Gone.
The Awful Truth About Divorce
She was cooking again.
I wasn't sure why she bothered. I mean, I'd have been happy to
bring something home and Bennigan's was just a short stroll
across the parking lot. But, soon as I hit the door I could
smell dinner in the air. Dropping my keys and coat in the foyer
closet, she had Sade playing on the stereo as she busied herself
in the kitchen. This woman who'd been on her feet all day
teaching at a New York college, now slicing cucumbers and
whipping up exotic Caribbean fare. This was when she'd poke her
head through the little gates on the window over the kitchen
counter, and there it was—that smile. No matter how crappy my
day was, that smile was worth coming home to. Well worth the
wait. "Hey," she'd say. She wanted her kiss. My fussing about
would need to stop. And, just as often, the stove would get cut
off; dinner would have to wait.
That's what I remember. Not the stress or the arguments or the
struggle. I remember the smile. I remember her walk—a kind of
toddler's amble that I used to describe as "The Walk of The
Truly Innocent." I remember her kindness, which extended well
beyond me, well beyond family and friends. It extended to
strangers. Her compassion was available to those who needed it.
She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, having seen her
first at age 16 behind the lunch counter at Woolworth's, wearing
this 1950's waitress getup while taking lunch orders. I didn't
fall in love with her until eight years later, when I looked her
up by chance after having an argument with my girlfriend. She
was running late for work and she came rushing downstairs to say
hello. And I knew, I mean, I really knew, when I saw her, that I
was looking at my wife. Talking to my wife. Took another three
years to convince her, but the day came when I waited
breathlessly for her to hurry down the aisle, afraid she might
come to her senses and ruin everything. A lot of grooms are
terrified on their wedding day. I was ecstatic. I won the brass
ring. And she was walking too darned slow.
It's easy to fixate on what went wrong. But, ten years
later, I'd much rather remember what went right. What made her
special. She hates this—hates me talking about her online. I
don't hear from her much these days, and when I do it's usually
unpleasant. I have changed so much from those days, it's
possible she is holding a grudge against a man who no longer
exists, just as it's also possible I've been carrying a torch
for a woman who no longer exists. I could speculate as to what that's all about, but
I'll leave her to her, and I'll cherish what is mine: those
wonderful memories, the precious gift she gave. The love that
changed my life forever.
I’ve never been happier, never been so completely bound up in
joy, so enraptured, than when I was married. I mean it. It’s
hard to explain this kind of indescribable, delirious bliss I
experienced. She was heroin and I was mainlining it. I adored
this person. I changed my entire life for this person, gave this
person every part of me. But, in many ways, all that giving was
actually fairly selfish. My goal was an innately selfish one: to
convince her to stay. When I was married, not a single day—I
mean it, not one—went by without my falling to my knees and
thanking God for this person. For her love, For her goodness.
That’s what a good woman will do for you: without nagging,
without hollering, just by being who she was, she made me want
to be a better human being.
She was, in every conceivable sense, a better, kinder, nicer
person than I was, and that gravity drew me in and made me want
to change, made me want to be compassionate, made me want to be
helpful and patient. Of course, I was none of those things. I
was a cynical New Yorker who disliked everyone he’d ever met.
And she was my emotional bodyguard: she had the super-power to
walk into a crowded room and shake hands and not pretend to be
interested but actually be genuinely interested in people and
their problems. She was Batman. It just amazed me.
I relied on her for daylight and air. I was simply not
functional without her, and my devotion may have been a kind of
bribery to keep her distracted from what was broken and wounded
about me. For a marriage to work, for any relationship to work,
there must be two people. Two whole people—not one broken and
the other investing all of their time and energy propping them
up.
Today, I can't turn the warning signs off.
I don't want to. If it isn't right, if it isn't going to work,
then I really would much rather face that up front and not kid
myself or the woman about things. There have been many dear
friends in my life since the divorce, but things only go but so
far before they reach a place where I am emotionally
unavailable. Because she lives there. She will always live
there. It is her home, and it is a place that is simply
off-limits.
The closest to love I've been was with a very special and very
dear friend who was, for years, my friend first. While everyone
assumed we were more, we were, in fact, confidantes and
co-conspirators who enjoyed each other immensely. And one
Christmas eve it seemed like things were finally going to be
more between us. But when I kissed her, I pulled away and just
kind of assaulted my friend, my dear friend who meant the world
to me, with the honest truth. A truth even I was unwilling to
face, and it startled me to actually hear myself saying it: I
still love her. It was a terrible thing to say, but if my new
friend and I were to have any future at all, I owed her the
truth. She caressed my cheek and smiled and kind of shook her
head sympathetically and whispered back: I know.
And that actually freed me. It made me less of a freak and less
of a cripple because, finally, somebody understood me. A lot of
these well-meaning, kindly country folk out here assume I'm gay
because they don't see me with a lot of women. Well, for one
thing I tend to be extremely discrete about that, but, for the
other, they don't understand the simple truth my friend
instinctively understood. Being with someone who understands
you, who truly gets you, is all you can ask for in this world.
Our bond became closer because I didn't feel like I was lying to
or misleading her, I was being honest with her. And because she
made room for that honesty, we broke through a lot of that hurt
and pain and she remains one of the people in my life I cherish
and trust.
I wrote about this briefly in
Table For One: Why You're Okay:
A lot of women kind of present themselves
to me, which, I guess, is flattering until you consider the odds
of middle-aged women finding an unmarried, un-gay un-broke
un-living with his mama man here in the middle of nowhere. So, I
am only marginally, say, statistically flattered. But nine out
of ten times these are people who have no chance because we'd
have no chance. They want Bill Cosby, not Norman Bates, and
these people are only going to complicate and frustrate my life
before I inevitably have to change my phone number and move.
When I meet these women, there's a part of me that goes, how
dare you. Do you have any idea who she was? Do you have any
notion what scale of nobility and grace you are treading upon?
In many ways, I still belong to her. It took someone of enormous
character and personal conviction to make it inside The Priest
Bunker, a depth very few human beings achieve in a lifetime. The
starry-eyed undergrads (scary people) and burn-out divorcees
(even scarier) are almost offensive in their shallowness, in
their lack of discernment for the pain that's written on my
face. We're off to a bad start already: they are less than
clueless about this person before them. And the obvious benefits
of intimacy notwithstanding, my own sense of honor won't allow
them in my home because I am simply not capable of being that
shallow, of taking advantage of their loneliness when I know
these people will likely never achieve the depth of character
required to understand a survivor like me. And that a wounded
child like me can never be to them the product they are clearly
advertising for.
A lot of people assume I'm gay. I'm 42; if I were gay, I'd know it by now. And I'm comfortable enough with myself and my God to not be in the closet. I could not be in the closet about anything. Besides, there are times when I'm around women and I feel like Dracula at a blood bank. But, like Brad Pitt in Interview With The Vampire, I'd rather not sell my soul to meet that need. There was a person in my life who set a standard, and that's the minimum level of strength of character I find acceptable. And a minimum standard of conduct and strength of character on my part that I can live with. I sleep well at night, knowing I don't owe anyone their humanity.
