I went into this relationship with the embedded notion that love never has demands which leave me vulnerable. So when your needs left me so, I attacked. I had been helpless for so long I had no other response. That is changing. And that is what I believe is significant about our fourth year together.
In this past year I learned I will be a great success. I believe that as much as I believe you will be a great success. It’s always seemed more obvious with you. But I’ve learned to love myself and that is your most precious gift to me. You have taught me my self-worth to a great degree. I will begin to repay you now with a steadily improving, increasingly uplifting marriage.
I love you. I love being married to you and I commit myself again to this beautiful life with you.
PART ONE
Getting There
I Closed My Eyes
I closed my eyes.
Because I knew what was coming.
It was always the same: the air just before thick with rage, red-ripe with anger. I never watched when his hand flew toward me; I only waited for the sound of the strike—shoulders clenched, neck tight—as if all I was waiting for was a balloon popping or the brief, shrill cry when a child falls from a bike, outstretched hands scraping cement.
And when it came, I never knew where his hand went first, which way his fingers grasped me, which arm sent me to the floor. I could never answer the questions properly, the ones that I asked myself, only myself. I could only feel the throbbing and the stings, like battery-powered flashes across my face, sometimes my chest, an arm, a shoulder. And I mentally mapped the argument in bruises and splits of skin, the blood warm and wet, my cheeks puffing up to apologize like air bags upon collision, the truth suffocating within me.
In twelve years together, including nine years of marriage, there were repeated split-second eternities when the man who was my husband was someone I didn’t know. And in those crimson flashes before each time he struck, I always remembered his eyes before I closed my own. Cold blue, pale as stone, the pupils wide, black chasms, his dark eyebrow arrows aimed at my face, his teeth gripped hard to his mission.
And before I closed my eyes, I held my breath, knowing that sanity does not hold court here. With my own eyes closed, the image of his eyes stayed before me in the darkness, like the square image of a television screen or the fading imprint of a lamp’s white-hot bulb across the inside of your eyelids when you first surrender to sleep. In my darkness, I was swimming underwater, without sound and without weight, body-less, soul-less, lost, unable to breathe or speak or remember.
As soon as the sound came, I felt a relief in the distant place where he struck, for there was no more need to recoil, only recover. This was the end, not the beginning of it all. There was no more reason to be afraid. Today. Ever. This has to be the last. This can’t happen again. The stinging radiating through my body reminded me that all I had to do now was heal. A different movie was playing, a slower soundtrack, with a woman’s soothing voice.
I would cry without sound at first, the hole inside me so vacuous, so unforgivably hollow that the loudest knell could not penetrate its emptiness. I was already beyond it; I had flown past and above and could no longer be touched.
You didn’t get me. My eyes were closed. It didn’t count.
I closed my eyes, yes, I always closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see him smiling. I didn’t want to see what he promised he would never do again. And with my eyes safely closed, I could escape to the mountains inside me, the paradise he couldn’t poison or devour with his words. I would find again the haven where I kept the kaleidoscope of colored drawings, where I could hear the songs inside me sing again, the tears heralding their own chorus of comfort. Inside me, I could feel the heaving breath of my children sleeping, soft as puppies.
I couldn’t hear him, really; the sounds about him were muffled and strange, animal-like, sometimes cursing, sometimes whimpering, never quiet or calm. I could not attend to him for I was somewhere else, always, somewhere he could no longer touch me. The apologies would come later; they needed time to warm up.
The man with the cold blue eyes and the percolating apologies was not the same to anyone else in the world. He was a different man. Completely.
Handsome and convincing, he had once looked charming and regal in the navy blue Bigsby & Kruthers suit my mother had bought him to celebrate his graduation, cum laude, from law school in 1992. He was a litigating attorney in one of Chicago’s largest firms, Sunday school teacher, mentor, all-around great guy, the kind of guy other fathers called to play handball, the kind of man who was just a little too intense in a Saturday game of basketball. He cheered at my oldest son’s T-ball games and carried the children in the rain under umbrellas on Halloween, ringing all the doorbells. He called my mother on Mother’s Day. He smiled in all the pictures and sent me flowers in colors so brilliant they eclipsed the bruises on my arms. He wrote me beautiful letters.
“Your husband is so wonderful,” cooed more than one woman friend—envious and ignorant, part of the throng who knew us from church or work or the neighborhood—from across the social distance you keep when you want a secret hidden. “You are the perfect couple,” I heard often. “You have it all.”
He was even a good dancer.
Athletic, articulate, intelligent, funny—he seemed to be the perfect husband, the perfect father. I watched other women flirt with him, some innocently, and each time I thought, If only you knew. He delivered passionate soliloquies at parties about how proud he was of my career as a journalist, my accomplishments, my love for our boys, my ability to keep all the pins in the air. But behind the curtains, away from the crowd, I was juggling barefoot on shards of glass, spinning, tiptoeing past him, around him, to keep intact the wounds that would spill our family secret, hoping no one else would see.
If they find out, it’s over.
“You talked too fast,” he whispered in my ear once as I sat down at a starched white-linen table. I had just delivered a speech at the annual fund-raiser for Tuesday’s Child, a nonprofit intervention program for children and their families, where I was on the board of directors. The hotel ballroom was moving with applause and cheers. I drank in the approval and absorbed the nods and smiles sponge-quick, eager to be liked, eager to be loved. He had to criticize.
They like me. You’re wrong. Could I be married to one of the smiles instead?
“Psycho wife,” he would sing to himself in the kitchen loud enough so I would hear. “Loser,” he would call to me to underline a thought. And sometimes the taunts lasted until the moment the car, filled with our friends, honked in front of the house, beckoning us on a Saturday night. I wiped my tears as he walked brusquely past, pushing my hand aside as I tried to reconcile.
And then, only hours later—sometimes less—he could smile and lift a glass of blood red wine in a toast to tell all the world how much he loved me. And I prayed that this public face would become the face he wore at home.
Maybe if we stay out all night. Maybe, this time, he won’t change back.
Because whoever this man was in private was someone I did not want in our house. Without him, his stress, his excuses, our house was filled with joy and promise for me, filled with the laughter of my women friends and our children. Our house was a mosaic of bold colors, flowers, and pillows I covered in silk and tied with ribbons, photographs of smiles, the picture of a happy family growing, the face of love, completeness.
In the kitchen the refrigerator was covered in crayoned pictures, and in the family room, toy boxes spilled bad guys and trucks. On the table in the breakfast room a bowl was filled with apples the color of love.
But with him it was often a completely different address, a scary place where my stomach tightened and my head pounded, hammering behind my eyes, hammering them shut. When the boys went to sleep, I did not feel safe.
He’s