I sigh too. “I don’t like this,” I tell him. “Being the other woman. I thought I was too smart for this.”
“I understand.” He’s quiet a moment. “You shouldn’t be, then. Don’t wait for me, Kerry. I’m lost right now.”
I tell my therapist he said this.
“Sounds like he’s being honest,” she says.
“But he sounded so unhappy saying it.”
“He probably was.”
I look down at my foot, which I kick lightly against the coffee table that separates us.
“He likes me for who I am,” I tell her, hearing the whine in my voice. “Nobody’s ever really seen me like that before.”
She cocks her head, waiting.
“I’m such a cliche, aren’t I, waiting for him to leave his wife? I can’t believe this is me.”
She smiles. “No one’s a cliche,” she says as she tucks a strand of her straight blond hair behind an ear. “We all have to go through our own unique experiences, and we all have to find our own unique ways out.”
I look at her bookshelf, full of self-help books and psychopathology texts, and consider this. “How am I supposed to get out?” I ask.
“The way to get out is always the way you came in,” she says and smiles.
A few days later, I get a call from Tyler.
“I left him,” she says.
“Gill?”
“I couldn’t do it anymore.”
And then it all comes pouring out. How Gill has been going on out-of-control shopping sprees, buying elaborate trips to foreign countries without consulting her. When she’s dared to confront him he’s become belligerent and self-righteous. Other times he does nothing but sulk or lie in bed for hours.
“I’m in San Francisco,” she says. “With someone else.”
“So that’s it?” I ask. “You just left everything? The house, all your stuff? And you left with another man?”
Tyler’s silent. She knows what I’m thinking. She’s not dealing with her life.
“I just needed out,” she says quietly. “Being married to Gill was like being married to Mom. I couldn’t separate his needs from my own. I was dying there, Kerry.”
I close my eyes. Tyler was Mom’s stand-in husband for so long, it makes sense she wound up marrying someone who made her feel the same way. I want to be kind, to listen and be helpful, but I’m angry and I’m not sure why.
“What about Gill?” I ask. “Have you talked to him?”
“I can’t.”
When I don’t say anything, she says, “I’m going to have to do this my way, Kerry. I know what I did. But it hasn’t been easy for me, either.”
I think of Leif, the mistakes I made. I don’t want her making the same mistakes. But I hear her. She’s my sister and she needs me. That’s all that matters. “OK,” I say. “I get it.”
The next week, Gill calls.
“Come with me to Venezuela,” he says. “Just you and me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m going next month. Come on. We’ll have fun.”
“Gill,” I say. “We’re not even friends. You don’t know me.”
“I’ve always loved you.”
“You’re manic,” I say. “Do you have anyone there to help you?”
“I don’t need help,” he says, angry now.
“I’m going to go,” I tell him. “I’m going to call your parents and have them go over there.”
“Don’t you dare,” he says right before I hang up. I call Tyler, who promises she’ll get a hold of his parents, and when we get off the phone I call Terri to come over. I don’t want to be alone, knowing Gill is somewhere out there, feeling so much pain.
The next time Tyler and I talk, she mentions Dad’s five-year affair.
“Hold on,” I say. “Dad had an affair on Mom for five years?”
“I thought you knew that.”
“Mom told you things, not me.” I look out the window of my small kitchen, feeling the old jealousy.
“You didn’t want to hear them.” Tyler’s voice is full of pain too. She’s had her own difficult road, I’m well aware. She’s the one who had to bear Mom’s grown-up burdens, perhaps because I wouldn’t. I take a deep breath. Our parents pitted us against each other, but I don’t want to play that game anymore. We’re supposed to be adults now, directing our own lives. “Was it the same woman for all five years?”
“I think so. Remember Lynn?”
I close my eyes, searching my memory for a Lynn.
“She worked with him.”
I get a flash then, a slender woman with tight, dark hair. Standing in an unfamiliar kitchen. “Maybe,” I say.
“It was over pretty soon after the divorce.”
“So much for the idyllic childhood Mom wants us to remember.”
Tyler laughs. Maybe it’s because we’ve both made grown-up mistakes at this point too, but we can do this now. We can poke fun at both parents without feeling we have to protect them so much. On a jog later I think about the few memories I have before the divorce, the fun parties, staying up late, all of Mom and Dad’s friends. If I angle the camera just slightly, I think maybe I can see it: Mom’s forced smiles, Dad’s unhappy gaze turned away. In the revisions I find I feel sorry for them. Like in that Sharon Olds poem, “I Go Back to May 1937,” where she wishes she could warn her parents of all the mistakes they’ll make, all the pain they’ll suffer and inflict. I wish I could go back, too. I wish I could tell them to change it all, to start over, to think more about what they’re both about to do.
Friends and I go out to bars, and I meet a few more boys. I do my usual smiling across a room. I talk with them about whatever they’re eager to talk about. But I find myself bored. Even during the sex. I turn my head to the side, wondering why I’m doing this. Why I’m still doing this, after so many years.
When Frank calls, the caller ID screen says unavailable, like some kind of mean joke.
I make a tentative decision: No more boys for a while. Just to see what will happen.
Days pass. I spend time with my friends. I teach. I read novels and work on my own. I even try reading a self-help book about how to find love. The gist is that when you can love yourself entirely, only then can others love you too. Duh. Any moron knows that. But how to love yourself after a lifetime of self-degradation and effacement? That would be a book worth reading. I call Leif at some point, just to hear how he is and to wish him well. I miss him still. Some days, I sit in my small apartment with my loneliness, an unwanted guest, the pain intense enough that I keep my arms wrapped around my middle. I can almost envision it in there—a tiny girl with dead eyes, sitting alone in the dark. I hold her tightly, trying to bring her back to life. On these days, I don’t want a boy. Being alone feels more honest.
A few times I go out to solo dinners at a sidewalk cafe and watch people walk by. I see a movie by myself and cry the whole way through. A few people glance at me, but I don’t care. I don’t have to answer to anyone, and that feels nice.
I joke with my friends about what I’m doing, calling it a moratorium on my vagina. But it’s actually quite serious. I’ve crossed a threshold somewhere. We all have the opportunity to find that place where awareness trumps our actions. And I’ve reached that place. I can’t go back.
I fly to visit Mom. In the Art Institute of Chicago’s cafe, the cafe
that has the same installation of small kites as she has in her home, she tells me she and Donald are getting divorced. Angrily, she explains Donald has been seeing another woman. She tears up as she speaks, obviously in pain, obviously resigned.
“I did so much for him,” she says. “He just changed all of a sudden. I don’t know him anymore.”
