“I want you back and I want you back this instant,” my husband said over the phone. From the dangerously controlled tone of his voice, I knew I’d pushed my self over the precipice, past the point of no return. I’d just called to tell him that the kids and I wouldn’t be returning to Iran. Not after summer. Not after Halloween, the way we’d planned. Not ever. “I don’t care if you set foot in Mehrabad airport for ten minutes. Come back here for ten minutes, to prove your loyalty, and I promise I’ll put you on the very next flight out if that’s what you want.”
He sounded reasonable, magnanimous, even. Only, the exorbitant cost of the plane tickets and the difficulty of such a flight and the fact that I’d so utterly betrayed him had to underlie his true state of mind.
I had the kids. I wasn’t bringing them back. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do or say to change that fact.
How ironic. The one thing I’d always feared he’d do to me, I was doing to him. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I really meant it.
The summer I came back to the States, the fall I chose to never go back, I told myself that if I could just get away from my husband’s family, just gain a little control, then all my troubles would magically disappear. I understood that, if I refused to go back, I would likely end up divorced. I accepted that my husband would write me off. I summed up my decision as a logistical one. I wanted to live in the States. He wanted to live in Iran.
Four months later, my husband appeared on my mother’s front stoop.
On the outside, I was surprised. On the inside, disappointed. Because I didn’t know which was more impossible, re-negotiating the dynamics between two wounded people, or letting go of a boatload of attendant resentment.
What I did know was that I was tired. I didn’t have the energy reserves to work at my marriage anymore. Or the patience to unravel the hundreds of hurtful incidents knotted hopelessly together that, when separated from the whole, could only appear stupid and petty.
Or to put right the big things that, when combined with the little, beat the limping thing right into the ground
But, more, I didn’t want the fights I knew were looming, the recriminations, and that injured look on his face put there by my betrayal. I didn’t want to live in the aftermath of my brutal breach of faith. To have my nose rubbed in a puddle of guilt.
Being a coward, I sidestepped responsibility. I told him I could offer our marriage no guarantees. That it was up to him, his personal choice, if he walked away from his dream job, his extended family, and all that prestige. When I knew, in my heart of hearts, that it was way too late. That I no longer loved him. That I wanted him to shake hands with me and concede defeat.
After we divorced, I chalked up our failure to a broad generalization. From what I’d seen, the longevity of Iranian/American mixed marriages had little to do with happiness, and everything to do with a remarkable ability to slog through tribulation.
About this time, I picked up Sue Miller’s novel, While I Was Gone , the story of a flawed heroine, happily married for 25 years, whose impulsive betrayal comes awfully close to destroying her family.
I immediately recognized myself in Jo, a woman whose mind is invaded by a persistent restlessness. A woman “dislocated from her past, from her present, from her own reflection in the mirror.”
But, more, I was interested in the manner in which Jo dealt with consequences. Despite loving her husband, Jo comes dangerously close to having an affair. The act is interrupted, not by conscience, but by a twist in the plot. Forced to tell her husband the whole sordid story, she must then endure the byproduct of her faithlessness:
Each day now, too, I woke and felt something very like that agonized wrench of childhood. Sometimes Daniel was not in bed with me. He’d gotten up, sleepless, and gone to one of the girls’ rooms. Or out to his study. Then, the disorientation, the pain, lay in his absence, in my aloneness in the bed…I would be returning, too, with a sinking weight in what felt like my heart, to what I’d done. To all it seemed I’d destroyed. It was like waking over and over again to an illness, a long fever I could not recover from.
While she considers ending the marriage to alleviate their pain, unlike me, Jo chooses to stick it out.
A week passed since I had met Eli. Then ten days. The world froze and we froze in it…I felt I was living on pure will Every act was a deliberate one, costly and difficult…While below our tepid, empty exchanges, the deep moat of silence widened between us.
When I was almost finished with the book, my ex-husband stopped over to pick up our kids. He was unhappy, the kids were unhappy, and, feeling the cause of it all, I had to wonder, as I’m prone to do, if I’d been too hasty. I hadn’t really given him the chance to try and fix things. I probably hadn’t even presented a clear list of my harbored grievances. I hadn’t the guts that our heroine Jo did. I hadn’t the courage to allow my husband to express his pain for months on end. I wanted out before that horror show began. I had lacked–just one more thing that I lacked– the perseverance to wait out the storm.
For the longest time I believed that the moral of the story is that time heals all pain. That there’s no such thing as an instant fix. That you can’t just snap your fingers and get over a trauma. Who said these things take a month, or even a year? Who created these arbitrary time lines anyway?
But, upon second reading, a different aspect of Jo astounds me. Like me, Jo is a woman secretive by nature, a quirk she also inherited from her parents. “For it wasn’t the secret–the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway–that had led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably, most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too.”
Of course I knew from long-standing experience that when you’re secretive, you’re really terrified of truth. Because to reveal yourself by telling what is so, is to risk confrontation, dissapointment, rejection, and disgust. Evasion isn’t sexy and mysterious. It’s just a cheap slipcover for a lack of self worth.
How incongrous that all the while you present the false self, what you truly long for is raw intimacy. ” It seems we need someone to know us as we are–with all that we have done–and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight: know this about me, and yet love me. Please.”
Jo’s struggle isn’t about facing her husband’s pain, it’s about facing herself.
For the first time in her life, she must be honest about her actions, about who she is at her core.
And I think I hoped, too, that there would be a way made available for my words not to mean what they had seemed to mean. But I was also desperate to have Daniel’s sympathy, desperate for him not to feel what he was bound to feel Desperate to imagine I still had the power to make things right….I think what I had hoped was that by pretending things were better between us I could make them become better. I think I did hope that there was something I could do or say that would make a difference. But the lesson I was learning was that everything I did partook of me, of the things in me that had made him turn away in the first place. I saw that I couldn’t for the moment, try to change things with him. That when I did, I would inevitably do it in my own unwelcome way, and that would only make things worse…I would be secretive, because that was something that was part of me. I would sweep too much of his pain aside, because I so wanted it to be over, because I tried to make things happen at my own pace.
Looking back all those years ago, knowing what I know now, I realize that what I most wanted to avoid by staying in my marriage was remaining my self. “It wasn’t that I had been conscious of falsifying myself when I was living my other life. I’m sure I hadn’t . I think, in fact, that I was barely conscious of having a self in that world.” Locked in that dynamic, ashamed of who I was, I would never have experienced intimacy, the way I do now. I know that the secret to intimacy is remaining above board.
