Perfection (22 page)

We spoke on the phone almost every day after that. One evening I was bold enough to ask him if he wanted to have dinner with me. He said he couldn’t make it; he had “something important” to do. The next day he told me that he had ended things with Sally. I was so startled and thrilled that I didn’t ask for the details; it was enough that he had chosen me, though when I gave some thought to Sally, I imagined it had been a wretched evening for her. I weighed my own delight against her misery and selfishly relished what seemed like long overdue good luck.

And then, of course, we had sex and I was a goner.

At the end of our first month as a new couple, he had knee surgery for an old injury. In those days before arthroscopic surgery, ligament repair was a big open-knee operation. I visited him daily during his five-day hospital stay, bringing him food treats from the outside world. After his discharge, he navigated the city on crutches while I carried his computer, the original Macintosh 128 (Henry always was an “early adopter”), back and
forth from my apartment on the Upper West Side to his new apartment on East Second Street and Avenue B. I was delighted to take care of him, delighted to be with a man who wanted to be with me, who was so attentive, who made me laugh a lot, and who told me often how much he loved me. We even found ways to have sex in a single bed with his leg brace on.

As our relationship progressed, I overlooked the occasional red flags. There was the night he went to a poetry reading promising to be at my apartment by nine.

“Wait for me,” he said, “we’ll have dinner together.” He showed up cheerfully drunk at 1:00
A.M.
, after I had waited frantically by the phone all evening.

There were the heated debates about politics, where I discovered the ways in which our thinking had been influenced by our very different family environments. But the arguments were also exhilarating, a reminder that we were young, alive, thinking and therefore opinionated.

I especially tried to ignore the outsider feeling I had the first and every time we traveled to his small upstate hometown to visit his family. There I was confronted with the emotional distance between Henry’s withdrawn, elderly New Englander father and his younger Korean wife, though I immediately adored crinkled Aunt Rose, who lived next door.

At seventy-two, Aunt Rose was still vital. Till her death at eighty-six, she read
The New York Times
daily and could debate any current topic. She was more “motherly” than Henry’s own mother, whose poor English after thirty years in the States seemed an almost willful defiance of an American life she had refused to embrace. Aunt Rose baked apple pies and banana muffins in her perfectly
preserved 1940s kitchen, which featured an old, still operational, green Westinghouse refrigerator. She was thrifty in the manner of Depression-era survivors, yet with us, her “children” (she’d been unable to have any of her own), she was warm and generous.

I sensed that Henry’s mother had profound, even bitter regrets about the comfortable life of servants and cooks, driver and
amah
she had left behind in Seoul for the small town where Henry, her half-Korean son, was called Chink in the public school. As a city girl myself, I couldn’t blame her for that—the town seemed forlorn, with its abandoned rail line and tattered Main Street, though the surrounding countryside presented a gorgeous array of rolling hills and farms, where I often walked alone with the family dog as escort.

I was disturbed by Henry’s adoration of his father, an almost childlike, worshipful love. No parent is so perfect, especially not one who forced a move that satisfied only his own needs, though of course this was common for his generation. I concluded it was perhaps my family that was the anomaly, where my working mother wielded equal decision-making power with my father.

The dinner table seemed to represent the field of battle. When evening came, Henry’s mother set out two spreads—American meat and potatoes as well as a selection of Korean dishes, which created a pressure of superabundance, the two complete meals in uneasy competition for table space like neighboring but not altogether friendly nations.

An unhappy smell—mildew, cooking grease, sour milk, over-flowery room fresheners, and something else at first unnamable—permeated the house. Liza noted and tried to identify the smell as she grew older; for me it was the odor of disappointment.

At the point in our marriage when we began thinking about
moving away from the city, Henry, perhaps caught up in a momentary fit of nostalgia, laid out a plan to move back to his hometown, where he fantasized that we might build a house on a portion of the hundred acres owned by his family.

“Henry,” I said, “let me just be very clear before you do any more planning. I won’t ever want to move to that town or live so close to your mother. No way. That’s just not happening.”

The town we ultimately chose had seemed an acceptable compromise, positioned at roughly the halfway point between the city and his family. I maintained what I hoped was a courteous but detached relationship with his parents and spent my time there with Aunt Rose. When Rose died, in 2000, I was heartbroken to have lost her, my only meaningful connection to Henry’s family. With her death, I also felt that Henry had lost a powerful emotional anchor in his life, a moral rudder, someone who understood him, loved him, and for whom he willingly made sacrifices.

One evening about six months into our relationship, I met Henry and Eric, one of his close college friends, at a restaurant near their shared East Village apartment. Henry had his back to me when I entered the restaurant. Eric smiled as I approached the table. Feeling giddy, I put my hands over Henry’s eyes. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise. My gesture was meant as a sort of rhetorical joke.

Eric looked at me with a steady, affectionate gaze and said to Henry in a quiet voice: “It’s not Michelle, so don’t make a fool of yourself.” The huge unanswered question cast a shadow over the rest of the evening.

Michelle turned out to be his physical therapist, a woman Henry had described in some detail, without naming her, who put weighted sandbags on his postoperative knee in weekly sessions that he had described as excruciatingly painful. Yes, they were
having an affair, but it wasn’t a serious thing, he assured me.

“I promise you that this will never happen again,” Henry said.

And soon after, we seemed on a happier path. I gave him keys to my apartment, where we had lots of joyful sex. I was in love. He told me he loved me. I became part of his circle of friends. Matthew, one of his closest college friends, lived nearby with his wife, and we were a frequent foursome.

Henry and I made plans. We traveled to France and Italy together and struggled at our low-paying jobs, dreaming of a creative future. Henry would write a great novel. I had many unfocused urges and envied his single-minded ambition. I had never been in a long relationship, but now this seemed to be the right person—smart, challenging, worth adoring.

“You are so lucky,” my friends said. “Henry is so handsome, and he loves you so much.” Sometime, I thought, I might even rethink my early edict on the topic of marriage. After all, I imagined, I didn’t have to love everything about him, and I didn’t have to love all his family.

Always, from the beginning,
he cooked for me; frequently elaborate events with many courses. But for me the humble meals were even more memorable.

Two
A.M
. on a Saturday in early 1987 found us returning to Henry’s apartment after a long night in the emergency room at Beth Israel hospital. We had been mugged on Lafayette Street immediately following a showing of David Lynch’s
Blue Velvet
. One of the young perps who surrounded us on a quiet street corner hit me on the head with a piece of wood. The one-inch lacera
tion had released a dramatic quantity of blood, which the ER doctor had cleaned up; now the wound was neatly sutured with a metal staple inserted into my scalp.

We were shaken and famished. Henry began rummaging in his tiny kitchen. Half an hour later he offered me a soup: chicken broth from a can, some Korean seasonings, frozen peas and spaghetti noodles, with a swirl of sesame oil. We devoured it all, supercharged with the lingering tension of having survived real danger. That night I began to fully appreciate Henry’s joy and creativity in the kitchen. I even wondered if maybe it wasn’t a novel he needed to write but a cookbook. We made love ecstatically after that meal. I would always remember that night—we were more connected and intimate after the ordeal we had experienced together.

“My Supreme Loveliness
(this, I swear, was one of his nicknames for me), I love you as I love life,” he pronounced dramatically as he handed me a small antique green jewelry box.

It was late December again, and we were drinking champagne at a table at Café des Artistes, one of New York City’s most over-the-top romantic restaurants. We had been a couple for two years. Henry had moved into my nasty railroad apartment (it was way cheaper than his tiny sweatbox-in-summer, icebox-in-winter East Village apartment), and this anniversary warranted a celebration. Several times during the autumn, Henry had asked me how I felt about marriage. I was careful to soften my prior strident position. Marriage could work, I said. We could have a different kind of marriage, where we wouldn’t slip into typical patterns. There would
be no
Diary of a Mad Housewife
for me.

So when he offered me the green box, I thought I knew what was going to happen next. There would be a tasteful engagement ring, recently purchased, I hoped not too expensive.

But when I flipped open the lid, I found inside the gold claw ring he had described the night of our second meeting, which was the day we thought of as our anniversary. It indeed resembled a golden fist holding a small white stone. The stone itself didn’t look like a pearl to me.

“This is the ring, isn’t it?” I asked. “When did you get it back?”

“Oh, ages ago, along with the
Macbeth
. I wrote to my old girlfriend right after we met.”

When I took the ring to be resized, the jeweler told me that the center stone was actually a piece of coral, not a pearl. But the original story was so wonderful and romantic I decided it should remain intact.

Our April 1989 wedding was a no-frills affair. We borrowed my brother’s loft work space, and I arranged for economical catering. Henry wore a vintage midnight blue tuxedo. I wore a simple long white cotton dress, something Jane Austen might have chosen, with red satin shoes, because the white bride thing was starting to get to me. A rabbi sang the traditional Jewish prayers as we stood beneath a chuppah. Henry stomped with enthusiasm on the napkin-wrapped crystal wineglass he’d purchased for the occasion. Irena’s unforgettable offering—a homemade wedding cake—was a chocolate extravagance sheathed in edible gold leaf. My parents looked pleased and proud, and happy toasts were made to our future together. We danced to the music on a series of tapes I’d made.

A few days later, we subjected ourselves to shots for yellow fever and hepatitis. Our young doctor handed us prescriptions for malaria prophylactic and just-in-case antibiotics. The shots hurt like hell. I winced when the needle went in my butt.

“Haven’t you kids ever heard of the Bahamas?” the doctor asked with a sigh.

We laughed. The Bahamas—indeed.

We were off on our “honeymoon” (we enjoyed the ironic usage of that word to describe this trip) to visit Sara, my college friend, who was serving in the Peace Corps in Malawi, a sliver of impoverished nation in southeastern Africa.

After an English lunch of smoked trout on British Airways in coach class, we stepped out of the air-conditioned plane onto the metal stairs at Lilongwe Airport. The sun glared on the hot tarmac. I rummaged for the sunglasses Sara had insisted I pack. I glanced around and saw the edge of the airport. The very edge, where the watered lawn ceased and the wild bush began. There would be no smoked trout till we got back on a plane in a month to return to London. We were precisely in the middle of nowhere.

Sara’s boyfriend, soon to be husband, was there to greet us. Just past the airport exit, the road quickly changed to rust red dirt where we passed adults and children in rags, walking barefoot, malnourished children with bloated bellies, strange skin conditions, and discolored hair. I had grown up in New York City, I had seen poverty, but this was something entirely new.

When we reached Sara’s village, we found her living in an ample-size house with concrete floors, cool to the touch of our bare feet. I unloaded the supplies she had requested: shampoo, conditioner, soap, and chocolate. “You’ll be eating rice and beans three meals a day from now on,” she said. “But at least we can
have a treat now and then. I haven’t had visitors for a while.”

During our first walk alone together, Sara told me that she was pregnant. At thirty years old, I still had only one close friend, Irena, who had a child, but having been married a week earlier, I was optimistic and thrilled for her. A baby in Africa—what an adventure.

I learned to tuck in the mosquito netting good and tight at bedtime. While I tried to cope with large, hairy spiders, I never did overcome my aversion to snakes. The rule of thumb in Africa seemed to be “better dead than alive.” People loved terrifying us with “can you top this” tales featuring puff adders and mambas. The stories always ended with a just-in-time hatchet.

We reassessed the concept of garbage in a place where almost nothing was thrown away. Ingenious toys were made out of bits of scrap metal and wood. Clothing was worn till it literally fell off the body. Any piece of plastic could be put to some good reuse.

In addition to poverty, we glimpsed the political upheaval in that part of Africa. We were drinking beers one night in a bar on Likoma Island with the town’s only doctor when the local priest opened the door and announced somberly that there had been “an incident.” Henry and I (he was more eager) followed the doctor back to his crude clinic. No painkillers were available for the stoic patient, who had been shot in the back of his right calf by Renamo guerrillas in a village across the border in Mozambique. The doctor was quite drunk.