CUT IT OFF! I DON’T NEED IT!

It was autumn, roughly five months into my life as a separated woman. One day, for no evident reason, a finger of my left hand went red and painful and swelled into a fat little balloon. Some days went by during which I expected the problem to take itself away. It didn’t.

“You have to get it looked at by a doctor,” friends insisted.

I am doctor-averse by nature, and seeing someone meant a co-pay I couldn’t afford. But the thing dragged on and finally I made an appointment with a nurse practitioner in town.

Like me, the nurse couldn’t find any sort of wound. “There must be a tiny pinprick somewhere on the surface of the finger that allowed bacteria to enter,” she explained. She prescribed antibiotics and told me to come back if it didn’t get better right away.

In the next couple of days it got much worse. Darker. Fatter. More painful. The pain began to be distracting. Still, I didn’t take it very seriously. I would have lived with it a good while longer before shelling out another co-pay. But friends, alarmed, kept phoning to ask about the finger, urging action. “Go back today! Don’t wait!”

I returned to the nurse. This time she looked at the finger and called a doctor in her practice to join us. The doctor, a tiny woman with a generic European accent, studied my hand.

“I would hate to see you lose the finger,” she said pleasantly.

I watched her hold my hand and listened to the echo of her words. Their meaning wafted slowly toward me. She was contemplating the amputation of my finger. Not doing it herself, presumably. Surgeons do that sort of thing. Right? Not family practitioners in downscale offices? She didn’t speak of loss as if it were a bizarre and unthinkable outcome of my situation. She said it as if it were a distinct possibility. If it happened, we would all share mild regrets. Two things occurred to me. One, the obvious funny-ironic but also funny ha-ha metaphoric value in being threatened with something castration-like. (I mean—what would Freud say?) And two, the obvious funny-ironic but also funny ha-ha metaphoric value of my ring finger heading for the chopping block. Because that was what it was. How could I have failed to notice before now? Before being faced with its extinction, at least as a current part of my body? This fat, red, naked finger was the very one around which I had worn a small white-gold diamond ring and a small engraved white-gold band for nearly all my adult life. What a relief. This was a finger for which I no longer had a need. The loss of my finger would be no great loss.

Nonetheless. I thought that I would like to try to keep it.

I left the doctor’s office with a prescription for a different antibiotic. I took to soaking the finger. Gradually the redness and the pain went away. The swelling stayed. It stayed until my friend Nina, a massage therapist, took the finger in her strong hands and squeezed. Hard. The skin burst. The poison was released, the swelling went away. She had healed me. The finger never bothered me again, but the incident left me changed. By the time the burst skin had mended without a trace, my body had changed, profoundly. My life, equally so.

First: The antibiotics upset my stomach so that I couldn’t eat, not just for the week I took them, but for a week or two after as well. I lost weight. I shed those pounds! as the diet ads say, the pounds I still carried from my third pregnancy and more recently from a single-mother lifestyle of snacking on the run. I lost just a few pounds to the antibiotics, but it was enough to shift the utter hopelessness with which I regarded my body. I changed my diet. I adjusted my clothing size down several notches. When the ladies I’d grown up among were widowed, they put on shapeless black and never took it off again. Transwidowed, I went to a thrift store in town where I could find T-shirts and jeans for single-digit-dollar sums. I put away and eventually gave away the nice loose middle-agey clothing in which I had hidden for years. I began to walk. Not for exercise. For anxiety. That fall, winter, spring was an anxious time (ha ha). In my anxiety, I became addicted to walking. I’d get jumpy and head for the road. During months when I was in the habit of hibernation, I walked and walked, several times a day some days. When summer came, I set off on a walk I take only in good weather, a lovely uphill hike that wends past a big beaver dam and a small horse farm, a walk that makes me sweaty and breathless, a walk that is work. This time I was stunned to discover that, lost in thought, I had reached the top of the hill in minutes, not sweaty, not breathless. The most unlikely thing had happened. Inadvertently I’d become healthy.

Second: Epsom salts. I mentioned that along with the antibiotics I soaked my finger. The doctor recommended soaking in Epsom salts. I didn’t have any. I said I’d get some, but of course I didn’t. Late in the evening of the day the doctor had spoken of my losing the finger, one of the friends who had been checking up on me, somehow guessing—we weren’t all that well acquainted—that I was not the sort to run out and buy Epsom salts for myself, unexpectedly turned up at my door. Holding out a box of Epsom salts. A red, white, and black box shaped like a half-gallon milk carton. I looked at the box and a phrase that I’d been working very hard to keep from coming into existence took shape in my mind. Ooh, I thought. I’m in love. The box of Epsom salts. I have it now. It is the most romantic gift I have ever received.

There is the story I’ve been telling, and then there is this story, the Epsom salts story, that runs parallel to the other. Well, not entirely parallel. Sometimes intersecting, interweaving. Okay, not sometimes. Often. Constantly. It’s my life, so I know that through some of the story I’ve been telling there has been this other story that I have not been telling. Yet I forget it, writing this one. It feels like the separate trajectory of a separate life. It’s easier to leave it out. It complicates. It changes my understanding of what is my story. That is, changes it once again. My story was about marrying young, gradually creating a family, a life, a Jewish life. Then my story was about the destruction of that story. The third story is not so much about a different man as about a different me. It offers the ludicrous, offensive, delicious suggestion that everything happened as it did so that I could discover the person I am.

Let’s go back a few months before my finger swelled. Late summer of our first months as a single-parent family. The children and I kept busy, went swimming, visited with friends. The school year cranked to a start. We were out a lot. Sometimes when we arrived home we’d find paper sacks of vegetables and apples propped against our kitchen door. Small, elegant handwriting on scraps of paper, on the backs of old envelopes, told me which bag of apples I could feed directly to the children, which were for baking only. No explanations for the potatoes. Because he kept missing me, the man who had grown these things made an appointment to come and see me when my children were at school.

He arrived midmorning, roaring up my driveway in a big blue pickup truck, a vehicle I’d never seen him drive, and walked into my house in jeans and a tattered, faded blue work shirt, not the clothes I usually saw him in. He put more fruit from his orchard, half a sponge cake, on my dining room table. He hugged me. I remember the hug. I remember the faded shirt, his chest at my eye level. I thought at the time: This is like having a man come to see me. An attractive, exciting man rearranging the atoms in my atmosphere. Bringing maleness into my home. Bringing tenderness. Danger. It was like that, but it wasn’t that. I knew this was a charitable visit. I knew he wasn’t for me.

Sam (not his name) and I had been part of the same Jewish community for years. For the past two, which were also my two years of post-marriage cohabitation with Tracey, we’d both been members of the havurah, the small group I’ve already described that met informally in members’ homes for monthly Shabbat dinners and seasonal holidays. Sam and his wife had been invited to join the group at my suggestion. They were serious, interesting people who I thought would be a good addition. But despite knowing them in a communal religious context, despite being guests any number of times in their home, I had never exchanged personal words with them. Sam and his wife seemed to me the sort of people one could know for a lifetime and never get close to. When we announced to the havurah that Tracey was vacating our home and our marriage to begin a new life as a woman, the group, including Sam’s wife, made an almost unanimous decision to back Tracey. Because I didn’t know Sam very well, I couldn’t imagine that he would be the lone holdout who would offer his support to my children and to me. Because I didn’t know his marriage, I couldn’t imagine that there was nothing unusual about him and his wife going separate ways.

That morning in early fall, it was still just barely warm enough to sit outside in my backyard at the cheap green plastic table so ancient that the discount store it came from hasn’t existed in years. I drank coffee and Sam drank tea. “I want to tell you about myself,” he began. He had come with this express purpose, to tell me about himself, his marriages, his family. His ups and downs and reversals.

Later he would tell me, “I had seen your love for Tracey. I could imagine how devastated you were.” The night I’d told the havurah that our marriage was over, he had been unable to sleep, imagining my desolation and the children’s.

Knowing him to be as PC as the rest of the group, I asked him what made him break ranks. “Why did you choose us over Tracey?”

“Because I thought you were getting a raw deal.”

His was a mission of tzedekah, an act of loving-kindness through which Jews believe we repair the vessel of our broken world. Put another way, I think he’d decided to be my friend. He wouldn’t have expressed it in such religious or intimate terms to himself. Sam just thought knowing him might help me. He had no idea.

Sam and his wife had both been married to other people when they’d met in their late twenties. They’d divorced those people to be together. His first, brief marriage had produced two children, hers one. They’d had a child together. Creating a united family had been tricky, one of several significant sources of stress throughout their marriage. One child had gone through rocky times, but all, now adults, were doing well. Neither Sam nor his wife had been interested in a monogamous marriage, and both had had many affairs. At one point, Sam’s wife had divorced him for another man. When her lover unexpectedly died, she’d asked Sam to take her back. No longer in love but lonely, he’d had no faith that he would meet anyone he could feel closer to. They’d gotten back together, and a few years after, when Sam was facing surgery, they’d remarried, first in a civil service, then in a Jewish one. That’s the very short, skeletal version of what Sam told me.

But let’s go back still further. Years before that autumn morning, roughly fifteen. Tracey and I joined the synagogue in our new town and regularly attended services there, first alone, then with our baby, Adam. From time to time we saw a couple about twenty years our senior with a lovely young daughter. We didn’t speak with them, but they somehow made a good impression. When we arrived one week to discover that the service would include the bat mitzvah of the daughter, we expected it to be a meaningful ritual, not the circus these events could sometimes be. It was.

Another Saturday I overheard the man in this family telling his wife and daughter that his coat was missing from the closet after service. “Is it a black wool coat?” I asked him, taking my own black wool coat from the closet.

“Yes.”

“I might know where it is.”

I led him to a coat that had been left on a sofa in the social hall. It was his.

“I wonder how it got here?” he mused. “Thank you.”

I didn’t tell him that I had accidentally taken his coat, believing it was mine.

A few years later, I was phoned by a woman who wanted me to conduct a healing service for her husband, who was about to undergo surgery. The services, which I led regularly at the time, were for the purposes of gathering communal support, coming together as members of the synagogue to pray for someone in crisis. I had no idea who the woman was, but both she and the rabbi assured me I would recognize her and her husband when I saw them. As I did. The brief healing service took place after Kabbalat Shabbat, regular Friday evening worship. I recall speaking to Sam only once. “What is your Hebrew name, Sam?” I needed this name for the prayers I would lead. Sam looked into my eyes and softly said his name.

In the spring of that year, leaving a Saturday morning service at the same time, Sam and I paused in the sanctuary doorway and exchanged a few words. Apropos of something, Sam told me that he and his wife were not actually married. “You didn’t know that we were living in sin,” he joked. “We’re divorced.”

At these words I felt a fleeting, incomprehensible joy.

Then, without mentioning that they were in fact already legally remarried, Sam said, “We’re getting remarried. We’re having a Jewish wedding next week.”

No, I thought at him. Standing there talking to a stranger, in love with my own husband, and with our second baby, Bibi, in my arms, I had the bizarre and intrusive thought that this man was meant for me and me alone. I smiled and nodded and said nothing inappropriate aloud. That was our first conversation. It must have lasted approximately three minutes.

During my marriage, I always felt I couldn’t allow myself even to think about other men. I locked away those very odd thoughts about Sam. When events caused me to recall the moment some ten years later, my therapist resorted to highly technical language to describe it. She said, “You were having a woo-woo moment.”

I continued to see Sam sometimes at synagogue. I remained vaguely aware of him in a difficult-to-define way that I ignored. That summer, Adam attended the synagogue’s day camp, and his adored counselor was Sam’s daughter. The following winter, Sam called our home. I remember answering the phone, hearing his voice. He told me that his wife was away and his daughter was home from college for the weekend. “We thought it would be nice if your family came to Shabbat lunch.”

One of the peculiarities of my memories of Sam is that I can often recall the precise words he said, his face as he said them. I can generally recall what he was wearing. At this lunch, he sat at the head of his table in a tie-dyed T-shirt. The table was laid with an array of cold salads, prepared before the start of the Sabbath. At the end of the meal, without asking myself how I knew it would annoy him, without asking myself why I should wish to annoy a host I barely knew, I deliberately complimented Sam’s daughter on preparing the whole lunch by herself.

“You’re making sexist assumptions,” Sam scolded, clearly annoyed.

We stared at each other for a moment, and then I rose from the table. Silent. Now that I had Sam’s attention, I suddenly understood that I wasn’t thinking about lunch. That if I said another word, I was going to risk sounding as if I were flirting.

One spring, Sam invited us to a Passover seder. This time his wife, whom we knew even less well than Sam, was present, along with some of their extended family and friends. In the next couple of years, there were a few more of these occasions. During one there was a moment in Sam’s kitchen when he was busy at the stove. I looked at his body and wondered idly what he looked like inside his clothes. Horrified, I swiftly suppressed the thought and kept it from happening again. I think I kept it from happening again. When the havurah was formed, I saw to it that Sam and his wife were included. They rarely came to group events together. Both were academics with international careers. They traveled constantly, and it was rare to find them in town at the same time. They were wealthy, successful people with places to go. They were high achievers with the material spoils to show for it, but travel in particular seemed to define them. The way culture or religion or ties to a particular place sometimes defines a family.

No one knew that I found Sam a very attractive man. Even I didn’t know, outside the moments when I experienced and quickly banished the attraction. Sam certainly never guessed. When he came to see me that first morning and took to dropping in from time to time thereafter, he thought I didn’t like him. “Whenever I hugged you,” he told me later, “you never hugged back. When I came to see you I never called first because I thought if I gave you a chance to tell me not to come, you would take it.”

“Yet you came.” I laughed.

“Yes, I came.”

When the winter months brought the offerings from his garden to an end, he showed up with books for the children. I invited him to join us for a Shabbat dinner one Friday when his wife was away. That night when Sam walked in from the cold, I lit a fire in our woodstove and the five us gathered around it. The children, reeling in the wake of Tracey’s desertion, and the havurah’s as well, loved Sam’s visits. They laughed hysterically when Sam said he could enliven our fledgling fire by blowing into it with a hair dryer and succeeded only in scattering ashes all over the room. We all thought Sam was having us on about the hair dryer. Doing something uncharacteristically silly to make us laugh. He wasn’t. He really thought the hair dryer technique would work. That, of course, only made him all the sweeter.

Sitting before the tepid fire, he remarked, “I have a circulatory condition that makes my hands stay cold.”

“I do, too,” I told him. “Let me see.” I took his hand to test the temperature of his fingers. This, for me, was about as daring as it could possibly get. Tantamount to tearing off clothes and lap dancing for another woman. Nearly fainting, I held his hand for a few seconds and then dropped it. I had the impression that Sam liked me holding his hand. That he didn’t like me dropping it. That didn’t stop me from continuing to believe he was in love with his wife and making duty calls on me and my children. My holding his hand didn’t stop Sam from believing that I couldn’t possibly return the feelings that were beginning to trouble him.

A couple of weeks later, his wife again away for the weekend, Sam invited us to dinner at his house. It was a Saturday night. An advance copy of his new book had just arrived from the publisher. He handed it to me. “You’re the first to see it,” he said, adding teasingly, “I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather show it to.”

I stood in the center of his kitchen and examined the book. I hoped I would be able to say intelligent things about it. I hoped I looked sexy. Sam moved around me, preparing food with a little smile. His multicourse dinner included, by chance, some of my favorite dishes. Also one vegetable, Brussels sprouts, that was not a favorite but that I cheerfully chewed and swallowed in an effort to be congenial.

That dinner marked a turning point. When I described it to a friend, her eyes widened. She said, “It sounds like he’s courting you.”

I began to wonder, Does Sam like me? My friends were urging me to start seeing men. “Find another husband,” some urged. “Just get sex for the time being, and worry about relationships later,” advised several others.

I told them about the various single men on my horizon. I told about the visits from Sam. “Forget the married one,” they advised. I tried. It wasn’t easy. At first. Then it became impossible. What did I think I was doing with Sam? A married man was off-limits in my book, even one in what used to be called an open marriage. Other men got closer, but all I could think about was Sam. I went on a date with an attractive and interesting single man and spent the evening comparing him with Sam. Wondering when I could next see Sam.

One Sunday morning, I went to Sam’s house to help him brainstorm ideas for promoting his book. His wife was once again away for the weekend. I dressed with care, then was so nervous when I arrived that I refused to take off my coat. “I’m too cold,” I told Sam. “I’ll keep it on.” As if coat removal were a provocative act. We sat on either side of a table, drinking coffee. Me in my coat. Sam talked and I tried to focus on his words. I worried that he would realize I had no idea what he saying. I was distracted. I had decided that I definitely would not let anything happen between us. I was afraid that Sam would make some gesture, indicate an interest that I could not return. And I was wondering, Will we ever go to bed?

Sam’s wife left soon after on yet another trip, this time not for a weekend but for two months. Sam took her to the airport and arrived at my door with a huge bouquet of flowers. The children and I were on our way out to visit friends, so he didn’t stay. What did the flowers mean? I wondered. Remember: I had never had a single adult life, never had an affair. I hadn’t even seriously flirted with anyone since I was a college freshman. (Did I ever seriously flirt as a college freshman?) To my limited secondhand knowledge, a man gave a woman flowers after they slept together for the first time. Not before. Was Sam trying to tell me we would never sleep together? (Sam had never heard that one. I checked. Later.)

The following week I told N, my therapist, about Sam. She was surprised. Understandably. As the person to whom I told everything, she thought it was kinda funny that I had never even mentioned the existence of this friend. Much less that I thought we might be on the brink of an affair.

N, never one to pull punches, told me exactly what I had to do. “The next time you and Sam get together you’re going to clear the air. You’re going to tell him that you feel there’s some tension between you. That maybe you’re both starting to have feelings that neither one of you expected. You’re going to tell him that if anything is ever to happen between you—if, not when—it will be far off in the distant future. You’re going to tell him that you would first have to spend a long time talking about what you’re both feeling, and what any kind of involvement might mean for both of you. In particular what it might mean for someone in the highly vulnerable state that you’re in.”

From N’s office I drove directly to Sam’s house. He took my coat at the door and I walked into his arms. We had begun.