Stephen, the man I was sure was the one, could see into me, all that I was and all of my possibility. He worked for the company that put on those classes. He had big plans for a big life. He was healthy, like I’d become (running and lifting weights, no alcohol, no drugs, no smoking, no sugar, no fats, no meat). This man was for me.
I waited the right amount of time, to avoid breaking one of the rules from those classes (don’t have an affair). The right amount of time so the new man didn’t break the rule of his job (don’t sleep with the participants, especially the married ones). I went to the courthouse and got the divorce papers, filled out the forms, paid the fee. I kept moving fast, to not think about the hurt I’d caused Sam.
I moved in with new friends from the classes. Amy and her then-boyfriend Will had a spare bedroom. They made space in their basement for most of the belongings I’d kept from my marriage. My short life as wife, pushed to a corner and covered with a drop cloth.
The papers came in the mail. May 1985. I was divorced.
“It’s final,” I said to Stephen. “I’m no longer married. The one-year rule is over.”
That first time with him I hardly made it over his doorstep before we were out of our clothes and into each other. That first time made all that waiting almost worth it. In those first weeks we fueled ourselves from our stored up wanting. I saw him on weekends, me driving from Eugene to Portland, where he lived, or meeting somewhere.
One afternoon we met at the coast. The sun shone. But it was early spring, and it was the Oregon coast, which meant cold. We sat in the car and watched the sun diamond the waves, watched the waves come and go, come and go.
He said, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
The quickest briefest wash of worry in my chest; so fast I didn’t know what it was, except for this: Too soon.
It was cold outside and warm inside. I wanted him to love me. “I think I love you too,” I said.
Within six months I quit my job, left Eugene where I’d lived for nine years, and moved North to Portland to live with Stephen.
I barely even gave a nod goodbye to the slow city-town of it, the green, the rain, and hibachi smoke, bicycles and beards and runners. All that had happened there: a degree, a career, a crime, a marriage, a divorce, a transformation.
And yet, when it came to men, nothing had changed.
The day I moved, we rented a small truck. Just the two of us loaded it. I couldn’t fit all my belongings in, and I left most of Aunt Lena’s things behind with my friend Amy, saying I would get them sometime. An oak desk, a mirrored china cabinet, the rocking chair Leanne had wanted. I didn’t think to ask her if she wanted it now.
Within a few months Stephen said, “I love you, but you’re not the one.”
I didn’t see it coming.
“Why?” Calm outside, the surprise of it made me still. Pain inside, the heat in my stomach, the stab of his words spreading.
Stephen didn’t have an answer. Not the kind that I could do anything about. “It’s a feeling I get,” he said. “You’re not the one I’m going to spend my life with.”
I said, “I love you. You are the one.”
I would make him see it.
At first I was reasonable.
At home in Condon, I pretended everything was okay. I didn’t want to worry my family. I didn’t want them to think Stephen was just another man. In my life. Out of my life.
On my visits home, Leanne and her husband came out to the ranch with their girls. Annilee was five, Shannon was three. They thought I was magic. I laughed and ran and danced with them. They liked that I played silly, that I made funny voices and crazy faces. I ran in the sprinklers and brought gifts and let them ride on my back like a horse.
“Do you know what?” I said. “Do you know I can make myself invisible?” They looked at me with hopeful eyes.
“No, you can’t,” Shannon said. Already her eyes were on my hands, my legs, my face, to see if any part of me had disappeared yet.
“Yes, I can.”
“Show us.” Annilee clapped her hands.
Nothing changed Stephen’s mind.
I became unreasonable.
Once a month, once a week, once a day, once an hour. I asked. I asked. I asked. I asked.
“Has it changed?”
“Do you know now I am the one for you?”
“Why aren’t I the one?”
“What can I do?”
I read every book he talked about. I bought new clothes, higher heels, stockings and garter belts. I ran more. Lifted weights more. Ate less. He talked about pregnant women being sexy, and he wanted a child someday. Even though I’d let go of the blind need for a child, I could still have one. His romance ignited mine. I imagined our infant in his arms; downy head resting in his open palm, the length of that baby along his forearm.
In less than a year he moved out.
“I love you,” he said. “But I’m not in love with you.”
Words spoken a thousand times by a thousand lovers. Words spoken by me to Sam. But never to me. Not until now.
“You have to close your eyes,” I said. “And you have to sit really still.”
The girls closed their eyes. Dark long lashes against pale child skin.
“No peeking,” I said.
They put their child hands over their eyes.
Mom and Dad were watching.
Leanne smiled.
I went into the kitchen, tiptoe quiet.
Leanne said, “Oh, wow. Aunt Jackie disappeared, you should open your eyes and see.”
His new apartment was a mile from mine. At night I drove by. Back. Forth. His car was there. I went into the parking lot. Scanned the cars like I would recognize which one belonged to another woman, a woman not me. I went up the cement steps. Step, step. Tiptoe quiet in my high heels. I knocked.
The door opened. Dark outside, light inside.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said.
He stepped back.
I went in.
One more night of me in his bed would convince him I was the one.
We were together for those hours, me above him, me below him, me in his lap. I looked into his eyes and tried to draw out the love, like a snake charmer with a cobra, like the venom from a bite.
In the morning, when we woke, he said nothing about tomorrow, or next week, or again.
And, like magic, I was gone. The girls wanted to believe. But they had to come into the other room to see if I was hiding. I ran the circle of the house, from kitchen to laundry room to bathroom to Mom and Dad’s bedroom to living room to family room. Little feet behind me, Annilee behind me, Shannon behind her, not finding me.
Until they came back to the family room. And there I sat, in the same spot I’d been in when they’d closed their eyes. I had appeared again.
“Do it again,” they said, both at the same time. Annilee smiling like she knew a secret, Shannon big-eyed. “Do it again.”
Another year went by. I kept on.
His car.
Those cement steps.
Me knocking. “Can I come in?”
This time, I disappeared three times in a row, warm from running through the house, enough ahead of the girls that they never caught me. I felt magic, like I always did when I was with them.
Dad watched from his chair, smiling at his goofy daughter, his gullible granddaughters.
The girls came back to the family room, cheeks in high pink flush, sweaty wisps of hair around their foreheads. I stretched out on the floor or sat on the couch. Slowed my breath. “Wow,” I said. “That last one really wore me out.” They believed it was maybe true. I could make myself disappear.
“But why?” I leaned in, over the wood table in the dining room of my apartment. “Why don’t you want to be with me?” Stephen sat across from me. The one I thought was the perfect man for me.
He sat with his hands on the edge of the table. His dark eyes on me. No answer to my question.
“Why?” The pitiful, the whine and need in my voice. “What’s wrong with me?” Like a mirror held up to me reflecting how Sam had tried to understand why I was leaving. Now it was me asking why of a man with no answers.
Stephen folded his arms across his chest. His shoulders curved in, protecting himself from the hurt of my words. What he had been trying to tell me all this time held in that curved hurt. Stephen wished he could love me. But it wasn’t possible. Not because of me, but because of him.
I could do nothing about that.
“You have to stay away from me.” I said. “Because I can’t stay away from you.”
“Do it again. Do it again.” The girls’ foreheads were damp from running to find their invisible aunt.
“I have to stop,” I said. “I might not be able to come back if I do it again.”
We sat on the sofa, one girl on each side of me, and we took up crayons, paper. We made pictures. They drew and colored and gave their drawings to me, names in crooked child print in the corner. Annilee. Shannon. A house, a cat, a horse, a girl.
He stayed away. This man I went all out for, all in for, all over for. And I stayed away too. So that I could be done with the needing, hurting, begging, asking, trying, pleasing, longing, pleading.
So I could find answers that wouldn’t have made sense to me at any other time but did right then, when everything I had been doing had stopped working.
I read self-help books that told me I was a smart woman making foolish choices who loved too much with my Cinderella complex. It all made a sad kind of sense.
Stephen’s rejection burst a fence, letting loose all that I’d never let myself feel. The long trail of boys and men in my life. What I put on them, the hope of perfection and forever falling in love, the ecstatic loss of myself. The need in me to fill up with another because it was the only way I could, for a while, feel good enough. This was the stampede that came through that fence. It wiped out the false glitter of love.
Now Annilee and Shannon are women. When I ask them did they really think I could disappear, they say, “We knew you couldn’t. Not really.” Do I imagine that little spark of the possible, still in their eyes? “It was fun, though,” they say. “Like maybe, just maybe, you could.”
One afternoon, near the end of the time of staying away from Stephen or any other man, I walked alone to the store and bought a chocolate-covered ice cream bar. I sat on the curb and ate it in the sunshine, all by myself. Here I am, I thought. Here with the dark flakes of chocolate, the sweet of the ice cream, the sun on my legs.
I would take time on my own. I knew I would find another kind of love. Eventually. And I swore that when I found it, I would not fuck it up.