Perfection (16 page)

Roberto was married to Annette. A green card was involved (he was from Italy), but his wife demonstrated an adoring devotion. They had no children. Roberto was dedicated to academia and had been completing his doctorate in linguistics.

In September of that year, 1984, Annette went for three weeks to do research in Chicago. One afternoon after she left, Roberto called me up at my office to see if I would go out with him to the movies that night. There was a Wim Wenders film festival in a small art theater in my neighborhood. The movies were a wonderful reason to leave my terrible apartment.

Small, cheap, hard-won after years of ever-changing sublets
and shares, my apartment was a nasty railroad array of four rooms on Broadway and 107th Street, with a view of a dimly lit air shaft. The lonely male inhabitant of the apartment across the airshaft liked looking into my windows. The shades I put up to gain some privacy blocked out most of the remaining light. The only regular male in my never-sunny apartment was Chester, my imposing tabby cat.

Chester helped me chase down mice and the water bugs whose antennae and shit brown whiskered feet startled me awake at 2:00
A.M.
My panting screams were followed by long hunting expeditions. Chester had nothing but time. He could wait stock-still by the radiator for hours until the water bug ventured out again. Chester’s twitching tail alerted me that our quarry was on the move, followed by much use of Raid foam and a Manhattan phone book or shoe, whichever was closest at hand.

Roberto and I saw
Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, The American Friend.
After the movies we ate rice, beans, and oxtail stew at La Rosita, a narrow restaurant on the north corner of my block. We drank steaming cups of
café con leche
and ate our stew as the last summer flies buzzed lazily near the grease-fogged windows. He walked me home after the movies and often came upstairs for a cup of tea. We talked about the movie we had just seen, his endless thesis in linguistics (something to do with Noam Chomsky, about whom I still understand nothing). When we ran out of movies, we just went to the restaurant.

The night before his wife returned he stood outside my half-closed doorway at midnight and finally told me what he wanted. He pressed his body on the door and said he did not want to leave. I opened the door and let him stay with me. The initial euphoria of fulfilled sexual attraction was followed by several brain-numbing
migraines. I found myself stumbling up Broadway to the corner market with a half-moon of vision loss in each eye. Insomnia kept me awake till 3:00
A.M
. I wasn’t cut out for an affair with a married man, though I had certainly fallen deeply in love. I ended the affair after a month.

Roberto pleaded with me to give him time. We began seeing each other again. At Christmas he gave me a pair of long black lace gloves. I didn’t give him anything for fear that Annette would notice. The migraines returned with greater intensity, snowy vision, pain, and nausea. I begged Roberto to make a decision and to tell Annette about the affair.

He told Annette. He told me he couldn’t decide what to do. He wasn’t in love with Annette, he said, but his marriage provided him with support and comfort. He didn’t know if our relationship would work. I told him I didn’t know either, we would have to try first, but I couldn’t continue this way. I ended the affair and the friendship. We never spoke to each other or saw each other again. It was like quitting smoking cold turkey.

On Valentine’s Day, I opened the white envelope that had arrived in my mailbox eagerly, half-hoping it was from Roberto, whom I still missed with gut-wrenching misery. The card inside was crudely drawn in black ink, a black heart decorated with dead cockroaches, their antennae and legs perfectly preserved, carefully glued onto the white paper.

It was from Annette. She called me a bitch and a cunt and a slut. These words still had the sting of high school days. I felt frightened, knowing that there was a woman a mere twenty city blocks away who hated me to the core of her being and might do me harm if she saw me. But I also thought that I deserved her anger.

I wondered about her careful effort in the creation of the card. Were the roaches from her kitchen? Had she hoarded and then
emptied a Roach Motel for this purpose?

I quietly suffered over my lost love, still hoping that he might change his mind and return to me. With a lesson well learned, the pain of this loss gradually softened until I met Henry, a year and a half later. That brief affair was the most chastening experience of my early adulthood, and I kept that card for many years as a reminder of a path never to be taken again.

Christine in California was in her late thirties or early forties, not an inexperienced twenty-five-year-old. And though she expressed genuine regret about what she had done, she was vague and evasive when I pressed for details. She seemed to understand that she owed me an explanation, but at a certain point I hit a wall.

In our conversations she tried to minimize the sexual aspect of the relationship. Perhaps she wanted to spare me some pain. And it’s true that sometimes sex is just sex. Some people pay for it. It’s not always interesting or meaningful, though Henry’s e-mails made it clear that he was eager to continue their sexual connection. Christine suggested that she had really felt more drawn to Henry intellectually, that it was their conversations that had been important and meaningful to her, and that these conversations had even changed the course of her creative life.

She apologized for these conversations. She told me that she understood how wrong it had been to engage so emotionally in conversation with Henry. She understood that this kind of intellectual engagement was as wrong as the sex they had, because it must have provided a huge distraction from his marriage.

But the more I thought about it, the angrier it made me. The emotional intimacy of their relationship over those few months had been significant enough to deeply affect my marriage that
morning in the car on Route 9. With Cathy in and out of his life, Christine had temporarily satisfied Henry’s need to be the center of the world.

My conversations with Christine never felt “done.” I felt like there was something more she had to tell me, but lacking Henry’s charms, I couldn’t pry it out of her. Nevertheless, I called Christine again one morning from my kitchen while taking a break from packing boxes of foodstuffs to take to our island rental house in Maine. I couldn’t wait to leave town again. Piles of sheets and towels were stacked on the table. There were more piles of clothing upstairs. Even in August, Maine can be unpredictable. I had taken out everything from fleece jackets to bathing suits. It was good to be busy.

“I am so sorry that you are dealing with the results of Henry’s poor life choices and I am so sorry for my role in such a yucky mess,” Christine said.

Yucky. A word children use to describe a bowl of pudding overturned on the kitchen floor or the foul-smelling contents of their diapers. I sensed her wish to be done with me, and this whole sordid tale, to move on to a happier life chapter.

But I did not have such a luxury. For reasons I was just coming to understand, I needed to dig much deeper. It was not cathartic, the digging, it was horrible in every imaginable way. Yet I did have the sense, clearer with each passing day, that in order ever to have a new life, I would have to strip away the veneers of the one that was over. I knew that Christine had finished confiding and wanted to return to her life, and that whatever else I discovered would be elsewhere.

I wondered how many other people, maybe even close friends,
were not telling me what they knew, to spare my feelings.

Who could I trust but myself? Though it felt like I was jabbing myself in the chest with a scalpel, by the following morning, Liza safely at day camp, I was ready to head back to my office to continue down the list of women.

A pleasant woman’s voice
answered the phone.

“This is Julie. Henry’s wife.”

Ellen—the wiry muscle girl who could do ten one-handed pull-ups—began crying.

“I’ve thought about you so often,” she sobbed. “I heard that Henry died. But I didn’t go to the wake or the funeral.” I heard her sigh, and she paused for a moment. “I knew I didn’t belong there.”

Weeping continuously, Ellen told me that, after they met at the gym, Henry had flirted with her and pursued her. Her mother had been very ill, living in her home, requiring constant care. Her daily trips to the gym were a welcome escape from the burdens of her home life. She and her husband had been going through a difficult time.

Ellen said that she and Henry had sex twice. Consumed with guilt, she had then told her husband, started marriage therapy, and rearranged her gym schedule so that she and Henry would no longer meet.

“Out of curiosity,” I asked, “what do you look like? No, don’t tell me. I bet you’re a little brunette.” She was.

The day after that phone call, Ellen called me back. She cried some
more and asked for forgiveness. I’d read through all her e-mail exchanges with Henry. Her letters suggested that she was gullible, but perhaps no more than I might have been in her situation. Henry had complained to Christine in California that Ellen wasn’t that intelligent, but she was no dimmer than I had been while married, and while he may not have seen her as his intellectual equal, in all other ways she was his superior. She had a working conscience, and she was capable of authentic emotion. She had come quickly to a clear understanding of right and wrong, a clear sense of her own culpability. She had made a mistake but had corrected herself. She did not run away from her responsibilities to her marriage or to me.

I wished Ellen a good life. I told her that I hoped her marriage would improve. She said she was grateful. Now life could move on, for both of us.

I was surprised at how quickly my anger passed after our conversations. Perhaps I was just worn down, desensitized. But I felt mostly pity for this woman who had stumbled briefly into the mud pit of my marriage and fallen for Henry’s charms. She never knew about Cathy, and even if she had lingered longer in his life, he probably would not have told her about Cathy or Christine or anyone else. She was a plaything for him. Ellen was, in my mind, a kind of innocent bystander, briefly tantalized by something Henry seemed to be offering at a time when she herself was exhausted with obligation. I noted that Henry had been good at finding vulnerable women. In matters of romance, illicit or otherwise, timing is everything.

I sent an e-mail to Alicia,
the Argentinean woman Henry had mentioned in his letter to Christine.

I had only one e-mail, from December 3, 2002, from Alicia to Henry. My friend Sara had found a printout of it during her searches in Henry’s office when she had visited in the spring, folded at the bottom of one of his travel bags. Without understanding its full significance, she had saved it for me and mailed it back after I told her about Henry’s affairs. The subject header was telling enough: “Re: My North American Boyfriend.”

In the e-mail, written in stilted English, Alicia told Henry that she would be happy to talk to him about “my sex matters.” She suggested a time to talk on the phone and included her phone numbers.

I had met her twice, at parties, one at our own house during the prior summer. She was a friend of Tomas’s former girlfriend, Lindsay, who in this case had unwittingly acted as matchmaker.

I sent Alicia an e-mail, and to my surprise, she responded promptly. Our correspondence was hampered by her poor English, but we muddled along for a few rounds. Her life seemed confused and sad. She was a university student. She lived with a man, a relationship that was by her account troubled and unhappy.

“Nothing really happened,” she said. Was this the truth? Were Henry’s fantasies of a future affair overblown? Clearly they’d talked about something and had made plans to continue talking. I understood from her description of her own relationships and culture that infidelity was more flexibly tolerated in Argentina. I guessed that Henry had counted on that. His ideal woman would come from somewhere outside the United States—we are known worldwide for being prudes, the sins of Bill Clinton et al. not
withstanding.

In a peculiar twist that seemed to suggest the extent to which he had compartmentalized his life, I recalled with bitter amusement that Henry had come down quite hard on our former president, both for his adultery and for lying about his adultery.

During this first terrible week
after I found out about Henry’s affairs, Tomas and I corresponded daily, a welcome relief. I knew he was having his own hard time after having told me what he knew. Some of the same people who had viewed his involvement with me suspiciously judged him even more harshly now. But I felt liberated and grateful.

Tomas invited Liza and me to a dance event in a large barnlike building on the grounds of a local summer camp. A band played, and we danced exuberantly, sort of a mock boxing match, which perfectly released the anger I’d felt all week. Tomas tossed and twirled Liza in the air. I knew many in the crowd and had the uneasy feeling that they were beginning to view Tomas and me as a couple. After a time, Liza tired and Tomas and I were sweaty. We walked outside to rest and get some air on the beautiful grounds. Liza enjoyed the last daylight and began playing with some other kids. The ten-year-old daughter of a friend recognized me. She looked at me and then at Tomas, then back at me.

“Are you
dating
?” she asked, still looking back and forth between Tomas and me.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to her question, the bold and direct type that kids are famous for, the type I usually encouraged. I didn’t really know what Tomas and I were doing. We were trying to be in a relationship that couldn’t be classified in such tradi
tional terms as “dating.” As the time of my trip to Maine drew closer, I sensed these might be some of our last times together in this way. The fall was bound to bring changes.