Blue Plate Special (39 page)

There were three things that saved me during that time. The first was the unquestioned, unswerving love of Dingo, and the second was the Thai place near my new apartment, Tuk Tuk. It became my regular hangout in the evenings. Its vegetable green curry was good and cheap, and the waitstaff was friendly and kind. I loved the simple warmth of the routine—a glass or two of white wine and a vegetable green curry every night. The third thing was the mathematically conceived structure of the novel I was working on, which I stole loosely from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and which comforted me with its orderly precision.

As with my other novels, I wrote
The Great Man
in a state of dire loneliness, and possibly because of this, food serves an important purpose in the book. Eating and cooking bring the
novel’s solitary characters together, and, in writing about the meals they ate, my own loneliness lifted, just a little.

A
few evenings a week, after I walked Dingo and brought him back to Jon’s house, Jon came home from his studio early to meet me. We went out to dinner together, and then back to Calyer Street so I could say good night to Dingo. Whenever Jon tried to kiss and hug me good-bye, I panicked; I hyperventilated, and my brain started to go dark. I went back to my basement dungeon to lie awake all night twisting in agony. I wanted desperately to go back to my marriage, but I also couldn’t bear the thought of it.

And then, one day, back in my old neighborhood, I ran into my former writing-studio landlady, Nancy. She knew Jon and liked him.

“Kate!” she said to me. “How’s it goin’? I haven’t seen you around lately.”

“I moved to Queens,” I said. “I separated from Jon.”

“Are you nuts?” she said. “Does he beat you? Is he a drug addict? No? Then why the hell did you leave him?”

I had no easy answer to this.

When my three-month lease was up in Hunters Point, after Dingo’s body had stopped making blood platelets and he’d literally almost died of a broken heart and had to go on prednisone for six months, after Jon and I had both come undone because of our own broken hearts, I moved back into the Calyer Street house.

Over the course of the next two years, Jon and I saw two marital therapists: one very bad who told us to just break up already because we were obviously incompatible, one very good who did her best to help us stay together because she could see how much we wanted to.
The Great Man
was published; I went on a book tour. Then it won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award. Gradually, the terrible pain from the aftermath of my affair lessened until I could sleep again. I never contacted or spoke to Nathan again, although I sometimes saw his wife driving by or on the sidewalk. She always glared at me as if she wanted to kill me, which no doubt she did, but she never said a word to me.

Slowly Jon and I began to drop our guards and talk to each other. I worked to regain his trust. He worked to regain my passion. After therapy with the good therapist, whom we saw for a year and a half, we went out to eat and drink together, always at the same place, an Italian bistro in Park Slope. This routine, somehow even more than the therapy itself, comforted and steadied me. I always ordered the sausage frittata with a salad, always drank Orvieto. We hunkered down at our table and smiled at each other over our food. This was what we were best at, the thing we knew how to do together to connect. I began to take heart. Maybe things would be all right.

Then one night, about a year after I had moved back, I had
too much to drink at a Christmas party. When I came home and got into bed with Jon, out of nowhere, I saw the violent breakfast scene from my early childhood as if it were happening right in front of me, all over again. There it was, on my brain’s screen in living Technicolor: the breakfast table, my father leaping at and pummeling my mother—the suddenness of the violence, that fierce eruption, swift and monstrous—my mother sobbing and hurt and crumpled over the table, my father a muscular tense hotheaded ball of rage, slamming out the door, leaving us there. The long-delayed reaction I hadn’t let myself have as a tiny kid was now forced on me in a purely physical way. My chest seized up and constricted in choked sobs. My heart raced like a revved engine in neutral, going nowhere. My brain recoiled in a panicky bruise.

Two paramedics arrived and questioned me and reassured my terrified husband that I wasn’t having a heart attack, it was a severe panic attack, and I needed to take some deep breaths and calm down, there was nothing they could do for me. They talked to him as if he were my father, as if I were a small child. I remember feeling that this made sense, somehow. I felt that I looked like a small child in that moment. I was a small child again.

This was the culmination of all the other panic attacks I’d had throughout my marriage, the recoil I’d felt early on, when Jon threw things or had road rage, the collapse into loneliness I’d felt after September 11, the instinctive paralyzed fear I’d felt when we were separated and he tried to embrace me. Coming back to this marriage had not solved anything. I could try to tell myself that everything would be all right, that I would be able to stay with Jon, but my psyche and body were telling me otherwise. They were telling me, more and more loudly and clearly, to flee.

I called my mother and told her what had happened. We both cried, me for her, and her for me. “It never occurred to
me that it affected you,” she said. “I’m so stupid! You were so little, but I should have known. And me, a therapist.”

“You poor thing,” I said. “How could he do that to you? How often did it happen?”

“It was maybe five times in seven years,” she said. “Well, of course that feels like all the time in some sense. So why did I stay? I always wanted it to be different, I thought somehow magically he’d understand and stop. Also, I was crazy about him. He was always the most fun and interesting person in the room. I never stopped hoping that my leaving would wake him up and make him want us. When I was accepted at ASU, I wrote him a letter asking for permission to move out of state. I was hoping
that
would get his attention, but no. And then with his sudden appearance at our Tempe door—I finally got it, he wasn’t going to ever want us.”

“I carried that feeling with me for years, too,” I said. “Never quite getting that he’d never want us. It was heartbreaking.”

After that conversation, I realized that that scene over breakfast so long ago had haunted me all my life. I had always denied it, had always pretended to myself that I was like my father, not my mother, trying to keep my mind safe in any way I could, for as long as I could. For much of my life, I had willfully denied that part of me that was female, not realizing that, ironically, this was the source of my true power, my real identity, and my happiness.

D
uring that winter, I wrote a novel in three months, aptly named
Trouble
. Set mostly in Mexico City, it’s about two close friends, women in their midforties, who go for a week’s vacation together when both their lives fall apart. In this novel, food and drink represent freedom, exotic romance. They eat chorizo tacos from the little stand outside the Cantina Tlaquepaque;
they sip tall shot glasses of tequila and
sangrita
, and then, in the mornings, hungover, they eat
chilaquiles
from the Hotel Isabel restaurant or go to the Café Popular for
pan dulce
and
café con leche
, then get a fresh pineapple juice from the juice bar across Cinco de Mayo and take their breakfast to the Zocalo to sit in the winter sunlight. Their lives are going to hell, so they eat and drink and smoke cigarettes, as if they were twenty-five, ignoring mortality, middle age, and propriety. The narrator has left her husband without any problems or seeming consequences, met a sexy younger man and embarked on an affair with him, and started a whole new life in her own apartment.

The book was, of course, sheer fantasy. I was trying to stay in my own marriage, so I let Josie do all the things I couldn’t let myself do but most yearned to.

Yet as hard as I tried to ignore the gaping loneliness I still felt in my marriage, to put a good face on things in a Pollyannaish way, that lifelong habit of mine, I was still having panic attacks and crying jags. I started drinking far too much, even more than usual, and stopped eating. I became very thin. I flirted maniacally and drunkenly and indiscriminately. I was behaving like a starving animal. I felt as if I were going to explode, but I didn’t know how to leave. Jon was so good to me, so loyal and kind and generous and devoted. He did not deserve to have his marriage end. So, given my inability to face myself, the only way I found to leave was to become the villain, to create chaos, rip a hole in the fabric of my life to escape through. I had to unravel, behave crazily, wreck enough of Jon’s trust and respect to allow him to let me go.

I
n August 2008, I flew to Guadalajara to meet Jon, who had gone down a week earlier to hang his work for a group show at the Ex-Convento del Carmen. It had been curated by
two Mexican artist friends, both of them named Carlos, who had a loft in the building where Jon had his studio. All the artists in the show were from Brooklyn, a Bushwick collective the Carloses had dubbed the Leonard Codex. Hundreds of people came.

Afterward, Paco, the gallery director, invited a few of us over to his beautiful, strange, dark house, where every wall and surface was crammed full of small paintings and artifacts and his own work, an assemblage of eerie, mechanical, Victorian wind-up toys and boxes. Three guinea pigs and two reeking, semisavage dogs had the run of the place. Paco played 1950s Mexican cha-cha on his old record player, and we all ate roast pork with rice and beans and drank huge amounts of tequila and danced. Jon and I sat alone, close together on the couch, and leaned our heads against each other, smiling at everyone. “You two are so in love,” said the smart, serious Dutch girlfriend of one of the Carloses. I felt a lurch in my chest.

The next morning, Jon and I rented a car and drove to Cuyutlán, a tiny town on the Pacific coast, for two nights. It was the off-season. We were the only guests in the huge, crumbling, formerly super-mod hotel that must have been very swank about forty years earlier. It was like
The Shining
set in Brasilia, a long-gone architect’s modernistic sci-fi dream, rooms built around the inner wall of a huge curving shell, the lobby set within, with internal freestanding rooms, the now-closed bar, restaurant, and dance floor as grand as an MGM movie-musical set, now all falling to pieces, with chunks of concrete breaking off and plaster sconces detaching from walls. We were given the room on the top floor at the very end; we perched up in the furthermost corner in a little box with a tiled balcony that looked out over the black volcanic beach and the ocean. Except for the two of us, all seventy or so rooms were empty.

The main street felt like a movie set, too, waiters standing idle, music playing futilely, a hot ocean wind blowing
across empty chairs and tables, ruffling place mats and napkins. Everyone eyed us with hopeful yearning as we strolled up and down the street, studying menus and consulting each other. We finally chose the restaurant directly across from our hotel. As we seated ourselves in the centermost of the empty tables, we could feel a collective sigh around us. Our waitress was a young girl, all merry smiles at having been the lucky winner of our business. She encouraged us to order the fish special, and so, of course, we did. We were served plates of well-fried whole sea fish with heads and tails intact, alongside yellow rice and a limp salad.

Although we had been passionate fellow eaters from our first date all through our fourteen years together, neither of us had much appetite. We didn’t talk about the terrible summer we’d just had, during which Jon had worked night and day in his studio to get his photographs ready for the show, and I had gone very obviously insane with grief, longing, and panic. We sat over our dinners, trying to eat our fish, making quiet, grim jokes about being the only game in town.

After dinner, we crossed the street for a drink, because there seemed to be another customer in the outdoor bar attached to the hotel, a man sitting alone, hunched over his laptop, wearing headphones. He turned out to be the owner and local expat; he was American, and he had married the daughter of the previous owner. He was a chain-smoking, shambolic, entertaining, obsessive music buff who mixed drink after drink for us—Herradura mixed with a weirdly delicious neon-blue soda—while he played us choice, rare old R&B and jazz he’d downloaded into his computer. At about two in the morning, we got up to go. He begged us not to leave. There were so many more songs he wanted to play for us.

We crossed the street to our dark, cavernous hotel and climbed the stairs to our room. Its tiled floor was slick with condensation, and the air was stuffy and humid. We opened
the window and went to bed. I lay awake for a long time, listening to the wind blowing steadily off the ocean. Jon lay next to me. I thought he was asleep, but then he asked out of the darkness, “Are you having an affair?”