Adultery

Today is my daughter’s birthday. I count the months. January, when my mother died in 1990. March, when I turn 63. June, when my sister died in 1993. She was 53.

I am discovering what it is not only to age but to live a decade longer than my older sibling. My sister would have helped through heartbreak. She knew it well. That knowing I have now learned is a gift.

My daughter is turning thirty-five, a beautiful startling woman whose mind is full of wonder. She is a philosopher. This morning I dreamt that I’d taken my first Philosophy class with Jacques Derrida. My daughter is an expert in this philosopher who died in 2004. I was taking the final exam and could not answer a single question. The test was full of quotes from philosophers I should have read but had not and from some I had read but still did not recognize what they had said. The key was to match the quotes with the names, no list of names provided. Others taking the exam seemed to be finishing but I left every question blank with the exception of one guess: Nietzsche, who said, It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

I must do what follows here in the third person. I need the distance that point of view provides: His name was j. and he appeared in her dream. When she woke she knew that it was a vision of him but not him. His eyes in the dream were cloud-white blue, the color of her husband’s eyes. J.’s are brown. She’d describe those eyes that once electrified her if she could see him in real life, but he had never been totally real. He was not possible. She’d met him before she’d married her husband and fallen madly for him only to discover later to her horror that j. was married. The serial adulterer she’d often write about in her stories, the man she never met again once she’d married, the man she’d always believed had broken her heart before she knew what breaks a heart. That she learned from her husband, the man she would always love even if she could never be with him again, even if she could never sleep with him again—all the things she was certain of and this from a woman who was certain of only one thing: the meaning of an open heart. And this term “open heart” was one she could not define. So even that was surrounded by uncertainties.

Definitions were not her strong suit.

In the dream j., an attorney, was on trial and she had inexplicably been chosen to be his attorney. But she had not been to law school. She was patently unqualified but there was no way out. He had been accused of stealing cigarettes kept in cartons in the office of his closet, kept under lock and key so that no one in the office could smoke them. But j. who used to be a chain smoker and a self-claimed alcoholic (she never believed that he drank enough to be one, but he had a coin in his pocket, a five-year coin he’d shown her that alcoholics carry after being sober for that long). They were in the court room. She was trying to figure out how to solve the case. She decided, perhaps because of too much television, that lawyers must be detectives, at least criminal lawyers did and she was only interested in crimes of passion and anger. Crimes of need fell into categories that covered the global realm of the human psyche while crimes of passion and anger were primal. Or so she thought. Let’s be clear. She was not certain of this or anything but the open heart.

She concluded that he was innocent of the crime of stealing the cigarettes because that crime was not one of need—not for him anyway. It had to be a crime of anger or passion against him. She knew that he was having an affair with an Asian beauty, a young attorney in his office.

She had learned this while awake and separated from D.—a phone call, a drink with j., the man she thought she’d once loved. And of course he was still married.

In the dream he told her he’d left his wife. Left his wife for someone other than herself? How could he? But she would defend him.

Open heart, open heart, open heart.

His wife is a beauty in her own right, a beauty whom he said he didn’t love. But what did he know of love? This she was concluding about herself so she said it about him. Most people come to such conclusions through their own clouded lenses that lack the clarity of cloud-white blue.

Nietzsche says, He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

J. had not joined the Asian attorney though he was still sleeping with her: “The sex is amazing.” That’s what he said when they met for the drink. That was the sort of thing he said out loud while she drank red wine and he drank water, the sort of thing he should say only to the woman he was having sex with, the sort of thing that made her see that he’d not been the one to break her heart, that there is a difference between disappointment and rejection and that irreparable break in the beating organ at the center of our chests and minds and souls—the metaphor for who we are: human and alive: open heart, open heart, open heart.

Break front

On Friday, February 6, I saw the Obamas at the Alvin Ailey performance. I have a season ticket to the ballet at the Kennedy Center, a box seat in Box 3, the box to the left of the Presidential Box. D. had gone with me (don’t ask—I shall explain in time). Afterwards that night, we sleep, long and deep, entwined together on my side of the bed. I know this because at 7:24 I wake and see that D. lies in my space on the left side of the bed. I climb back into the narrow curve of sheet that his form leaves and sleep again. Bird on a wire. Open heart. Open heart.

I then tell D. my dream about sex and storage:

I wake wanting to make love but don’t say anything. He 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. The vibrator that I have had since he left me, that never would have been possible for me to have while we were together. He would have been offended by it or so I thought. But when I reach into the side table at my bedside where I keep it, I have instead the side table from the bedroom set, the one table I took from that set that belonged to my first husband and me. Yes, I have been married twice: 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. Recently California Closets helped me create more storage but 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 (I made all the costumes in different colors of gingham. His was green. Sarah’s was red. Ben’s was blue. Sarah and Ben are my children from my first marriage.) In the dream, my 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. (My daughter is pregnant. Her and her husband’s baby girl is due the end of April.) 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 D. sold after I went to Missouri to teach, after he decided to leave me, after we had sold the house. I have recently been to the island of St. Lucia, an island of beaches and rainforests and a dark people with open hearts, where I saw mahogany trees.

In the dream, the 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 that other state to teach fiction writing as a visiting writer. 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 died, to his first James Bond movie, “A lot of breakage.”

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 film, was born and raised in St. Lucia, the isle of indestructible mahogany—or so I’d always thought. 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.