Superstar
November, 1998
When I backed the U-Haul into our driveway on Saturday morning, Kurt still hadn’t told his family about our situation. I struggled with being deeply concerned about his denial, but fought the urge to question him by channeling Dr. Maria’s words of wisdom that I only have the power to control myself, and I forged on with the move. Together, Kurt and I loaded up all of the guest room furniture and everything from my closet and, like the superstar he is, Kurt did it all with a smile and a whistle. Every time we passed each other in the hallway, I wanted to slap the smile off of his face and scream at him to feel something. When we clumsily carried the mattress out to the truck, I wanted to beg him to stop joking about it and comprehend the seriousness of it. When we shared a beer after the work was done, I wanted to feel like he cared about what he was losing, but all it felt like was that he was thirsty.
Every therapist and self-help book says that once a spouse moves out of the house, the marriage is over, the mover-outer has officially given up. If Kurt knew this, I wonder if he would’ve been whistling. I doubt it, and so it makes me think he thinks I’m coming back. I used to want to protect that side of him, the side that’s oblivious to pain, bad and negative, but not anymore. I only have the capacity to protect myself now, and I need all the protection I can get because my heart actually breaks. And so, after two hours of oddly impressive teamwork, I said goodbye. Like a kid going off to college, Kurt gave me a kiss on the forehead, told me to be safe, and to call him when I got home. As I sat idling in the driveway, we locked eyes and for a second I thought something deep might come out of it. But I was wrong. He glanced at his watch as if I had already taken up too much of his time, shook his head, and let out a condescending chuckle accompanied by his infamous half smile and then proceeded to close the front door on me. After I wiped away what I swore to myself would really, really, really be the last tears shed over Kurt’s indifference, I put my rig in gear and headed to Lafayette.
On the drive down Highway 680, all I could hear was Kurt’s voice, and it was calling me a quitter, so I turned the music as high as it would go, and I screamed at the top of my lungs to block it out. It certainly wasn’t the liberating drive I thought it would be. And all the relief I thought I was gonna feel on my big moving day was nowhere to be found when I pulled into my parking space at the cottage. On impact, the place made me feel lonely. When I stepped inside, the freezing cold air was quick to remind me that I forgot to notify the gas company I was moving in. Then when I hit the light switch to find my way to the bathroom, it occurred to me that I also forgot to let the electric company know. For a second, I was grateful for the light coming through the French doors, but then I became horrified at how exposed I was. I thought, “Someone could easily break into this place and murder me!” I rushed back outside to get as much work done as I could before the daylight ran out, but when I opened the back of the U-Haul, the biggest shock of the day slapped me across the face. “How the hell am I supposed to unload this stuff all by myself?”
I started cursing and accusing Dr. Maria of being full of shit when she said this was gonna be easier than being a sneaky adulterer. Part of me wanted to call Kurt for help, but I knew he’d only make me feel incapable of surviving without him, so I fought off the urge. I called Slutty Co-worker and asked her for help, but she was quick to remind me that she doesn’t perform manual labor. There was no one else to call; I had cut everyone else out of my life. I didn’t feel alone, I was alone.
But I was only alone for a few hours. Once I found my CD player, I had Alanis Morissette, Jewel, and Natalie Merchant to keep me company. Nothing like having a bunch of kick ass dejected chicks to motivate you! Seriously, if it wasn’t for those girls and their angry words to keep me going, I never would’ve been able to move all of my crap into my cottage. And for the last two days, I worked like a maniac to make everything just perfect. Pictures got hung, dishes got put away, new pretty linens now decorate my bedroom, and shielding curtains are now hanging over the French doors that just two days ago scared the crap out of me. Aside from needing a few thousand more square feet attached to it, my cottage looks and feels like home.
The nights though…they’re a lot harder than I thought they’d be. And it wasn’t the exaggerated shadows of The Blair Witch Project like branches that swayed back and forth outside of my bedroom window that made the last two nights unbearable. It was that I couldn’t celebrate my accomplishments with Leo. I live closer to him now than I did in Danville, but he might as well be a world away. It took some heavy duty self-medicating to get me through the last two nights, and this morning I wake feeling scared of the task that lies ahead of me at work. In fact, I feel tied to my bed.
You can do this, Chrissy. No I can’t. It’s too hard.
C’mon, you’ve come this far. You should be proud of yourself.
Proud? I’m disgusted. I’m a horrible bitch who ruins people’s lives. Stop that! You’re trying to make people’s lives better, remember?! Why couldn’t I be one of those wives to gracefully accept her fate?
You know…a wife who says her wedding vows and sticks to them no matter how crappy her marriage makes her feel?
Because you’re better than that.
I doubt that’s what everyone at work is gonna think when I tell them I’m separated.
C’mon…up we go, one foot at a time.
They say the hardest part about exercising is putting on your tennis shoes. Well I say the hardest part about snapping out of a love funk is making it to the shower. You’ll be okay if you can just make it to the shower! If you can’t do that, then you need to immediately call your best girlfriends or your therapist. Since I have none of those at the moment, I have no choice. It’s shower or die.
Luckily, I made it to the shower and managed to wash away most of my self-deprecation, and now that I’m settled at the kitchen counter with my cup of coffee, I feel ready to take on the day. Everything in my cottage is pretty and tidy, and I feel calm knowing this is exactly how it will look when I get home. In all of my grown up years, I’ve never been able to enjoy a quiet cup of coffee before I set off for a busy day at work. I’ve usually had to stuff down a breakfast I didn’t want or race out the door to avoid it. But right now, my bed is made, Page Six has been read, and my coffee cup is about to be washed and put away. Everything’s heavenly abnormal.
I wonder what Kurt’s doing. I pick up my wedding band from the bowl of stuff I have no idea where to put and slide it back and forth across the counter top.
How is this happening to me?
Chill, Chrissy. You’re regressing again.
Maybe I’ll give him a call. I should probably remind him to give the dog his medicine.
No, dumbass, the dog’s an excuse! Put the phone down! You can’t make the call! You’ve been the one to do that too many times in the relationship…and look where it’s gotten you!
As I get in my car, I congratulate myself for staying strong. Besides, I can’t be pre-occupied with Kurt right now, I have a busy day. On the agenda is to tell the biggest loud mouth at work that I’m separated and then sit back and watch the wildfire spread.
And that it did. By 9:15 the owner of my company was in my office offering his deepest condolences and, I think, hitting on me. By 10:15, I had emailed Courtney and Nicole and apologized for being out of touch for so many months. I gave them a status report on my marriage and my new address. Oh, and I asked them to pass the information on to Kelly. I wasn’t trying to avoid Kelly, she just didn’t have email. She thought it was like Atari and it would be obsolete as quickly as it became a sensation. Too bad she didn’t have that same point of view about the Rachael hairstyle. Anyway, I suppose I could’ve called her, but I really don’t think she cares one way or the other about what happens with my marriage.
What happened when the people at work found out about my marital status totally blew me away! Half of the people never even knew I was married and the other half had a friend they wanted to immediately introduce me to. No joke, for the past few hours there’s been a line of kiss-asses at my door who have a “really great guy” they want to set me up with. One by one I tell them, “It’s just too soon for me.” What? It’s not like I can tell them I already have an ex-boyfriend I dream about getting back together with! They’ll figure that out for themselves when Megan starts her internship next week.
Normally the thought of my co-workers knowing I’m an adulterer would bother me but right now it takes backseat to the fact that once Megan finds out about my marriage, she’ll tell Leo about it. It’s definitely not the way I wanted all this to go down and trust me, since the Megan interview, I’ve toyed with the idea of telling Leo I’m married myself just to beat the bitch to it. But I can’t find the right words. I mean, the night of my surprise party, the only truth Leo knew was that Kurt threw it for me and that was cause enough for him to reject me. If he knew I was married to the man, how could I hope for a better reaction than the one he had that night? I can’t, and so it looks like Megan will have the last laugh after all. Maybe I’ll get lucky and Leo will punch her in the face for being the bearer of bad news! Fortunately for me, I have another week to contemplate the fall out of Megan’s arrival, and right now all I want to do is enjoy how temporarily uncomplicated my life is. And what a nice uncomplicated four hours it was.
As I’m leaving the office to pick up some lunch, a sharply dressed man catches my eye and not because I’m looking for some action. He just seems out of place. He’s in the parking lot with another interesting looking dude, and they’re talking to a girl who works in the production department. They clearly aren’t associated with the garment industry, as they’re not Jewish or Chinese. These guys have on expensive suits, dark sunglasses, and drive a black Range Rover with the most tinted windows I’ve ever seen. Once in the car, the guy in the passenger seat rolls down his window and gives something to the production chick. Then he turns to look at me and stares at me until the car makes a left turn and drives out of sight. I follow his gaze until I nearly fall over.
“Hey Chrissy, do you have a minute?”
“Only a minute, what’s up?”
I love acting busy when I’m not.
“That guy I was talking to wants you to call him.”
“The black guy?! Sorry, but I’m not down with the brown. I mean, I like plenty of black people. You know Oprah, Denzel, Chris Rock… they’re all cool, but I wouldn’t date any of them. Well, maybe Oprah because she’s loaded…but no, no not even her. Sorry.”
“No, not the black guy. The other one. He asked me to give this to you.”
She hands me a business card and it reads:
Mark Wisely, Attorney at Law Beverly Hills, California.
On the back he wrote:
I’d love to have a drink with you. I’m in town ‘til Tuesday.
“Uhhhh…first things first, what do you need an attorney for?”
“I’m trying to keep it hush-hush, but I got my third D.U.I. last month. The black dude’s my lawyer, and he works for Mark’s firm. Mark’s in town for a bigger case. I think he’s the defense lawyer for that pre-school teacher who was drunk at work and killed a three-year-old.”
“Jesus, who’d wanna defend someone like that?”
“I don’t know, but he’s hella fine. Hey, I’m not gonna get fired because of my D.U.I.’s, am I?”
“Only if you go to jail and you can’t do your job.” And then I drove off.
By no means is Leo a thing of the past to me and trust me, I’ve been resisting every urge to enroll in an economics class at St. Mary’s, join his gym, or pop into The Round Up for a beer just to catch a glimpse of him. Even though I know he’s mad at me and he has some kind of super ability to cut people out of his life, I don’t think he can cut me out. I’m special to him. He told me so. He showed me so. And I think if I found him, he’d give me another chance. But I also think Taddeo’s right; I have too much baggage and way more baggage than he’s even aware of…for another week anyway. Yes, yes, yes, staying away is what’s best for Leo. But it’s also really hard to convince myself of all that when I live so close to him now. And to compound the torture of being so close, yet so far away from him, I remind myself that he’s probably seeing other people. That’s usually about the time I open my second bottle of wine and break out my vibrator (yeah, picked up one of those bad boys a while back). But not tonight. Tonight I break out Mark Wisely’s card and give him a call.
Mark’s an interesting guy. He’s a big time criminal defense attorney and has defended some super bad people and right now he really is defending a woman who killed a kid because she was drunk. It’s all reprehensible stuff, but I can’t help but be curious about all of it and that’s why I take him up on his offer to meet for a drink… tonight…at eleven. I pull up to the Lafayette Park Hotel and valet my car at the same time his chauffer-driven Town Car pulls up. I immediately second guess my nonchalant decision to wear a baseball hat, jeans, and old college sweatshirt because everything about Mark is put together like he’s James Bond or something. I’m instantly intimidated and intrigued.
“Just so you know, I don’t usually get out of bed to meet someone for drinks at eleven on a Tuesday.”
“Just so you know, I don’t usually ask women to do that, and I appreciate you working around my schedule. I’m tied up in court for the next two days, and then I have to head back to L.A. I really wanted to meet you before I left.”
“Okay…Why?”
“You’re beautiful, but not L.A. beautiful.”
“Whoa!” His comment makes me look at my boobs.
“No, no I mean that in a good way. There are plenty of beautiful women in Los Angeles but not many smart beautiful women. The girl who works for you… she said some impressive things about you.”
Nice save. I think.
Turns out Mark’s thirty-five and doesn’t date a lot and not because he’s too busy. He’s kinda shy. He has a house in Beverly Hills, one in Palm Springs, and one in Maui. He also has a Harley, a Porsche, an Escalade and some other new fan-dangled hybrid car (whatever the hell that is). The dude’s loaded. This is about the time most girls would get all wet and giddy about the gold mine of a guy sitting across from them. They’d be adding up the assets and already excusing his inevitable adultery. But Mark’s money isn’t what I find intriguing; it’s what he does to get all the money that I’m curious about. He defends the worst of the worst, people he has to know are guilty, just for the thrill of the win and the money. He has no problem with any of the negative connotations about his profession, and he’s quick to say, “If I didn’t do it, someone else would”. He’s brutally honest and he kinda reminds me of an older Leo, which makes me sad. I don’t want to be sad, so I drink…heavily. Soon I’m feeling pretty comfortable around Mark and I spill the beans (and a few drops of my drink) about being recently separated from my husband who I was cheating on. It’s the first time I blurted out the truth to anyone other than my friends and THE DUDE DIDN’T EVEN BAT AN EYE. Gosh, maybe I could date him. Maybe Mark and I could be the happy piece of crap couple who shamelessly does shitty things to innocent undeserving people because we’re selfish and greedy. Of course, I’d rather be a happy piece of crap couple with Leo but that toilet has long since flushed. And with that thought, I’m sad again. So I tell Mark it’s time for me to leave.
“Would you like to have dinner with me this weekend?”
Can I really do that?
“I think I can do that.”
“Would you be interested in having it in Maui?”
“Excuse me?”
“I was planning on taking a long weekend. I could just fly you up.” I’m fairly certain it looks like a broom just got shoved up my ass because he’s quick with a comfort comeback.
“Don’t worry, you’d have your own room and everything! You can even bring a friend if it makes you more comfortable.”
“Mark, I just met you like five minutes ago. I can’t accept a plane ticket to Maui!”
“I’d fly back here if I could, but I already have some meetings lined up there. You don’t have to let me know right now. Think about it.”
As he walks me to the valet, he loosens his tie, and like a meteor crashing into the hotel, a blast of red, yellow, and orange stops me in my tracks.
“Holy crap, what’s that?”
“Oh these- tattoos.”
“On your neck?”
“And on my torso and back too. Does it weird you out?”
F*ck yeah it does.
“No, not at all.”
He explains that the monstrosity all started with one small tattoo when he got his Harley and soon they became an addiction. He’s not really sure when or if he can stop getting them. I can relate; I’m an addict too. When the valet pulls my car up, he gives me a weird kiss, and I hope to all that’s Holy, he can’t tell how shocked I am. I’d like to be sorta cool about this. Dude’s got cash and wants to fly me places! I watch him get into his car and shake my head. I can’t go to Maui with a rich guy this weekend, can I? This is madness, I’m still married and in love with someone else. Dr. Maria would have a field day with this! I tuck myself into bed, and all I can think about is the funny conversation about tattoos I had with Leo the night we met. It makes me laugh and cry all at the same time.