and later, to inpatient treatment for PTSD. In 1999, at age forty-eight, he had a heart attack, and then, six months later, a quadruple bypass for a triple blockage called a Widow Maker. As I sat beside his hospital bed, the love I felt for him surpassed the simple passion we had known through the years. At one point, when a staph infection invaded the site of his incision, he lay for a week with his chest open, his heart exposed, the wound cleaned and the dressings changed every six hours. I would press my cheek against his when he called out to me, and sit beside him as he endured the claustrophobia of the hyperbaric chamber he was slid into to have his infection bombarded with pure oxygen. His body and soul were mine, and I wanted to protect, enfold them.
But his near-death experience also precipitated a new round of drinking—this time, with a suicidal vengeance. For the next eight years, he drank and drank and drank—and often raged—as I lay in another room and read books and wrote. I traveled to writers’ colonies and conferences, and led Zona Rosa, the series of writing-and-living groups I founded for women just before we met. When problems with my kids came up, I dealt with them alone. And sometimes, when I wasn’t too furious, we had great sex despite the booze. Like most alcoholics, he was a master manipulator, good at promising me what I wanted—from tango lessons to an immediate end to all this chaos. Nor did he lose his sardonic sense of humor: When a gas heater exploded in the garage (where he’d taken to hanging out to drink and watch TV) and burned his beautiful penis, he called the scar his Aztec Surgical Modification, claiming that it added to his prowess.
Why I was faithful to him during this period, I don’t know, yet I was. In truth, during those years, I frequently yearned for those times of easy, indiscriminate sex, when I didn’t have to take care of anyone’s feelings but my own. When Zane and I separated, as eventually happened in 2008, when he left for rehab for the last time, I had fun looking guys up on the Internet, but none of them sounded quite as interesting to me as Zane. When I saw a hunky man on the street, my next thought was almost always but he doesn’t punch my buttons like Zane . “She liked imaginary men best of all” read a retro package of tissues that lay beside my bed with my vibrator. And while I kept thinking I would revert to my wild ways, I didn’t. Also, when I did find a man attractive, it was now for different reasons—reasons that were almost protective of my relationship with Zane. These men were, inevitably, spiritually evolved, intellectual men—always married—with whom I formed deep friendships, but with whom my former behavior would have been out of the question.
Nor do I know why I didn’t divorce him—after all, I’d lived through that particular scenario three times before. I was far from my grandmother, who knew she would be with the man she had married until the end of one of their lives. And then there was my shame: was I really as strong or as smart as I thought I was? And if I was, wouldn’t I have left him long before? “I would have kicked him out in three weeks!” a friend said when I told her of Zane sitting for four months in what had once been my study, drinking, smoking, and watching TV with the blinds down, and occasionally saying he was going out for cigarettes, then coming back after eight hours at a bar—this, just before his last stint at a rehab and over two years spent in recovery.
The only thing I did to protect myself was to buy his half of the house from him, so that it now belongs solely to me. After all, he’s the man for whom I’ve written the half-dozen love poems framed in my dining room, complete with my drawings of hearts, flowers, birds, ribbons. Indeed, there is homage to our love everywhere—from the photos beneath magnets on the refrigerator to the deliriously happy-looking portraits taken of us
But his near-death experience also precipitated a new round of drinking—this time, with a suicidal vengeance. For the next eight years, he drank and drank and drank—and often raged—as I lay in another room and read books and wrote. I traveled to writers’ colonies and conferences, and led Zona Rosa, the series of writing-and-living groups I founded for women just before we met. When problems with my kids came up, I dealt with them alone. And sometimes, when I wasn’t too furious, we had great sex despite the booze. Like most alcoholics, he was a master manipulator, good at promising me what I wanted—from tango lessons to an immediate end to all this chaos. Nor did he lose his sardonic sense of humor: When a gas heater exploded in the garage (where he’d taken to hanging out to drink and watch TV) and burned his beautiful penis, he called the scar his Aztec Surgical Modification, claiming that it added to his prowess.
Why I was faithful to him during this period, I don’t know, yet I was. In truth, during those years, I frequently yearned for those times of easy, indiscriminate sex, when I didn’t have to take care of anyone’s feelings but my own. When Zane and I separated, as eventually happened in 2008, when he left for rehab for the last time, I had fun looking guys up on the Internet, but none of them sounded quite as interesting to me as Zane. When I saw a hunky man on the street, my next thought was almost always but he doesn’t punch my buttons like Zane . “She liked imaginary men best of all” read a retro package of tissues that lay beside my bed with my vibrator. And while I kept thinking I would revert to my wild ways, I didn’t. Also, when I did find a man attractive, it was now for different reasons—reasons that were almost protective of my relationship with Zane. These men were, inevitably, spiritually evolved, intellectual men—always married—with whom I formed deep friendships, but with whom my former behavior would have been out of the question.
Nor do I know why I didn’t divorce him—after all, I’d lived through that particular scenario three times before. I was far from my grandmother, who knew she would be with the man she had married until the end of one of their lives. And then there was my shame: was I really as strong or as smart as I thought I was? And if I was, wouldn’t I have left him long before? “I would have kicked him out in three weeks!” a friend said when I told her of Zane sitting for four months in what had once been my study, drinking, smoking, and watching TV with the blinds down, and occasionally saying he was going out for cigarettes, then coming back after eight hours at a bar—this, just before his last stint at a rehab and over two years spent in recovery.
The only thing I did to protect myself was to buy his half of the house from him, so that it now belongs solely to me. After all, he’s the man for whom I’ve written the half-dozen love poems framed in my dining room, complete with my drawings of hearts, flowers, birds, ribbons. Indeed, there is homage to our love everywhere—from the photos beneath magnets on the refrigerator to the deliriously happy-looking portraits taken of us
Similar Books
