This is not going to be the story of the woman’s
recovery. She’s not going adhere to another
regime of wellness. She is not going to
be “stronger for this adversity”. She will not collect uplifting quotes of
spiritual healing.
This is also not going to be the story of a woman who stands
around in a haunted house, manifesting her innards in a dwelling that has a
soul, though she does do a lot of that.
The hornet’s nest that grew overnight in the spot of her last hug, one
full of deceit, to which she goes back in her mind and wonders: if I had known
would have I slapped his face, or hugged him and not let go? There is no answer to a question like
that. She’d have never slapped his
face. And he’d have not let her hold onto
him. So, where there is no answer, a
hornets nest is as logical a response as any. Etc. I only mention this because the haunted house comes
in just once later in the story that this will be.
The actual story begins in medias res, it is a Saturday morning in the middle of their lives.
This is his first on call weekend as a critical care cath lab nurse, which
means that unlike the jobs he has had before where he has gone to take care of
critically ill patients and then come home more or less in time for dinner,
this time he will stay home and go to interrupt their emergencies if called to
do so. He will not care for them at all,
he will stop their need for care or they will die. He is very happy about this new job, though
its effect on his mental and physical health worries the woman, his wife. For weeks, he has been increasingly absent
from home and increasingly agitated. He
smokes incessantly. He tells disjointed
stories of work when he comes home, that do not have beginnings and ends, only
middles, wherein something highly technical occurs to stop a stroke, but how
the stroking person got there or left is always obscure. Stories that are not stories. They’re images only. Like dreams, a bit unreal. This is the first full weekend for which he
will be on call to rush to these dream sequences. He was home late the night
before, already held captive to crisis, and he is already running low on sleep
and running high on nicotine. He cannot
be distracted easily because he cannot stray far from home, can’t go to a
movie, anything like that. He lives 45
minutes from work as it is, he has to be able to jump in the car and go. She is not troubled by this aspect of the
day. In fact, she prefers home. (Since this is a real story that leads to
trauma, I can’t remember what we did that Saturday in truth, but I can make an
educated guess.) She teases him (I do
remember this) for wanting an emergency to occur, says to him “it’s probably
bad for your karma to be hoping someone has a heart attack to liven up your
day, just saying” and they laugh and he admits that is probably true. Finally she insists he needs sleep. He says he thinks it is alright to drink one
class of wine. They do that and she lays him down and asks “big spoon or
little?” and he says “big” and they curl up, him around her, to sleep, which he
does and she does not. As per usual, she
uncoils from him to turn and put a hand on his chest and watch him sleep, as
she often notes, “as if with a perfectly clear conscience” he’s a good sleeper. He is an extremely jealous man, watchful of
her almost always, a strange irony that she will dwell on in the weeks to
come. He is so jealous that he doesn’t
even want her to write, not even to herself, afraid of what she will put on a
page that will not belong to him. Even
to write simple work emails, she has to use a locked work pc to save herself
the hassle of his constant roving through her words looking for a threat, a
double meaning, a betrayal waiting to hatch out. There never is such a thing, for
unbeknownst to him (or not believed, anyway), she lived with a knot in her
stomach all her remembered life that he
only has finally loosened in her. He
is as precious to her as is the ability to live and breathe at last. No friendship with anyone else, no anything at
all of any kind, is something she would refuse to give up for his sake. As for
writing, it never did do her much good to be a daily writer, not in terms of
mental wellness anyway, so she has given it up.
But her mind writes whether she puts pen to paper or not. So this is how she writes now: she lies
next to him, her hand on his chest, and she writes in her mind. She thinks of
it as internal Tibetan sand art. She is
writing in sand about his heft, that she is sorry he doesn’t like the 15 pounds
or so that he has put on in the last year because she likes it. Having spent almost all of her life up until
now feeling as if she might fly off the earth, she takes great comfort in his
there-ness, the weight of him on the bed next to her. She is watching her hand
move up and down on his chest with his breathing and writing a kind of
thankfulness for him in her mind when his pager goes off, and he is up and
out.
In every way that counts, he never comes back.
Like someone who has a fatal illness but no awareness of it
yet, she worries about all the wrong things.
As the hours mount and turn to days, she worries that she did not pack
him enough food, that he will become both exhausted and drained, that he may
even make a mistake at work and she knows (thinks she knows) if that were to
happen, he would never forgive himself.
The man’s mother, the woman’s mother-in-law, lives 5 minutes from the
hospital at which he works. The woman
begins texting the mother, forcing her husband to take a break and go to his
mother’s house, get food, get rest. He
is texting his wife that he is increasingly exhausted and desperate to be home
again, he phrases it this way: “I just want to be in my own bed.” Again and again, with an increasing tone of
lament, he texts that to his wife. “I
want to be in my own bed.” But she
insists, he must stop trying to get home only to be called back again and again
before he can get there, he’s never making it home that way anyway, and is just
adding what their son calls “desperocity” to the situation. He must stop and get something to eat at his
mother’s. So he does, he goes there to
his mother’s finally, late Sunday and again Monday morning. Thank God, thinks his wife. Thank God, he is with you, the wife says to the mother-in-law. It is Monday morning when he rests once more
at his mother’s, showers, and heads for home.
The wife, she is thankful to her mother-in-law, whom she has always
found to be strange, strangely overly forthcoming with the “I love you like a
daughter” statements. The wife is not
particularly demonstrative by nature.
But at this moment, she does feel a strong bolt of allegiance to the mother-in-law,
who has kept her husband safe and sent him home in one piece. The mother-in-law says “Sorry … He’s all
yours”. The wife thinks nothing about the
odd locution of that – the mother is odd – the wife doesn’t care – all the wife
cares about is the solidity of her husband back in her arms late Monday
morning. He holds her a long time. He says, O my god it’s so good to be
home. She puts him to bed and makes him
a big dinner, working in the quiet of the house with the kids at school,
filling it with cooking food smells before she wakes him late in the afternoon and
makes love to him until dinner, putting her nose behind his ear, breathing him
in.
About a week later, the boyfriend of the girl with whom the
husband is having an affair will look through that girl’s phone, find emails
and texts and pictures, find things that if enumerated here would render the
husband character completely unsympathetic to the reader utterly. So I will leave most of that part of the
story untold for now. The basic facts
are that the girl’s fiancĂ© looks for a woman with the same last name as the
husband and calls the man’s mother, not his wife, mistakenly. What he says to the mother, the wife never
knows exactly. Whatever it is, it
prompts the husband to bring his wife into the yard, near the potting shed, and
to tell her that he has gotten a little too close to a girl at work who is
trying to get away from an abusive boyfriend and he was just trying to help, to
“listen”. He tells his wife, “I love
you, I would turn my whole world upside down to be with you, you know that,
there is nothing to worry about here” and he hugs her and she shrinks from him a
little, the knot in her suddenly drawn fatally tight again. She puts the kids to bed, calming down so
they can talk for real, but by the time she is done doing that, he has walked
out the door, leaving only a “I lied, sorry” text behind. And no matter how much she sobs into his
voicemail, no matter how much she does not, cannot believe it, no matter how
much she stands in the street in front of their house in the dark whispering
desperate prayers to any God into the wee hours that night, her husband is
gone.
(I will come back to more of those details later when I am
able.)
In the weeks following this night, as you would expect,
details emerge, more lies are told, more details emerge…but no TRUTH comes
forward. No emotional truth. The wife is
looking for that truth. Not of what
happened, that she knows, he fucked a girl named Stacey who is prone to
bragging about how big of a bitch she is, that type. Who wrote many smutty and
vacuous emails to the woman’s husband, that the wife catalogs in her folder
full of them, one for instance labeled the
dumb bitch can’t even spell adultery that reads ‘you defiently didn’t disappoint
me in bed’. All of that is just fog to
the wife, through which she is trying to SEE. What is an affair to a man but a pain
killing addiction usually? That he is having an affair is a SUMMARY not an
ANALYSIS, as the wife would tell any of her students. Stacey is/was her husband’s preceptor for
this new job, a teacher of sorts, and that is a pattern, for the wife herself
was once her husband’s teacher. In fact,
she still has some of those notes from many years before, 2006, and she can map
his initial disappearance from her life that time to a question she asked him: “With
what are you alone?” From the moment she
asked him that question, he would begin disappearing and reappearing in her
life, enrolling into and haltingly finishing her classes usually over
protracted periods of time. And the
wife, in cleaning and packing and looking and thinking finds those old
notes. And she finds one other crucial
thing: a carelessly discarded set of
receipts that proves that her husband was not on call that long weekend, and
not at his mother’s house that Monday morning….that her husband’s mother must
have known that, knew he was not at home nor at work nor obviously parked in
her driveway…and that despite knowing these things, she would act surprised and
appalled by the fact of his affair. The
mother is lying. To her son. To shame him more with her feigned appalled
shock. (Why?)
Backstory: the husband is terribly in debt, to an extent he
doesn’t quite understand and that nobody fully comprehends, not even the bankruptcy
judge, so varied are the non-dischargeable versus dischargeable debts that
resulted in his mother’s insistence that he be in school throughout his
twenties, which he didn’t want to be, that he take out loans to do so at
expensive private colleges, enrolling at every local college in succession only
to drop out with another loan, for which the mother arranged co-signors across
their extended family, and that with each round of that, he faked it more and
better that he was actually in school when he was actually not at all so that
at least it was only debt mounting and not forgiveness for his failings, for
which he increasingly did not want to be known let alone forgiven. That pattern
continued until he met his wife. She
herself unwittingly helped keep him on campus, his crush on her mounting just
by her allowing him to show back up again and again and again, and letting him
balk by half every question she asked him. Suit yourself, she would say. She is a very tolerant teacher that way, for
she is a very tolerant woman that way, for she herself is still a student too,
always trying to hold it together, (was) always trying to figure out how to
do that as well internally as she was able to maintain the illusion of it in the
world. In her, he found he could be
released from the pattern of failing expectations. She had no attachment to
her expectations of him. If he preferred to write something other than what she
had assigned him, that was just as well as far as she was concerned. She never
thought he needed forgiving. No harm, no
foul, no guilt. And he finished nursing
school, and turned around and asked her to marry him as soon as he’d graduated,
much to her surprise (she had not, in all the years prior, committed the proper
spelling of his name to memory). It was
he now who was full of questions, which in her disarmed surprise, she answered
with complete candor. And in doing so
found that she trusted him. And all her patterns of wary solitude dissipated
too (she thought), blown into harmless motes floating in the sunlight of their
curtained windows, in the beams shining on the orchid on the mantel by the bed.
(But this is not a story of happily ever after either,
apparently, though they both deserved to have one.)
In the days following her husband’s abrupt departure from
her life, the wife flails considerably.
In the habit now of caring for him, a groove formed in her mind to
instinctively do so, she packs all his needed things, so that for instance he
will not be without his favorite socks.
He comes and gets these things, his father and brother tagging along to
carry them away, and she cannot watch and can hardly bear it, so the reverend
who married them handles the transfer for her as the wife curls up inside the
house, weeping in a corner. It will be weeks
before the wife goes upstairs in her own house, weeks before she looks at and
replaces the bed….in this time, there is only one kind of communication between
the wife and her husband, and that is his increasingly hostile insistence that
his photo album of baby pictures be returned to his mother. The album is upstairs with their wedding album
and with other painful mementos, such as the ultrasound photo of the daughter
that they lost at 11 weeks 2 days the previous winter. She cannot bear to go and retrieve these
things immediately. And as he pressures
her to do so, wanting only his own baby book back, noting no attachment to any
other sentimental objects at all, and never once asking to speak with his
stepchildren let alone have a keepsake of them, her anger mounts. And mounts.
And mounts to a deadly quiet furious.
He is insistent he get back what is important to his mother. And what is important to his mother is none
of the son’s current life: lost wife, abandoned step-children, and increasingly
dire options of living conditions, given that he is bankrupt and has fucked his
boss in a scenario not likely conducive to his employment conditions. In fact, the only person that the husband has
screwed over more than he has his wife is himself. About this, the mother-in-law is interested
not at all. In fact, it seems
convenient, forcing him to provide plentiful demeaning manual labor, during which
time she can console him grudgingly but “generously” that she never did like
the wife anyway, infertile and diffident, and thus “understands”.
Eventually when she is able to even touch them, the wife
puts all things of sentimental value into storage in a church where nobody can
have any of it, baby pictures, wedding rings, all of it. She just so happens to have started working
at a hospice, where disputed sentimental objects is a common challenge and
temporary safe storage a common solution.
Not even she herself can have those things, she has made the keepers of
the things promise this, not until the fog clears, burned off by her anger
perhaps or at the end of her sorrow or however these things work themselves out
... But more than anything, the wife
instinctively feels protective of these things from the mother-in-law who wants
them so badly. His mother, who did see it coming and didn’t say shit and acted
falsely surprised and is still lying that she didn’t know to her son’s face to
make him feel even more indebted for the help she is providing him in a place
to stay; the mother wants her alibi. Proof of his happy childhood. Proof that it is, of course, none of what is
happening in his life now is the fault of his upbringing. A cover story is what that is, the wife’s gut
tells her, filling with black tar anger every time she thinks of it. Not the mistress (too common to bother
hating, like the common cold, the wife just wishes it would go the fuck away). Not even the husband, whom she is very angry
at to be sure, but she can think of nothing worse to wish on him than his own
life currently. But the mother-in-law, she is who the wife want to slap the shit out of. The mother-in-law, who just after he blew his
entire world apart, through him a backyard birthday party. A cake from Eileen’s. Is that to invite the extended family over
and pretend his has not just lost an entire family, an entire life, or to rake
him over the coals for doing so (plus frosting)? That is fucking
crazy. That is enough to drive anyone crazy.
If this were a story about the wife’s recovery from all
this, it would proceed through her whopping PTSD symptoms currently, including
sleeping with boots on and pepper spray and tazers on the end tables, and then
rehash her daddy issues, and then forward again through “learning to love
herself” bla bla. Fuck that shit. This
isn’t even the wife’s story at all mostly, the possibility of which in her
arrogance she overlooked from the beginning, that she was a minor character.
Why is it that the husband is so irrationally jealous? Always tremblingly so,
struggling with the constant fear of emotional and sexual betrayal? The wife has known him for a LONG time now,
through several relationships before their own, and each time the fear of
betrayal (each time ungrounded) has plagued him. While he himself was cheating on her, the
wife complained off-handedly one day about his never being home, that for all
he knew she could be holding roman orgies.
It was just an offhand remark.
And he grew white lipped hurt livid at it, and she felt terrible, she
didn’t mean it like that, OF COURSE NOT, she just was missing him that’s all
she meant. What kind of emotional sense
does that make to be Othello-like jealous of a woman on whom you yourself are
cheating and want to get rid of?? Having her own daddy issues indeed, she knows
from experience it’s the parent to whom you are most similar that you will have
the most struggle. She is thinking of these
things, and it hits her: the mother-in-law cheated on the father-in-law….with
one of Aaron’s teachers maybe?….
(And as soon as the wife thinks that thought, the light bulb
in the kitchen above her head literally bursts and smokes and sends the whole
house into darkness with a central circuit breaker tripped. Her son was standing in front of her, his
eyes wide. That’s the only haunted house bit, relevant to the degree you
believe it.)
The rest of this story (that is not of the horrendous
present, I mean) takes place in south Buffalo, circa early 1990’s, where a boy
at a formidable awakening age loses a teacher to whom he is attached to a
mother with whom he shares that attachment behind the back of a father he loves
(but is nothing like).
