“Coming Unstuck” was the title of a Daily Om in my inbox back in early July. About how when we seem unable to make progress toward goals, a change of perspective to adapt to changing conditions can be key. Or, if this proves fruitless, you might “contemplate whether your lack of progress might be a sign from your mind or body that you are in dire need of rest and relaxation.” Yes, the latter. This was in the middle of a working holiday weekend. Independence Day.
Note to reader: although I think most of you understand that this blog contains both personal and les collines information, especially as I have not posted much of late I want to take a moment to alert anyone unaware that posts under Daily Grace, where you are now, are personal essays, whereas posts under Les Collines are related to all things jelly & preserves. What follows are indeed highly personal reflections so please read no further if your interest is limited to les collines.
À nos moutons. Around the same time, I watched Jennifer Araoz on Today as she described being raped at 15 by Jeffrey Epstein. That man, no words. Just, another horrifying sign of the times. From the time the Weinstein story began to break, like so many I have found the stories of women coming forward incredibly compelling. Mesmerizing, at moments, and triggering. I remember telling the man with whom I was having a long-running affair that I recognized in some of the descriptions of Weinstein’s gross misuse of power the imbalance that existed in our own constrained and tortured connection. I was trying to have a real relationship with a married man who could not counter change. Tortured. He got angry with me, at the comparison, and righteous. But it was apt.
So it was that just after Independence Day I began thinking about this coming unstuck, which extrapolated into coming unglued, definitely not interchangeable– so close language-wise yet so far. Get unstuck, move on, get unglued, uh oh. How women continue to be too frequently and disproportionately tagged as overemotional, as well as wily pursuers of, and purveyors of stories against, men. Have you ever heard coming unglued used for a man? I can’t think of an instance. Do men ever really fall apart? Or are they always in control somehow, so that these terms don’t apply? Women become hysterical, men shut down. Right.
In the midst of these ruminations, high season production, and driving Ocean Blue 382 in the heat with no AC, after a long reprieve I passed the man with whom I had the long-running affair. This happens occasionally, driving in opposite directions on our local two-lane roads I see his car, or sometimes the Wife’s, and find myself wanting to drive off the road to remain out of their odious energy field.
Mid-July. Six months since the last, brutal severing. There were quite a few through the years, with five the final tally, six if you include a first, discounted text discovery, followed with coming back together, rinse, repeat– and now, there is passing on the road. At these moments I experience revulsion and a strong desire to look away. But I had passed him one warm July evening, good boy on his timely way home, and then again a mere twelve hours later, coming from his secluded estate. Driving into the sun, he was slowed behind construction trucks, and this time I was strangely compelled to look. A good look at the man who abandoned me in the middle of winter, having promised not to, never again, snapped in by the umbilical cord one. more. time. As things blew out, she had a forensic accountant digging through his stuff, he claimed, which initially I thought meant they were finally divorcing, thank God, toxic cleanup at last. But no, just more of the awful, same, til death do us part. Dig away. Her positive influence ran to advising him to have a lawyer send me a letter to end our affair.
NB: The affair was emotional for several years before it became three-dimensional over several more. The discoveries, separations, reunions, blocked phones, tracked email, tracked phone. Last I checked you can’t block or track hearts and minds, though. Soon enough.
Before January the previous blowout was spring 2018, when he forgot to turn the tracked phone off. Sigh. Which led to a few unforgettable scenes, then the usual complete silence. Not a note, postcard, voicemail, “I’m sorry.” “We’ll talk in a month.” From speaking and seeing each other every day to blackout. Back in Wife orbit. This can’t be, I magically thinking thought; me being me I had to stand up for the feelings, real, complex. Too slowly I came to understand he’d accept any terms and put a coat of high gloss on them to avoid any change, confront any demons.
His terror of losing life as he knew it kept him in a marriage he was dead set on presenting as A-ok, alternately cajoled and bullied to ensure the lifestyle remained intact. Before I showed up, he was having his heart ablated, a week after his father died, and again nine months later. His heart. Oh, but everything was hunky dory, yep. His family and inner circle treat him like a dependable putz, the amenable clean up guy. A role he’s comfortable with, apparently.
Like the country song says, I may not know what love is, but I know what love ain’t.
So it was in late spring 2018, still in shock, delusional too, I reached out, foolish, foolish heart. Multiple conversations, a full frontal session in a car by a barn, two months it took for him to realize he’d handled it horribly, abominably. He should not, never have left me in silence, he could and should have handled it differently, should not treat anyone that way. Would not, never do that again. Over the next six months we remained in close contact, yes close, speaking multiple times a day, seeing each other infrequently (tracker and all), always so many horror scenes. They’ll have to wait for the comic novel.
It’s been a rough seven years even apart from this story with him, multiple challenges and searing losses, beginning around the time of my mother’s death in October 2011. He knew my story. Ah but he was torn, dutiful, felt he had to try to work on his marriage (two plus years of counseling, begun after the first/second blow up, wasn’t enough. Awhile back, I heard a review on NPR of a new collection of short stories, one describing a woman’s conversation with her lover on his way to marriage counseling. Ugh. You can write this stuff). While he continually wanted to claim love for his wife, it never felt like love, rather a brute obligation that he was good at whitewashing, especially for himself. He has a knack, and it has carried him through a lot. He also loved me. Terrible place to be. Tell me you really love her, and of course I’ll step aside, was the prisoner’s dilemma he was presented with. Knowing his inability to hurt her anymore than he already had, it was never a question.
Now, in the slow moving July traffic I took a good look; he stared ahead. He actually glanced the other way, probably looking for escape. He could have nodded, smiled, lifted a hand, some sign of human connection. He acted as if I did not exist, passing him in my hotbox car, he with his windows rolled up.
(APRÈS sept ans de malheurs
Elle brisa son miroir.)
(AFTER seven years of misfortunes
She shattered her mirror.)
from Francis Ponge, “Fable”
If I survived, I knew I’d write about it eventually, and a comic novel is indeed the form it’s likely to take. But at that moment something began to come completely unstuck in me. Unglued, too. I realized the writing needed to begin sooner than later. Not in a year or ten when I may have time and ease. Here, now. A practice run for the novel.
I let the heat of summer subside into autumn, let it all macerate, hotheaded me bruised, battered, more than a little cautious. Now, the snow is beginning to fall, and the deep midwinter approaches. I’ve continued to pass him occasionally; last week, there was a new variation when I ended up behind him for several miles. I resisted turning off or detouring, refusing to minimize the discomfort on either end. Though I now doubt he is capable of such subtle emotion. There was some small comic relief in that he was nearly driving up the tailpipe of the guy in front of him, trying to scurry away, continue his sad charade of hiding. I don’t see you, so you don’t exist! Well you don’t get to hide, bud, not in my book, no more.
That suffocating weight in my solar plexus, the inability to write anything besides Instagram posts, and those barely, since this all came down. It is time for me to get unstuck, speak up, speak out. Provide an antidote to the poison of the Man and Wife, whatever their awful narrative is negating me in order to hold up their status quo. His cruelty, driving past my house daily month in, month out, and occasionally me in the flesh in my 300K miracle vehicle, without a nod to my existence: this is who he is.
A man of means and some standing, who coldly abandoned a friend– forget about the rest, we were friends. He has issues, his wife has hooks, he ceased feeling them long ago. But in six, eight, now ten months, no crisis of conscience resulting in basic decency toward another sentient being with whom significant time, energy, feelings, and plenty of other stuff were exchanged. Respect their marriage, their relationship? I saw a bit too much for that. “I’m sorry,” was one of his mean verbal tools, to convey an obvious something with a sharp twist of sarcasm. As in, “(insert Hey stupid tone) I’m sorry, but I’m married, remember?” Or, “Oh, I’m sorry, but my wife wouldn’t be cool with that.” My heart would plummet at the tone. Well, I’m sorry dude. Sorry, not sorry to lack respect for a marriage you were running away from (but you loved your wife!) whose questionable existence seemed to require exquisitely cruel treatment and complete lack of respect of me. Just enough balls to have an affair, yet a few short of standing up to the Wife in any way, shape or form.
July’s close encounter, the clear look at his expressionless face staring straight ahead (and looking for escape!) was a terrible moment of grace. Grace. It is not the silky brush of an angel’s wing, a whisper of wisdom in your ear. No, more likely an angel’s wing walloping you in a full body blow. We humans are so stubborn, arrogant, and blind, we have to be knocked down and counted out before we begin to wake up. I once was blind, but now I see. This man I loved, he had a choice. He chose the path of least resistance, and as he told me himself, that means he remains an asshole. It seems a cowardly dishonorable one to boot.
Dude, you made the mistake of not respecting me, and worse, my writing. Your lack of sensitivity might be excused in any number of domains at any given moment– blame the stress, the double life, being torn between this and that, the guilt, and all the rest– but to have been as close to me as you were and not honor that, well that was just one of many signs who you are, and who you are not, and I should have bewared. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Maya Angelou, yes. My big, big bad not to have seen, and believed.
“Tu as une belle plume,” Olivier told me in the year after “Litost” came out. Such a lovely expression, the French sure know how to do those: literally, you have a beautiful feather/pen. A gift for writing, high praise indeed for the French. “You should use it.” One of the few who’s come close to seeing me for who I am. He was right. I should use it. It is time for the writing to return to center stage. And this story with the Man cries out for expression. For me to take the facets that ask for examining and hold them up to the light, like Montaigne in his tower make my essai, attempt, try– this is the origin of our word essay– to write it.
Does the Man have a soul, much less a heart? Did he ever? Did his cleaving to the marriage annihilate both? Sorry, moral highhorsers, stone throwers, glass house dwellers, an extramarital affair doesn’t justify inhumane, cruel treatment of the Other Woman. There was love on both sides; naïve as it may have been to believe in it, it should have meant something.
Dude. Act as if I don’t exist, as if your decision to remain in your marriage renders both me and whatever that love was null and void; leave me dead alone, fighting to survive on all fronts (Clarence, too, but that’s another story) in the dead of winter.
Well, last I checked I do exist. And I can write about it, my existence, including the Man, in whatever ways cry out for it. Nora Ephron’s mother famously told her everything is copy. Amen. If my mother were here I’m guessing she might say the same. Don’t take it. Write it. Silence, officially broken.