Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (5 page)

Now, just six months later, Dr. Seckin was telling me I wasn’t crazy for not feeling like being intimate. He said every fiber of my being would be repelled by the idea of intimacy because of what was going on in my reproductive system and with my hormones. In fact, “I’m surprised you walked into my office on two feet,” he said. I started to cry. I remember worrying, for a second, about ruining my makeup.

In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the “endo-whatever,” had stained so much—my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn’t take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made.

I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be cel
ebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive system was a liability. The disease, developing part and parcel with my womanhood starting at puberty with my menses, affected my own self-esteem and the way I felt about my body. No one likes to get her period, but when your femininity carries with it such pain and consistent physical and emotional strife, it’s hard not to feel that your body is betraying you. The very relationship you have with yourself and your person is tainted by these ever-present problems. I now finally knew my struggles were due to this condition. I wasn’t high-strung or fickle and I wasn’t overreacting.

All my life, I had had the sense that something was wrong and couldn’t put my finger on it. I had seen college roommates pop two ibuprofen pills and skip off to basketball practice with no problems when they had their periods. I always wondered what was wrong with
me:
Why did I have such trouble dealing with one of the most basic and common functions Mother Nature handed all women? I heard my mother’s voice echo in my head: “Because I had it, and your grandmother had it. It’s just what happens.”

In my mother’s generation they would just take out all your plumbing if it got really bad. But now, “We can treat it with laparoscopic surgery, excise this problematic tissue and expel it from the body,” said Seckin. “I am surprised you slipped through the cracks without any treatment this long.”

If he was surprised, I was flabbergasted. I had dutifully gone to my gynecological checkups and not one doctor had ever brought up this disease. I even had two ovarian cysts removed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where my Beverly Hills gynecologist had said that one of my cysts was “endometriotic,” or blood-filled. But he never said the words “You have endometriosis. It is a condition that needs to be treated and monitored. It is a serious condition that can and will not only endanger your health and the proper function of your internal organs, but will
also affect your fertility.” In fact, endometriosis is one of the three major causes of infertility in women, and 10 percent of all women worldwide suffer from it.

As I reached the dinner, I tried to stuff back down all the emotions that had bubbled up, just as I’d stuffed away from view the pain and discomfort for all these many years. Just like I struggled to fit all my cosmetics back into my small evening bag after I dabbed and patched my face back together. The car door opened; a flashbulb went off. I hopped out of the car and fixed a smile on my face. At dinner, there were toasts and cheers as we looked out over Central Park, the first of the blue night’s stars visible above the bony trees and the fallen autumn leaves.

Three weeks later, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Dr. Seckin performed his first surgery. I picked the day in the hope I could recuperate over the long weekend without anyone knowing I’d been out of commission. At first, he guessed the surgery would take an hour and a half, and I’d be home the next morning and back at my desk by Monday.

I awoke to the sound of my own voice. I smelled the faint odor of mustard seeds and ginger. In the darkness of the hospital room, my mother, two aunts, an uncle, and various cousins kept vigil, leaning or sitting on every surface and quietly nibbling food from round tin containers.
Top Chef
was on the TV. There was a Thanksgiving marathon. Dr. Seckin came to speak to me in the recovery room after the surgery was over. In my anesthetized haze, I heard him say that my right fallopian tube had been rendered functionless from the buildup of endometriosis tissue. He asked if I knew that part of my left ovary had been removed during a previous operation. Incredibly, I didn’t. I learned the surgery had taken four and a half hours, my kidneys were in stents, I had stitches on four major organs, and that of the nineteen biopsies performed, seventeen came back positive as deeply infiltrating endometriosis tissue (also known as DIE). Rather than an overnight stay, I spent five days in the hospital. Twenty-four hours after
my discharge, my husband had to leave for a trip. “The show must go on, after all,” he said.

My aunt Neela, who had flown in from India, and my mother, who had come from Los Angeles, cared for me, something they had done at different times throughout my life. Over the next two and a half months, as I lay bedridden on the top floor of our brownstone, they took turns, flying in and out. As they tended to me, my husband toiled in his office below. Over those many weeks, on my back staring at a white ceiling, I had ample time to think. There was nothing to distract me, no work I could do or ways to keep busy. Now, the thoughts that had exploded like little bombs in my head as I drove down Fifth Avenue that inky fall evening could no longer be muffled.

All those hours and days and weeks staring at that ceiling, looking back, revealed a new perspective on my years with Salman. Early on, we were so full of passion. Even when we fought, which we did quite a lot over matters both large and very small, I took it as evidence of the intensity of our love. He would slam doors and storm out, snatching a pillow from our bed and dramatically decamping to another room.
He’s said his piece,
I’d think.
He’ll cool off by morning.
Then I’d hear his fast footsteps on our creaky wood floor and he’d charge back in, like a rhinoceros up on its hind legs. I found these heated exchanges challenging and difficult. I had heard enough bad-tempered yelling from my stepdad in high school to last me a lifetime. I no longer wanted that as a part of my life. Nor did it help that my husband argued with the same lethal eloquence he had used to woo me. Of course, just because a point is well made, doesn’t mean it’s right. I was articulate enough but couldn’t compete rhetorically. After a while, I was simply defiant.

Passion can come from many places, including but not limited to love. I don’t doubt he loved me. Nor do I doubt that what seemed like a desire for me was also in part a desire for what I provided—an adoring audience.
Few people could resist his charm, the way he dominated a dinner party and made you glad you were there to listen. This made him a glorious friend and party companion. But after a party, everyone goes home. Me, I went home with him. I was the full-time, live-in audience.

As is the case with many creative people, his ego needed frequent tending. He is, without a doubt, a brilliant man and a great artist, yet somehow he lacked self-awareness and, tellingly, a sense of humor about himself. Every October, when the Nobel Prize winners were announced, he became moody and irritable. He was certain he was
nobélisable,
and every year I’d comfort him, cooing, “Of course you deserve it” and “Oh, they don’t know what they’re doing.” I did feel he deserved it and the disappointment understandably cut him deeply. But then he’d say, “Yes, many great artists never get the Nobel,” continuing on to list, without irony, those writers: “Proust, Joyce . . .”

My attention was proof of my devotion and my devotion was a balm for his insecurities. At first, I was grateful to be the object of such intense desire. Yet what’s flattering in the first year can be suffocating in the eighth. I thought marriage might prove to him that I wasn’t going anywhere.

To be fair, my husband didn’t change during the eight years we were together. I knew what I was getting into. I think, however, that I changed, as do most women between twenty-eight and thirty-six. And because I’d been a model, enjoying six or so years of surreal, carefree existence, my twenties had been a sort of extended adolescence. When we met, he was already the man he’d always be. At twenty-eight, I was still becoming myself. Perhaps I didn’t voice my unhappiness soon enough; rather, I spent more time feeling like a disappointment and scrambling to patch our cracks than I did considering whether he required an unreasonable level of tending. The tension grew worse as my work prospects grew brighter and I became, I guess, less portable. No longer could I be on his arm at every
dinner and tribute. I had a second cookbook coming out, was hosting
Top Chef,
and had addressed the UN in support of the organization then called UNIFEM that advocated for women. Those achievements were my own. And I was proud of them.

All that time in bed and the locus of my sickness brought another matter into focus. I had never really decided whether I wanted children. Early on, Salman told me he didn’t want to have another child. After all, he had two already. This made me wonder whether our relationship had legs. Ultimately, though, he relented. For me, he’d be open to it, and so I felt comfortable agreeing when one day we rolled out of bed after almost five years together and he wondered aloud, “Maybe we should get married.”

“Are you asking me to marry you?” I asked.

“Yes, will you marry me?” he said.

Our honeymoon included a red carpet event in Cannes (my first) to help out his son Zafar, who was doing PR there, and a stop in Barcelona so he could give a speech. I was immune then to what this rather unromantic detour portended. And I didn’t mind so much. I’d have said so if I did. What mattered was that we were together. As we walked the carpet, I watched the mass of photographers falling over one another as flashes flashed and shutters clicked with a constancy that produced a sound like an infestation of some strange insect trying to attract mates. I was no naïf at the time, no stranger to the spotlight or the paparazzi. I had paraded down the runaway in a bikini. I had cohosted a live TV show. Yet for some reason now, with cameras going off like automatic weapons, my worried thoughts—
why are they taking so many photos, like nature photographers trying to catch a hummingbird in flight, when we’re standing still?
—became a physical presence. I couldn’t breathe. Salman sensed something was wrong and I found comfort in his hand steady around my waist. For the next few years, until we divorced, I had panic attacks on the red carpet. In these moments I was captured being what I most
feared I would become: an ornament or medal. I was not a model, host, actress, or advocate. I was wearing a sparkly dress and standing beside a great writer. I was worried, whether I knew it then or not, that without him I would simply disappear.

My laissez-faire attitude about motherhood began to change. The surgery brought a sense of urgency to my decision. If I did want kids, I would have to find out right away whether my body would even oblige. I’d also have to be sure I wanted to bring a child into this marriage. My husband was fifty-nine then. Aside from the logistical complexities of our relationship—he traveled often; his children lived in London; with which family would he spend holidays if I couldn’t travel, as had been the case while I was bedridden?—there was my unhappiness. I was a child of divorce (two times over). I dreaded my child having the same experience. Before the operation, we had somehow managed to piece and patch together the relationship with the putty of our love. But now, I could no longer continue making those repairs. Even after the surgery and all of Dr. Seckin’s talking to him, Salman didn’t seem to grasp the disease’s impact, on me or on our marriage. He was absent, emotionally and often physically. The women in my family shepherded me through recovery and made sure I was never alone.

I was left to grapple, however, with the most intimate effects, those that only a partner can know, by myself. I felt hollow, both in spirit and in body, my insides having been scalded, carved, and scraped out. I had been feeling guilty, like a bad wife, for not wanting to make love. It was this issue that was the nucleus of much of the strife between my husband and me. It must have been hard for him, after experiencing the intensity of my passion for him for all those years, to be confronted with my ebbing desire, my diminished wellness of being, and the increased distraction of my work.

But now the doctor had informed us that there was a tangible medi
cal reason for my waning libido. It wasn’t my fault. And it did not have anything to do with my love for him. Lying there bedridden, I felt that my sexuality was even more eroded than before the operation. I looked outside our window at the bare-limbed tree in the neighbor’s backyard, stoic in northern light. I swam in an ocean of loneliness as I thought about my marriage and my future. I was drowning.

That loneliness then turned into anger. What about “in sickness and in health”? What about “I’m so sorry I gave you such grief when you were very ill”? What about “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you on our anniversary, when the ambulance had to take you away”? Now, in retrospect, I can see how my husband suffered. The difference between two people who love each other as romantic partners and every other loving relationship is the sexual aspect of that union. At that time, I had just received the information that my fertility was in peril, I had been feeling like I had let down my husband for over a year (my body had failed me, but it had also failed him), and we were arguing almost every time I chose to pursue my own work instead of accompany him for his.