Breakfront: Chapter 45

(ReMaking Love: a serial memoir

Come in the middle? Here’re links to ➡️ Chapter One, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 , Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14 , Chapter 15 , Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24, Chapter 25 , Chapter 26, Chapter 27, Chapter 28, Chapter 29, Chapter 30, Chapter 31, Chapter 32, Chapter 33, Chapter 34, Chapter 35,  Chapter 36, Chapter 37, Chapter 38, Chapter 39, Chapter 40, Chapter 41, Chapter 42, Chapter 43, Chapter 44

Breakfront

In Paris, despite the rom-com I appeared to be living, skepticism reared its head. I recalled a key line from the Richard Gere and Dianne Lane movie Nights in Rodanthe. Late nights in Paris, D. and I watched in bed on my laptop, the rom-coms I love that he’d brought as gifts. He did not bring Nights in Rodanthe.

I must admit Nights in Rodanthe is a truly awful flick with actors I adore. It’s not nearly as good as French Kiss—that he did bring. Nights in Rodanthe lacks that film’s edge of irony.

We are sleeping late in the a.m. so that D. can adjust to the time change and, I think now, because I’ve needed to sleep in the comfort of his embrace. So I sleep even more than usual. I have always slept like a lion.

But I am self-protective in Paris and for some time after Paris. My not-so-ironic self relies on that one line from Nights in Rodanthe to get at my deep problem: fear that he may leave me again. Did it once. Why not twice?

Spoiler here, so skip the next paragraph if you haven’t seen Nights in Rodanthe. Oh, come on, read it anyway.

Nights in Rodanthe is not a rom-com. As I’ve said, in the true rom-com two cynics meet, neither believes love works, one or both have been hurt or been screwed by believing that the open heart is a good thing. So one, or in this case both, have closed off that option: closed heart, closed heart. In the rom-com, you do not kill off the hero. That’s what happened in Nights in Rodanthe—to my horror, not my tears. Go figure, I felt betrayed by the film.

I have not wanted to kill off D., metaphorically, or G-d help me, literally. Thus, the open door, and open heart, despite all the breakage.

But betrayal—and there are many ways two people in a marriage may betray one another—both my subject and my dilemma. Figuring out who is who and what is what inside my own head have been part and parcel of this journey—and I don’t mean to Paris—or do I?

In my limp defense, I have asserted to D. too many times that I’ve been through great loss and years of uncertainty both during the marriage and the separation. Not that this makes me unique.

But taking D. back has been no easy process: I’m scared.

So, I quote to D. this line from the movie, “Any guy who would leave a woman like you—” I do love it when Gere says that to Lane. And at that moment in Paris and for some time after, I needed the line. I needed the answer.

D. interrupts, “Should have his head examined. No, wait—I did!” D. finally did go to a shrink and I think he’s now fully shrunk—is that a word? I, on the other hand . . . Well, let’s just say, My process continues.

D. adds, “I won’t cop to being an idiot as in, ‘Any guy who would leave a woman like you is an idiot.’ I will cop to have my head examined—as in ‘Any guy who . . ., needs to have his head examined.’ ”

I’ve been seeing a therapist through the whole writing of this memoir. In fact, there have been two. Kinda like two marriages—and I’ve had two of those as well. The first shrink Cynthia moved her practice to Wyoming. I cannot click my heels and be with her, but she did feel like home. With Cynthia I had what might have been the first truly intimate relationship in my life. For the first time, I came to understand something about being seen and that being seen constitutes intimacy.

Do you remember in Bridget Jones’s Diary when Mark Darcy tells Bridget something like this, “I like you just as you are”? That’s the rom-com version of what I have come to discover. Intimacy lies somewhere in that line of dialogue that amazes all of Bridget’s friends.

My second therapist, who’s walked on this road with me is Martha. Cynthia has worked with her and made certain that I saw her before Cynthia moved away—to be sure about the fit. Martha is less formidable or perhaps I am further on the road. Cynthia was a bit scary. Therapy is no easy process though it gets lampooned and satirized and rightfully so, with Woody Allen doing the best work on solipsism in life and in film.

But the real stuff has, I think anyway, little to do with navel gazing.

Martha has shown me the way to the yellow brick road and I’ve seen that there is no Wizard behind the curtain. Like the Scarecrow with no brain, the Tinman with no heart, the Cowardly Lion with no courage, I have been at a loss. But like them, I’ve learned that the Wizard lies within and that I am no wizard.

I can’t find my way alone. I have needed and sought help. I have been afraid.

Before I went to Paris, once I’d found the apartment, rented it, bought the plane ticket, and even had Euros, I went into an unexplained panic. My friend Marly said to me, “Mary, you’ve done everything. You even have your Euros. Now’s the time for anticipation.” It was a week before the trip. “Something new and different is about to happen to you.” I said, “Right, I’ll get lost or be robbed. But here’s the thing, my getting lost is not a new and different thing.” For almost a year while commuting back and forth to Missouri, I walked out my front door here at my D.C. condo and regularly got lost. Sense of direction in the literal and figurative sense is not my strong suit. So I said to Marly, “The new thing is that now I’m down to being robbed.”

What was that about? Certainly not logical thinking.

So I did what I always do when I can’t figure something out. I slept. I had this dream about sex and storage. Oh, so you don’t think these two are related? I beg to differ:

In the dream, I wake wanting to make love but don’t say anything. D. does too and comes towards me, penis erect. I want his penis inside but he doesn’t want to enter because he says he wants to experiment. He wants my vibrator.

I’m dreaming of the vibrator that I’ve had since D. left me, that never would have been possible for me to have while we were together. Because of our problems with sex—his rejection of me?—I assumed, incorrectly I now know, that he would have been offended by it.

So in the dream, when I reach into the side table at my bedside where I keep it when I’m awake, I have instead the side table from the bedroom set that belonged to my first husband and me, the one table from that set that I took when we divorced. Yeah, yeah, I know: Two strikes and you’re . . .

The vibrator is not in the side table. It is empty.

I live in a small condo with very little storage. When California Closets helped me create more storage, I still had to throw away many prized items I no longer had room for, mostly books—and that, the loss of a book I have read is a difficulty I’ve not been able to overcome—I could live in a library. I was able to save parts of clown costumes I’d made when my children were small and D. took home the clown costume I had made for him, but I couldn’t find my pink gingham clown costume. When my children were small, I made all the costumes in different colors of gingham. D.’s was green. Sarah’s was red. Ben’s was blue. Sarah and Ben are, if I’ve not made this clear before, the children from my first failed marriage.

In the dream, my clown costume was in the long bureau from that bedroom set, long gone, sold at the sale of our house in Adams Morgan: the four-story Victorian brownstone. In the dream I found this bureau with its ridged top slider for jewelry and underneath, crayons and small blocks, small toys for children. (I have a brand new grandchild, Lila.)

Then I find my mother’s breakfront that ended up in the basement of the house before Kalorama, the house in Chevy Chase, the colonial that I loved where we bought my first mahogany dining room set that we took with us to the dining room in the old Victorian that dwarfed a console piano—that’s how big the room was: a room where all my children and grandchildren could come to eat the food I once cooked in my chef’s kitchen. D. sold that mahogany table after I went to Missouri to teach, after he’d decided to leave me, after we’d sold the house.

I have seen mahogany trees in St. Lucia, an island of beaches and rainforests and a dark people with open hearts.

In the dream, the mahogany breakfront’s first drawer had a silver drawer like the one in my sideboard where I stored my mother’s sterling that my father gave me after she died. That sideboard D. also sold after I’d flown away to Missouri to teach fiction writing as a visiting author. My first book had just come out. No book party. No sixtieth birthday party. Yes, my publisher sent the first copies out on my birthday, March 3. But there was no celebration. There was instead as my father said after D. and I took him, after my mother and sister had both died, to his first James Bond movie, “A lot of breakage.”

One night after we’d gotten back to D.C., while I was washing my face—D. slept over—I said, “You know what you gave me?”

“What?”

“You gave me a window into my soul and then you took it away. I know inside that I should be able to find my own window into my own soul. Isn’t that what all the therapy has been about?”

He listened.

I continued, “Aren’t two people afraid stronger than one afraid and doesn’t the human connection of love—and I mean committed, sexual love—manifest G-d?”

Did I really say that? Yeah, I did. And I believe it, but it hasn’t been an easy thing to say aloud.

And D. spoke, “Maybe I just borrowed the window for a while.”

Here’s something you do not know. D. has been reading this memoir the whole time I’ve been writing it.

I was often afraid to post the chapters of what was a “live” memoir. Great anxiety has accompanied “posting.” Overcoming that fear has been part of being seen.

When we were in Paris, D. told me he’d been reading the memoir. I told him how afraid I’ve been.

“Think about Confucius,” he said. “Out of all the pain and craziness in the world, he got an enormous amount of material.” He has a wit that charmed me from the get-go.

I said, and here we see that I am not funny, “Confucius say: Confusion create pain in soul.”

But confusion does guide. This I have learned.

The bottom dropped out of my world much the way the bottom dropped out of the stock market with what is now known as The Great Recession that President Obama inherited. I mention Obama because he and Michelle appear to me to be the real thing: A true romance.

When that bottom hit and we all got hit, I wrote this to D., not realizing at the time that my subject was our marriage:

“We must lead with our hearts and not our minds. I know this seems antithetical to what we are hearing in the news about how we should respond with reason to the crash, but let us not be held bondage to the intellect, which on some level says, all is lost. Let us lead with our hearts—not emotion, not feeling—but our hearts that know that we shall weather this together and that we will hang in when all seems lost and hopeless and the bottom has dropped out. Because we believe that, to be trite but true, love is the answer even in the face of a market that appears to offer little hope. We do live in a forgiving cosmos even when all seems lost.”

And D. wrote back to me:

“As usual, you speak goodness that must be the true guide to all of us who live in the practical world.”

Whether or not you agree with me about The Great Recession, you may understand what I mean when I say that D. sees me.

John L. Hitchcock, physicist and Jungian analyst in his book At Home in the Universe: Re-envisioning the Cosmos with the Heart, says:

“This book is a declaration of love. It is not a declaration of my love, but of the fact that love is the heart of the universe . . . [I]t is we who submit to the bonds of love. And since love sets its object free—since love is the very basis of our freedom—in submitting to its bonds, we also set free whomever or whatever is the object of our love. In a profound sense. . . submitting to the bonds of love can help release even God. We can love reality as it is, though it seems to throw obstacles in our way and wound us.”

I long ago let D. go. By reading this memoir while I wrote it, D. let me go. And I have been freed and seen.

Our marriage that was broken has had a solidity I could never have imagined. It is like a mahogany breakfront that holds all the broken china of our lives together.

Derek Walcott who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, the year before my sister died, the year before we took my father to that James Bond film, was born and raised in St. Lucia, the isle of indestructible mahogany. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said, Break a vase and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

St. Lucia, land of mahogany trees and open-hearted folk... and where Derek Walcott lives.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material in chapter 45: James Hollis: Excerpt from The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, Inner City Books, copyright 1993. Reprinted with permission of Daryl Sharp, publisher, Inner City Books.

Coming next: Chapter 46: “You Cannot Get Out of the Game” Table of Contents

Love,