Results May Vary (12 page)

“That's seriously what you thought I would think?” I whispered, my voice soggy with the urge to cry. “No wonder you cheated on me; you don't even know me.”

“No.
You
don't know. You have no idea what it's like to need to hide part of yourself in order to be respected.”

“You didn't need to hide anything from me,” I said. “You just didn't trust me. Locking me out is the worst thing you could have done. Because now, I don't know you,” I added, my eyes suddenly blurred over. “You've been my husband for ten years, and I do not know who you really are.”

“Yes you do,” he said raggedly, biting off each word. “I swear to you. You know everything that matters.”

Silently I shook my head. Just a few weeks ago, I'd thought I did. But now, the weight of all the possible things that might have been concealed by this man on the other end of the line was crushing the air out of my lungs. God help me, how would I ever be able to watch him do something as basic as sending a text message again, without wondering what it said and where it was headed?

I shouldn't have asked him what I asked him next. As soon as the words spilled from my mouth, I clamped a hand to my throat as if I could somehow force them back in; put them away before he heard them. Because the answer meant everything.

“Did Patrick know about it?”

“Yeah,” said Adam without hesitation, obviously expecting bonus points for telling the truth about something, “but that's because I didn't care—”

“No,” I wailed. “Don't tell me that. Don't tell me you didn't care if he knew.
I
cared.
I
should have known, so I could participate and support you. I am your fucking
wife.
How do you not understand how devastating that is?”

“Caro,” he whispered, catching on way, way too late.

“Don't. I don't want to hear any more. I need to go now, Adam. I need to figure out what I'm going to do.”

“What you're going to do? What do you mean? This doesn't change anything.”

“It changes everything,” I choked out.

“No! No no no no, sweetheart, come on—”

“Is there anything else you need to share with me, before I go? I'm not talking about things you
want
to share, I mean things you
need
to share. Things you owe it to me to tell.”

“No. I promise you. Please don't go.”

“I have to ask you again—have you cheated on me aside from Patrick?”

“No. I swear it.”

I let the words sink into me, and waited to feel a sense of certainty of their truth. But that warmth, that unquestioning trust in him that had pumped through my veins with every beat of my heart for the last seventeen years—it was gone. Without it, I felt flat; dry; blank. I felt…empty.

“That means literally nothing to me anymore,” I said.

The very first night of our honeymoon, Adam reached across the café table and took my hand. “I can't wait till it's forty years from now,” he said. “And we're back here for our anniversary, and I can annoy everyone we meet by telling them in my broken Italian that it's our fortieth year of marriage. I'll say, ‘Isn't she beautiful,' and they'll say ‘Yes, she is'—”

“Because they're humoring you,” I said, smiling.

“Yes, and because they want a nice tip, but still, they'll say it. Because you will be. You're going to be so beautiful with wrinkles and gray hair.”

And he meant it, too. Adam was exactly the kind of man who would see true beauty in an older woman's face, in the creases earned by time, without wishing for the bloom of her vanished youth. I had held that truth close to me, as we talked through all the things we wanted to share in our lives, all the miles we wanted to walk together.

But as we strolled, hand in hand, to our hotel, I wondered. Not everyone lives to be sixty-three. Cancer, drunk drivers, freak accidents—none of those things were known to be particular about the ages of the people they culled.

I walked next to my husband of less than forty-eight hours, feeling the warm skin and flexing joints of his fingers between mine, and I thought about the fact that one of us might die young. I thought about how it was possible one of us might be called to act upon “in sickness” rather sooner than seemed fair, and as I listened to the rumble and flow of his voice on the drifting June breeze, I was prepared to do it. The one thing that never entered my mind was that anything but death would end us.

It used to be that when I opened my eyes to his face in the morning, I smiled. My marriage, in some ways, had been as simple as that being with Adam made me deeply, deeply happy. Of course there were shared goals and long history and a thousand more complicated things; but in the morning, always, the first thing was the joy. It renewed itself, with every joke, every kiss, every kindness. I just…loved him. And he loved me in return, so I basked in it like a cat stretched out in a sunbeam. Adam, and his love, made me content.

And yet, he didn't feel the same. Whatever his reasons for doing what he'd done, his actions revealed a man who was restless, unsatisfied, uncertain. A man who hadn't trusted me enough to share his whole truth with me—not about who he was in bed, nor who he was in the work he cared so passionately about. None of what I'd thought I knew about him, about us, could be relied upon anymore.

It reminded me of the one and only time I'd gone scuba diving, on a trip to Mexico with Adam. It was a shallow dive among the coral reefs, in less than twenty-five feet of water, so at the end the instructor had simply signaled, grabbed our elbows, and tugged us up. Halfway up, I realized the air pressure in my ear wasn't equalizing properly as I breathed, but the instructor didn't understand my frantic waving, and when we broke the surface a few moments later I felt a pop of pain as the expanded air left my skull through a brand-new hole in my eardrum.

And then everything went sideways. With the sudden trauma to my ear, my equilibrium was unmoored, and the horizon pitched and rolled sickeningly as I flailed. The thing that brought me back was Adam. He caught my hands and planted them on his shoulders and held them there, firm and steady, until I knew which way was up.

But this time, it wasn't Adam I could ground myself with. Adam had become the horizon—the one thing I had counted on to stay in place, the line that sliced my world into up and down. I closed my eyes against the remembered vertigo, and my horizon, it just rolled and rolled and rolled.

It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it….No one HAS to do something he doesn't want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that's what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You'll have lots of company.

—Hunter S. Thompson to Hume Logan, April 22, 1958

Adam and I were married at New York's Episcopal cathedral, St. John the Divine, on a warm, rainy June afternoon. Nobody wants it to rain on their wedding day, but I didn't mind a bit; in fact, that soft, friendly rain wound up being the thing I liked most about all the circumstances of the wedding itself. Aside from the dress and the groom, little else about it was what I would have chosen: the June date (I'd wanted October); the Manhattan location (I would have preferred a country church in Dutchess County near the Hammonds' upstate home); the grandiosity of the whole affair. But the Hammonds were footing the bill, so I understood it was only fair to go along with what they wished. “For the honeymoon, we'll do whatever you want,” Adam had promised.

At my father-in-law's request, the ceremony was performed by the same priest who had married himself and Adam's mother twenty-five years before, and baptized their infant son. I have a vivid memory of meeting Jonathan's eyes as I proceeded up the aisle: Strapped into his rented gray suit, with his bright ponytail spilling over the collar, he looked like a teenager playing dress-up, and for this brief, wild second the thought dashed through my brain of
What are we doing, why are we doing this, we are too young, this is crazy.
But then I blinked, and I looked up at Adam, who was watching me walk toward him with this smile like he was seeing the sunrise for the very first time. And then I took his hands, and the ceremony started, and all the rest of it dropped away. “What God has joined,” said the priest after he had pronounced us husband and wife, “let no man put asunder.”

And yet, there I was, ten years later, getting ready to put it asunder with my very own hands. Leaving would mean losing the entire narrative of my future as I thought I'd known it. And I could not even begin to imagine what might transpire in its place. But as I lay there, on that long August night when I discovered the depth of what Adam had hidden from me, the certainty calcified inside me, brittle but hard. I could not stay married to this man.

While dawn soaked slowly into the sky, I mentally replayed the wedding in reverse: releasing Adam's hands, walking backward up the aisle, getting into the car that would take me back to my parents' apartment, where I would step free of the foamy white dress that hung now in my guest room closet down the hall. Retracing my steps to the city hall marriage bureau where we filed for our license, only this time I would be filing the petition to divorce.

It turned out that New York State, somewhat sensibly I suppose, does not want you to rush out and drop divorce papers on your spouse's head without some sort of deliberate interlude of consideration. According to the very informative .gov website that I spent the following evening perusing, I would have to sit out a six-month period of separation before the state would even entertain the notion of reviewing my filing. As it happened, I was already over a month into it, but even then, that was only until I could file. Lord only knew how long it would be before everything would be over.

I felt a quiver of pure fear at the word—
over
—because, quite frankly, I had never been so terrified of anything in my life. I thought of what Farren had said, about how devastating a divorce would be, and I believed it. But for the first time, I understood I had no choice. Avoiding the pain by going back to safety was not an option; my shelter had burned to the ground. And without any confidence in what it had been in the first place, all I had to rebuild with was loose and moldy straw.

My normal was gone. The marriage I'd thought I had did not exist anymore. It never really had.

I told my husband I was divorcing him in a letter.

I could try to make my reasons sound grand and dignified, I suppose. Letters had meant so much to us, after all; there was, perhaps, something a little bit fitting about that. But the truth was that I couldn't bear to say the words out loud to him. I knew, of course, that I would hear from him soon. That there would be tears. But that actual moment when it became real, when it changed from an idea that had taken shape inside me into an actual, spoken, acknowledged part of our story—into the very ending of our story, in fact—I couldn't share in it. I couldn't bear to witness the moment when he shifted, between one heartbeat and the next, from not knowing to knowing. And so, I wrote to him.

Adam—

From the first moment this all started, I've wanted to find my way to a place where we could move forward. I was prepared, with an open heart, to do it; but it's all become too much. You promised to be faithful, and you cheated. You cheated with a man, and when I asked you to explain to me what that means to you, to our marriage, you failed to even try. You hid the truth from me about your writing, your work, because you thought I would look down on you. I'll say it again—I no longer know who you really are.

I don't think you understand the impact of all of this together. You said I know everything that matters, but not only is that untrue, but the fact that so much of it was hidden until now shows a fundamental failure of trust. The two of us are supposed to know each other better than we're known by any other person on earth. And before this, I would have thought it was true. Except now I realize that I've only loved an image, not a person I completely understand. Because you never trusted me enough to fully share yourself with me.

And I think maybe I see, a little bit, why you did it. I love your father, but there's no doubt he's got a limited definition of success. But I'm not your parent; I'm your wife. For me to know you, truly know you, is far more important than for you to uphold some phony standard of perfection.

I'm crushed, and broken, and full of pain. I don't understand how and why you made these decisions, did these things that ruined us. But you did, you ruined us. I can't be married to someone I don't know and cannot trust. I can't stay in this marriage.

I sent it. And then I waited. And then he called.

Getting through the phone call was like walking through a hurricane. He called me while I was at work, four times on my cell, before giving up and calling the museum's line. I called him back from the privacy of my car. And as I looked out at the familiar surroundings while tears streamed down my face and I sobbed until I choked, the sense of dislocation was so profound it made my head spin.
How was it possible
this was actually happening?

“This isn't supposed to happen,” Adam said, in a voice like stones tumbling together. “This
can't happen
to us.”

“It already happened,” I said. “You made it.”

“I made the worst mistake of my life. Two mistakes, terrible ones. But that doesn't have to mean it's the end. It
can't
mean that. Why won't you at least try counseling?”

“Because I don't need to be counseled. I don't want to try to save the marriage anymore. I would rather be an ex-wife than a wife who can't trust her husband. I don't want to be suspicious of you for the rest of our lives. I can't live like that. And after this much concealment, I can't find the faith I'd need to have in you.”

“How can you be doing this? This isn't you, Caro. This isn't like you at all. Has Ruby been telling you to leave me?”

“Don't you dare blame my sister for this,” I hissed. “What makes you say this isn't like me?”

“Because it's us, love. This is
us.
I can't believe you're willing to destroy us over something like this.”

“
You
destroyed it, Adam. That's the thing you keep missing here. And you're wrong that this isn't like me; that just means you misjudged me.”

“I made terrible, selfish, stupid mistakes. I'm not denying that. I've damaged this marriage badly and I regret that more than anything in my life. But I know we can recover. We were making progress,
good
progress. I've built my life around you, and I will do anything to keep us together, sweetheart. I think you should, too. I think you owe it to both of us to try.”

His boldness inflated my chest with pure rage. “Wrong!” I screamed. “You are not
entitled
to me, just because you love me. And not just because I love you back. You have to keep on earning that love, every day, again and again and again. I never expected perfection from this marriage, but this wasn't some dumb little fuckup; you made a choice to put someone else before me, for months, and to hide things—for
years
—which are both actions you knew goddamn well would cause me awful, awful pain. It doesn't
matter
that you didn't think I'd find out; what matters is that you recognized the disloyalty of giving what is ours to someone else, and you still did it. And you have hidden
so much more
than that from me. There is no way you can rebuild my trust. And without that, we have no future.”

By the time I finished yelling I was mentally and physically exhausted, not least from the effort of stopping him from interrupting me. As soon as my lips bit off the last syllable of my final word, he was yelling back.

“You're my wife!”
he shouted. “How can you just give up on me like this?”

“Because, Adam. You gave up on me,” I said, in a voice as tiny as he had made me feel.

He vowed to fight me. He vowed to never sign, to keep us tied up in legal limbo until the end of time. It was all standard Adam; exactly what I had expected. The one thing I hadn't anticipated was that until the moment he opened my letter, he hadn't truly considered this was a possibility. He'd only been biding his time until he could plead his way past my resentment and my hurt. He must have thought I would forgive him anything, just because I loved him.

He wasn't alone in that, though. My mother took the news that I was divorcing Adam only slightly less poorly than Adam himself.

“Caroline Elizabeth, you cannot be serious,” she breathed. “This is foolishness. Over one affair?”

Admittedly, I hadn't told her the specifics. I didn't think I could handle another round of
Did you have any idea?,
especially coming from my mother, whose concept of men who liked men was drawn wholly from sidekicks on primetime TV shows. “Mom, you sound like a politician's wife from the sixties. I happen to care extremely deeply about this one affair.”

“Of course you do, darling. But it's madness to end the marriage over something like this. I'm certain Adam would never do it again.”

“Really? Because I'm not.”

“I am certain. I think you two clearly need to work on things, and communicate better, but once you do…”

I craned to reach my dusting wand onto the top of the door casing in the guest bedroom. One of the first things I'd done to batten down the hatches for the divorce—god, that
word;
how was it now a part of my daily vocabulary?—was to let go of our housekeeper, Eileen. I loved the woman and her efforts dearly, but we'd only been able to afford her because of Adam's contributions to our budget, and I didn't find it especially fair to ask him to pay for cleaning on a house I'd banished him from. I was also sure that his eventual attorney wouldn't find it too fair, either.

“Mom, this isn't about communication. This is infidelity. And beyond that, it's dishonesty on multiple levels. I can't trust him anymore. He's been hiding parts of himself from me, and I can't stop thinking about what there is that might still be concealed. I can't spend the rest of my life wondering.”

Her sigh was heavy, world-weary; unlike anything I'd ever heard from her before. My mother is a lifelong look-on-the-bright-sider who, when presented with evidence of injustice both great and small, will simply sniff, shrug her shoulders, and say, “Well, there must be a reason.” But this sigh sounded…tired. And sad.

“Mom? Please tell me you're not about to confess that you and Dad have cheated on each other and worked past it, because so help me God, I do not want to know.”

“No, Caroline,” my mother said peevishly, as if it were the most outlandish idea I could have arrived at. “We have not. But I do think you are being a bit naïve. When you marry someone, it isn't happily ever after like a fairy tale. No matter how much you love your husband, he is going to disappoint you. He is going to hurt you. And you will hurt him, too. It's what people do. Even people who love each other very, very much. The secret to staying married your whole life isn't doing everything perfectly, it's learning how to forgive.”

“I don't want to forgive this, though. I can't. Some things are too big to forgive. This isn't some petty misdemeanor; this is the foundation of our marriage that we're talking about here. The basics. Don't cheat. Don't lie. Don't conceal. If I can't count on him to do those things right, then how can I count on him to do anything?”

“I don't know, darling. I just think you ought to give it another try before you throw it all out in the trash. You've given him seventeen years of your life. Don't you think that deserves the best you've got?”

But as the days passed, I only grew more entrenched. I downloaded the A. T. Hamm/Richie Cabrero book, and reading it flooded me with fresh anger at Adam's pointless deception, because the book was
good.
It was told from Richie's point of view, of course, but I could hear Adam's voice in the cadence of the sentences, the charm of the narrative tone. My husband had tapped into a vein of wry self-deprecation in Richie's personality, and mined it for both humor and pathos that showed even the most outlandish drug-induced bender as a frightening loss of control for a man whose addiction was beginning to overpower him. In anyone else's hands, Richie's story would have been commonplace; but Adam rendered him as vividly, gloriously human, a man with good intentions who lost his way in the dark and made it back a better person.