But when she said this to me, I almost died.
Chrissy said, and her voice started to tremble, “Mom, you have no idea how fucked up it got me when you said that you and Dad were back together. You just said it, like it was nothing! You just blithely said it— Mom, you don’t get it, do you? You just tell us that after all this time oh by the way you and Dad got back together, as if all that shit that you guys went through together—that affected us, I might add!—that all that crap was all of a sudden no big deal, and—” She gave an exaggerated shrug, throwing her arms up slightly, she was really angry. “Just like that, oh we’re back together.”
We sat in silence for many moments.
“Did you have another miscarriage?” I finally asked her.
Chrissy said, “Who told you? Did Becka tell you that?”
“Nobody told me anything. I’m just asking.”
Chrissy put her sunglasses on again and stretched her thin legs out in front of her; her arms were crossed. “Yeah, I did,” she said. “In the middle of January.”
“Oh Chrissy.” I put my hand on her leg but she did not respond. We sat like that in the sun for some time. Then I said quietly, “Chrissy, this is about loss. You’ve lost three pregnancies and you’re angry. That’s really understandable. But don’t blow your marriage up over it. Please, Chrissy. Please don’t do that.”
She said, quietly, “Well, you did that. You said you had an affair and it got you out of your marriage to Dad.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And I wish now neither of us had had any affairs.”
She looked at me through her sunglasses. She was very angry. She said, “You were adored by a husband, Mom. David adored you. He adored you! And now you’re telling me you wish you hadn’t met him? How crazy is that?”
I shook my head slowly. I had nothing to say to her accusation.
* * *
—
Eventually I said, “Is this man married?”
And Chrissy said, “Mom, where have you been? How do you even know it’s a man? It could be a woman, or a gender-nonconforming individual.”
I said, “It’s a woman?”
She looked at me angrily and said, “No, it’s a man. I’m just asking where you’ve been the last couple of years. We don’t make assumptions like that anymore.”
Then I said, “Are there little kids?” And she said nothing. “Oh Chrissy,” I said. “I’m so sorry, honey. God, am I sorry.”
After a moment she turned to me and said, “Okay, the truth is we haven’t done it yet, but so what. We just haven’t been able to get away, but we’re working on it. I’m seeing him tomorrow, as a matter of fact.”
I looked at her and I said, “Honestly, Chrissy? I could be sick right now. This has made me sick.”
She said, “It’s not always about you, Mom.”
* * *
—
After a long silence I said, “Chrissy, you need to be seeing a therapist about this. Are you?”
In a moment, she shook her head to indicate no.
* * *
—
Rapidly—and unexpectedly—I remembered that last dream I had had of my father after he died, when I had said to him, “It’s okay, Daddy, I can drive the truck now.”
Because, bizarrely, I felt that my head was becoming extremely clear after so long of its feeling not quite right.
* * *
—
I turned so that I was facing Chrissy. “You listen to me,” I said. “You listen to every single word I have to tell you. And take your sunglasses off. I need to see your face.”
She took her sunglasses off. But she did not look at me.
“I would never have left your father if he had not had those affairs. I know that about myself. I would never have had an affair myself if he had not had all those that he did. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, I know this is about loss. Because when I had my disgusting little affair—and it was disgusting—I had lost my mother, and then my father. And then the next year you went off to college, and Becka was getting ready to go. And my psychiatrist said to me, she said to me, Lucy, this is about loss. And you, Chrissy, you have had loss. You have lost three babies, and now you think that you have lost your mother because I am back with your father.”
Chrissy turned to look at me then. She looked at me with interest.
“And I’m going to tell you one more thing. When I met that man—the man I had that affair with that made me realize I could no longer live with your father—we were at a writers’ conference, and he came on to me, and he made me feel special. That’s what he did. It was pretty simple when I look back: He just showered me with attention and made me feel very special at a time when I felt not so special.”
“You never feel special,” Chrissy said, but she said it quietly and not meanly, I thought.
“You’re right, I don’t. But I was feeling especially not special with all my own losses, and he paid great attention to me. And email had just started up back then, and every day he emailed me, imploring me, and every day I wrote back: No. And then this happened:
“I went out for dinner with a woman I had met years earlier. She was one of the saddest women I have ever known. She had never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and God knows she would have told me if she had. She was sad, Chrissy, she was damaged in some fundamental way; she had never had a day of therapy, she just lived her life as a tax attorney, and we went out for dinner that night, and then I realized that she probably was an alcoholic. She had at least a bottle of wine that night, and a martini to start off with, and then— Are you listening?”
But I could tell she was. She was watching me with real interest on her face. She nodded.
“And then, for dessert, she ordered these special-made doughnuts that came with chocolate sauce you could dip them in, and as I watched her dipping these little doughnuts in this chocolate sauce I felt such a sense—I guess a sense of fear—because I was in the presence of such deep loneliness. And I thought, Yes, I am going to have that affair.
“And so I went home and wrote him just the word Yes. And he was ecstatic. And that was that.”
Chrissy turned her face to look out over the pond, and she let out a deep breath.
“But I have always thought that if I had not had dinner with that sad, sad woman that night I would not have given in to him. And so now you ask about David. And yes, David adored me, and I adored him. But was it worth it? There’s no way of judging that, Chrissy. But you see the pain that Trey caused Becka—”
“I see that she got out of a marriage she didn’t want,” Chrissy said, turning back to look at me.
I thought about that. “Okay,” I said. “But she married Trey on the rebound. And you did not.” I added, “Her marriage was different from the one you have with Michael. When you met Michael through those mutual friends, you just clicked, Chrissy, everyone could see it. And you would laugh together, remember at your wedding how that guy who gave a toast said he would hear you both laughing and laughing in the hallway of some place?”
I waited a moment, squinting at the duck pond, and then I turned back to her. “Have you told Michael any of this?”
She shook her head quickly.
“But you’re obviously not getting along. Because you want to be with someone else. Or you think you do. So listen to me more, Chrissy. This is important. Do not put this on Michael. You make the decision of what you’re going to do, but you do not need to tell him that you’re attracted to someone else. I suspect he knows this and he feels humiliated and has no idea what to do because everything he does right now you find abhorrent. If you want to leave the marriage, then leave the marriage. But if you don’t, then try to be more openhearted to your husband.”
As soon as I said this I realized she could not do that. So I said, “But I suspect you can’t do that, be openhearted to him now, because you don’t want him.”