Читать книгу I Closed My Eyes - Michele Weldon - Страница 9

The Perfect Husband

They don’t carry signs, you know, even the worst of them, and there isn’t an asterisk on their driver’s licenses or the letter A tattooed on the soles of their feet. A man who becomes abusive does not have horns, drool venom, sweat poison, or even warn you that he is not what he seems.

No, he is most likely the one your girlfriends wish they had married. He is most likely the man in the room they all wish they knew better. He is most likely the charming guy who hugs all the ladies hello. I know my husband was.

When we first started dating in 1983, he was twenty-five years old making $8,000 a year as a reporter on the night shift of a downtown news service in Chicago. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Rogers Park with a friend named Carl who put holy cards on the fireplace mantle and kept peanuts in small glass bowls in the living room.

The man I fell in love with was attractive and charming, accommodating and sensitive, effusive and engaging, unassuming and honest. He was ambitious, having decided to become a writer after leaving the seminary and working as a bartender in San Francisco. I admired him for following his dreams and being willing to admit he had made mistakes and poor choices. He was refreshing.

Our first date was at a champagne bar. Other nights we ate dinner in my apartment on Cedar Street and took walks along Michigan Avenue, looking in the windows. We danced in the blues bars on Clark Street and ate Chinese food for lunch. We went to football games—the first was my alma mater, Northwestern University, versus the University of Illinois. We went to family parties: christenings, birthday dinners, weddings. Breakfasts at pancake houses, lunches in the park.

I dismissed the story he told me about the woman he had dated in San Francisco who was so crazy that once during an argument she hit him. Boy, are you lucky you got out of that relationship. I had never known a woman—or a man—who was violent, and I didn’t know he was likely telling me that it was really he who had hit her.

Very open, he wanted to talk about anything, everything. In a quiz in the pages of a woman’s magazine (the kind you only take if you are twenty-four or twenty-five and have the time for such things), he would have scored as “Mr. Right.”

“He seems perfect,” my friend Mariann said. “He can dance too?”

He would pick me up in his pale blue 1976 Delta 88 with the white vinyl roof, double parking and asking the doorman to watch it for him. His car was a gift from his parents, and it was wider than my first studio apartment. The car radio was usually tuned to an am station that played jazz, swing, and forties music. There was something wholesome and endearing about him, his short brown hair, his wide smile, the way he made meatloaf for himself on Sunday night and five meatloaf sandwiches to last him through a week of lunches.

Clean and fresh like soap, he smelled young, innocent; he didn’t wear cologne. His arms were strong and his build was thin, but muscular. He had sailed since he was a boy and later taught sailing at the Chicago Yacht Club. He was a track athlete in high school and a champion boxer in college. Once abc-tv’s Wide World of Sports did a special halftime report on him. He bore the physical confidence and lithe ease of a man who was exceptional in sports. The sailing trophies in his parents’ basement were his.

He was a great kisser.

He seemed too good to be true. When my brother-in-law Mike met him for the first time in 1983, he asked with a smile, “Are you really as great as everyone says?”

He wore wing tips with khaki pants and button-down shirts. He didn’t own a pair of jeans. He was a boy-man, dreaming and hopeful, not at all like the men I had dated before. He was not as sophisticated or polished, more vulnerable, inexperienced. He was younger than most men I had ever dated. I thought this was a good thing; he was less likely to be callous, dismissive. He seemed so young, so guileless.

A good dancer; God, he was a good dancer, and he would hold me around my waist, then twirl me. His movements were precise, controlled. I never danced with a man who held me so tight and guided me so closely. We looked good together. We looked in love. He quoted Homer’s Iliad and nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry from a college English class. He liked to watch the National Geographic specials on pbs, and I joked with him that he knew in detail how every species mated. He went to mass every Sunday and even said a prayer before eating when he came to my apartment for dinner. He went to confession regularly.

Only on occasion would he have a beer, a glass of red wine, or a screwdriver—just one, always, and he made fun of me at parties for drinking the kind of white wine that comes in gallon bottles with a twist-off cap. Having lived in San Francisco, he knew a thing or two about wine, he said. He could teach me.

I felt a brotherly comfort with him, but a definite physical attraction to him too. He looked more than a little like Kevin Costner, a young Mel Gibson, if you squinted to see. His face was smooth and welcoming, as if I had always been close to him, as if he was so comfortable he belonged with me, to me. His eyes were clear blue and serene at times, though he could be impulsive and spontaneous. He laughed hard and uncontrolled, loud, uncensored like a child. He was smart, really smart.

He made me laugh too. He was witty and thus filled all my requirements for a partner: smart, funny, handsome, and kind. My criteria never went any deeper than that because I had never thought it needed to. I never thought to include “nonviolent.” I had never known a man who was dark or complicated, so I ­wouldn’t have known what the warning signs were. I guess I skipped all those quizzes in Glamour.

We would meet some days for lunch on State Street at the Woolworth’s that is no longer there; he liked tuna melts with milkshakes. My office was at State and Adams, seventh floor, the retail trade newspaper of Fairchild Publications where I was Midwest market editor. His office was on Wacker Drive, and his shift began at 5 p.m., so we would meet for lunch late before he began work. Sometimes we just walked, talking the whole time. I sat on his lap in the park near the Art Institute. We held hands. And kissed.

If there was a warning sign there, I couldn’t see it. I guess I was too busy wanting him to be perfect, too busy nudging his quirks into the “positive” column. I wanted him to be like the men I knew were good: my father, my brothers, men with no surprises.

I did not know that men who tend to be abusive fall in love fast and want to spend all their time with you as a means of control. I just thought it was because I was irresistible.

One night after we had gone out for dinner, we were sitting on the beige Haitian cotton couch in my apartment. It was a tan-­carpeted one-bedroom with a view of Lake Michigan possible only if you stood on a chair and strained in an unnatural position to see an inch of blue between buildings. On this night, he told me he fantasized about my apartment building burning down and how he would save me. I thought it very strange but sweet. I learned later it was about control.

We had been dating about ten months when I was offered a job as a feature writer for the Dallas Times Herald. It was everything I had dreamed of doing, but yes, I was in love with this man, and yes, I did see marrying him. He seemed perfect. Should I leave without him? Would he wait for me?

I didn’t entertain the idea of not going to Dallas, of staying in Chicago with him, so when he said he wanted to go with me, I was thrilled. Yet I was frightened by the burden of changing his life. I was afraid that if it didn’t work out, he would hate me, his family would blame me. I didn’t know that he would end up hating me anyway, no matter what I did.

He volunteered to move there to be with me, to quit his job, go to Dallas, get a job, and build a life with me. I remember a scene in his parents’ Chevy station wagon, a ride back to Chicago from their summer home in Wisconsin, weeks before the move.

His father was driving, and his mother was in the front passenger’s seat; we were dozing in the back. It was late; we had been to his cousin’s wedding. The bride had worn a broad-brimmed white straw hat, and his youngest sister had told me she envied my new job, a life that seemed exciting. It had been a joyful night, another dreamy-eyed couple exchanging vows before the eruption of an enormous party outside on the lawn near the lake. On the drive home to Chicago, I closed my eyes, half asleep. The back window was open and the June air cool.

His mother asked him why he was moving to Dallas, and had he thought his decision all the way through? I kept still so I could hear what he would say.

“I love her, Ma, and I can’t live without her,” he said. “I need to be with Michele.”

My heart swelled. It gave me chills. Those were romance-novel words, corny and exhilarating, ones I had waited a lifetime to hear. His mother had more practical questions about where he would live and work. He answered them dutifully.

Driving home that night in the safety of his parents’ car, I was stunned by the belief that no one had ever loved me this much. This is how it works, I thought. This is how my father feels about my mother. This is how his father feels about his mother. This is how it starts, and eventually you end up with a cadre of beautiful children and a house and jobs that you talk about over dinner, holding hands on the way to bed.

And here is where it begins, the foreverness, the fruition of an ideal. This is the start of a parade of pictures on a mantle, the ones from the wedding and the ones from the twenty-fifth anniversary party. This is the script my friends and I rehearsed since I was four in our basement plays with Barbie in her white gown and Ken in his impossibly stiff tuxedo, his body without arms, his hair nubby. But this time, it was real. This was perfect.

I thought how lucky I was to be loved by a man this tender and giving, this kind and this determined. He is as good a man as my father. We will live happily ever after. The vision—paper thin and pasted to me—became stubbornly adhered at that moment, driving south on Highway 53. It was a vision I held tenaciously and would not relinquish, even years after it was clear that this man was not who he seemed. I held on to that vision even when it was evaporating and the untruth of it threatened to erase me.

But that warm, glorious night, with the windows open and the car rumbling fast and the calming voice of his mother distant and soft, melodious, dreamy, his arm on mine—there I felt loved. This must be it. Nothing has ever felt this good.

I was twenty-six in the early summer of 1984, and some of my friends already had gotten married. From where I stood as a bridesmaid in all those satin dresses—eleven in all—it looked so easy. You marry the one you are dating in your twenties. Just as in a board game, you land on the marriage square when you have moved enough spaces, counted off enough turns. Everyone wins. It’s about time, I thought, as if I was on a schedule. I’m on the right square.

I felt part of the club, the esteemed sorority of women who had husbands, fiancés, or boyfriends who could only see them as treasures, who never saw the flaws, who never complained about dinner or having to take out the garbage. Who never made a cutting remark.

The partners for life. The perfect husbands.

Card received on our eighth anniversary, August 23, 1994

M,

Can you believe it has been eight years since I raised my hand in joy walking out of Saint Vincent’s church? Eight years and three beautiful sons. We have been so blessed.

I love you.