A Beautiful, Terrible Thing Read online

  “Do you remember how uninvolved he was with getting Louisa’s nursery ready?” my mom says. “And when we surprised you guys with the IKEA furniture after Thanksgiving? He almost seemed annoyed. We gave him a pass because we all thought he was working so hard.”

  I think back to November, the month before Louisa was born and the month that I now believe the affair started. Marco seemed to be exhausted and withdrawn much of the time, but that was because he was working nonstop, crazy hours. My parents surprised us by buying a new IKEA couch for our living room, and I remember Marco saying “It’s interesting how your parents think they can just rearrange our entire apartment.” I had brushed off his comment with a laugh. “You know they like to be very involved. It can be a bit much, but I don’t think we can really complain. I mean, they’re moving here for three months to help us with the baby.”

  “True,” he said, and flicked on the TV.

  “Wow, you’re right.” I look at my mom. “It was very subtle, but I think he was actually devaluing our entire family. He went from adoring you and idolizing Dad to being vaguely annoyed and irritated at all the help you were providing us. Jesus. This is really sad, but at the time I actually thought, Finally, we’ve exited the honeymoon phase a bit after four years. I actually thought it was more normal and healthy that he wasn’t still over the moon in love and excited and happy all the time and he was getting annoyed with me once in a while.”

  Suddenly, I have a vivid flash to standing in the living room of our apartment in New York, holding Louisa. It was one of the mornings after we had driven back to New York City from Maine. One of the ten mornings we had to get through before packing up and moving into the cottage on Peaks Island.

  “Ready to go to brunch?” I said, bouncing Louisa side to side on my hip. Marco looked at me closely and then held out his arms. “Here, I’ll hold the baby while you go do your makeup.”

  “Oh,” I had said, wounded for half a second, and then, “right, thanks.”

  “Christ,” I say now to myself, lost in the memory.

  My mom breaks into my thoughts. “The fact of the matter is, you found that e-mail long before Marco was really ready to discard you. You accelerated the process. And then you kept digging for the truth. Who knows how long he would have devalued you if you hadn’t seen that e-mail.”

  I ponder this for a moment as it sinks in. It wasn’t that I magically skipped the devalue phase. It was that I basically forced Marco to discard me before he was ready.

  “Mom,” I say, “there’s something I’ve blocked for a really long time and just this morning it came back to me. Something that I found at the very beginning, in those days after I found the e-mail.”

  “There’s more? God. OK. What is it?” my mom says, and cups her own coffee mug tightly.

  “Do you remember when I looked at the Internet history on our computer? And I found a Google search for the Uber rides to her apartment?”

  “Yes . . . ,” my mom says nervously.

  “Well, there was another Google search that showed up multiple times. I asked him about it and then I think I seriously blocked it from my memory because I just couldn’t deal with the real implications of it on top of everything else I was trying to wrap my head around at the time.” I take a deep breath. “He Googled ‘Does penis enlargement really work?’ When I asked him about it, he said he was worried about me being . . . stretched out after having a baby.” I look at her with an embarrassed smirk and shudder. “But obviously at this point I know he was researching for Croella.”

  My mom stares at me. “So while we were all madly trying to help him and figure out what was physically wrong with him. While you stopped producing enough milk for your newborn baby because you were so stressed about the e-mail and his personality change. He was Googling how to make his penis bigger for his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  We stare at each other, and then we both burst out laughing.

  “I didn’t think anything he did could shock me anymore,” my mom says through hysterical laughter.

  After a few minutes we quiet down, and I say, “At least we can laugh about it.”

  “Thank God.”

  —

  I HAVE an appointment with a therapist today. The therapist’s office is on the fourth floor of a large brick building in the Old Port. A neighbor recommended this therapist, along with several others, and this is my first consultation, the “getting to know you” visit. It is also my first time ever getting therapy. In fact, I don’t even really know what it means, to “get therapy”; I just know that I need to talk to someone who can either validate or veto my amateur Internet diagnosis. I press 4 in the elevator and tug at the sleeve of my green cardigan as the box slowly ascends. The door opens, and I walk down a long hallway and through a doorway to another hallway flanked by small offices with closed doors.

  “Hi, Jen?” A very pretty brunette woman pokes her head out the door of an office into the hallway right as I am about to settle into one of the chairs lined up for waiting patients.

  “Oh, hi, Lisa?” I say. She is too pretty and too young, I think right away. And in the two small words she has spoken, she gives off an air of self-possession and intelligence. I used to be like that, I think to myself as I tug at my sleeve again and follow her into the office.

  She tells me to settle in and smiles at me from her cozy chair across the small room. “Is this your first time in therapy?” she asks.

  I smile back. “Yes. I’m sorry, I don’t really know how it works.”

  “For this first session, you basically just talk, tell me about your situation, OK?” she says warmly. Yes, I can do that, I think, and I begin to talk rapidly in order to bring her up to speed. She listens and nods. Her eyes grow wider as I ramble on, and soon she is leaning forward in her seat. “Wow, this is making me really anxious just hearing about,” she says with a laugh halfway through.

  “There’s so much more,” I say, and continue to speak as quickly as I can, determined to finish the whole story in these fifty minutes so that she can fix me. Or at least tell me how to fix myself. I do not mention the word sociopath. I do not want to lead her in any way. When I get to the end, I take a deep breath and look up. “So . . . what do you think?” I ask finally.

  Lisa folds one long leg under her body. “Some of his behavior sounds to be on the psychopathy spectrum,” she says carefully. “I’m going to be honest. In my ten years of practicing, this is one of the most extreme cases of pathology that I’ve heard.”

  “Pathology?” I ask. I knew it. He’s a sociopath. Now this very smart woman just needs to tell me the exact steps I need to take to heal, and I can start to feel like a person again instead of an empty, aching shell.

  “Pathology basically means having destructive, uncontrollable tendencies. I mean, his lying is . . . insane.” She laughs. “Or the clinical term would be ‘pathological.’ He also seems to have a pathological desire to live a double life.” She takes a sip of tea from the mug on her side table. “The suicide attempt is interesting because that seems to indicate that he’s completely unaware of what he’s doing. He’s so unwilling to face his lying and pathology that he would rather create this whole ‘I lost my mind’ charade and take it to the extreme of attempting suicide to validate his version of reality.”

  “Wait, so . . . a sociopath who doesn’t know he’s a sociopath? Do some of them know?” I ask in surprise.

  “Oh, yes,” she says emphatically. “Some sociopathic individuals absolutely know that they suffer from a personality disorder and use it to their advantage. Marco sounds like he lacks empathy and an inner moral compass but that he truly justifies his actions to himself. That’s to say, it sounds like he believes his own lies.”

  I turn this over in my head. It makes me feel better to hear that Marco doesn’t seem to even be aware of what he is. That he
isn’t actually an evil mastermind who looked at me five years ago and thought, Her. I’m going to destroy her.

  “So, he’s acting on pure instinct?” I ask, finishing the thought spinning in my head.

  “That’s what it sounds like. I also have to warn you, you should prepare yourself to find out about more infidelity that happened over the course of your relationship. It’s basically impossible for someone with these types of pathological tendencies to stay faithful to one partner.”

  My stomach drops. “Oh, no, I know why you would think that, but I really don’t think he cheated before this. . . .” I start and then stop. Even to my own ears I sound desperate and pathetic. I can’t explain that there is no way he was cheating before November. Because I just know. So, for now, I acquiesce. “I suppose anything is possible.”

  Leaving Lisa’s office, I feel more grounded than I have in months. I am still lost inside the maze of my own mind, but now I have something to hold onto, a cleat in the rock that I can cling to with my fingertips. I climb into the waiting Volvo, and my mom hands me a hungry Louisa.

  “How was she?” I ask, brushing back Lulu’s hair and undoing my nursing bra.

  “She was so good,” my mom says. “She’s an angel. How was your session? Do you like Lisa?”

  “I really do.” I recount the session and Lisa’s preliminary thoughts.

  “Wow, so she really seems to know what she’s talking about,” my mom says, sipping her to-go latte from the café next door.

  “I have a consultation with another therapist set up for tomorrow, so we’ll see. But I do get a really good feeling from Lisa.”

  At the end of my consultation the next day, the very sweet woman ponders my story and then says, “If you really want to save your marriage, then I think the first thing we need to do is to get Marco to attend a session with you.”

  I hop into the waiting Volvo again, and this time, I say, “Um. I think I want to keep seeing Lisa.”

  —

  I WAKE up today, and the sun is splashing through my window onto the hardwood floors of my bedroom. I realize it is mid-April. I have been home for more than a month. My parents are in Paris for two weeks, and Stella, Tim, and Henry have moved out of their house and into my parents’ house on Haven until my parents get back. “This is gonna be awesome,” Tim says in the week leading up to their move-in date. “It’s going to be like one big party all the time.” No one says the real reason they are moving in is to take care of me. I can now leave the house for a couple of hours at a time, but I am still not functioning normally.

  Stella called me last week to say, “So Tim and I were thinking that we could each plan three or four meals. Kind of like a commune! Think about what you would like to cook and let me know so I can do the grocery shopping.” When we hung up, I looked at my mom with big eyes. “Stella wants me to cook while you guys are gone,” I said anxiously. My mom looked at me with a mixture of horror and incredulity.

  “She doesn’t understand what it’s like over here,” she said. “I’ll talk to her.”

  My parents left three days ago, and even though I haven’t cooked yet, I feel OK, much better than I thought I would. Today, Stella and I are going to a friend’s baby shower. It is my first social gathering since January 20, and as I brush my teeth, cooing to Louisa smiling at me from where she is nestled in a towel on the bathroom floor, I think, I can do this.

  At the baby shower brunch, I munch on warm croissants and sip pour-over coffee. Louisa shrieks and laughs and tries to claw another baby and everyone oohs and aahs and says, “She is really something.” I glow.

  When a friend of my sister’s, Kim, sidles up next to me and asks, “How are you doing?” I remember that three years ago, when her son was two, she found out her husband was cheating and using drugs. I don’t know the details, but I know that she is raising her son now mostly on her own. The last time I saw her was at my wedding last June.

  “You know, today is the first day I woke up and it wasn’t the first thing I thought of. I actually feel like I might be able to do this,” I say. “It’s definitely been really hard, but I think I jumped a major hurdle today because I really feel fine right now.” As I am talking I notice that she looks interested and encouraging but perplexed. “Did my sister not tell you?” I ask quickly.

  “No,” she says with a laugh. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what happened at all.”

  “Oh, God,” I say. “I thought that’s why you came over! I found out Marco was having an affair when Louisa was a month old . . . so I’m living with my parents right now and trying to get back on my feet.” By now, all eyes are on me. But I feel fine saying this, proud of myself even, that I am able to recite my husband’s affair like a recipe from a cookbook. “I think I entered a different phase today. Like maybe I’m over the grief phase? Hopefully anger is next,” I say with a laugh, and look around the table. The rest of the women are looking at us, and I notice that the woman who brought the other baby has a tear trickling down her face. I look back to Kim and her face is full of emotion. She’s smiling, but her face is twisted up in pain. “No, it’s OK, guys,” I say. And, in the moment, it is true.

  “Do you want to get together sometime? I would really love to talk to you.” She gives me her cell, and we make tentative plans to meet up for coffee.

  On the drive home, I turn the radio up and hum. It is the first time I have hummed since January 20, and I cry, “Mama’s humming again, Lulu! Mama’s gonna be OK!” I am excited, even euphoric, about the life that is waiting for me. The person I was always meant to be is now waiting to be discovered; I can feel it.

  I nurse Louisa and put her down for a nap in her swing when we get home. I sit down on the couch and a thunder clap erupts in my body, and suddenly I am drowning in sorrow and panic. Four years ago, I was sitting next to Marco in a cozy booth at Doyle’s. He stroked my arm and leaned in, whispering in my ear, “Did you know I told you I loved you for the first time last night while you were sleeping?” I looked into his eyes, “I love you, too.”

  I stand up quickly from the couch and pace around the living room. Tim is working, and Stella is out running errands with Henry. I grab my phone and text my sister, “I’m having a panic attack. I don’t understand. I felt so good this morning.”

  Her response comes quickly. “Oh no, I wanted to talk to you about this before you left the baby shower. I spoke to Kim after you left, and she said ‘I know Jenny feels fine today, but it is going to be a really long road. There will be moments when she feels OK and then moments/hours/days when she feels like she is right back to ground zero.’ You guys should definitely talk soon. She said even briefly talking to you stirred up a lot of emotions for her.”

  I take some deep breaths. Reading Stella’s text does not take away the tightness in my chest, but it gives me something to hold onto. It will be OK. It will be OK, I think on repeat, and circle the living room taking deep breaths. From somewhere far away I hear a booming voice: “You thought you were fine? Ha!” I pace some more. There is a buzzing in my head. Through the buzzing, I hear cries coming from upstairs. I move on autopilot up the stairs and scoop a whimpering Louisa from her swing. I tell her everything is going to be OK and kiss her hair over and over. I’m not going to make it. I’m not going to make it through this. My jaw won’t unclench, and my eyes are wide and burning. I hear a text come in. It’s Stella. “I’m almost back. Do you want to go for a walk?”

  “Yes,” I respond to my sister. I breathe in and open and close my mouth to relax my jaw.

  Stella and I stroll to the beach that is a fifteen-minute walk away.

  “I felt fine this morning. I felt like I understood things. Like I understood basically what happened. Like, it happens. Men cheat. Marco had really bad timing. But then when I really think about it, about him and about us and how we were and our memories and . . .”

  “I know,” Stella cuts
in gently. “Jenny, this wasn’t a normal ‘married dude who cheated’ situation. You can’t think of it like that. We all loved Marco, and he turned out to be a completely different person than we thought. But the really crazy part to me is the lying and continuing to try to play both sides as long as he did. I don’t understand what he was thinking. Did he think he was going to get away with it?”

  Her simple question jolts me for a second. “Yes,” is on the tip of my tongue, but it doesn’t feel right. Did he actually want to get away with it? I ask myself.

  “I think,” I say, shaping my thoughts into words, “I think he wanted to get caught. I don’t think he wanted to fix things. I think he wanted me to be forced to leave.”

  My sister sighs. “He’s a coward.”

  We turn right onto Willow Street, which leads to a long, sandy beach and expanse of brilliant ocean. Henry hops out of his stroller and runs on his miniature legs to the playground at the edge of the beach. I unstrap Lulu’s seat belt and lift her into my lap, sitting in the shade on the small wooden boardwalk beside the playground. I look around at the kids playing and laughing. Adults yelling and forcefully applying suntan lotion to flailing limbs.

  Oh no, I think. I can feel it coming, the panic attack. There is black ink streaming out of the pit in my stomach, and soon it will cover all of my insides. I squint my eyes and try to focus on Lulu’s soft hair and the sand tickling my toes. The noises around me rise to a fevered pitch and then jumble together to form a high-pitched buzzing. “Shut up,” I want to scream at the mom yelling to her three-year-old to let his friend have a turn and the two ladies carrying on a casual conversation to my right. “How can you be so normal? How can you be talking about grocery shopping when my whole world has crashed down and I am drowning in my own body?”

  “I have to go,” I call to Stella. “I don’t feel well.” I wave to her worried face and turn around quickly. She cannot leave Henry and she cannot pick him up because she is nine months pregnant, and I am grateful because I am not going to make it if she comes over here. I drop Lulu into her stroller, fasten her seat belt, and I am off the boardwalk, off the beach, and onto the street before my face crumples, and I start to cry.