Remember The Moon (21 page)

“What is it?” she asked, Dom’s face shaded by the dark hull of the boat.

“Well... I guess I’m not feeling that there has been much space in the context of your past life for me to be who I am in our relationship. You bring your husband up in conversations. A lot. I don’t bring up my ex that way. I don’t have photos of her around my place. It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of room for me in what we are creating.”

Maya looked shocked. Calder, luckily, was plugged into his iPod. “I talk about my husband to help Calder.” I could hear the defensiveness in her voice. She turned then to look at Calder, to see if he could hear them. He looked up, briefly, but was oblivious to the conversation happening in the front seat. Maya turned back toward Dom. “It’s my job to keep Jay’s memory alive for him.”

“Oh,” he said, thoughtful. “I’m glad you told me that. That makes sense and makes me feel a little better.”

Have I been talking about you too much, Jay?

Of course not.

“This is not really about you, exactly,” Dom said. “It’s my own reaction to your past, and I need to examine that. You’re just being you. I need to figure out where I fit in the context of your past.”

“I’m glad you recognize that because I don’t think I know any other way to be in our relationship. Jay is a presence in my life. I like to think I am sensitive to you and how it must be dating someone with a ghost in their closet, but I did love him very much and that hasn’t gone away. I will try and be more sensitive to your feelings,” Maya said.

“I feel that love when I go to your house – the photos, your attention. You seem elsewhere when I’m at your home. I feel like we can’t be ourselves at your house the way we can at mine.”

Yeah, because I don’t want to screw you in front of my kid!

You make me laugh, Maya!

I rejoiced at Maya's anger. Apparently, I didn’t need to do anything at all to interfere with this relationship. Dom would kill it all by himself.

“When we’re at my house,” Maya explained as if to a child, “I have a son who needs my attention. I can’t help that. We’ve only been going out for two months now. Calder needs time to get used to the situation.”

“Yes, but it’s not just that. I feel like there is this big mound of dough that is your life and your past and I’m trying to find a tiny air pocket within it to be who I am. We should be bringing ease and grace to your son and your home.”

“I thought we were,” she replied.

What’s with all this ‘ease and grace’ garbage?

I think that’s ‘Dom speak’ for ‘it should all be about me’, Lenie. This dude is such a narcissist!

Dom followed that stellar weekend conversation with a text and email blackout. Maya finally called him two days later. “Is everything OK? Should we talk?”

“I value integrity,” he said over the phone, his voice terse. “Not being truthful with your son means you’re not being truthful with me or with our relationship.”

Maya closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m doing my best, Dom. I’m sorry if you feel I’m not being truthful, but I have to do what I think is right for my son.”

This was my fault. My stupid ego over Marcus had created more turmoil for Maya and Calder, a consequence I couldn’t have foreseen when I conjured “Sean Connery” into Maya’s life. I would need to find a way to undo this mess, though it looked as though it was unraveling quite successfully without my help.

I
t’s 4 a.m. and I can’t sleep. I wonder what you must think of me? Widowhood has clouded my sense of character judgment, clearly. What a catastrophe with Dom. Three months of my life I will never get back. Can I justify my idiocy in any way? I honestly thought you had sent him to me, Jay. That you, as my cosmic guardian angel, had found me a perfect new mate. Crazy, I know. But that feeling gave me a false sense of inevitability about this new relationship. God, I’m such a romantic fool sometimes. The idea that you would actually set me up from the afterlife. Foolfoolfool.

I woke up in a sweat. Those photos I allowed him to take. The videos. Oh God. How could I have done such a thing? Jay and I had a good sex life, but like many married couples, we’d fallen into a bit of a rut. Maybe only I thought that. But after Jay died, something in me snapped. I couldn’t explain it. Sex with Dom filled an empty crevasse deep inside me, made me feel more alive. But I surprised myself with my sexual appetite. But now. All those external hard drives I saw on his desk were probably filled with lurid pictures of naked women. Of me. Or worse, maybe he’d sold those pictures to pornographic websites. I Googled him, too late. I paid $35 for a report, verifying addresses, family names. Everything checked out, but I was unnerved. Could I trust him now? What would he do with the photos, which until now I had seen as artistic, me playing the seductive muse?

I lay awake trying to assess his character. In his presence, everything felt fine. He seemed sane, articulate, prided himself on his honesty and talked at length about integrity. When I was with him, I had no qualms. But in the middle of the night his peculiarities woke me – the sexual photographs in particular – and yet I went along wordlessly when I went over to his place that morning to find a video camera affixed to a tripod peering at the bed. I felt extra pressure to be sexy, and to point certain parts of my body toward the camera. I wanted to trust him, to convince myself he was worthy of my trust. I wanted to be in love with him, and to do that I had to trust him. I convinced myself it must be love if I could afford that level of trust.

He seemed to sense my unease and once told me how I reminded him of a friend he had as a child of five or six, a girl who he considered to be his soul mate. I felt strangely honored by this confession, that we had a child-like friendship as well as a romantic relationship, something special, a connection that I alone shared with him. One of the defining moments of his life, he told me, happened the day he went to her house and found that her family had moved away. No one had told him. When he told me the story, I wondered if deep down, he was setting me up to hurt him the same way, creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. I felt inexplicably sad.

My weekend alone with him both excited and frightened me. I hadn’t had even one night away from Calder since Jay’s death. I still bore the guilt of my indiscretion against him. But this man was not Jay or Marcus. What could I say? I was horny as hell. Having regular sex again made me more so. I wrote provocative emails and poems about him when we were apart and he sent me photos of us together in bed. “Naati”, a derivation of the words “naughty,” or “nasty”. “Nasty” was my visceral reaction to each of the shots he sent of us together in bed. I didn’t know how to respond to those naked photos of myself in compromising positions. They made me squeamish, but I often found myself dashing upstairs to find the vibrator. I was in dreamland, at the height of sexual addiction, riding high. I felt sexy, desired, alive. It was easy to convince myself I had fallen in love.

And then it quickly started to unravel. His comment that I still had photos of Jay around the house. What could I say? I did. It felt like a shot to the belly. I thought I had relinquished my widow mantle in the context of this new relationship, and had become a new woman, one capable of love. But now I wonder, was he right? Was I still in love with Jay? Perhaps I will always be his widow.

Calder added another complication. One night, Calder sat with me on my bed watching TV when he asked to play Angry Birds on my phone. Halfway through a game, the familiar ping of a text message sounded and Calder stopped playing.

“EEWW!! Who is texting you that?”

I took the phone and on the screen, it read: ‘I want to see you naked.’

“Oh God!”

“Who is that?”

“Sorry, sweetie. It’s just a friend playing a joke.”

“Dominic?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Why does he want to see you naked? That’s so gross! Does he want to have sex with you?”

“Calder! How do you know about sex?”

“I’m not a baby anymore!”

“I know, sweetie. I’m not saying you are. It’s just, I’ve never heard you say that word before.”

“Well, I know what it is, you know.”

“Yes. Of course. Anyway, like I said, it was just meant as a joke.”

“A pretty gross joke.”

After Calder went to bed, I adjusted my phone so the content of my text messages would no longer pop up on the main screen. I called Bethany in a panic.

“Dominic expects Calder to simply accept him. A child traumatized was the person meant to change for him, a grown man. ‘He needs to accept me for who I am.’ Jesus. What a fool I am!”

“God, Maya, the guy sounds like a weirdo. Sorry to say it.”

“Maybe. But he might be right about me needing to tell Calder the truth about our relationship instead of sneaking around. I should allow him to be a part of whatever Calder might dole out. Still, I’m surprised he can’t be more sensitive to Calder's needs, not to mention mine.”

“Calder is your number one priority right now, Maya. And any decent man would see that and be respectful of it. Are you sure about this guy?”

I didn’t know what I could trust about him anymore. He seemed so enmeshed in the dogma of “ease and grace” and it made me realize that perhaps he was not as secure in himself as I thought. He needed a framework, a vocabulary to keep himself in check, as though without it he couldn’t even trust himself. He believed he had “integrity” and depth, but I think now that he was so self-absorbed that his depth could only ever be skin deep. And I had apparently scratched the surface a little too hard.

I didn’t see him again until he arrived at my little art show at a Seattle wine bar a week later. I needed to chat with people, so when he arrived, he hovered nearby until I turned to him. He stood waiting expectantly until the people I was talking to became uncomfortable and walked away to view another painting. Dom held out his arms for a hug, closing his eyes and pursing his lips, awaiting the kind of greeting I might give him if we were alone. Instead I gave him a peck on the cheek. He looked pained.

“I’m with some friends right now and they might be interested in buying a painting. Can you give me a few minutes?”

He moped around the bar alone, peering into my paintings as if trying to find the key to my psyche within their colors. I rejoined my friends, but watched him out of the corner of my eye. When they left, he came over and gave me a hug and tried again to kiss me on the lips, but I swiveled away from him to escape his embrace.

“Not now, Dom. I’m working.”

He stepped back, chastised.

After the reception, we walked to a nearby Mexican restaurant for dinner. He tried to hold my hand as we walked, but I wiggled my hand out of his grasp. We were seated at a brightly painted table, an overflowing basket of nacho chips and a bowl of salsa between us.

“I’m sorry about not wanting to kiss you at the show.”

“It’s fine,” he said and looked away.

“I hope you understand it was because I was working. It just didn’t seem professional.”

“It’s fine, really. I just don’t understand why you don’t like being adored.”

“Adored? Don’t I?”

“That’s all I’m trying to do, Maya. Adore you.”

“OK. Well, I’m sorry.” Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. I couldn’t help thinking how his version of adoration felt as if he were trying to possess me. I took a warm chip and dunked it in salsa.

“I’m looking forward to meeting your daughter,” I said, trying to change the subject. Despite our three months together, I still had not met any of his friends or family.

“Yes, I’m looking forward to that as well,” he said, looking away. He was leaving the next day to drive to California with his son to help his 21-year-old daughter move into his place in Seattle. His apartment was small, the second bedroom occupied by his office which he said he had no intention of moving. His daughter, Alicia, would sleep on the couch which would have a profound effect on the amount of time we would be able to spend alone together, something that didn’t seem to worry him. “We’ll find other ways,” he assured me.

A week after his daughter’s arrival in Seattle, we arranged to go out for dinner with our kids the night before his departure on one of his business trips to Hawaii. When I arrived at the restaurant, Dom waved but then turned his back to us to talk intently on his cell phone. I introduced myself and Calder to his daughter and then we all stood in awkward silence waiting for our table as Dom continued his conversation on the phone.

“Did you have a good trip up? All settled in?” I asked Alicia.

“Yes. Fine,” Alicia replied. She was tall, slim, and had the same pale complexion as her father. Calder stood beside her playing on his PS2 game, ignoring the world around him. We were shown to our seats just as Dom got off the phone.

“Sorry,” he said. “The hotel in Hawaii.” Alicia rolled her eyes.

We sat next to our respective children, Alicia opposite me, looking bored. She clearly wanted to be elsewhere. We ate dinner in near silence, and I fumbled to make conversation. Alicia seemed to perk up only once when I told the story of my car being hit the day before and how much the shop said it would cost to fix.

“That happened to me too!” Alicia exclaimed, light in her eyes for the first time.

As we were waiting for the bill to arrive, Dom leaned over the table toward Maya and puckered his lips, an expectant gesture for a return smooch that had become his habit in public places. He appeared desperate to prove to the world, and apparently our children, his claim on me, again making me feel more possessed than loved. I gave him a withering look, hoping he would read, “Are you kidding? Our kids are sitting right here!” into it. He sat back in his chair and turned away from me, like a petulant child.

After dinner, the kids waited in our separate cars, and I stood near Dom’s truck to say goodbye.

“I don’t suppose you want to drop off the kids and go meet somewhere?” I asked. “I won’t see you for a while.”

“I still have a lot of packing to do,” he said. “Why? Did you want to talk about something?”

Yes, I think I want to break up,
I thought.

“It would be nice to talk, but I guess it can wait until you get back,” I said instead.

“You sure?”

I nodded. He gave me a quick peck on the cheek and walked away.

During his trip to Hawaii, I had more time to think about things and wrote Dom an email:

I’m struggling right now with your expectation that Calder needs to ‘accept you for who you are’, as you say. He’s a kid, Dom. I think it’s you who needs to accept him for who he is.

Dom replied:

I’m surprised what you share with me now that I am not there to defend myself.

I sat back in my chair after reading this. I tried telling him my views, but he couldn’t hear my words unless they were in black and white. I wrote back:

I’ve tried talking with you about this, but you don’t seem to want to hear my views. I thought that I could express my side of things better in writing.

The email exchange that ensued became a volley of increasingly angry misinterpretations. I finally wrote, incredulously, “Are we breaking up over email?”

His immediate response, “I will call it – declare it as complete,” came as a shock. He had gone from “I will die for you” to “it is complete” in a matter of three months.

“Complete” apparently was Dom’s way of overcoming an unpleasant past experience. I had apparently been labeled “past heartbreak” and swept under the carpet – perhaps Dom’s habit with any painful experience – ready for a fresh, new blank canvas to emerge. The blank canvas shimmered in all its linen whiteness, a mirage. I could no more sweep away my past than I could hold my own heart in my hands.

Our past makes us both powerful and weak, lithesome and unbending, hopeful and cynical. Our past is enmeshed into every particle of our minds and bodies, both in life and in death.

Despite my intention of only questioning myself and our relationship, I made it easy for him to read between the lines of that email. I wanted out. I knew I would never fully understand his intentions, and would always feel as if something stood in the way of us having an honest relationship. I wondered why it felt as if my own grief recovery seemed irrelevant to him. If I had dared to look deeper, my aversion to the way he tried to infiltrate my family in such a self-centered way or the fact that I had allowed my sexual relationship to cloud the way I really felt for this man would have been more obvious.