Tsunami Across My Heart (9 page)

I’m told that psychically I have to tell this story twenty to forty times to release myself of the horror of it. I’m so ashamed, disgusted that I chose HIM to be anything at all in my life at all, but most especially to be my love, my husband, the father of three beautiful children that I love and adore. The one person that understood the exact nature of the betrayal of my own family, in particular of my own father, the one person who knew the horror of the legacy they had delivered to me, and this is how he exacts his revenge. I understand just how intelligent David is, I also understand how committed he is to getting what he wants. I understood, implicitly, that he had exacted the perfect revenge, the thing he knew that would devastate me the most.

While he said what my father had done in fondling me and covering it up was “reprehensible” what he did was to rape me, anally, admit it to my father and my friends and then later deny it and his admissions all together. Somehow, in his mind, he doesn’t seem to understand he can’t go back and deny it not that it’s inconvenient to face the truth.

I woke up to an absolutely pounding head ache. I was groggy, disoriented; my body was one tremendous, heavy, throbbing ache. I opened my eyes and David was in my bathroom adjoining my bedroom, making a mess of the sink shaving. He’d leave for me to clean up, as usual. The look on his face was menacing. I realized my ass was slimy, my anus very sore and uncomfortable. I noticed an open jar of petroleum jelly at the foot of the bed, finger indentations deep in the goo, lid nowhere to be seen.

I was overcome with horror and disbelief.

Scant memory returned to me as I realized what happened. He senses that I am awake; I must have made some kind of a noise in my realization. His face
is hardened, unapologetic, and cognizant of what he had done. He looked at me with contempt in the reflection of the mirror, without turning towards me, continuing what he was doing without pause.

“What have you done?” I said accusingly.

“That’s what you get for getting drunk Mary.”

He’s addressed me as Mary throughout our marriage, knowing I hate to be addressed this way. He’s called me “Mary” ten thousand times. My response of “Don’t call me Mary.” is what he hears nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times. This time I don’t debate how he’s addressed me. Why? Because he’s won finally? Because I’m too damned weary to fight him after this? This is what I get? What I deserve? He is the judge, jury and executioner to my alcoholism, my failure to provide for him, for a bankruptcy that happens while he calls himself Chief Financial Officer of a four million dollar firm? Anal rape is my justice?

He saunters out of the room so much more the man for having conquered me finally with nothing more to say for his pathetic self. I am left with the unsettling fact that it wasn’t just that I had chosen poorly in a mate or a father of my children, but that he had the consciousness of a sociopath, that his sense of justice was criminally twisted.

I felt filthy and furious and unsure of what I should do next. I suppose if I was going to discover that I was capable of murder it would have been that day, in that moment. But, I didn’t lift a finger against him. I locked the bedroom door, went into the bathroom and locked that door too. I stood above the toilet for a moment leaned forward and vomited. I always felt nauseas when I thought of my father’s betrayal, which by comparison was absolutely nothing to this. But now, I wanted to wretch forever.

Eventually I stopped, exhausted, disgusted; I turned got into the shower and turned the hot water on. The water pelted against the walls and the glass of the door and when it was warm enough I got in and slid to the floor while the water beat down upon me like rain, and I sobbed clutching my knees with my weary arms, cried copious tears for myself and this life that was once full of promise but now ruined. While I was using the soap I remembered stories of other women saying they could not feel clean and I understood the completeness of his violation of me.

I stood at my bedroom window after I’d showered and gotten dressed, knowing if I was going to have him arrested I’d gotten rid of a lot of the evidence of it. I was still injured. The Vaseline jar still intact with his finger marks pulled through the thickness of it, imprinted. I imagined him grasping at the lubricant to prepare himself to enter me and I was disgusted all over again.

I stared vacantly, numbly, at the empty court in front of our home, imagined it filled with police cars and policemen in the yard or approaching my house. I lived in a very nice neighborhood. My neighbors were already witnessing the disintegration of my marriage, my family, of me. I tried to imagine everyone I knew in
Loveland
knowing this about me, that I had been fool enough to believe in this man. How hard would it be to stand up for myself in a trial for marital rape? How many people would know the significance of this particular choice? It would mean I couldn’t leave the state, leave him behind for a really long time, or I thought that is what it would mean. It would delay my moving on and I wasn’t even sure it would be a successful prosecution, or how it would be received.

But mostly, I was incredibly ashamed, and he had succeeded in oppressing me. I usually told everything that happened in some kind of affirmation that I existed despite whatever horror I had faced. But this, it was just too much and I kept it inside for weeks before I dared to share what had happened.

Later that day he pushed roughly against my shoulder as he passed me in the hall above the chandelier illuminating the foyer. I was startled and fleetingly thought I might have fallen when I realized that the only asset we had left was the life insurance on my life, and that I would be worth more dead to him than alive.

I wondered if he could do this to me what else was he capable of?

The drunken blurry rape was over by a few days. In my shame and horror, I hadn’t told anyone what happened. I longed for Eric like I had never longed for him before. I fantasized he’d rescue me out of that nightmare and provide love and comfort and healing. Eric’s warning that I shouldn’t marry David was ringing in my head again, but now it was heralding his unheeded warning on over time. I wanted, needed comfort, to say “You were right, look what’s happened now. Look what he’s done to me. Look how he’s broken me, my spirit.”

K
nowing Eric would understand the significance of the act David had chosen as his very deliberate act of personal revenge before I even said why out loud to myself. There wasn’t a more exacting one, given how I felt about the betrayal of my father. I wondered where Eric was, what had happened to him. I knew from his father that he had married and moved to
Atlanta
. I just didn’t know where or if he’d still be there, still married or if he’d had any children. Tears seem to stream from my eyes continually, and my children only knew this broken inconsolable version of me, not the accomplished phoenix who once accomplished so much.

I sat at my desk in the cold, chocolate brown office in the basement. The room was long and rectangular. The desk was huge and beautiful, a semi circle, state of the art computer equipment resided within and upon it.

A broken printer sat there, I’d hurled it across the room in frustration weeks before, not at David, but because of him. He characterized it as though I had thrown it at him, his way of forever twisting the facts. Imagine, that in his mind this offense was even worse than what he had perpetrated.

Three wooden lateral file drawers perfectly fit into an indentation under designer lights. David’s favorite artwork was there atop the filing cabinets. A gas fireplace was lit, but its warmth could never reach me again. The floor was covered in a specially ordered wood grain tile he’d asked for, three rugs with an Eastern Indian design of curry yellow, brown, scarlet and forest green covered the tiles. Hookah’s and other brass and wooden artifacts decorated the room. A thousand dollar signed Michael Jordan jersey sat in a box awaiting framing. A television in a custom shelf above the fire place, hanging beads from somewhere in Asia covered the bathroom door that contained his specially built throne on a pedestal, the special mirror he’d asked for above a new pedestal sink, more designer lights and perfectly matched crescent moon curry yellow wallpaper covered the walls in his custom executive wash room. I’d spent thousands of dollars to create this office for him. He declared it was only fair after he’d supported my business and it had failed – that
 
I had failed. It was his turn he said. All this he demanded amidst corporate and personal bankruptcies, with a new Trail Blazer he hadn’t bothered to make payments for, now repossessed.

So with all the expense, I’d worked like a slave on it for David and one afternoon while I was out he’d taken gold glaze and in an ejaculatory imitation spewed it upon the walls. It was gaudy and disgusting and people’s eyebrows would disappear into their hairlines when they witnessed David’s finishing touch upon the décor. I’d just raise my hand in surrender and swear it had not been my intended result or personal effort; it was David’s sense of passive aggressive style.

I’d been resigned to David’s selfishness for so long. Just the thought of him exhausted me anymore. If nothing else, despite the fact we were lucky to be bringing in $1500 a month against the $6000 in expenses, he was away 12 hours a day now. At least he was away.

It sounds insane when I think of it now and as I write it, but I stayed because of the children. I thought they needed their father, maybe more than they needed all of me. At least they had the shell of what was once me. I suppose the antidepressants, the booze, getting stoned each night while they slept kept me numb enough to endure it, and during the day I stayed sober and I had the kids with me. I loved them even if it was total chaos, and at night I was wasted and then I slept alone, but now with the door locked.

I went to an internet search engine and I typed in the letters of Eric’s name and then A-T-L-A-N-T-A and as I pressed the Enter key with my trembling fingertips my breath was bated. I saw he was still there, still married because there were several numbers and the name of his wife, Roxanne, was included in the listing.

I stared at it a long, long time.

The silence of the basement suspending time as the ancient round stone thrown fifteen years before finally came to rest beneath the long still surface of the pond. Seemingly so far removed from the original act, that its movement, dissonant sound and disruptive effect seemed strangely silent and still. As though it rested gently, and whispered quietly, and innocently. Here my memories of my love for this other man were resident in my heart and mind, his significance to me undeniable, but there are two families in the balance. It wasn’t right for me to call after all this time. I should leave it alone. Heavy hearted that he had married someone else, sick at the irony that he was in the city I loved and left behind while I was tortured in a marriage that I could not repair and couldn’t leave, I pointed the mouse at the corner of the window and clicked into further silence and the water’s glassy surface remained calm, flat and seemingly unaffected.

Six weeks went by and occasionally I tried to glean some further information of his life, what he was doing now by a search. Only his address and number presented itself. I’d stare at the listing, repeat the click of the “X”, refusing, unable to cast the pebble, and move on trying to forgive my husband and save our family. My misery knew no release. My authentic self was lost again in an alcoholic blur. I had become a shadow of the woman Eric knew, barely recognizable even to me; broken, sad, stricken with grief.

Eventually, I told my friend
Florence
what David had done. Then I told Mindy and I told Pam. One by one my friends learned what had happened. Naturally they were alarmed. I was so confused; it was so hard to make sense of how my marriage had come to this.

I finally told my step-father’s mother what happened too. She broke her promise to me and told my mother anyway. I suppose it isn’t reasonable to keep secrets like that about someone’s daughter and grandchildren.

They all said the same thing, “You’ve got to leave Marissa. You’ve got to leave. He’s left you no choice. You’ve got to leave.”

My mother and I had not spoken for the better part of five years, our relationship having been irretrievably damaged after my father’s abuse and her denial regarding her role in the wreckage that was the aftermath.

She’s a horrible bully when she doesn’t get her way, even to this day. She kept promising that if I left David and came to
Atlanta
that relations between she and I would be different, that she wouldn’t make things difficult for me personally. “Come. Come for the sake of the children” she said.

On so many levels I knew that was a lie, but I didn’t know what else to do or where else to turn, and by now the house was about to be foreclosed upon and I could clearly see that it would happen when my daughter was in her first year of school and that our, but especially her, humiliation would be utterly complete.

So I went to
Atlanta
to visit with my mother to talk about the possibility of actually leaving David and to
 
make an attempt at reconciliation with her. For four nights I sat at her dining room table drinking red wine and I spilled out the truth of what life with David was really like.

Without really realizing that I was merely within days of leaving the marriage, I found myself quietly in the basement on my mother’s computer checking my email and surfing the Internet. By now I’d looked up Eric so many times, and once gain I typed in his name, my fair city and hit Enter. His number was there.