Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir (24 page)

When I opened the door, Linus shot toward Lea’s lap.

“I’ve got no more room for this. I deserve more than this.
HOW COULD YOU?
” I was screaming, my finger pointing at him.

He threw his hands to his sides and waited. I didn’t know for what. Then he shifted his weight and screamed, “Will you lower your voice? I have no idea what you’re—”

I began to pound on his chest. They weren’t punches as much as pushes. It just seemed like the thing you do when you catch your husband. You scream and hit him. I didn’t want to hit him, but I didn’t know what else to do.

“Lea, you better stop her, or I’m going to hit her back.”

“Oh, because you haven’t fucking hurt me enough?”

“What are you TALKING ABOUT?” As he enunciated his words, spit hit me. He pulled my wrists off him and pressed them into my chest.

“Who is Bernie?”

He looked confused and let go of me. “Bernie? I don’t know a Bernie. What are you—”

“This,” I grabbed the e-mail printout I’d made and shoved it in his chest. “This is what I’m talking about!”

He took a beat to measure the words I’d found and printed for him.

“Answer me! Who’s this Bernie person?”

He became quiet, as if I’d just slammed a door.

“Her name is Bern. The
i
and
e
are silent.”

“Burn? As in burn victim? You’re fucking kidding, right?”

“Nothing happened, Stephanie.”

“I’m pregnant, you asshole!” I was screaming, the kind of scream reserved for a mugging. My throat rattled. I ran to the front door and opened it, “Gabriel Rosen, you are a liar and a snake. Get the fuck out!”

“Shut up, you stupid Spic! Everyone doesn’t need to hear this.” His face was red and a vein pulsed near his eye.

“Gabe, that was uncalled for.” Lea was now standing between us.

“I’m sorry, Lea. You’re right.”

“Is it that easy?” I shouted as I pushed his shoulder. “Should I just tell you you’re low, then you’ll apologize? No, fuck that. I don’t want your sorrys. How could you, Gabe?” I was sobbing now. “How could you?” I whispered. My mouth turned sour and I stood shaking, my chin on my chest. He held me.

“Stephanie, I’m sorry,” he whispered, “but nothing happened.”

“Don’t you dare. I already spoke with her. You were going to go with her to a black-tie party! You tucked me into bed, your pregnant wife, then went out with her and your hospital friends. You introduced her to your fucking coworkers! Do you know how humiliated I am? They all must think I knew about it or something. You never even let her know you were married. And you’d come here and write her e-mails telling her you missed her! How could you do this?”

I know humiliation can be a pretty shallow feeling with everything I was up against, but it’s the one that chose to bubble up within me. I didn’t want to care what I looked like to anyone, but I did. Being hurt is messy that way.

“Really, Stephanie, you’re making a big deal—”

“If nothing happened, then give me your phone.” I sounded professional suddenly, as if I were asking for a stick of chalk.

“Stephanie, stop it!” He grabbed my wrists as I lunged for his cell phone.

“Well, if you have nothing to hide, then give it to me. What? Are you afraid I’ll find her number in there?”

“Her number isn’t on my phone, Stephanie. I’m telling you. She always just paged me at the hospital.”

Turns out he’d met Bernie when her son, only two years my junior, had an infection. Gabe examined him, and when he finished, The Burn wanted her turn. “Let me thank you.” I imagined she touched his hand softly. “Come play golf at my country club with me.” He obliged. And he continued to oblige her day and night, right after apologizing to me. “I’m sorry, baby. The hospital has been grueling lately. It will get better soon. I promise.”

Once I got hold of his phone, I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. He chased after me, but he was too late. He pounded on the door as I thumbed through his call log and text message history. He’d texted her from the Barney’s dressing room, while I was there with him. He was looking forward to the “affair.” I’ll bet.

While I was in the bathroom, I found her numbers on his call log.

I opened the door to the bathroom. “Yeah, I found your girlfriend’s numbers, you know the ones you don’t have.” I threw his phone at him.

“Okay, I lied about that.”

“Yeah, ya think?!”

“But listen, Stephanie. I love you. I want us.” He wanted to do or say anything he could to stop me from crying.

“Why her?” It was a small voice I didn’t recognize as my own.

“Look, I’ll never talk to her again, I swear.” He moved his hands from the small of my back to the nape of me. “I want this, Stephanie. I really do. I love you.”

I wanted to believe him, to believe that this was all some mistake, that I was overreacting. But come on, this was just the one I found. I knew, deep down, there were others, women who made him feel important, and I knew he was more needy for attention than he was for me. But I didn’t want us to be over. I loved him in our bed, his body and breath in the middle of the night. I wasn’t ready to let go. So I told myself maybes. Maybe he was just panicking because he had to be so responsible at his job. Maybe he had to act out in his life. Look what he’d done with the responsibility of marriage. Maybe this was how he dealt with change. Maybe he just needed therapy.

“I’ll do whatever it takes to make this work,” he’d said, “to earn back your trust. I will tell her that I want nothing to do with her. Then I won’t speak to her again. I swear, sweetheart.”

“Why her?”

“Honestly?” No. Lie to me. “She took me to impressive things. Things I’d never have the opportunity to go to. I didn’t think you’d understand.”

“No. You want to be single is what you want. It isn’t about my not understanding. Otherwise, you would have told
her
about me. You didn’t tell me about her, and you led her to believe you were single. That’s not about my not understanding.” He just stood there with his arms crossed. “You know what? You’re a fucking asshole.” I said it simply, as if I were asking a butcher for a leg of lamb.

“I’m your wife. I
shouldn’t
understand why you want to go to nightclubs with another woman. Sorry. It just doesn’t work that way. Wow. It’s amazing. You really are a piece of shit.” I began to count with my fingers. “You e-mailed her from our house, texted her while you were with me, lied to my face saying you had plans with your friends when you were really out with her! All this time you’ve been telling me you didn’t have time to spend with me, how you missed me, how hard work was. All that time, she was ‘work.’” I turned from sad and wanting to hear every detail to angry again. “GET THE FUCK OUT.” He did as he was told.

As soon as he left, I cried to Lea, “I can’t believe he just left. He doesn’t care about us. Lea, I hate him. I Hate. Him. So. Much.” I couldn’t breathe. I cried into her lap. Linus licked my tears. This was now my family.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, STILL IN MY FIRST
trimester, I didn’t know what to do. I called everyone asking for advice. My mother told me to just have the baby. “He’s just scared of being a father, and he acted out. Once he sees the baby, everything will be fine.” I might have flinched when I heard her say it. “Who knows when you’ll have a chance to be pregnant again. I’d just have it because I know how long it took you.” It didn’t sound healthy, what she was saying. I heard her, but I didn’t feel her. She didn’t know the kind of person I married. I was beginning to.

I called Gabe’s parents’ house. Rome and Marvin said “Hello” at the same time. I might as well tell them both. I felt like I was tattling. It was my, “See, I’m not the bad guy. It’s been him all along. Now you should be on my side!” call. I wanted sympathy, even from them.

“I knew something was going on,” Rome said after I used the word
pregnant
followed by “seeing an older woman.” “I just knew,” she added again after a long silence, “because I heard from my friend Myron that he’d run into Gabriel at a Knicks game with that Bernie woman. I asked Gabriel about it, but he looked at me like I had two heads. I mean, I warned him. I told him to be careful, to really know what he was doing. I mean really. He should be more careful about who he associates with.” Holy fuck. I didn’t know if Rome was disappointed in her son’s behavior or in his taste in women. I couldn’t believe his parents knew something was going on. The conversation made everything feel more real.

“What are you going to do about the baby?” Marvin asked.

“I don’t know, but if I do decide to keep it, I promise you can both see your grandchild as much as you’d like.” It’s what I was supposed to say. I used the word
grandchild
purposefully. I wanted them to feel the real in all this, to know their son fucked with forever. I wanted them to feel guilty for raising a son like Gabe.

“I’ll call you later, okay, sweetie? We will check up on you.” And Rome did call, just as she’d said. She called every day to see if Gabe and I would be working things out. To see if I’d go through with our marriage. To see if she’d have to be connected to me for the rest of her life.

“LET’S GO FOR A DRIVE,” MY FATHER SUGGESTED. “IT WILL
be good for you. You need to air yourself out.” Thirty minutes later, he picked me up, and we drove for an hour to Nyack, a charming spot of a New York town with Victorian homes and antique shops. My father and Carol were in the market for “old” new furniture.

Dad searched in mothball antique stores for a dining room table. I searched for answers in antique armoires, tried to feel the meaning of life as I fingered handmade afghans, awaited answers to the “why me’s” in chandelier reflections. I sat folded into myself in a leather chair wishing it were a bed, so I could crawl into fetal position and just weep. Weep, without someone judging me thinking, “Oh dear God, not again,” as he rolls his eyes. Gabe had been doing a lot of this over the past two weeks. Said things like, “I’m going to fix it. What more do you want from me?” He was annoyed I hadn’t recovered from devastated. I didn’t want a solution-oriented man to walk around with a tool belt and corkscrew to fix things.

Dad saw me tearing in the patina of a final-sale mirror. “Steph, you can do better,” he said pushing the tears into my hair with his thumbs.

“Dad, I’ll never do any better. He’s smart and funny and good-looking…”

“Stephanie,” he took both my hands, “how could you do any worse?”

Best rhetorical question ever.

“No one can tell you what to do, Stephanie,” he said. “Only you know what’s in your heart. You have to be true to what you feel. No one else knows what’s good for you.” Then he told me he was always worried. “Somewhere in my gut, I worried this would happen. Don’t get me wrong—I liked the guy enough, but every time the phone rang, and you called me with panic in your voice, I always feared either you were laid off from your job or something happened with Gabe.”

“Nice to tell me now, Dad.”

“I asked you right after you two got engaged, asked if he’d sown his oats.” He did ask me that, and in turn, I asked Gabe, who rolled his eyes, grabbed me, and said, “You’re the love of my life.” It didn’t matter anymore.

On our drive back to Manhattan, my father turned up the volume to The Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg,” and pointed at me each time he sang, “sweet darlin’.” Gabe wasn’t interested in keeping me any way he could, the way the song suggested a man in love should. And that wasn’t good enough.

Gabe
said
he’d do whatever it took to show me he wanted us. But when I asked what that meant, he didn’t know how to answer. “Therapy?” he said, wondering if that’s what I wanted to hear. He swore nothing physical happened, that he knew what he’d done was very wrong, and he wanted to learn why he lied and snuck around. “I promise, baby. I love you so much, and I know I’ve been a jerk. I will show you. You’ll see. I will make this right.”

I was anxious about everything, but I decided I’d give it a few weeks to see how I’d feel before making any emotional decisions. Two weeks after finding out about Bernie, while Gabe was in the shower, his pager vibrated, loud against the dinner table. My stomach fell. What if it were a woman?

Was this the way it would always be? A life of stress and pitfalls, of looking behind my back, waiting for something else to drop? Maybe it would just take time to be at ease again? Yes. That’s it. Time, the great salve.

I’d just made dinner and set the table. Linus began to bark when the pager vibrated again. It was a hospital number…it had to be. Go on and look, you fraidy cat. Open your eyes. I knew it. I returned Bernie’s call immediately.

“I thought he told you it was over, that he didn’t want to speak to you again, that we’re trying to work things out.”

The line was silent, and for a moment, I worried it wasn’t her. What if I were seeing things and it really was the hospital? But then I heard her voice, calm and demeaning. “Actually, Stephanie, that’s not at all what he’s told me. He tells me that you two have been separated for months, and that you’re living in denial.” Yeah, well, denial must be made of tomato sauce with crinkled noodles and housed in a lasagna pan because we’re just about to have fucking dinner!

“That’s really what he said? I mean he’s obviously here with me now. That’s not very separated, is it?” I believed her. I knew as soon as I asked that she was telling me the truth.

“Well, he said his clothes were still in your apartment, so he has to go there. He said you just wouldn’t accept that it’s over.”

I began to shake. “He is lying,” I finally said. “He’s been here telling me he wants us, loves me, and that he wants nothing to do with you. He told me he only hung out with you because you got him into events. He said he used you because of your connections and that you’re a jealous person. He said I should be glad he went out with you because you’d freak whenever he spoke with anyone else.” I wanted to hurt her, to make her hate him too. But when I heard myself, I hated him more. He’d actually told me I should be happy he was with her at night because she prohibited him from flirting with other women. This was my husband saying these words,
happy
and
other women
in a sentence constructed to make me feel better.