Tsunami Across My Heart (10 page)

Right there.

I picked up the phone and dialed the number. The phone rang, once, twice, three times, four. A voice on an answering machine predictably explains that no one is home, and instructs me to leave a message.

Surely I am desperately out of my mind because I actually do leave a message. I’m sure that my voice shook. “Uhm. I’m calling for Eric. This is Marissa, I need to talk to him about something that’s happened, and I’m in town for a few days. Please call…”

I was terrified. With the same symptoms as usual, pounding heart and sweaty palms, I hung up the phone and wondered if I’d hear from him at all.

I didn’t hear from him that day, the next, or for three more days after that. I assumed by then that I would not hear from him at all. One afternoon though, I came in from shopping with my mother and there was a message from Eric. My heart pounded. My hands were sweating. Some things just always remained the same. I went into the guest room alone, read his number off of the piece of paper. Waited while the phone rang, and he answered.

“Eric?” I tentatively said. “It’s Marissa.”

“HEY!! It was great to hear your voice! How are you?” he said

We talked a long time and the whole story poured out of me. I don’t know how I avoided it but for some reason I didn’t cry. It was as though there had not been seven whole years of silence between us, and the shorthand and easy laughter was still instantly there as though everything was suspended in time.

He was still married, though not any more happily than I was. He had a son, who he adored. He didn’t want to face what I was facing, hoped to make it better but admired my willingness to consider alternatives. When I told him what David had actually done? He said “My God Marissa. With what happened with your Dad what could he have done that would have been worse?”

Of course, he intuitively, implicitly knew the horror of it, the particular specific horror of it, and why it was such a perfectly exacted revenge, whether I’d deserved David’s revenge or not. It was the one comfort I was sure of, that came in just the way I needed it to. I just simply didn’t’ have to explain anything at all about why or how it had devastated me in just the precise way that it had.

His wife was out of town, but I was leaving the next day and she was returning the next day and I wasn’t really prepared for him to see me bloated from alcohol and worn to an absolute frazzle. I didn’t want to cheat, it was wrong, and I didn’t want him to cheat, it was wrong.

I went home to
Loveland
, the small burg ironically chosen for my desire to have love in my marriage once again, and we stayed in touch a few weeks. I wrote of him then, passionately, and shared my thoughts and feelings with him more than once. We were hot for one another. It was steamy and on the verge of dangerous.
I told myself I would not act on these feelings and so did he. It was the first time I’d felt passion in years. It was the first time I remembered feeling desirable in years. He poured out his heart and I poured out mine.

Suddenly, when David came home and dished out his negativity about me, I felt a buffer between him and me. I felt strong for the first time in months on end.

One Friday afternoon a few short weeks after I’d returned, I got the job offer in
Atlanta
I had been hoping for and my exit was imminent.
 

Am I sure I want the job? Yes! Yes. No, I don’t need to think about it over the weekend I’m sure I want to take it. When do you need me to be there?” I said into the phone. The silence hung in the air as I listened to her answer. “I’ll leave by Monday then. I can start next week.”

David was eavesdropping on my conversation from the open window of the den, and that is how he realized I was actually going to leave. For two days I prepared to pack and go and he said nothing about it of any substance as I did laundry and cleaned. I asked him to follow me and to go to see Rabbi Ohr in
Atlanta
. He’d offered free counseling for us if he went. David said no, he wouldn’t go, that he hated
Atlanta
, my friends, my family, and didn’t want to live there.
Atlanta
was a cesspool, remember?

Two days later when I left it was extremely ugly, the tension between us so thick and tight. My friend Mindy and her daughter came to help me pack the car and to say goodbye. I’m in the garage with David and the menacing hateful look has returned to his face. He’s angry? Incredible to me that he had the audacity to blame me for the end of our marriage after I’d begged him to change things so many times.

His eyes bore into me. “I hate them, and I won’t do a thing to take care of them. I hate them because they are half of YOU. You’ll leave here and I won’t send a penny. I won’t see them. No one will ever have you again because no one wants to raise another man’s brats.”

I was stunned, taken aback. “I can’t believe you’d say such a thing. Even for you, that’s incredible. But I’m leaving because you’ve given me no other choice but to leave and that’s what’s best for me and for our children, whether you love them or not. I can’t go on this way, angry all day and drinking all night. They can’t go on this way, and now after years of your refusing to get a job to take care of your family, we’re going to lose this house and it will happen while
Brittany
is just entering the first grade. I can’t do that to her, and you shouldn’t have either.”

He packed the rest of our things, put the children in the car, kissed them good bye and told them that he loved them and would miss them. I supposed I should have been grateful he didn’t utter his hateful statements to their faces.

He stood by the car while I refused to believe he had meant what he said and I asked him again to come for counseling in
Atlanta
. At one point we did actually go to Imago therapy in
Atlanta
together. Our first meeting together, the rabbi who married us, Rabbi Ohr, had us make a list of the things that each of us wanted in order for us to be the perfect mate to the other. He listed his first, as was always the way it went with David. I listed mine to him. They were typical, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary.

“So what did you learn about what Marissa wants David?” asked Rabbi Ohr. How a man who was short in stature seemed huge was secreted in the size of his heart, his kind brown eyes, and the gentle smile that adorns his face.

“Nothing. I’ve known what she wants all along. This is nothing new.” He says this in a flippant, slightly defiant manner. I feel stunned, slapped by both the words and the delivery.

I sat there incredulous. “If you knew what I wanted, what it would take for me to be happy with you and to make our marriage happy, and it was so little, so ordinary, why wouldn’t you give me that?”

“I didn’t want to.” He said flatly.

Nothing he had said before or since could have been truer. It was the last straw for me. The tears welled up and overflowed and I can remember that my breath was escaping from me and I just wanted out, away from him, once and for all. I realized then that he had never kept a single promise he had made to me. Times he’d said “I have never lied to you about anything important.” Made me realize that nothing was important to him and so he lied about everything. The whole thing was a farce, meant for me to take care of him, and in failing to do it as well as his mother had, anything I got, I deserved.

It was over.

The first six weeks in
Atlanta
were hard. I quit drinking three days after I left David and my need to push down my anger and my constant sense of violation was relieved. He still made me feel mad, still made me feel violated, but I had respite and relief and I could hang up the phone or close the email and he didn’t have the power he had before.

I didn’t expect Eric to do anything but be a cheerleader from afar if that much. But he kept in touch to see if I was ok and his presence was comforting to me. Before long, I did see him. I know I shouldn’t have and it wasn’t very many times.

The first time I saw him we had lunch. I was so much heavier than the thin very pretty version of me. He was shocked when he saw me again after so many years apart. I could tell by the way he almost stopped walking when he saw me and he masked his response so quickly, but he was extraordinarily sweet about it.

He kissed me hello and took me to lunch. He looked exactly the same, as though he had not aged a day, as though he hadn’t had a moment of hell. He was charming and sexy. It was so easy to talk to him. We were still good friends and while there had been flirtation by email, I knew he had not been prepared to greet this very Rubinesque version of my physique. Yet I could tell I comforted him emotionally and psychologically in a way he was missing and that our friendship was still a comfort to him.

Eventually, months into my divorce, when I was losing weight and feeling more attractive and more like me again, we met in a hotel one afternoon. I got there first and when he came into the room I took his clothes off as quickly as I could. As I pushed him naked on the hotel bed and slid on top of him “Oh my God, that is some sweeeeeet……” he actually said it again right out loud. He knew now the way it had haunted me, surrounded me, and made me long for him. Once again the absolutely perfect fit and the smile of sweet relief upon his face…upon my own, I was in heaven.

“It is. It is. It’s a perfect fit, even now.” I said breathlessly and I made love to him with perfect abandon.

We lay together talking. It had been great, like it always had been between us. I don’t think it meant as much to him as it meant to me, and I don’t think I was prepared to admit what it meant to me even then. His confidence at pleasing me wasn’t there like it had been. He seemed shy even or maybe just hesitant and I misread his guilt for a lack of confidence. I was angry with Roxanne for emasculating him and I felt surprisingly guilt free. I sat there and told myself he had been mine first and since his wife wasn’t the same religion as we were, well, then it didn’t count as adultery. Not exactly. Amazing, my ability to justify the act of taking what I wanted, but there it was and I wasn’t proud of it, but that’s the truth of it.

“I actually have never cheated on her Marissa.” I swore I wouldn’t do this. But God, I’ve been so unhappy for so long. I’m so tired of jumping through hoops and having to say just the right things, and do just the right things, and get her prepared in just the right way. I mean for ONCE I’d like it to be just the way I’d like it to be. She’s just so fucking particular and she’s constantly busting my balls. We’ve been to therapy endlessly, it never gets better. I work my ass off and I just wish she’d back off…” His voice trailed off and I knew inside he was traveling around that same circle I had traveled so many times before and suddenly it didn’t seem right to confide this in me. What to do with a marriage that refused to work? What to do?

I was quiet a moment. Not sure if I should be honest about what I was thinking, but it was our way to be honest with one another. “I wish I could say I was sorry Eric. I’m just not. It was wonderful being with you after all these years. Just the way I remembered it,
 
exactly. I thought of you just this way every time I was lonely or hurt or longing for something better than I’d chosen for myself. I needed you and while I know it’s wrong, and that I shouldn’t be here, and you shouldn’t be here, I just feel like I need you more than she does right now and I’ll just have to live with myself for doing the thing I know is wrong. It is very selfish of me, and I’m sorry not to hold back when I know intrinsically the weakness you feel too.”

“I know Marissa. I understand.” He kissed me, and then, “God what time is it? It’s getting dark.” he got up to get dressed. “That was great, just like it always was. It never changes with us, no matter how long we’re apart.”

Yet again, we parted and my expectations and demands were zero of him. He had to face his own demons as I was facing mine. There was no realistic end of the road that culminated in his loving me instead, in marrying me, and I knew it.

Somehow a lack of a future didn’t matter; the friendship maintained merit without a sexual relationship intact. We still talked periodically and we were both worried about being discovered. We weren’t looking to start an actual affair.

Six months later I found myself suddenly free of responsibilities and I called him, longing to be with him again, despite the complications, despite it all. He was out of town but not that far away, just two hours in the closest city far enough away to justify an overnight visit. I was trying to seduce him again. He was game.

I got there late in the evening because the weather was horrible and traffic delayed. I felt thinner, more beautiful, more confident yet again than the last time I’d seen him. I entered the steak house, white linen table cloths, candlelight, with the same confidence and sense of beauty I’d felt coming out of the train station years before. My sense of guilt absent once again I just looked forward to being with him again.

He stood as I approached the table and pulled my seat out for me as I sat down. “You are looking quite lovely this evening. How are you doing?” he leaned over and kissed my cheek and then situated himself again.

“I’m doing much better, thank you. It’s hard sometimes, but I haven’t regretted leaving him, not once.” I said while smoothing blonde curls behind my ears and spreading the napkin across my lap.