Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) (20 page)

Step Eight: Make Imprudent Purchases

Still thinking of the book on feng shui, I burned all of Nick's letters and cards. I deleted all his files from my computer, especially the pictures of male genitals freely posted on Gay.com. Those, dear readers, were not hard to let go. I paged through every old photo album, removing every picture of him. These I hurriedly stuffed into an envelope and sent to a Chicago address before I could change my mind.

Nick had always been opposed to framed photographs of loved ones as part of home decor, on the grounds that such photos were cheesy, low-rent, and sentimental. The one photo he let me display was a goofy little picture of me and Lola when we were kids. Now I saw a clear way to assert my independence. I wrote to Hannah and my mom, asking for copies of old photos, of family photos.

Right around this time I had some poems published in
Poetry
. Unlike most of the fine-arts journals,
Poetry
actually pays. I knew I should take the money straight to my savings account, or use it for the medical bills that my insurance wouldn't cover. But I didn't do that. Instead I blew up one of the old photos and had it expensively framed. It's an old black-and-white snapshot from 1949 in which my mother and her sisters stand in a long line, dressed in identical Mennonite white blouses and dark skirts, with arms about each other's waists. The seven of them look like typical Loewens, with their round homely faces, their wide smiles as fresh as hoop cheese. They are lined up in order of age. My mother, the youngest, stands to the far left beside a blooming hollyhock.

In the face of all that Mennonite sobriety, my mother had tied a wee white bow into her hair. None of the older sisters had bows. Just my mother. I studied that photograph for a long time, wondering if the essence of that little bow had come down to me in a genetic form. I inherited a flat ass, big hair, strong bones-why not a yearning to be pretty? The bow delivered an eloquent little argument: there had been a time when appearance was important to my mother. She had once wanted to be jaunty, different, even if only for a day. Over the years I and my siblings had settled into the inevitable acceptance of family roles. Aaron was the Smart One, Caleb the Athletic One, Hannah the Sensible One, and I the Vainglorious One. I was the one who majored in minor things. I was the one who spent time on foolish details. As a girl I had no way of knowing that Flaubert and van der Rohe had already argued what I secretly felt: God was in the details. I'd long acknowledged my debt to Flaubert, but now that wee white bow also suggested a debt to my mother. It was nice to think of her as a pioneer of aesthetics. She was Mennonite, but she was mine.

Step Nine: Consider the Autoharp

During those first weeks of crisis, Lola was e-mailing me every day, sometimes twice a day, from her seventeenth-century apartment in Bologna. Since my fingers were about the only part of me that felt fine, I briskly typed the entire narrative of the end of Nick's and my relationship, no detail left behind. My study looked out over a winter waterscape, a peaceful vista. The lake hadn't yet frozen entirely over, and sheets of ice would vanish into steel-gray holes in the middle of the lake. In the twilight the lights from the dam on the far shore would suddenly breathe life into the gathering gloom, and the tiny glowing pinpricks of light grew dear to me. They held a promise of succor and comfort, like Portia's candle in
Measure for Measure
: "How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world." At twilight I made sure to be in my study, typing to Lola and waiting for the naughty world to shine. Sometimes I whispered out loud, substituting Lola's name for the name of the almighty God, a snippet from the Holy Eucharist, "Almighty Lola, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid."

And when I had come to the end of everything I had to say about Nick, I asked Lola what she was eating, wearing, reading, singing. "Tell me about your invisible mustache," I urged. Or, "What do you do in Bologna when you're in the mood for pot-stickers?" She answered every question, no matter how dull. She reported on freckles, furniture polish, her husband's sister's dinner parties. She discussed deodorant, ironing boards, and double-sided tape. She described in detail the impact and trajectory of the secondhand autoharp my mother had purchased in 1971. Mom had been disappointed when Hannah and I had categorically refused to learn how to play this autoharp. In 1971 we knew in our bones that the autoharp, along with everything it represented, was the zenith of uncool. My mother strummed it alone and singing, until she retired it to the garage, going back to the piano of our youth. One day Lola tardily surprised my mother by asking for this selfsame autoharp. This was the last time Lola was in California, and my mother had joyfully passed it on to her. Lola took the forgotten autoharp back to Italy, where it seemed a thing of wonder to many an amazed Italian. In these stories and others, Lola's presence was so complete that I could hardly believe she was five thousand miles away. "Hey little Lola, play on your harp!" I sang.

Step Ten: Branch Out from Borscht

My local girlfriends, most of them busy professors themselves, showed their support by leaving me treats in my office mailbox when I returned to work. I'd find the pile of grammar exams I'd ordered, but also a container of baba ghanoush. An article on American sexology circa 1912 came right on time, but there on top I'd see a stack of Tupperware bowls, each containing a different homemade soup. I found quirky recipes, bottles of oddly flavored vinegars, selections of Moroccan spices. New bestsellers, old favorites. Tickets for events that did not interest me. Candles in fragrances I would not have chosen. I gratefully read everything, lit everything, attended everything.

Step Eleven: Reinterpret Student Sympathy

My students knew about the accident but not about Nick. I had told my girlfriends to wait until I was safely out of town for my sabbatical before they launched the catapult. Yet the students may have sensed there was more going on with me than broken bones, because they reached out in extraordinary kindness. Young women made me loaves enough to feed five thousand; young men brought me lattes and poetry. As I would leave my office to begin the slow trek to class, a gracious student would appear at my elbow, ready to take my briefcase and bag. For weeks I drifted about like an unmoored buoy; I couldn't even carry my own purse, let alone a briefcase weighted with books and papers. Strange how those familiar trappings anchor and define us! Because I couldn't raise my right arm, students sprang up to take notes on the board. If I hadn't been too numb to cry, I'd have shed buckets of tears at the hearty outpouring of support. I knew that my students were only being kind to a disabled professor, but their courtesy was easy to interpret as sympathy for heartbreak.

Step Twelve: Visualize Patty Lee

Since I had supported Nick financially, he could have sued me for alimony. I don't know whether his sense of fairness stopped him, or whether he just didn't think of the legal possibility. At some level he must have regretted that he wasn't a stable provider, and that he was incapable of showing up for a job that took time away from his heart's true interest. He often made fun of me for doing just that, charging that my Mennonite workhorse habits bespoke both cowardice and a kind of underclass conformity. If I had any balls at all, he charged, I would walk away from academia and become a freelance writer! But beneath his scorn there must have been some degree of guilt, because he would often remind me that although he wasn't bringing money or stability to the relationship, he was bringing just the things I'd never known I needed: genius, insight, a view of the road not taken, a new heart for the people he affectionately called "the bungled and the botched." And it was true: Nick's abiding love for the severely mentally ill, the developmentally delayed, the homeless folks who wore six coats and made a beeline for him in the street, did much to change my worldview. I always admired his commitment to this population, which was another reason I had been okay with my own role as breadwinner. In the early years his caseworker jobs paid even less than I was making as a TA.

Then when he finally landed a job that far outpaid mine, he was as stunned as a kid in a candy shop. He spent his money on fancy stuff: a sportscar, a bike, guy gear. It was the first time in his life he was truly financially independent. His new toys were well earned, in my opinion, and I reasoned that after the reality of his higher income settled in, he would start prioritizing our financial future together as a couple. I figured that eventually he would start caring about and investing in our home, our retirement package, things that benefited us mutually and not just him. What I couldn't quite grasp, of course, was that the financial goals that were important to me seemed banal to him. Moreover, there was the matter of the sacrifice he had made for me six years earlier. A big-city boy to his toes, he still felt that he had gone over and above by moving with me to the Midwest so that I could take the job of my choice. He saw his increased salary as a long-delayed, much-deserved payback. Which it was.

I loved the lake house to which we had moved for closer proximity to his job, but the mortgage was exactly double what I had paid in our old rancho. There was simply no way I could afford it on my own. I knew it. He knew it. And we had moved in with the explicit agreement that this time he would
have
to pay his share of the bills and mortgage. In the last hideous days before he left me for Bob, he agreed to pay his half of the payments for three years, during which I would put the house up for sale and pray for a buyer.

I told my attorney that Nick was ready to do the right thing by me. She raised her eyebrows and said, "Well! Let's get him to sign his name to that before he flakes out on you!"

I knew that Nick wouldn't flake in the usual sense. He wasn't one of those deadbeats who shrug off responsibility like a hangover-oh well, can't do anything about it, too late now, bummer, chil
lax
, man. He wasn't like that. But at the same time my belief in his fairness was destabilized by a faultline of doubt: how could he make the payments if he couldn't hold on to his job? The hospital administration position was a beauty, but I knew in my bones that he would quit within minutes of driving off with Bob. Nick quit everything; quitting was his special MO, the fullest flower of his bipolarity. He quit jobs, friends, karate, pets. He'd buy a brand-new Cannondale bicycle and sell it two months later. He'd paint in oils and abruptly switch to photography. The moment he had something, he didn't want it, a philosophy eloquently echoed in the platonic concept of desire, except that, as far as I know, Plato was not bipolar. By definition desire turns on something you want but don't have, and it follows that if you have it, you don't want it. In the fifteen years of our marriage, Nick had never held the same job longer than a year. If the best predictor of future performance is past performance, then I was in trouble. My heart sank when I received a terse e-mail from Nick a week after he had gone off with Bob. He had quit the plum administration job. There was a familiar note of panic in his e-voice.

Nervous, I asked my attorney what I would do if Nick stopped making his half of the payments. She was texting me from the courthouse, and she managed to raise her eyebrows electronically: "Bailng on u so sn? Find out whr he wrks. Grnish wges."

She didn't wholly understand the situation. You can't garnish wages if there are no wages to garnish. Nick would quit whatever new job he managed to land as soon as he dumped Bob, and then what would happen? If he went into a tailspin of depression, he wouldn't be able to hold a job. Hell, he wouldn't be able to
look
for a job.

About this time Lola gave me a stern lecture on positive thinking. "Hear me out," she said. "I know you're the queen of cause and effect, but what if you flipped the argument around? We don't know how the universe works. Maybe you've got the logic backward. On the one hand, you could say that people doubt Nick because he has a long history of being a flake. But what if it's just the opposite? What if he's a flake because people don't expect him to be anything else?"

"Is this some lame new-age hoodoo?" I said.

"You got anything else?"

"No," I admitted. "Go on."

"Well, has Nick flaked on the payments yet?"

"Not yet. He's threatened to, though. He's been sending frantic e-mails saying he just can't do this. He said he doesn't care what happens to his or my credit. He wants me to voluntarily give the house back to the bank, the way he did with that truck a while ago. He actually called me two weeks ago to tell me that the October payment would be the last one he could swing."

"So what you're saying is, he hasn't flaked yet?"

"Honey, aren't you listening?" I asked. "October is going to be the last payment. He said so. Into my ear. I
heard
him."

"It's you who aren't hearing
me
. Just answer the question. Has he flaked yet? As of now, this moment, today?"

"No," I said in my Voice of Condescension. "No, okay, he hasn't flaked yet."

"Here's what I think you should do. Take this whole financial thing with the house one day at a time. Don't worry that Nick won't come through for you. Instead just be grateful that he has made each and every payment so far. Just, you know, breathe in and focus on today."

I considered this a moment. "Lola," I accused. "Have you been reading
The Language of Letting Go
?"

"I have," she conceded. "And you know what? That's okay!"

Lola told me to get caller ID and not to pick up for Nick at all, ever, under any circumstances; I could not preserve a tranquil attitude if I was simultaneously listening to him spin his crazy web of negativity, like a spider run amok.

"But I'm worried about him!"

"Yeah, well, let somebody else take care of him for a change. You don't need fear right now," she said. "Not yours, not his, not anyone's." She suggested that I return polite, one-sentence e-mails. And that every day I write out the following message on an index card: "Nick makes timely, reliable direct deposits to my account!"