Wedding Cake for Breakfast (17 page)

Ghosts of Husbands Past

JUDITH MARKS-WHITE

My husband, Mark, and I arrived at the marital altar like beasts of burden dragging behind us remnants of our past—the overweight baggage of two respective lives. No longer were we the wide-eyed newlyweds of our twenties on the precipice of new beginnings. Slightly frayed around the edges though cautiously optimistic, we approached our first year ready to secure the old knots that had become unraveled and try another marriage on for size.

There is a certain comfort in going the matrimonial route after one has muddled through one's midlife crisis. By now, we had two things going for us: (1) life experience, and (2) well-oiled resiliency. Wounds from previous relationships had healed, or so I thought. The battle scars—our medals—were displayed proudly as proof that we had survived a handful of adversities, and were willing to go another round.

Mark, I soon learned, made smooth transitions, segueing from one marriage to the next like a bird in flight, flitting from nest to nest, and approaching each wife like a shiny new car waiting to be road-tested and broken in. I was his latest model. His colorful and illustrious nuptial past became a family joke. At our wedding in 2002, his brother David's toast resonates still as he echoed the all-familiar and rather startling refrain: “Mark just keeps getting married . . . and married . . . and married.”

I was not amused.

Our histories, equally diverse and tinged with loss, were circumstantially different. Mark had three previous wives to my two husbands. The first, the father of my only child, was all but a distant memory. Ken and I parted ways after five years when our daughter, Elizabeth, was three. He later remarried a flight attendant with whom he developed a “meaningful relationship” thirty thousand feet above the Pacific. I imagined she had won his heart on frequent bicoastal trips by serving him an excess of minibar selections and unlimited bags of salted peanuts and by her ability to sashay down the 747 American Airlines aisle with such panache that he couldn't resist. The strawberry-blond hair didn't hurt either. Where she undulated with sensual dexterity—in high heels, no less—I would have suffered altitude sickness. Her wifely profile was so vastly removed from mine we might have inhabited different planets.

After a while Ken's image became a blurry snapshot slightly out of focus and bearing no resemblance to anyone I had ever intimately known. He simply faded into oblivion, surfacing only for parental purposes when joint decisions demanded our mutual attention. Years later, with our daughter grown and herself a parent, her father and I met only on those rare occasions that forced us to share similar space. The first time was Liz's wedding, when both of us, in a boozy haze, reunited like two long-lost relatives who couldn't quite place each other's face.

This “starter husband” never would have been had I been the woman I eventually came to be. No longer would I be attracted to Ken or him to me, but back in 1963, a year out of college and beginning a career in journalism, I turned to marriage as another rung in the ladder of prescribed protocol—a stepping-stone that officially marked the end of childhood and the start of what I perceived adulthood to be.

It was also a time when the first tremors of women's lib were struggling to break through, but weren't fully realized. Betty Friedan was not yet a household word, though her book
The Feminine Mystique
was starting to cause ripples, becoming the latest discussion at dinner parties. Home and hearth were still the expected MO of “nice girls” who were supposed to be virgins when they married.

There we were, Ken and I, registering at Georg Jensen, Bloomies', and Tiffany, playing out our assigned roles as Mr. and Mrs. Newly Married Couple, teetering on the edge of our own naïveté like two ill-prepared soufflés about to fall at any moment.

After our lavish wedding reception, dressed in my going-away suit and pillbox hat, we sat in the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel sipping glasses of Veuve Clicquot and feeling very grown up while we counted our envelopes of money surreptitiously handed to us by those guests who bypassed the registry items by showering us with cash.

The next morning we left for Puerto Rico, where, on the third day of our honeymoon, in the lobby of the Caribe Hilton Hotel, I ran into an old boyfriend who looked remarkably fit and more handsome than I had remembered, making me wonder if I had, perhaps, hopped on the marriage bandwagon too quickly. In comparison with Bob's muscular biceps bulging through his Izod shirt, my groom looked bleached and thin.

Instead, I dismissed that thought and settled into honeymoon mode, drank piña coladas on the white, sandy beach of San Juan, and worked on my tan. Two years later our daughter was born. Three years after that, Ken and I—the happy little homemakers—divorced. I never looked back.

I have since come to view my marriages as analogous to a three-act play. The curtain falling on act one—which felt more like a dress rehearsal—was followed by a lengthy intermission. It rose again when, with a couple of ill-fated relationships behind me, I was to meet the love of my life.

Call it divine intervention, on which many of life's pivotal moments are based. On a frigid December morning in 1978, I stopped off at Oscar's Deli in Westport, Connecticut, where my daughter and I had moved from Manhattan. After several years of exploring the “meat-market” smorgasbord of possibilities, and having given up any notion of ever meeting Mr. Right, I literally tripped over him standing in line ordering a sesame bagel with a slathering of cream cheese.

Excusing myself for being so clumsy, I serendipitously found a seat on the banquette next to him, and squeezing in, my huge down parka squished between us, I pulled out my prop: the latest novel I was reading. I began flipping pages, pretending to be engrossed but completely aware of his presence. A few minutes later, turning to me, he uttered the words that were ultimately to be repeated for years to come when people asked how we met.

“I don't know if it matters,” he said, “but that book you're reading is upside down.”

I was hooked.

It was a year after that chance encounter that Mort and I were married. Elizabeth's status as only child evolved into stepsister to Mort's three college-age children, who welcomed this fourteen-year-old into the fold with open arms, and just the right amount of sibling rivalry to keep it interesting. Liz played out her “new kid on the block” role with teenage delight, while they enjoyed having a new partner in crime to corrupt. And, a new family was born.

What had become my most significant relationship to date ended abruptly in January 1995, when we had just returned from visiting friends on Cape Cod, Mort threw back his head on our living room couch and died. The suddenness was stupefying as I was catapulted from wife to widow in the drawing of his final breath. Grief-stricken, I went through the next hours in a numbed state of disbelief. Surrounded by family and friends, who helped guide me through the unfathomable mystery of death, I could hardly process the depth of its grip that held me captive by its enormity.

There had been no warning signs, no sudden jolt of recognition that something big was about to happen. Much in the same way Mort had appeared in my life seventeen years earlier, he dramatically left without so much as a good-bye. His heart had simply given out.

After that, and for a long time following, the color drained from my life. I entered a monochromatic world fueled only by memory while the present felt oddly surreal—the future nonexistent. It was my work, my writing and teaching, that exonerated me from alienation into a routine that allowed me to move through my days in a somnambulant stupor—my survival mechanism between what no longer was and the vague uncertainty of tomorrow.

Dinner invitations from friends guaranteed I wouldn't be alone, but did not promise a reprieve from loneliness. For that there was no remedy. I had entered a new phase of my life, assuming the role of widow-in-training. Graciously, and with some trepidation, I gave myself over to those quick to respond by making me their new project.

I visited a chalet in Vermont, where skiing was to become my antidote for depression. I wasn't a skier. A mountain house in the Blue Hills of Virginia presented a similar escape from solitude. By spring, the first honeysuckle appeared. I was whisked off to a lakeside cottage in New Hampshire by friends whose sole purpose was to get me out of my doldrums and cook elaborate meals that would cushion the blow of my recent loss. Instead, I gained three pounds and felt sad. I took long walks on windy beaches and came down with a bad cold. Pretending to be grateful for their concern, I slipped into a kind of anesthetic inertia indicative of the grieving process. I brought along my laptop to record my feelings should an impromptu cathartic moment present itself. I wrote my weekly humor column, met freelance-article deadlines, and worked on my first novel that hadn't yet seen the light of day.

I became a regular traveler, zigzagging between my real life and the escape routes provided by others. My suitcase, a constant companion, eased me into role of rotating houseguest. I spent time with my gallery of friends, who introduced me to the rhythm of their lives, and the myriad activities that went along with them—all perfect distractions for keeping sadness at bay as I became a temporary resident in other people's lives.

Then, like an unwelcome intruder, late-August breezes appeared. Sweaters replaced halter tops, and the first subtle whisper of autumn crept in. It was time to put away porch furniture and throw an extra blanket on the bed. And suddenly it was over. I officially bade farewell to those halcyon days that had been a temporary buffer against my melancholy. I packed my bags, returned home, and silently mourned.

Time, the great equalizer, has a way of, if not completely obliterating gloom, at least of tempering it. If the life force is strong enough, emotional rehabilitation is possible, and slips in subtly like a sliver of sunlight breaking through a cloudy landscape. Eventually, the sting of bereavement ceased to be a sharp knifelike thrust and modulated into a dull ache and then to sporadic twinges that become bearable. Slowly, I emerged from my blackout, the color returning to my life.

The next months, Mort's memory continued to buoy me, so that his nonpresence became pervasive, as though a friendly ghost had taken up residence in the house. I had only to glance at the photos of us lining the shelves, and we were, once again, reunited. It was enough to hold me for a while. I fell in line like a good soldier standing guard over my own life. Weary from battle fatigue, I forged ahead as if nothing were particularly wrong, though not quite right either.

“What choice do you have,” a friend asked, “but to keep going?”

But there were choices, plenty of them. I could fall apart, cave in under the heaviness of my grief. I could surrender to the comfort of apathy or enter a new relationship.

Change occurs when you aren't looking. Act three's curtain rose in 2000 when, just back from a few days away, I was invited to a last-minute dinner party hosted by friends who lived in Manhattan and summered in Westport. The purpose, aside from Mimi's desire for any opportunity to cook, was to introduce a group of her available female friends to a recently separated and on the-fringe-of-divorce bachelor: a Florida import up for the weekend. On a warm July evening, we assembled at Mimi and Michael's house for Mark to assess the harem of hotties and choose from this bevy of postmenopausal divas the one who would make the cut as his weekend companion. Underwhelmed, I agreed to attend.

Shrouded in a shield of ambivalence, I managed to sport a to-die-for outfit and coquettish air that interested Mark enough to call me the next day to invite me to dinner. I had plans. Monday, back in Florida, he asked if he could fly up to see me the following weekend. I casually agreed, feeling mildly amused and flattered, as though I had taken first place in a competitive event whose prize—a man—seemed, at the time, more of a liability than a treasured acquisition.

That Saturday night, Mark and I sat over dinner at a Thai restaurant exploring the menu along with each other's life. He had four daughters. I had one. His grandchildren numbered double digits. I had two. He was a Virgo. I was an Aries—a killer combo. We both loved films, although my passion bordered on addiction. I was a theater buff; Mark, a jazz enthusiast. He could play the piano by ear, but couldn't read music. I could whip up a poem for a birthday party in a couple of hours. We both liked strawberry milk shakes. Neither of us had a burning desire to hike. We could recite passages from favorite childhood poems and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. It was an evening of discovery fraught with the warm realization somewhere between the appetizer and dessert that we were, quite possibly, made for each other.

Along with that scenario were fifteen hundred miles between us that rendered us geographically undesirable, providing the perfect safety net: long-distance dating without infringing on each other's autonomy.

And so, gradually, we settled into a routine as frequent fliers on JetBlue. Where many years earlier my first husband had stumbled upon love in the friendly skies, I was now doing regular runs to the Fort Lauderdale airport. One week I flew south, the next Mark came to Westport. We were introduced to each other's gallery of friends, and before long we became “an item.”

Six months later, having crossed over that fine line between dating and what was referred in high school as “going steady,” I announced with stoic determination: “I'm never moving to Florida.”

He was not a cold-weather person, but was open to new adventures, I being his latest one.

Until now, we had been careful not to use the M-word, though the whiff of it hung heavy in the air. A year later, an engagement ring adorned my finger. Mark relocated to Connecticut, moved into my house, and we married in June at Stonehenge—a lovely inn in Ridgefield, Connecticut—set among wildflowers and a babbling brook, where, surrounded by family and friends all wishing us well, we embarked on this new chapter in our lives.