Tuesday, November 23, 2010

A Change in the Weather

My marriage is ending.

The “ing” jumps out at me because ,not only does it place my predicament in the present tense, but it also puts me in the middle of a continuum rather than at the beginning of the end.

That statement - “my marriage is ending” - is a declaration and also a realization. The relationship didn’t just crumble one day. It weakened until it broke irrevocably. Sadly it is also not the end of the break up because - logistically, financially, emotionally - separation takes much, much longer than anyone can stand. But here I am; having to cope with life as it happens, rather than how I’d like it to transpire.

My husband, I believe, suffers from wanderlust - the impulse to wander, to leave. It is a gut feeling that a better, more exciting person or life is somewhere out in the world. Your present set of circumstances prevent you from finding it with an imaginary set of shackles; the old “ball-and-chain,” if you will. He longs for a more “passionate” partner and existence.
This is where musical theater comes to my aid with a song from a failed musical, “The Baker’s Wife.” The score boasts an exquisite set of songs by Stephen Schwartz (Pippin, Godspell, Wicked). It tells the simple story of an older man - the baker - and his younger wife. She leaves him for a sexy young man only to return, wiser, to her husband. She had wanderlust and recovered.

Late in the show a song comes along as a poignant counterpoint to wandering and as a beautiful cautionary tale: “Where is the Warmth?”

Since I grow feverish with the flush that comes every time he holds me,
naturally you'd suppose I'd be warm when I'm hot.
Well, I'm not.

But oh, where is the warmth?
The fire is there
But where is the warmth?

These lyrics have been looping through my mind a lot lately, especially “...naturally you'd suppose I'd be warm when I'm hot./Well, I'm not.” That plaintive conclusion comforts me. Don’t get me wrong. I like the burn, the fever that comes with some new couplings. We have had an open marriage so I have felt that rush and excitement that comes with inexplicable chemistry. I did wonder, in those moments, if one of those men held the promise of a better life than my man at home. Then my rational, reasonable self would kick-in to remind me that the heat is not sustainable.

But, ah, the warmth! That’s hearth that heats the home. It’s the concern and care you keep for one another, the dinners together, television watching side-by-side, planning for your shared future, telling your husband about your day, collaborating on what towels to buy, saying “I love you” at the end of each telephone call and before you go to sleep. The expression of that warmth can be subtle and easy to miss, or discounted as the “business” of running the relationship. Whenever I felt the heat with another man, I tried to remember the joint history of my real relationship so that I would not become tempted to squander it to chase a fleeting flame.

There are cold winds, too, that blow through a relationship: misunderstandings and miscommunications, hurt feelings, jealousies. Days pass with little said to one another. Or others when all that passes between us is the business of the marriage. He would retreat into himself to worry and fret and I no longer tried to get him to talk it out. Sex was had more often outside the marriage than within it. And there were a whole slew of real life hardships that two must either bear up against and traverse together. That quiet, creeping chill can cause the space between two people to erode, separating them further and further away from each other’s good will.

As my husband’s wanderlust metastasized, in that cold space that grew between us, my own imagination began to wander. I allowed myself to envision a happier, more simple, less complicated future - without him.

So what do you do when your spouse tells you that he wants to leave and you are also not so certain you want him to stay?

If my grip on the relationship is tenuous as he pulls away, then it’s not so hard to let go.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Looking for a Disorder

"Perhaps we should explore David's drinking. The conscious and unconscious reasons for it."

So said our - my husband Mark's and mine - couples counselor Tony. I like him. Natty and trim. He uses his hands like an orchestra conductor to slow, start, and pause our dialogue. He has the kind of haircut that looks like it gets a weekly trim and he peers out at us through glasses with prominent black frames.

Mark and I sit close to each other, side-by-side, on a small leather sofa-ette, which I tend to slip lower and lower toward the edge of the seat. The room itself is carved out of an old New York building without any symetry in the walls, like an aimless parallelogram.

His statement was both a cross-reference to another session and also a nonsequiter within the session.

For context: Tony and I had a one-on-one session two weeks prior, as part of our course of couples therapy. He had brought up drinking then, which had made me uncomfortable.

"If we talk about this, I feel, it then becomes a problem and I don't see it that way."

Look, I drink, but I'm not an alcholic, I thought.

Tony is adept and empathetic so he'd reframed the discussion (which is something he does well): "Let's not talk about it as a problem. Let's just address it as a thing. Something to explore. Perhaps there is something there worth understanding without vilifying it. You do like to drink

"Well, yes," I'd admitted. "Some wine..."

"How much?"

"Mark and I may drink a bottle with dinner."

"And cocktails?"

"Occasionally and moderately."

(Watching "Mad Men" does give me the urge to pour a few whiskeys on the rocks, while I watch it Sunday nights.)

"It's funny. I don't drink to get drunk or even to feel anything. I just like the ritual of it. Wine with dinner, unwinding at the end of the day."

And...I'm not drinking alone. Mark is there too, so why why am I the focus on this investigation? I ponder.

"Do you think- and perhaps just consider this - that it serves any other purpose?"

I sat for a moment and let the quiet settle in my head to see if something would reveal itself to me...about me. It did: "Perhaps, maybe it is an effort to anesthetize myself, a bit. A little. Just to keep the lid on..."

What I then conveyed and we further explored was that the wine keeps whatever anger and frustrations I may have in my marriage depressed. Not suppressed. Let's say less than fully expressed, like a burner turned down to simmer so the pot never boils over.

* * *

My dear friend Angela sent me an email this week apologizing for having "one too many" at my 40th birthday party last Sunday. She had given me the loveliest of toasts but she'd felt as if it meandered and went on a bit too long. She was also holding a baby - not her own, who (true to his disposition) was named "Cool" - during the tribute and he seemed to weigh her down as she spoke. (To read this from her perspective, go to Angela's column on the Huffington Post.)

As I read Angela's email, I immediately thought, what is one too many? The threshold is individual and defined by the consequences. If no one gets hurt and you make it to work the next morning without neglecting your spouse and children then you're no drunk in my estimation.

That occurred to me again when another friend wrote to tell me that she'd sent her husband of 25 years packing after Labor Day because of his long-term alcohol problem. She wrote that she felt like a pot insulting the kettle because she can drink. We used to work together and we'd go out on outings where she would get blitzed. In those instances she was always more of the loveliest parts of herself - more affectionate, more complimentary - and always upright and able to walk herself out at the end of the night.

It is useful to understand that we were both working in a Sales organization where professional drinking should really be a skill listed in the job description.

Her husband has since joined AA for the residue of his past sins will keep him out of their house for the foreseeable future.

* * *


In an earlier session, perhaps a month ago, Mark and I were exploring with Tony an interruption in - shall we say - physical intimacy.

So there had been a break in that interruption. There was a discussion about whether it counted because it had occurred after a night out on the town where we had imbibed a considerable amount of booze.

"Look." Tony paused our quibbling with the flat of his palm. "Sometimes alcohol is a social lubricant right? We do things, or we allow ourselves to do things when we've been drinking that we would otherwise not. Are the circumstances ideal? Sometimes if you wait for the optimal place and time and vibe, you can die waiting. Let's just - and I'm only suggesting that we consider this - let's 'celebrate' this." (And he did make air quotes on "celebrate" god bless him.) "Perhaps alcohol got you to it, but it happened and that's a good thing."

We each sat there silent, considering this prospect that alcohol is not always the villain.

* * *

Wine, beer, cocktails. Alcohol. We pour it out. We bring it to our lips. And we set down the glass when we're done drinking. It can be a balm or an agent for action.

We are so eager to vilify our own behavior that we go hunting for disfunction or tease it out of the obvious suspects, like alcohol. Marriage can be tough. If I gave voice to every frustration or passing gripe, my marriage would have ended years ago. The danger, however, being that perhaps the glasses of wine leave my thoughts muffled indiscriminately - the mundane and the critical subdued into inertia.

After all that pot that has been turned down to simmer may never boil over but it is still filled with scalding, hot water.

Friday, August 27, 2010

The Soundtrack of My Severance*

When something happens in my life of any significance - happy, sad, or otherwise - I cycle through the iTunes implanted in my brain and play snippets from showtunes to give words to my feelings. I never seem to know any whole song by heart so a few relevant (and remembered) lyrics start playing as a loop in my head. If I'm alone at home or in an elevator perhaps I will sing these bits out loud. I also would extract every recording I have of those songs from my computer to put them into active rotation on my iPod.

When I found out in mid July that I would no longer have a job, or that my job would soon cease to exist because of a pending merger with another company, lines from "I'm Still Here" started a rotation in my brain that lasted for days.

Good times and bum times,
I've seen them all and, my dear,
I'm still here.
Plush velvet sometimes,
Sometimes just pretzels and beer,
But I'm here.

Carlotta sings the song in Stephen Sondheim's "Follies." She's an ex-showgirl and a D-A-M-E. She's been around the block and - although her feet are tired - she is indomitable. She ends the song, which is really a "fuck you" anthem for indefatigable, with a defiant declaration.

I got through all of last year
And I'm here.
Lord knows, at least I was there,
And I'm here!
Look who's here!
I'm still here!

That mapped pretty well to my initial reaction to losing my job - rage. In fact, I didn't lose my job. That makes it sound like I misplaced my employment because I was careless. It was taken from me. Not that I loved it. It frustrated the hell out of me a lot of the time. I had gotten through re-orgs, product blunders, and clueless bosess and I still performed. I'd delivered.

To quiet that Eartha Kitt/Dolores Grey/Yvonne DeCarlo ranting in my brain, I came up with a simple mantra: Sometimes you have to be kicked out of something in order to leave it.

It's true in work and love. My last bad break up happened about six years ago. The guy dumped me. He was a tool but I would've stayed in that relationship and entertained delusions of longevity. So he did me a painful favor by ending it.

Sometimes you have to be kicked out of something to leave it

A couple of weeks passed between notification and the merger close date where I was still an employee although I had little to do except pack up my cubicle into boxes and shuttle them home. It was at that point that my accompaniment turned morose. That's when I reached out to Miss Peggy Lee and her version of a song that starts with a child's house burning to the ground.

I remember when I was a girl
Our house caught on fire
And I'll never forget the look on my father's face
As he gathered me in his arms
And raced to the burning building out on the pavement
And I stood there shivering
And watched the whole world go up in flames
And when it was all over I said to myself
Is that all there is to a fire?
Is that all there is?


I did not know that song very well and I didn't already own it, so I bought it. I made a Bloody Mary at the kitchen counter as I downloaded it. Then I played it. And re-played it. And re-played that song that was a lot like a dancehall dirge.

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

One might interpret this song as a cry of help. I see it as someone who, like Carlotta in "Follies," remains defiant although depression has replaced the anger. Also a level of acceptance has seeped into the message. If that's as bad or good as life gets then fuck you and pour me another drink.

Word got out and people would come by or telephone to offer condolences, which I refused by repeating my mantra to them: Sometimes you have to be kicked out of something to leave it. I said it to them. I said it to myself.

Sooner or later, I had hoped, my mantra would convince my emotions that what had happened was a positive thing.

The merger closed and I got a short email - pick up your severance package from HR and drop off your laptop with IT.

Best thing that ever could have happened

A good friend asked if, considering that I didn't have to work, if I would be taking August off. It had never occurred to me that I had that option. Meaning that I had the choice of not worrying about finding that next job. Adding up my severance and payout for unused PTO, I had four or five months of income to use up before my unemployment turned chronic.

There gotta be endings
Or there wouldn't be beginnings —
Right?

These lyrics from "Now You Know" (from another Sondheim show - "Merrily We Roll Along") overtook the other songs running through my head. This was when acceptance met empowerment.

It's called flowers wilt,
It's called apples rot,
It's called theives get rich and saints get shot,
It's called God don't answer prayers a lot,
Okay, now you know.

Okay, now you know,
Now forget it.
Don't fall apart at the seams.
It's called letting go your illusions,
And don't confuse them with dreams.

That day, after considering the question of "taking August off," I began a "sabbatical." After 14-15 years of uninterrupted employment - including two recessions and surviving a half dozen layoffs, I took a break. I have been going to the movies, reading books, and finally watching those old foreign films on my DVR.

Because now you grow.
That's the killer, is
Now you grow.

This last bit reminds me to remind myself that it's the hard stuff that makes you better if you can accept it, learn what you can, and move on. The alternative it that you dwell on the unfairness and the misery until that bitterness calcifies making that sadness a permanent aspect of your thinking. I do not want to hang out with that person, much less inhabit that body.

So I got shit canned. That made me angry then sad. Now it is just something that happened to me that has given me the opportunity to rest, relax, reflect, and - soon - find some new job.

[*NOTE: A "soundtrack" is different than a "cast album." The former is for films and that latter for recordings of theater scores by the original, revival, or studio casts. I only bring this up, as this distinction is very important to some enthusiasts. To me it's the kind of esoterica that is only interesting to the person in the role of correcting another.]

Today on "the View"?

I'm a bit anxious that I'm missing "The View" at this moment.

I'm concerned that I'm anxious about missing "The View."

I've spent too many days and hours at home. It's time to get out.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

An All Too Obvious Metaphor

This morning I sat down to re-assemble a jigsaw puzzle...of me and my husband Mark putting in the final piece of another puzzle. (Mark's wee nephew Milo was looking on from the side.)

In June 2007, my mother-in-law, Helen, had brought together her three sons with two spouses, one long-term boyfriend, and three grandsons to a big house on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, to commemorate her sixtieth birthday.

I found a puzzle in the house and obsessively spent a couple of hours a day, over 3 or 4 days, putting it together. The others would walk through and comment as they passed by or wandered onto the porch, while I stayed dedicated to my self-imposed task. (I like to finish something once I start.) Mark has helped from time-to-time and Milo had often come in and stared on rapt. Someone took a photo to memorialize the finishing it. So we all got into the picture.

That Christmas Helen had the photo made into a puzzle, which has sat on our dining table in the box, unopened ever since.

Today I scattered the little pieces on the table and started to put it together. "Oh," I thought, "I'll work on this for an hour or so and leave it off." Of course, I'm not that person so I spent the next several hours putting the pieces together.
Separating the edge pieces from the others. I started with the most recognizable parts - which were Mark and my smiling faces. Milo came together in fits and spurts. Other parts of the picture began to emerge unexpectedly - like the puzzle within the puzzle. Edges of some pieces would give clues to their destination because they contained the hard outline of some object - a chair, a table.

After putting together the middle and center, the outer edges challenged me. The detail in the photo was fuzzy and the colors and shapes simliar. Then my friend John called to catch up and make plans to meet later today. As I listened to him I still scanned the pieces looking for something to come into recognition. As occasional but close friends do, he asked about the state of my marriage. "It's good. Solid. Sometimes stale. I tend to focus on what needs to be fixed - in any circumstance - so I have to remind myself that a stable, happy relationship is a good one; especially a marriage that is almost five years old."
Our cat - Mills - walked across the table, threatening to disturb the unassigned pieces. He was quite likely to nudge bits onto the floor. I picked him up and tossed him away. He returned to the table top so picked him up and set him further away. All the while John listened to me curse the cat - "goddammit Mills!" - as the cat squawked back at me. I said goodbye to John and Mills left me in peace.
I returned to the gaps in the picture and the scattered, unintelligible pieces. I stared at some and then the fuzzy details started to make sense; not entirely but enough to try them out with the grain in the wall that would line up a row or gradation in color and light that made a piece of the puzzle more appropriate to one place than another.
Flashes of success were followed periods of staring and seeing nothing. Sometimes I would take a bit and try it here-and-there and - not often - it would snap into place. I finished the last area - of blurry grasses and leaves in a sprint. With fewer pieces to consider each one found its logical spot quickly and in a neat succession.
The picture of two smiling men - married - and a little boy looking on had been reconstituted.

A Cry for Help?

My husband sent me an email last Thursday with a subject line matching the title of my most recent posting.

ok so that made me sad again. We can go somewhere for the summer, just not while I have this job.

It just how passive aggressive a blog can be even if that isn't your intention. I hadn't blamed him or even thought much about him when I typed out my bit of melancholy.

It's nice to know he reads what I've written.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Where Did Everybody Go?

I boarded the L train yesterday morning with no trouble; at 8 o'clock in the morning. Without having to push myself into the mob inside the subway car or wait for the next (or the next-after-next) to arrive, I walked right on to it.

The gym has been quiet too. Relatively. Yesterday there were only two people per lane in the basement pool at Equinox on Greenwich. Ah the luxury of it!

But I'm suspicious. The men at Equinox are getting fatter and hairier. Or the handsome, fit men have migrated to the next happening gym. It happens. Gay men who work out slavishly move from gym to gym every year or so like birds in search of the ideal nest. David Barton has a live DJ during prime time, so they may have set down their wieghts and relocated there...for now.

I've never been clued into the next thing. I always seem to pick up on a trend a little late, just as the bleeding edge has already found the next "it." Or maybe the A gays have gone off to Fire Island for the summer, having spent the Fall and Winter sculpting the perfect pecs for shirtless dancing in the Pines.

All of this relative emptiness has me feeling left out. I have no plans for the summer. No vacation to look forward to; no summer share.

I should appreciate the extra room in the pool, on the sidewalks, and the occasional seat on the subway.

In a city that suddenly feels deserted when it is still quite crowded, not participating in the summer rituals of sun and fun can leave you wandering around like a wallflower waiting for a dance.

Monday, June 7, 2010

A Younger Man in Dublin

Last week I spent a few days in Dublin; mostly for work with a Saturday for myself tacked on to the end of the trip.

The last time I'd been in Ireland was the end of September 1997. I tried to resurrect those memories so I could compare the then to the now. My remembrances were more like flipping through a set of random snapshots. "T'anks a million," I heard that 100 times when the Irish would get off the bus. I took a lot of buses back then. The All-Ireland Gallic football tournament had filled the city to overflowing, so I had to stay at a bed & breakfast in Donnybrook, which is a suburb just outside of Dublin proper, but it made me think of the failed Broadway musical based on the "The Quiet Man." (I didn't know any of the songs or even the plot though a vague vision of the LP cover would flash into my mind each time I boarded that bus to Donnybrook.)

I met an Irishman in a gay bar and asked him to dinner. I had wanted a proper Irish dinner.

"You'll have to bear with me, but if I wanted to eat Irish food I could just as well go home to my mom and dad." I asked him what he'd like. "Mexican," he replied.

I remember pints of Guinness that had to sit and settle before getting topped off. It looked like black sludge but tasted piquant and creamy. That hadn't changed in thirteen years.

Mostly I had this sense of my 27 year old self compared to the man who will turn 40 this Fall. Dublin had been my third trip out of the United States in 1997, after Warsaw and London. I had a job that had sent me to those cities for a month or more at a time. Dublin was tacked on to the end of the London trip. Those had also been my first trips abroad in my life. Coming from New York I had felt so cosmopolitan, but my almost 40 self knows that I was really a young man, a boy perhaps, wandering into a world that was much, much broader than I had any sense of.

Friday, May 28, 2010

New York New York Makes You Feel Brand New

I'm at a hotel in Dublin; near Temple Bar. That means I'm staying in the part of the city I would caution people against because it's overrun tourists. Dublin is so small in a way that you can't apply the same principles.

It's Friday night at midnight and through my open window I heard "New York! New York! Makes you feel brand new." Ms Alicia Keys. I'm home.

The place they aspire to is the place that I live...when I'm physically there.

NYC is a state of mind. I carry it with me as I place my foot onto each Irish cobble stone.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Who Cares What Happened in High School? Me. A Little

"Carl thinks that you hate him."

Someone ran up to me, delivered the news, and ran away. At least that's how I remember it; like a poof of information from a crier.

Then just as quickly Carl was standing near me, in a small semi-circle of people.

"I'm gay," he told me. He seemed to tremor, in his voice, in body.

"Yes. I know." I must have sounded annoyed. We'd known each other since we were in elementary school.

Carl had been absent from the Dobson High School - class of '89 - ten year reunion and the retirement party for drama teach the year before that (1998).

He's one of the only people I rejected when I got his "friend request" on Facebook.

This was a grudge I had been intent on keeping. It had lost it's enmity and perhaps even it's purpose. Still it had a rationality that kept it preserved.

What had happened back in high school that twenty years caused me to still give a damn?

When I was 18, he and his mother had sat down a new friend of mine and told him that I was "evil." And they were serious. I don't think they had any justification or reason to support their claim. They thought I was Ouija board evil and wanted to protect other people from that. It had been a hard experience at the time because this was a new friend and he listened to them. Or at least my purported evilness cast enough doubt for him to dump me.

If I had to guess, I would suspect that Carl's and his mother's insanity had been born from toilet paper.

I was sixteen and driving around Mesa, Arizona in a VW Rabbit Convertible with my friends Stacy and Sean. We bought toilet paper and flung it all over Carl's house. Why him? Because we knew where he lived. We went back an hour later. Why? Because we weren't sure where anyone else lived so we went to revisit our work. The TP had been removed. So we TP-ed it again.

Then we drove around. Unable to find another target, we went back to Carl's house. It had been cleaned again. But this time they were waiting for us, in stealth. Then Carl jumped out in front of the Rabbit, causing me to turn it around on two wheels. He took off after us in his Mustang. I lost him on the freeway. But then we were determined to, well, to take it too far.

I dropped off my friends at their homes. Two hours later, well after midnight, I snuck out to pick them up in the same Rabbit and redecorated Carl's front lawn.

That's the only thing I can come up with. Carl's family had been deeply religious - Catholic, so I became a bogeyman to them.

So more than twenty years later, we stood near each other in a ballroom at a Hilton in Scottsdale with him coming out to me. I look down at a red string on his wrist. He noticed, tugged at it and said, "My partner Gary and I practice Kabbalah." Carl had always been a Madonna fan going back to Junior High.

I knew that Gary was his partner for close to twenty years. Jesus. We had friend in common for thirty years. Carl and Gary had been living together since college in a condo that Carl's parent's had bought for him, not far from the TP'ed house. Carl was a flight attendant who had been having an early mid-life crisis putting that relationship in jeopardy a few years ago.

I had all that information without having spoken to him once in twenty years. I had all that news without really even wanting to know.

So Carl was still worried what I thought about him. And I was still mad at him for being a weirdo dick to me a generation ago.

I didn't want to confront that. And I couldn't let it go.

That's what people do at reunions.