One Game at a Time: Chapter 31

(Re)Making 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

D. makes me think about baseball. In particular, about Albert Pujols when he was still at bat.

Here’s what Joe Posnanski wrote in Sports Illustrated:

“Pujols . . . really does take 'em one game at a time, one at-bat at a time, one pitch at a time . . . Questions are beside the point. Talk is beside the point. The point for Albert Pujols is to hit the ball hard. Everything else is just noise.

“This doesn’t make him especially fun to approach after a game, even a two-home run game. But it’s part of what makes him the best baseball player on earth. And it’s what makes him likely to have many more two-homer games, even if he isn’t a home run hitter.”

With D.: no answers to questions. Silence.

D. makes me think, too, of the movie Juno: Juno is a sweet flick about a sixteen-year-old who makes love once with her boyfriend, her initiation into sex with only the motive of love, and she gets pregnant. She decides to have the baby and give it away to a couple that really wants a baby. She says she’s ill-equipped to raise a baby. She is a wise, sharp-tongued, witty and oddly sweet character. Sweet in her sharpness. And at the end, when she’s had the baby, her boyfriend comes to the hospital in his running clothes and gets in the bed and lies down and holds her.

My heart broke at this image, because this is the way D. used to lie down at night with me. We didn’t make love—no home run to continue the metaphor—but we did lie down together, body on body.

I became angry with D. again the night I watched the movie with him.

D. had been anything but a “husband.” He hadn’t made love to me willingly anyway in so many years I could calculate the time in terms of a decade, a wall of time, a block so large that it stood in the way of vision, my recollection of the past. I’ve talked about this too much here. I now know I am a fool for having done so. Fools repeat their mistakes—except in Shakespeare’s plays where the fool speaks wisdom: In Lear, the fool wisely says:

He that has and a tiny little wit—
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain—
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But that night, I was thinking about the fact of lack of sex as the source of all my trouble, fool without wisdom that I was. After the movie, I drank myself through our take-out-Chinese dinner—I live a block from Chinatown. I drank my way through D.’s silence.

What was he to do with my anger?

I recalled for him how hard alone has been. I recanted nights with my chest full of anxiety that raged so hard I couldn’t eat, mornings with my head hung over. Nights I didn’t have the energy to shower. Nights when my teaching work was done and still I couldn’t eat. I recounted all those nights I worked on the separation agreement again. The nights I had a vodka and tonic. How that made the anxiety subside, how when hunger appeared, I ate a frozen pizza and cooked some asparagus. I recalled how my kitchen and my body were low on food because I don’t have a car—and getting food via metro in D.C. is not at all the way I thought it would be when I moved here, when I thought a small grocer, Balducci’s, was gonna be here. Expensive but close. They backed out of that deal while I was in Missouri.

I recanted the night I had finally gotten the pot rack hung in my apartment, the same pot rack I’d had in our house. How I’d finally gotten all the copper and stainless steel pots hung. I’d polished the copper. Even though I did not have the energy to cook, I was ready to cook—but did not cook.

D. listened. He was silent but he listened. You gotta admire his restraint. And then he went home.

And then I slept but woke at 2 a.m. from a terror: My kitchen. In the dream my son came to visit—my son who has not spoken to D. since D. left me. He swiftly took down all the pots. The pot rack wasn’t there. Just some hooks in the ceiling. He had cleaned up what he viewed as my mess. I called out: Where are they, where are my pots and pans? Where is my bain marie, my French copper and enamel double boiler that I used to melt chocolate, that I scrambled eggs in, that I loved. I find instead dolls and children’s clown costumes. I’d made these costumes for my daughter and son when they were little. I’d made one for myself too. I’d made one for D. after my first husband had betrayed me. But in the dream the only costume I can find is the one I’d made for myself—the pink gingham one.

For the fool does need the costume.

When I’m awake, this costume is the only one that is lost. I have all the others in a box in a closet that D. built for me this year—after the separation agreement was finally done. After it was clear we would live apart, that we are done.

After all that, he gave me money to build out the closets in my 1200 square foot loft with virtually no storage. The loft where I am making a life—alone: where I make content with my fortunes fit.

He did this after he’d come over to drop off miss-delivered mail—an excuse? He could have forwarded the mail. He gave me money for the closets after he found me throwing out the clown costumes, the sweaters my mother had made for my children, the dress she’d made for me in 6th grade, after he found me in tears, throwing away what I could not store.

Now all is stored away in my California-Closet-re-done apartment where I live alone.

And then he sent an e-mail. The subject line was: “I know this is against the rules but— Would you like to go to the Nationals baseball game Thursday night? They're playing the Cardinals. Really good seats. Red, Hot and Blue barbeque. Or Ben’s Chili Bowl.”

I didn’t go to the game where I would have seen Albert Pujols at bat.

I said I couldn’t go because we were done, because I needed to move on, because I couldn’t bear the silence.

And then he spoke. He wrote:

“M.,

“I do love you and always have. I have in the past only known how to show love through care-taking. I never learned any other way. But that is no longer enough. I know I need to show it in other ways, most especially through emotional intimacy. I can tell you I love you, but it sounds hollow because there is, right now, no other action behind it. I know that is how it appears, so it is hard for me to say it to you. I just know my feelings are deep, and it is not just history, important as that is. I have always thought and said that I believe we will end up together. I still believe that. But I know it is very hard for you. I don’t want to lose you, but I also don’t want to hurt you again. That is how I am torn. It is hard; it is painful. I hope and pray that it will work out. I just want you to know that I do love you and care deeply for you.

D.”

All this makes me think of Albert Pujols. He avoided reporters. When he didn’t talk to them, he didn’t answer their questions. He just kept going to bat.

All this makes me think of the movie Juno: When all goes wrong, how to set things right?

And I answer: One at-bat at a time.

Once D. asked me, What do you call a player who strikes out two out of three times?

He answered: A hall of famer.

Coming next: Chapter 32: “Light” Table of Contents

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