At an art dealer’s party, John drank too much and spoke too carelessly and too long with the wrong people.
When I prompted him, he admitted he’d noticed that powerful people never get drunk at parties. Then he said, I don’t want to be a footnote in someone else’s biography.
I’d just sold another book. It was my biography that he was talking about.
John’s mother sent a photo card of the four of us on the Brooklyn Bridge. In June we welcomed John’s wife, Jane, into our family. Happy Holidays.
* * *
—
Every few weeks I remembered something I’d said to John within days of meeting him. I’m kind of a workaholic, I’d said. And immediately he’d said, Oh, thank God.
I’d found someone for whom making art was central and being in a relationship was incidental. I loved sitting in a room with John, both of us on our laptops, working silently, fiercely. I could feel our energies awake and together. We didn’t need anything else from each other.
But by then I knew that John was often the one who arrived late to a party, overstayed his welcome, and forgot the gift. When I asked him if he’d be better off with a servant-wife than a human wife, he said, I get up and shower and have breakfast waiting for me, and nine times out of ten you do the laundry and think about dinner and remind me to mail things and make phone calls…I can’t imagine anyone being more helpful.
He gave me a look of love. I felt wonderful. Then I felt trapped.
After John left to work in his studio, saying he’d grab a sandwich at the diner and be home by nine, I packed our things and hailed a cab and moved us from one sublet to another. We were bouncing around in those last days before our cross-country move.
