Blue Plate Special (38 page)

HOPPIN’ JOHN

Jon’s and my favorite holiday tradition together was our annual New Year’s Day party, the good luck hoppin’ John hangover cure. We invited every single person we knew and made a huge spread. We started cooking on the morning of New Year’s Day after we’d had some coffee. Jon always made two roasts and a glazed ham, and then, when they were in the oven, he made pitchers of Bloody Mary mix, and meanwhile, I made the sides: a huge pot of hoppin’ John—spicy black-eyed peas
with long-grain rice and andouille; two trays of oozing mac and cheese with a crusty top; collard greens stewed in cider vinegar and lardons; and jalapeño cornbread with a honey glaze. On the table in the kitchen, we set out stacks of paper plates and plastic forks; on the dining room table, shrimp cocktail, cornichons, bread, cheese, olives, crackers, salami; and on the sideboard, the ice bucket, stacks of plastic cups, the pitchers of Bloody Marys, bottles of various kinds of booze and wine, cut-up lemons and limes, and seltzer
.

Starting at four o’clock, our house began to fill with people and music and cigarette smoke; someone always lit a fire in the living room fireplace. People brought desserts, liquor, interesting presents. Often, later on, we all danced. Dingo circulated with his snout to the ground, inhaling whatever he could find; he was always sluggish for a day or two after the party, but there was no stopping him
.

For the quasivegetarians in the crowd, I used organic turkey andouille instead of pork sausage in the hoppin’ John, and for speed, I used canned black-eyed peas
.

Sauté 1 chopped onion; 2 ribs celery; 1 each green and red pepper, chopped; and many cloves of minced garlic in plenty of olive oil. Add while it’s all cooking generous dashes of cumin, paprika, salt, pepper, thyme, as well as 2 chopped jalapeño peppers and a bay leaf. Add 2 chopped turkey andouille sausages and sauté until everything is fragrant and soft. Add 2 cups of chicken broth, a can of diced tomatoes, several shots of Tabasco, 2–3 cans of rinsed black-eyed peas, and ½ cup long-grained white rice. Make sure there’s enough liquid to cook the rice and have it wind up just a tiny bit on the soupy, rather than dry, side. Taste—adjust seasonings—cook until rice is soft. Serve with Tabasco.

Once the question of having kids was completely moot, our marriage began to run aground. We retreated to separate wells of misery and lost each other. Food, which had always sustained and protected our bond, could no longer fill the emptiness, and our once-joyful, decadent drinking became numbing and solitary.

During recent years, I had wallowed in a series of crushes on other men, as a way of trying to find some respite from the grief and strife Jon and I were going through. I was a terrible flirt, but I never even remotely crossed a line into actual adultery. Now, as our marriage disintegrated even further, as Jon and I shut each other out and buried ourselves in work and alcohol and threw an affectionate gloss over the big hole in our marriage, I became unhinged, unmoored, ungrounded. I did something that had terrible consequences, something that changed the course of my life.

In August 2006, I had an affair with possibly the worst person I could have chosen. He was Jon’s old college friend; his wife had briefly been Jon’s girlfriend in college. They lived in our neighborhood with their two kids. Nathan and I were both starving and lonely, and had been for many years. We found each other, recognized each other, and didn’t even try to resist. We were both far too desperate to be rational or cautious or good.

Our affair was very short, as well as euphoric, druglike, and vertiginous. Nathan was a poet, a songwriter, a romantic; he was sensitive, dreamy, quiet, soothing, calm. I sincerely believed I’d found my soul mate, my true love. He felt exactly the same way about me, or at least he told me so, that I was the woman he’d always hoped to find. And so we plunged into a free-fall swoon of ecstatic communion. Neither of us tried to stop it or slow it down.

Actually, my lovesick dementia was so far gone, I couldn’t imagine that anything bad could ever come of something that felt so purely right, so urgently necessary, so destined. Somehow, I imagined that when our love came to light, the world would rejoice with us, including his wife and two kids, including Jon. Obviously, I was out of my mind, beyond all rational thought; extramarital affairs are said to mimic the effects of crack on the brain, and this strikes me as totally true in my own case. To justify and augment my complete severance from reality, I fantasized that we were living inside a poem, that this love between us was foreordained and unstoppable.

But one afternoon, I brought him a picnic—cheese, olives, artichoke hearts, figs, chocolate, wine. He looked at this spread, which I had laid out before him with anticipation of the happiness it would give him, and said flatly, as if he didn’t care at all about it, “yummy.” And then he paid no attention to it. I should have known then that our so-called true love was illusory: he didn’t care about food. A small alarm bell went off in my head then. But I ignored it. To pay attention to it would have forced me to face this terrible thing I was doing, would have introduced a jot of reality and sober truth into our folie à deux. So I pushed it aside and went on telling myself that this was the perfect love I’d always wanted.

The end came ten days into our affair, when we fell off the cliff and decided that we had to be together for real and blow up our marriages. That night, Nathan told his wife that
he wanted to leave her to be with me. The next day, when he told me, we both panicked; here was the dose of reality we’d needed to make us see things as they were.

“You can’t leave your marriage,” I said. “Mine is over, but you can’t leave, at least not for me. You have kids.”

“You’re right,” he said. It was agonizing and unthinkable to us in our current state, but we agreed to end our affair. He would stay in his marriage, and I would leave mine, and this thing between us was over. We left the hotel and said good-bye and went our separate ways.

The next morning, Nathan’s wife went into his e-mail account and read an e-mail he’d just sent to me, in which he said he was going back on our agreement and asked if we could meet that afternoon. I wrote back to say yes. Immediately, his wife called me to beg me to leave him alone. Properly mortified finally, and horrified at myself, I assured her I would let him go and that the affair was really over. And after that, except for the letter I wrote him to say good-bye, a letter his wife intercepted and read, I did not talk to or contact Nathan ever again. He went back to his marriage, and the waters closed over our love affair, whatever it had been.

That day, in tears but resolute, I told Jon that I was leaving him and that our marriage was over. I told him that I’d fallen in love with Nathan, but it was over. When he asked if we’d had an affair, I had to tell him the truth. I could not allow him to hear it from anyone else, but part of me wanted to tell him, to make the marriage irreparable. It was a means of escaping, of shattering everything so that he’d force me to leave.

Of course, he was devastated, hurt and furious. But he also said instantly that he knew he had been neglecting me, taking me for granted. He vowed to win me back. He asked if I’d see a therapist with him. I told him I didn’t think there was any hope for our marriage, but therapy might help us end it.

A few days later, I moved into the basement apartment
of an old house behind a French restaurant in Hunters Point, Queens. It was one big room with stone walls, an old fireplace, small high-up windows, a beamed wooden ceiling, and a door out to a back garden. It was half dungeon, half French country cottage, the perfect place to go crazy in.

Technically, I shared a kitchen with the couple who lived upstairs, my landlords, but I never used it; I didn’t feel like interrupting their twosome. They were strangers, and I was feeling low and antisocial. They fought a lot late at night, drunkenly shouting at each other overhead. I found this immensely soothing as I lay awake. It was good to hear voices in my deep dungeon solitude. It was good to know that other marriages were fucked up.

I spent every morning at my desk, drinking coffee and writing my fourth novel,
The Great Man
, while cooks and bus-boys came out to smoke by the Dumpsters in the courtyard. I watched their feet through the window above me. For breakfast every morning, I ate thick, sweet gluten-free bread with peanut butter. After I finished my day’s work, in the early afternoon, I walked over the Pulaski Bridge to my old house. Dingo had stayed with Jon in Greenpoint, since my new landlord didn’t accept pets. He barked at me despairingly, questioningly every time I arrived. Jon had already left for the day; the agreement was that he did the morning and bedtime walks, and I did the long afternoon ones. Dingo and I roamed through the parks and the streets of north Brooklyn every day, sometimes for hours. Every evening, I took him home and fed him, and on most nights I left him there and walked back to my self-imposed exile in Queens, wishing I could bring him with me.

Because I had no kitchen of my own, I ate in the unfamiliar restaurants of Hunters Point. I had no close friends during this time, or rather, I had allowed myself to drift away from my friends because I was too deeply immersed in the knotty problem of my own life to be good company, so I ate alone.
Afterward, I went back to my underground burrow and stayed up reading as late as I could. Finally, when my eyes started to cross, I went to bed to lie awake and wait for daylight, wondering whether a person could literally go mad and die from loneliness.

The abrupt, forced end of my just-begun love affair, just when hormones and feelings and mania were surging as high as they could go, was weirdly and extremely traumatic, like a psychic amputation in whose aftermath the phantom pain from the missing limb was almost unendurable. To make things worse, facing my part in the end of my marriage and the suffering I’d caused Jon would have been adequate punishment, but Nathan’s wife had told the two biggest gossips in our group of friends about the affair. Soon, everyone knew. I might as well have worn a scarlet
A
on my chest when I walked Dingo through north Brooklyn. Although I knew I had no right to expect a speck of sympathy from a single person and received none, the fallout caused me a shocking amount of pain. I felt like I was in a waking nightmare.

My mother had told me, when I was much younger, that an extramarital affair is never a good idea; it’s really about problems in the marriage, and involving another person never ends well for anyone. It’s always better to end a marriage on its own terms. Of course, she had been right. And of course, I had ignored her advice. But she didn’t say “I told you so.” She came to visit me. She listened without giving advice. She was stalwart and kind, and she didn’t judge me. She was worried about me, but she treated me as if I’d be okay, as if what I’d done was really no big deal, and this was just a little bump I’d get over. This was exactly what I most needed. I didn’t tell her how heartbroken and crazy I felt. I didn’t want to; it would only have upset her and exacerbated the pain I was in. So we talked very little about what had happened. Instead, we walked Dingo together, drank wine in the evenings, and talked about
books, about Susan’s kids, about my mother’s happy new life as a retiree back in Arizona, in a town called Oracle outside Tucson. By the time she left, I felt comforted, but the instant she was gone, all the demons came back again howling.

Cathi, who had been my best friend since before my marriage, tried very hard to empathize with and understand this sudden, alarming turn of events in my life, even though it had shocked her that I’d suddenly had an affair and left Jon, since I’d convinced us both that I was happy in my marriage. But try as she might, she could not respond to me in a way that I could tolerate. Whatever she said, I felt judged, which made me agitated, defensive, and hurt. I told her I needed her to listen; I knew I’d fucked up. No one could be harder on me right now than I was being on myself. She told me she loved and supported me unconditionally, but she couldn’t help worrying about me and trying to help me do the right thing; it was human nature, it was what friends were for. I got more and more angry at her, until she finally told me she couldn’t help me, and she needed a break. Her reaction was visceral, instinctive, and honest. I felt as if I’d lost her, and she felt the same way about me.