"What have you done?" I said accusingly.

"That's what you get for getting drunk Mary."

He's addressed me as Mary throughout our marriage, knowing I hate to be addressed this way. He's called me "Mary" ten thousand times. My response of "Don't call me Mary." is what he hears nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times. This time I don't debate how he's addressed me. Why? Because he's won finally? Because I'm too d.a.m.ned weary to fight him after this? This is what I get? What I deserve? He is the judge, jury and executioner to my alcoholism, my failure to provide for him, for a bankruptcy that happens while he calls himself Chief Financial Officer of a four million dollar firm? a.n.a.l rape is my justice?

He saunters out of the room so much more the man for having conquered me finally with nothing more to say for his pathetic self. I am left with the unsettling fact that it wasn't just that I had chosen poorly in a mate or a father of my children, but that he had the consciousness of a sociopath, that his sense of justice was criminally twisted.

I felt filthy and furious and unsure of what I should do next. I suppose if I was going to discover that I was capable of murder it would have been that day, in that moment. But, I didn't lift a finger against him. I locked the bedroom door, went into the bathroom and locked that door too. I stood above the toilet for a moment leaned forward and vomited. I always felt nauseas when I thought of my father's betrayal, which by comparison was absolutely nothing to this. But now, I wanted to wretch forever.

Eventually I stopped, exhausted, disgusted; I turned got into the shower and turned the hot water on. The water pelted against the walls and the gla.s.s of the door and when it was warm enough I got in and slid to the floor while the water beat down upon me like rain, and I sobbed clutching my knees with my weary arms, cried copious tears for myself and this life that was once full of promise but now ruined. While I was using the soap I remembered stories of other women saying they could not feel clean and I understood the completeness of his violation of me.

I stood at my bedroom window after I'd showered and gotten dressed, knowing if I was going to have him arrested I'd gotten rid of a lot of the evidence of it. I was still injured. The Vaseline jar still intact with his finger marks pulled through the thickness of it, imprinted. I imagined him grasping at the lubricant to prepare himself to enter me and I was disgusted all over again.

I stared vacantly, numbly, at the empty court in front of our home, imagined it filled with police cars and policemen in the yard or approaching my house. I lived in a very nice neighborhood. My neighbors were already witnessing the disintegration of my marriage, my family, of me. I tried to imagine everyone I knew in Loveland knowing this about me, that I had been fool enough to believe in this man. How hard would it be to stand up for myself in a trial for marital rape? How many people would know the significance of this particular choice? It would mean I couldn't leave the state, leave him behind for a really long time, or I thought that is what it would mean. It would delay my moving on and I wasn't even sure it would be a successful prosecution, or how it would be received.

But mostly, I was incredibly ashamed, and he had succeeded in oppressing me. I usually told everything that happened in some kind of affirmation that I existed despite whatever horror I had faced. But this, it was just too much and I kept it inside for weeks before I dared to share what had happened.

Later that day he pushed roughly against my shoulder as he pa.s.sed me in the hall above the chandelier illuminating the foyer. I was startled and fleetingly thought I might have fallen when I realized that the only a.s.set we had left was the life insurance on my life, and that I would be worth more dead to him than alive.

I wondered if he could do this to me what else was he capable of?

The drunken blurry rape was over by a few days. In my shame and horror, I hadn't told anyone what happened. I longed for Eric like I had never longed for him before. I fantasized he'd rescue me out of that nightmare and provide love and comfort and healing. Eric's warning that I shouldn't marry David was ringing in my head again, but now it was heralding his unheeded warning on over time. I wanted, needed comfort, to say "You were right, look what's happened now. Look what he's done to me. Look how he's broken me, my spirit."

Knowing Eric would understand the significance of the act David had chosen as his very deliberate act of personal revenge before I even said why out loud to myself. There wasn't a more exacting one, given how I felt about the betrayal of my father. I wondered where Eric was, what had happened to him. I knew from his father that he had married and moved to Atlanta. I just didn't know where or if he'd still be there, still married or if he'd had any children. Tears seem to stream from my eyes continually, and my children only knew this broken inconsolable version of me, not the accomplished phoenix who once accomplished so much.

I sat at my desk in the cold, chocolate brown office in the bas.e.m.e.nt. The room was long and rectangular. The desk was huge and beautiful, a semi circle, state of the art computer equipment resided within and upon it.

A broken printer sat there, I'd hurled it across the room in frustration weeks before, not at David, but because of him. He characterized it as though I had thrown it at him, his way of forever twisting the facts. Imagine, that in his mind this offense was even worse than what he had perpetrated.

Three wooden lateral file drawers perfectly fit into an indentation under designer lights. David's favorite artwork was there atop the filing cabinets. A gas fireplace was lit, but its warmth could never reach me again. The floor was covered in a specially ordered wood grain tile he'd asked for, three rugs with an Eastern Indian design of curry yellow, brown, scarlet and forest green covered the tiles. Hookah's and other bra.s.s and wooden artifacts decorated the room. A thousand dollar signed Michael Jordan jersey sat in a box awaiting framing. A television in a custom shelf above the fire place, hanging beads from somewhere in Asia covered the bathroom door that contained his specially built throne on a pedestal, the special mirror he'd asked for above a new pedestal sink, more designer lights and perfectly matched crescent moon curry yellow wallpaper covered the walls in his custom executive wash room. I'd spent thousands of dollars to create this office for him. He declared it was only fair after he'd supported my business and it had failed that I had failed. It was his turn he said. All this he demanded amidst corporate and personal bankruptcies, with a new Trail Blazer he hadn't bothered to make payments for, now repossessed.

So with all the expense, I'd worked like a slave on it for David and one afternoon while I was out he'd taken gold glaze and in an ejaculatory imitation spewed it upon the walls. It was gaudy and disgusting and people's eyebrows would disappear into their hairlines when they witnessed David's finishing touch upon the decor. I'd just raise my hand in surrender and swear it had not been my intended result or personal effort; it was David's sense of pa.s.sive aggressive style.

I'd been resigned to David's selfishness for so long. Just the thought of him exhausted me anymore. If nothing else, despite the fact we were lucky to be bringing in $1500 a month against the $6000 in expenses, he was away 12 hours a day now. At least he was away.

It sounds insane when I think of it now and as I write it, but I stayed because of the children. I thought they needed their father, maybe more than they needed all of me. At least they had the sh.e.l.l of what was once me. I suppose the antidepressants, the booze, getting stoned each night while they slept kept me numb enough to endure it, and during the day I stayed sober and I had the kids with me. I loved them even if it was total chaos, and at night I was wasted and then I slept alone, but now with the door locked.

I went to an internet search engine and I typed in the letters of Eric's name and then A-T-L-A-N-T-A and as I pressed the Enter key with my trembling fingertips my breath was bated. I saw he was still there, still married because there were several numbers and the name of his wife, Roxanne, was included in the listing.

I stared at it a long, long time.

The silence of the bas.e.m.e.nt suspending time as the ancient round stone thrown fifteen years before finally came to rest beneath the long still surface of the pond. Seemingly so far removed from the original act, that its movement, dissonant sound and disruptive effect seemed strangely silent and still. As though it rested gently, and whispered quietly, and innocently. Here my memories of my love for this other man were resident in my heart and mind, his significance to me undeniable, but there are two families in the balance. It wasn't right for me to call after all this time. I should leave it alone. Heavy hearted that he had married someone else, sick at the irony that he was in the city I loved and left behind while I was tortured in a marriage that I could not repair and couldn't leave, I pointed the mouse at the corner of the window and clicked into further silence and the water's gla.s.sy surface remained calm, flat and seemingly unaffected.

Six weeks went by and occasionally I tried to glean some further information of his life, what he was doing now by a search. Only his address and number presented itself. I'd stare at the listing, repeat the click of the "X", refusing, unable to cast the pebble, and move on trying to forgive my husband and save our family. My misery knew no release. My authentic self was lost again in an alcoholic blur. I had become a shadow of the woman Eric knew, barely recognizable even to me; broken, sad, stricken with grief.

Eventually, I told my friend Florence what David had done. Then I told Mindy and I told Pam. One by one my friends learned what had happened. Naturally they were alarmed. I was so confused; it was so hard to make sense of how my marriage had come to this.

I finally told my step-father's mother what happened too. She broke her promise to me and told my mother anyway. I suppose it isn't reasonable to keep secrets like that about someone's daughter and grandchildren.

They all said the same thing, "You've got to leave Marissa. You've got to leave. He's left you no choice. You've got to leave."

Chapter 21.

My mother and I had not spoken for the better part of five years, our relationship having been irretrievably damaged after my father's abuse and her denial regarding her role in the wreckage that was the aftermath.

She's a horrible bully when she doesn't get her way, even to this day. She kept promising that if I left David and came to Atlanta that relations between she and I would be different, that she wouldn't make things difficult for me personally. "Come. Come for the sake of the children" she said.

On so many levels I knew that was a lie, but I didn't know what else to do or where else to turn, and by now the house was about to be foreclosed upon and I could clearly see that it would happen when my daughter was in her first year of school and that our, but especially her, humiliation would be utterly complete.

So I went to Atlanta to visit with my mother to talk about the possibility of actually leaving David and to make an attempt at reconciliation with her. For four nights I sat at her dining room table drinking red wine and I spilled out the truth of what life with David was really like.

Without really realizing that I was merely within days of leaving the marriage, I found myself quietly in the bas.e.m.e.nt on my mother's computer checking my email and surfing the Internet. By now I'd looked up Eric so many times, and once gain I typed in his name, my fair city and hit Enter. His number was there.

Right there.

I picked up the phone and dialed the number. The phone rang, once, twice, three times, four. A voice on an answering machine predictably explains that no one is home, and instructs me to leave a message.

Surely I am desperately out of my mind because I actually do leave a message. I'm sure that my voice shook. "Uhm. I'm calling for Eric. This is Marissa, I need to talk to him about something that's happened, and I'm in town for a few days. Please call..."

I was terrified. With the same symptoms as usual, pounding heart and sweaty palms, I hung up the phone and wondered if I'd hear from him at all.

I didn't hear from him that day, the next, or for three more days after that. I a.s.sumed by then that I would not hear from him at all. One afternoon though, I came in from shopping with my mother and there was a message from Eric. My heart pounded. My hands were sweating. Some things just always remained the same. I went into the guest room alone, read his number off of the piece of paper. Waited while the phone rang, and he answered.

"Eric?" I tentatively said. "It's Marissa."

"HEY!! It was great to hear your voice! How are you?" he said We talked a long time and the whole story poured out of me. I don't know how I avoided it but for some reason I didn't cry. It was as though there had not been seven whole years of silence between us, and the shorthand and easy laughter was still instantly there as though everything was suspended in time.

He was still married, though not any more happily than I was. He had a son, who he adored. He didn't want to face what I was facing, hoped to make it better but admired my willingness to consider alternatives. When I told him what David had actually done? He said "My G.o.d Marissa. With what happened with your Dad what could he have done that would have been worse?"

Of course, he intuitively, implicitly knew the horror of it, the particular specific horror of it, and why it was such a perfectly exacted revenge, whether I'd deserved David's revenge or not. It was the one comfort I was sure of, that came in just the way I needed it to. I just simply didn't' have to explain anything at all about why or how it had devastated me in just the precise way that it had.

His wife was out of town, but I was leaving the next day and she was returning the next day and I wasn't really prepared for him to see me bloated from alcohol and worn to an absolute frazzle. I didn't want to cheat, it was wrong, and I didn't want him to cheat, it was wrong.

I went home to Loveland, the small burg ironically chosen for my desire to have love in my marriage once again, and we stayed in touch a few weeks. I wrote of him then, pa.s.sionately, and shared my thoughts and feelings with him more than once. We were hot for one another. It was steamy and on the verge of dangerous. I told myself I would not act on these feelings and so did he. It was the first time I'd felt pa.s.sion in years. It was the first time I remembered feeling desirable in years. He poured out his heart and I poured out mine.

Suddenly, when David came home and dished out his negativity about me, I felt a buffer between him and me. I felt strong for the first time in months on end.

One Friday afternoon a few short weeks after I'd returned, I got the job offer in Atlanta I had been hoping for and my exit was imminent.

Am I sure I want the job? Yes! Yes. No, I don't need to think about it over the weekend I'm sure I want to take it. When do you need me to be there?" I said into the phone. The silence hung in the air as I listened to her answer. "I'll leave by Monday then. I can start next week."

David was eavesdropping on my conversation from the open window of the den, and that is how he realized I was actually going to leave. For two days I prepared to pack and go and he said nothing about it of any substance as I did laundry and cleaned. I asked him to follow me and to go to see Rabbi Ohr in Atlanta. He'd offered free counseling for us if he went. David said no, he wouldn't go, that he hated Atlanta, my friends, my family, and didn't want to live there. Atlanta was a cesspool, remember?

Two days later when I left it was extremely ugly, the tension between us so thick and tight. My friend Mindy and her daughter came to help me pack the car and to say goodbye. I'm in the garage with David and the menacing hateful look has returned to his face. He's angry? Incredible to me that he had the audacity to blame me for the end of our marriage after I'd begged him to change things so many times.

His eyes bore into me. "I hate them, and I won't do a thing to take care of them. I hate them because they are half of YOU. You'll leave here and I won't send a penny. I won't see them. No one will ever have you again because no one wants to raise another man's brats."

I was stunned, taken aback. "I can't believe you'd say such a thing. Even for you, that's incredible. But I'm leaving because you've given me no other choice but to leave and that's what's best for me and for our children, whether you love them or not. I can't go on this way, angry all day and drinking all night. They can't go on this way, and now after years of your refusing to get a job to take care of your family, we're going to lose this house and it will happen while Brittany is just entering the first grade. I can't do that to her, and you shouldn't have either."

He packed the rest of our things, put the children in the car, kissed them good bye and told them that he loved them and would miss them. I supposed I should have been grateful he didn't utter his hateful statements to their faces.

He stood by the car while I refused to believe he had meant what he said and I asked him again to come for counseling in Atlanta. At one point we did actually go to Imago therapy in Atlanta together. Our first meeting together, the rabbi who married us, Rabbi Ohr, had us make a list of the things that each of us wanted in order for us to be the perfect mate to the other. He listed his first, as was always the way it went with David. I listed mine to him. They were typical, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary.

"So what did you learn about what Marissa wants David?" asked Rabbi Ohr. How a man who was short in stature seemed huge was secreted in the size of his heart, his kind brown eyes, and the gentle smile that adorns his face.

"Nothing. I've known what she wants all along. This is nothing new." He says this in a flippant, slightly defiant manner. I feel stunned, slapped by both the words and the delivery.

I sat there incredulous. "If you knew what I wanted, what it would take for me to be happy with you and to make our marriage happy, and it was so little, so ordinary, why wouldn't you give me that?"

"I didn't want to." He said flatly.

Nothing he had said before or since could have been truer. It was the last straw for me. The tears welled up and overflowed and I can remember that my breath was escaping from me and I just wanted out, away from him, once and for all. I realized then that he had never kept a single promise he had made to me. Times he'd said "I have never lied to you about anything important." Made me realize that nothing was important to him and so he lied about everything. The whole thing was a farce, meant for me to take care of him, and in failing to do it as well as his mother had, anything I got, I deserved.

It was over.

Chapter 22.

The first six weeks in Atlanta were hard. I quit drinking three days after I left David and my need to push down my anger and my constant sense of violation was relieved. He still made me feel mad, still made me feel violated, but I had respite and relief and I could hang up the phone or close the email and he didn't have the power he had before.

I didn't expect Eric to do anything but be a cheerleader from afar if that much. But he kept in touch to see if I was ok and his presence was comforting to me. Before long, I did see him. I know I shouldn't have and it wasn't very many times.

The first time I saw him we had lunch. I was so much heavier than the thin very pretty version of me. He was shocked when he saw me again after so many years apart. I could tell by the way he almost stopped walking when he saw me and he masked his response so quickly, but he was extraordinarily sweet about it.

He kissed me h.e.l.lo and took me to lunch. He looked exactly the same, as though he had not aged a day, as though he hadn't had a moment of h.e.l.l. He was charming and s.e.xy. It was so easy to talk to him. We were still good friends and while there had been flirtation by email, I knew he had not been prepared to greet this very Rubinesque version of my physique. Yet I could tell I comforted him emotionally and psychologically in a way he was missing and that our friendship was still a comfort to him.

Eventually, months into my divorce, when I was losing weight and feeling more attractive and more like me again, we met in a hotel one afternoon. I got there first and when he came into the room I took his clothes off as quickly as I could. As I pushed him naked on the hotel bed and slid on top of him "Oh my G.o.d, that is some sweeeeeet......" he actually said it again right out loud. He knew now the way it had haunted me, surrounded me, and made me long for him. Once again the absolutely perfect fit and the smile of sweet relief upon his face...upon my own, I was in heaven.

"It is. It is. It's a perfect fit, even now." I said breathlessly and I made love to him with perfect abandon.

We lay together talking. It had been great, like it always had been between us. I don't think it meant as much to him as it meant to me, and I don't think I was prepared to admit what it meant to me even then. His confidence at pleasing me wasn't there like it had been. He seemed shy even or maybe just hesitant and I misread his guilt for a lack of confidence. I was angry with Roxanne for emasculating him and I felt surprisingly guilt free. I sat there and told myself he had been mine first and since his wife wasn't the same religion as we were, well, then it didn't count as adultery. Not exactly. Amazing, my ability to justify the act of taking what I wanted, but there it was and I wasn't proud of it, but that's the truth of it.

"I actually have never cheated on her Marissa." I swore I wouldn't do this. But G.o.d, I've been so unhappy for so long. I'm so tired of jumping through hoops and having to say just the right things, and do just the right things, and get her prepared in just the right way. I mean for ONCE I'd like it to be just the way I'd like it to be. She's just so f.u.c.king particular and she's constantly busting my b.a.l.l.s. We've been to therapy endlessly, it never gets better. I work my a.s.s off and I just wish she'd back off..." His voice trailed off and I knew inside he was traveling around that same circle I had traveled so many times before and suddenly it didn't seem right to confide this in me. What to do with a marriage that refused to work? What to do?

I was quiet a moment. Not sure if I should be honest about what I was thinking, but it was our way to be honest with one another. "I wish I could say I was sorry Eric. I'm just not. It was wonderful being with you after all these years. Just the way I remembered it, exactly. I thought of you just this way every time I was lonely or hurt or longing for something better than I'd chosen for myself. I needed you and while I know it's wrong, and that I shouldn't be here, and you shouldn't be here, I just feel like I need you more than she does right now and I'll just have to live with myself for doing the thing I know is wrong. It is very selfish of me, and I'm sorry not to hold back when I know intrinsically the weakness you feel too."

"I know Marissa. I understand." He kissed me, and then, "G.o.d what time is it? It's getting dark." he got up to get dressed. "That was great, just like it always was. It never changes with us, no matter how long we're apart."

Yet again, we parted and my expectations and demands were zero of him. He had to face his own demons as I was facing mine. There was no realistic end of the road that culminated in his loving me instead, in marrying me, and I knew it.

Somehow a lack of a future didn't matter; the friendship maintained merit without a s.e.xual relationship intact. We still talked periodically and we were both worried about being discovered. We weren't looking to start an actual affair.

Chapter 23.

Six months later I found myself suddenly free of responsibilities and I called him, longing to be with him again, despite the complications, despite it all. He was out of town but not that far away, just two hours in the closest city far enough away to justify an overnight visit. I was trying to seduce him again. He was game.

I got there late in the evening because the weather was horrible and traffic delayed. I felt thinner, more beautiful, more confident yet again than the last time I'd seen him. I entered the steak house, white linen table cloths, candlelight, with the same confidence and sense of beauty I'd felt coming out of the train station years before. My sense of guilt absent once again I just looked forward to being with him again.

He stood as I approached the table and pulled my seat out for me as I sat down. "You are looking quite lovely this evening. How are you doing?" he leaned over and kissed my cheek and then situated himself again.

"I'm doing much better, thank you. It's hard sometimes, but I haven't regretted leaving him, not once." I said while smoothing blonde curls behind my ears and spreading the napkin across my lap.

"You are made of sterner stuff than me, because I do not want to go through what you are going through, no matter how awful it seems in the marriage." He placed his cell phone on the table and I briefly thought it important that he not lose track of that, or her, or of time and felt a twinge of guilt, but ignored it.

"Don't call me brave or anything. It was simple self preservation. What choices did he leave me but to leave him when it was all said and done Eric?"

"None, really. None at all. I never could blame you for going."

"Things are no better for you? Didn't the last round of therapy help at all?"

"Yeah it helps. It helps with making me more compliant to her needs. It doesn't make it safe for me to express my own, especially if I am trying to avert disaster for my son and financial ruin."

"Ouch. No, of course not, of course it doesn't. I'm so sorry." I said as I touched his hand across the table and let it rest there feeling the warmth of his hand underneath my own.

"So, what's your favorite movie these days?" He deftly changed the subject and I withdrew the touch casually, without deliberation and picked up my Sweet Tea.

"My favorite movie? There's a refreshing question, something actually pertinent to what I like and care about." I smiled at him. He doesn't realize how few men ever ask a woman about her likes and dislikes, never mind the reason she has the preferences she has. I answered, "Surprisingly enough, I like 'Cinderella Man', something that finally replaced 'Prince of Tides' after many years."

"With Nicholas Cage? I like that too" he said confused.

"No, no. That's not his name. The guy that had the affair with Meg Ryan.... and it has Renee Zellweiger? He's a boxer during the depression?"

"Oh oh oh Russell Crowe. Yeah I like that movie too! It's really great!"

"Yeah, that's him. Russell Crowe."

"Why do you like the movie so well?" I couldn't help but be almost grateful to have a conversation where he was finding out something new about me, even after fifteen years of our friendship, he was still exploring.

G.o.d, why didn't I marry him?