Chapter 16
Seal tracks, Malibu, 2009.
It was June 2007, almost four years after our wedding, and I was in Vancouver, working on the supernatural TV drama The 4400. D.V. and I had now been together for eight years. I longed for a baby but had yet to become pregnant. On the surface, everything appeared fairly normal. It was the detective in me that sensed otherwise, the child of parents who drank too much, whose powers of perception had been honed to a razor-sharp edge. I was a master at reading the unfamiliar pauses, the off-kilter inflections, of those I loved. My senses zeroed in on the tiniest quiver.
All week, I had a daunting feeling I couldn’t shake. Something in the tone of D.V.’s voice seemed off when we talked on the phone. He didn’t call as regularly, didn’t ask how my work was going. I told myself he was intently focused on the writing workshop he was teaching at Sundance. Also, I was in the middle of a job. When you’re acting in a TV series, you have to give it your entire focus. I was playing the sister of the lead, an integral part. I loved the role and I loved the show; the challenge was being away from home, working long-distance, as they say. I told myself I’d deal with whatever was troubling D.V. when I got back to LA.
I had been reading Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, a novel about a newly married couple in 1962 discovering their differences despite their deep love for one another. When I finished, I inscribed it to D.V. with a passage from the book: “All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience—if only he had had them both at once—would surely have seen them both through.” Whatever problems we had were not insurmountable. If D.V. could just be patient, I knew we could work everything out. That was our plan, the reason we were spending so much time and money in couple’s therapy.
After I returned from Vancouver and D.V. got back from his week in Sundance, we were going to meet up at our therapist Mason’s office. Our paths hadn’t crossed in two weeks, but this was a mark of pride for me. That means we have an unbreakable bond, I told myself. We can withstand the separations and the storms.
That morning it’s hot out, only the beginning of summer but already in the eighties. I’m a few minutes late as I climb the stairs to Mason’s office. D.V. rings my cell phone and asks impatiently, “Where are you?” I tell him I’m right outside the door. Before I can sit down, Mason, dressed in an orange T-shirt and jeans, appears at the waiting room door. This is the fastest he has ever opened the door, and I sense danger in the air. “Casual Friday?” I ask, noticing the T-shirt. We sit down in our usual spots—me on the brown leather club chair, D.V. on the green chenille sofa.
“D.V. called me last night,” Mason says, cutting right to the point. “He has become aware of some feelings that he needs to share with you, Natasha.”
I freeze. My heart pounds. I search Mason’s face for something, any clue that might make me feel less terrified. He has never opened a session like this before. I set my coffee cup on the table beside me. I think I know what’s coming and I do not want to go there.
After a moment, I turn and look at D.V., who cannot meet my gaze.
“I, uh…” D.V. manages to say. “I don’t think I”—a pause, a deep breath—“can be… married anymore.”
His stifled emotions escape in a sort of grunt followed by strange, uncontrolled weeping. I begin quietly, asking perfunctory questions. Is he sure, does he no longer love me? “So, you’re talking about a separation, right?” I say.
D.V. shakes his head slowly before he answers, finally looking up at me. “I just don’t know what a separation would do. I think I am talking about a divorce. Yes, a divorce. I want a divorce.”
“A divorce,” I say. I sound like an echo. But I need to say these two words, speak them out loud, feel them form on my tongue. A divorce. These are the scariest words I can imagine. And my husband of almost four years just spoke them, at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning in June. My life will never be the same again.
I am calm, very calm. So calm that I am momentarily unsure whether I heard him correctly. Is this a dream? No. This is really happening—right here, right now. This is my life. I am sitting across from my husband, this man I love, whom I need—my one and only for the past eight years—listening to him tell me that he wants to break up and, furthermore, that he is unhappy and has been for a long time.
“You’re not happy either,” he tells me.
I realize D.V. is crying and I am not. This is a role reversal. For years, I was ashamed of how often I cried in front of D.V. But Mrs. Malin felt differently. “Your tears will save your life,” she told me. D.V., meanwhile, never cries. Once, after we had a particularly emotional fight, he told me, “I wish I could cry like you, Natasha.”
Now my husband is crying. I want the tears to roll backward, back into his eyes. I want him to somehow take back everything he has just said in the last twenty minutes, the last two weeks, maybe the last two years. Can we please rewind the tape?
I slump down, rest my head on the cool leather arm of the chair, trying to listen. Mason is talking. D.V. is talking. I am not talking. I have no words. There is nothing to say because D.V. has said everything. All I can do is take direction from the other people in the room, who seem to have a plan.
Suddenly, I know what I need. I turn to D.V.
“Can I have Manny?”
Manny is our eight-year-old, hundred-pound black lab. I need his size, his bark, his deep brown eyes, his floppy ears. He had started out as D.V.’s dog, but as the years passed, he became my compadre, my protector.
D.V. seems surprised by my request, but all he can say in his kindliest voice is, “Of course. Of course you can have Manny. Of course,” he repeats, almost to himself.
“Thank you,” I reply.
Mason asks me if I need anything else, and I say, “Yes, I need Amanda. D.V., can you please call and let her know what’s happening? Can you ask her to meet me at our house?” My head is so light it no longer feels attached to my body. D.V. steps outside to make the call. The moment I hear the door click closed, the familiar tears come, streaming silently down my face, staining my cheeks. D.V. returns and tells me that Amanda will meet me at our house. I schedule another appointment with Mason for the next day, and basically every day after that for the rest of the long, hot summer. A daily pilgrimage of sorts. I glance at my untouched coffee sitting on the table next to me and decide to leave it. Mason can throw it away. I leave my car in the parking lot in Beverly Hills. I can get it later or never.
D.V. drives us home from Mason’s office. I curl into a ball in the passenger seat and look out the window at the landscape of my life, all of it suddenly redefined. Alien and terrifying territory that only this morning looked safe and familiar. Quietly, as a child would, I ask him questions.
“How are we going to figure this out? Why did you keep telling me you wanted to stay married if you didn’t? Why did you say you were ‘getting your head around’ having a baby?” My questions are not angry or accusatory. They are my brain’s attempts at processing the conflicting information it has received. My husband answers my questions, one by one. But I am still so very far from understanding what has just happened.
The next day I made a plan. I told D.V. that I wanted to stay in our Mulholland house for the summer. He needed to go to London for work anyway and when he returned he could rent a place. I needed a couple of months to figure out my next steps. D.V. complied, leaving me alone in the house with Manny.
Katie and her fiancé, Leif, visited me. My marriage had imploded days before their wedding at Old Oak Road. I was supposed to be a bridesmaid, D.V. a groomsman. Despite my love for Katie and Leif, I couldn’t go. I could not stand under the great big sycamore tree, the one D.V. and I stood beneath only three and a half years earlier. The day was meant for their joy, not my sorrow.
After I had been living in this brave new world for a couple of weeks, Amanda and my other close friend Maya came over. They entered through my unlocked front door and perched on my bed in a shaft of afternoon sunlight. My friends did this most days, checking up on me, making sure I was okay, but even so, this particular day felt different. Amanda’s chin was quivering, Maya’s face a stone wall.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Lady, we have to tell you something, and it’s not going to be easy,” Amanda said through tears. They proceeded to tell me that D.V. had been cheating on me for a long time, with a lot of different people.
I absorbed the facts from Amanda and Maya, slowly, dumbly, and numbly. I didn’t want to believe what they were telling me, and yet I knew what they were saying was true. On some remote, unconscious level it all made sense. Frequently during our marriage, I felt jealous or suspicious—as if some internal alarm was alerting me to danger—but when I brought these insecurities up, everyone said the same thing. D.V. was a writer, a watcher. He was funny and charming and smart. He was also devoted to me. Now I was learning otherwise.
It was the middle of the night in England, and D.V. answered the phone with a sleepy “Hello.” The soothing sound of my husband’s voice was a momentary comfort. I had not heard his voice in three weeks.
“D.V., it’s Natasha,” I said formally. “I know everything. I know about the cheating, the lying. I know about Chloe.” Chloe was a younger girl whose name kept coming up. She knew he was married but sweetly referred to him as her boyfriend. They would meet for rendezvous when D.V. would spend a couple of days downtown writing at the Hotel Figueroa, telling me he was “working.” All of Chloe’s friends knew about “her boyfriend and his wife.”
D.V. paused, took a long breath, and said nothing. I had actually hoped he would deny it, fabricate some amazing excuse, that it would be a bad dream, a terrible rumor that D.V. would fix for me. But that was not what happened next. What happened was a stream of accusations pouring forth from my mouth; raging, screaming, demanding answers: “Why did you do this? Who are you? How could you? How could you? How could you?”
By the time I hung up the phone, the fury inside me had been expressed. But I had not even begun to feel it all. The full force of it took weeks to sink in, and months to process.
As soon as my brain stopped spinning, I began to revisit our eight years together. The time we went to that wedding where he stayed out all night, even after I went home. The trip to Spain where D.V. eyed every pretty girl we passed in the street. The birthday party I threw for D.V. when I walked into his office, filled with people talking, smoking, listening to music, having a good time, to find D.V. seated at his desk with a pretty brunette on his lap. Is my mind playing tricks on me? What the hell is this? I watched D.V. spot me and shift nervously in his chair as I walked over.
“Hi, I’m Natasha,” I said, the soul of composure. “I live here and you are sitting on my husband’s lap.”
The pretty brunette stood up, shock and embarrassment spreading across her face.
“I’m so sorry, uh, I didn’t know he was married,” she mumbled, and off into the night she vanished.
Later, D.V. took great pains to let me know that “she had no idea I was married!”
“Yes,” I said, “but you do know that you’re married, so why was another woman sitting on your lap?”
“Babe, it was late, we were all drunk. It’s no big deal. Chill the fuck out.”
Oh right. It’s me again, needing to chill the fuck out. Okay, let me keep working on that.
Faced with cold, hard facts, I was forced to admit to myself that the whole fantasy of my life with D.V. had been just that, a lovely illusion. The fact that D.V. bore a slight physical resemblance to my mother and shared her birthday confirmed my belief that she sent him to me, that he was my destiny.
The truth was that I had chosen him all by myself. There was never going to be any baby from D.V., no daughter who looked just like my mom. I had painted a magical picture and convinced myself it was reality. When my husband was revealed to be a cheater and a liar, my rage at him branched out to include my mother too. I was angry at them both.
I would wake up in the middle of the night in tears. The heartbreak of humility. After the words occurred to me, the phrase wound itself around my brain, circling my head like a familiar song. I had nightmares that I was drowning in an ink-black sea filled with debris. I woke up most mornings with the shadows of my bad dreams lingering in my bedroom.
I was appalled at myself for feeling so awkward and ill-equipped to be on my own. It would have been easy to claim that this insecurity stemmed from my mother’s death, but I knew it started way before that. My grandmother never left my mother alone, not even for a second. My mom grew to be a woman who simultaneously resented her mother’s overprotection and craved constant company. Whenever she was not in the room with another person, she was on the phone with a friend or family member. I believe she made strides, but I’m not certain my mom ever really overcame her loneliness and dependence on other people to make her feel safe. Naturally, she passed this fear on to me. I was a sensitive child, deeply in tune with my mom. When she was ripped away from me, this terror of being alone was magnified. The gaping hole of her absence made me cling more vehemently to my dads, my friends, my sisters, my boyfriend—those I loved. Reaching, always reaching for other people. My mother had taught me that I needed her for everything. Despite all the work I had done to try to move forward, I still didn’t know how to exist on my own.
In the weeks and months after my marriage collapsed, the two people who were there for me most—besides my incredible girlfriends—were Courtney and my dad. Courtney and I had been virtually estranged in the period leading up to my breakup. A new boyfriend had introduced her to heroin and she was gone.
But after D.V. left me, I needed my sister. I called Courtney and she came immediately. She slept next to me in my bed each night and brought me bubbly water in the morning when I awoke, sick to my stomach.
Then there was my dad. Around the same time I was filing for divorce, my father decided to sell the house at Old Oak Road. His daughters had moved on with their lives, and he and Jill were spending more and more time at their house in Aspen, Colorado. The only person living full-time at Old Oak Road was Kilky, and that was a big place for just one person. So my dad said farewell to the house that had been our family home for more than twenty-five years. He bought a condo in Westwood, and while it was being remodeled, Kilky stayed with Courtney, Jill went back to Aspen, and my dad moved in with me at my beach house in Malibu. He was still working as an actor, so he needed to be in LA.
It was funny living with my dad again. In the mornings, I made coffee for us before taking Manny for a walk along the wet sand. My dad hung out on the deck that overlooked the beach, waving and chatting to everyone who passed. At first I was irritated by his overly friendly ways. I was trying to keep a low profile through my divorce, trying to pretend I was invisible. The failure of my marriage was shameful and sad, and I didn’t want to make it public. But the natural openness of my dad’s personality drew me out of my seclusion and back into the community. We ate dinner together at the local Mexican restaurant or Italian place. Katie; her husband, Leif; and my newborn nephew, Riley, came over on Sundays and we ordered pizza and watched TV. If I stayed out late, my dad wrote me little notes and left them on the kitchen table: “I hope you had a good night. I love you.” Mostly he sat with me, he listened.
At the house in Malibu in the months after my divorce, he didn’t shut down or dismiss my feelings. He didn’t walk away. There were times that I could still see his internal wheels turning: What can I do to make things easier for her; how can I help her? I could almost see the ideas forming in his mind like delicate fizzy bubbles, and then popping one by one as his thoughts returned to the here and now. He knew that there was nothing he could really do to ease my pain except to be present for me. The only way out is through.
My dad stayed about three months, until his condo was finished, then he moved out. I was sad to see him go. I stayed close to the ocean, walked along the shore with my dog, the rhythmic pounding of the surf in my ears. It was only later that I learned my mom had done this too. In the painful period following her divorce from R.J. in her early twenties, she had rented a house on the beach in Malibu, where she lived alone for the first time in her life. I was unconsciously following in my mother’s footsteps.
I wanted a boyfriend, to lose myself in a new person. I had crushes and flings. I flirted and dated. But despite my efforts, I kept ending up alone. I told myself I wanted another long-term relationship, but most of the men I picked were far, far from being able to give me that. As Mason put it, “Why are you going to the hardware store to buy milk?”
On the weekends, friends would visit, and a couple of days a week, I would drive into town for various reasons, but for the most part, I was startlingly alone on the coast, at the edge of the world. Isolated, with plenty of time to sit with my ugliest fears and get to know them intimately—to offer them tea and cake, and become comfortable with them. At this time there was a writers’ strike in Hollywood, so not much was happening in the way of work and auditions. Thanks to my mom’s good business choices, I had the privilege of knowing that my bills would be paid. I directed my energies into acting workshops, reading, walking my dog, and soaking in hot baths.
It was a bright, blue-skied morning as I walked down the rickety wooden steps to go to the beach and saw something stirring under the house. A rather large, silvery-gray seal hissed at me as I passed. I had lived in Malibu long enough to know what to do when any marine wildlife—dead or alive—washed up on the beach. I called the Marine Mammal Stranding Network, and they arrived within the hour. “It’s a baby elephant seal,” they told me, “and it’s molting.” I was instructed not to touch or feed the seal. Signs on wooden stakes were placed in the sand around the animal, informing the public to stay at least one hundred feet away by law.
Each day I descended the old beach steps, I’d nod hello to the seal, shedding its skin, under my house. Each night as I lay in bed, I wondered if he would be there the next day. He stayed for quite a while. My constant companion under the house.
Finally, early one morning as I walked down the steps, I saw, in place of the elephant seal, a set of funny flipper tracks. The tide hadn’t come up yet, so I could see the pattern he made in the sand as he wriggled all the way out to the sea, back to his rightful home.
It was time to move on.