The Fortress Read online

  Writing about our relationship helped me find this freedom. Readers of the book always asked me if it was cathartic to write, and it was, I suppose, a release from the past. Yet the real magic came not from getting feelings out but from the turning inward, the examining of myself and my past, in relation to my father. I saw us both more clearly, more truly, than before. Re-creating the past required an imaginative possession of our characters, of who we used to be together. I had to speak as he spoke, walk as he walked. I had to make him come alive on the page. The writing was an incantation, and the incantation helped me find peace.

  But the magic worked two ways. My father had cancer when I began writing about him, and while I was working on the book, he got better. He went into remission, and his doctors believed he could fully recover. He was strong and healthy for some years. Then, not long after I turned the book in to my editor, his cancer returned. During the prepublication period of my book, he declined rapidly. The month the book about my father was published, he died. While I’d been writing about my father, he’d been strong. When I stopped, he withered.

  Some years later Nikolai wrote me a letter that explained the workings of magic. He wrote that everyone, that all human beings, are actually magicians, but some more powerful than others. Our minds are our weapons, and we have more power than we realize. He explained the difference between black magic and white magic, namely that black magic will initially hurt the target but will turn around and damage the sender even more strongly. White magic, on the other hand, helps both the target and the sender. He said I could, by visualizing a person or situation, transform it through compassion (“Om mani padme hum”) or emptiness (“Om gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha”). My intention could change the karmic and metaphysical reality of my world. Mind and matter cannot be separated, he said, and we all have the power to transform our lives and relationships. It was a two-way street: The object of my thoughts would undergo a transformation, and I would undergo a transformation as well, because everyone is connected.

  He wasn’t commenting specifically on the act of writing in this note, and I don’t know if he believed that magic could explain what happened as I wrote and published the book about my dad. But we both understood that we, as writers, were magicians. We were powerful in ways we might not even realize.

  —

  IN PROVIDENCE WE were writing all the time. Nikolai was in school and writing his memoir. I was writing a new book, a novel, and teaching as an adjunct writing instructor in Boston, taking the train north in the evenings. We were working seven days a week, and yet each month we struggled to scrape up enough to pay our bills. The stress of it wore on us, and we fought more and more about money. Neither of us wanted to think about the practicalities of life. We wanted to live in our books, where we worried about nothing but character development and the right turn of phrase. But we had two children under five years old, and there was no choice except to take responsibility for our finances. I’d been on my own for my whole adult life and had more experience than Nikolai when it came to paying bills, and so it fell to me.

  I was terrible at managing our money. I didn’t know how to do it at all. My solution to this lack of comprehension was denial and avoidance. I was in denial about the fact that we were broke and avoided finding a solution. My life raft became credit. I applied for a credit card and began to use it for groceries and other necessities. This eased the tension a little, although I still dreaded going to the mailbox each afternoon, knowing I would find a fistful of past-due bills. Soon this credit card was maxed out, and so I applied for another one. Miraculously, I was approved. Again I felt as if I’d been given a reprieve. When the second card was full, I repeated this process, until I had five credit cards that were charged to the limit. I paid the minimum balance each month but couldn’t pay more, and so these debts grew as the interest accumulated. I would go over our expenses and try to understand what I was doing wrong, but we weren’t living outlandishly. We simply weren’t earning enough.

  I felt both powerless and powerful about the role that money played in our relationship. Because I would (eventually, after lots of mistakes) be better at managing our money and because I had a career, I knew I would never have to be financially dependent on my husband. This gave me confidence that I could always stand on my own. I remembered my father and his criticism of dependent women, and I felt that I had avoided that fate, that I had not become “that kind of woman.” And yet, at the same time, I longed to be taken care of by a man, to feel secure, and for my financial well-being—which was really the well-being of me as a person—to be respected. But I wasn’t able to depend on Nikolai in this regard. He spent freely, and always expected someone—his parents or me—to rescue him financially. He couldn’t understand the correlation between work, money, and respect. While being in charge of our finances put me in a position of power, I didn’t always like being there. I couldn’t ever be vulnerable, or in need, with my husband.

  And yet while the practical problems were stressful, the romantic ones were corrosive. By the time we arrived in Providence, the romantic story I’d invented had all but crumbled. In Bulgaria I could tell myself that we were momentarily waylaid and that our “real life” hadn’t started yet. But in Providence real life hit us hard. The dream life I’d imagined I would have with Nikolai was nothing at all like what I was actually living. The dream life could not accommodate exhaustion; the dream life could not accommodate money problems; the dream could not accommodate needy children. The very nature of the dream had been unreal. And so when reality arrived and the dream I had of my marriage began to die, I found myself wishing I could stop everything and start over.

  —

  AS PART OF his financial-aid package at Brown, Nikolai taught an undergraduate workshop each semester. He told me about his students and sometimes brought home their workshop stories for me to read, and so I knew a little about his class. For example, I knew that on the first day of the semester, when everyone went around the table and made introductions, one of the students had identified himself as a “Mayflower descendant,” a term that Nikolai didn’t understand and, with my being midwestern and of Italian descent, one I rarely encountered. Another student was a world-class cellist and another a Russian whose parents were, Nikolai speculated, “rich ex-Communists.” Danny DeVito’s twins were at Brown that year, as was Donatella Versace’s daughter. We joked about how cool it would be if a DeVito child and a Versace child got married. It would be an off-the-charts Italian dream couple.

  Nikolai’s class began at five-thirty on Thursdays. Usually he was home around eight, or if he went out for a beer after, he’d be back at ten. But on the last day of the spring semester, he was going out for sushi with his students after the workshop, a kind of farewell party. I knew he’d be out for dinner, so I put the kids to bed, had dinner alone, cleaned up, and went to bed, expecting to hear the front door open any moment. Hours later I woke up and found his side of the bed empty. I glanced at the alarm clock: It was two-thirty in the morning. He still wasn’t home.

  I got up, found my phone in my bag, and called him. He didn’t pick up. I texted him and got no reply. I went to the window and looked outside, to see if our Toyota was parked in front. It wasn’t. For a moment I considered calling the police, but then I didn’t. Clearly he was still out with his students, and so I decided to wait another hour. I went back to bed, took a book from my bedside table, and began to read.

  I woke the next morning with my lamp on and the book across my chest. I felt a nagging sensation that something wasn’t right and realized, when I looked at Nikolai’s side of the bed, that he hadn’t come home. I jumped out of bed and went to the front window. The car was there, and, sure enough, so was my husband. I stood over the couch, where he had fallen in a pile, his coat still on and his black leather boots on his feet. The keys to the Toyota were on the floor. It looked as if he’d just made it to the couch and collapsed there. That, I thought, scooping up the keys, is one m
other of a hangover.

  I didn’t have time to talk to Nikolai. I’d do that after I got back from the school drop-off. I made some toast and hot chocolate for the kids’ breakfast, poured coffee into a mug to bring in the car, and helped Nico get ready for school. Alex didn’t want my help. At seven years old, he loved to be independent. He dressed himself, packed his own school bag, tied his own shoes, and got his own cereal. Nico, at four, still loved to be dressed. She waited for me to pull up her cotton tights and slip on her shoes and put on her sweater. When she was ready, I took her in my arms and carried her outside.

  Alex waited by the car. I unlocked the door, and he climbed into the backseat. I went to put Nico in but found that her car seat had been unbuckled and tossed into the cargo area. A green flannel blanket lay in its place. I leaned over the seat, pulled the car seat back into place, and was wrangling the straps around Nico, when Alex said, “What’s this?”

  I didn’t look around right away, and so he repeated himself.

  “Mama!” he said, more loudly this time. “What’s this?”

  I turned to see what he’d found. There was a bright blue condom package in his hand.

  “Sweet Tarts,” I said, taking the package from his fingers. It was torn and empty, the condom gone. Used.

  “Can I have one?”

  “Not now,” I said. “Maybe after school.”

  Alex wiggled onto the seat and buckled himself in. He slid his backpack down by his feet, shoving aside a Louis Vuitton wallet lying on the floor. Another condom package, also bright blue, lay next to it, this one unopened. A credit card, a driver’s license, a student ID, and a handful of change—a whole mess of quarters—were scattered over the floor.

  “Can I have those quarters?” Alex asked.

  “Sure,” I said, distracted by the wallet. I picked up the quarters and dropped them into Alex’s outstretched hand. Then I shoved the student ID, driver’s license, and credit card inside the wallet and climbed into the front seat, where I took a closer look.

  “Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five,” Alex counted from the backseat.

  “Hey,” Nico said, realizing she’d missed out. “I want some monies, too!”

  The Brown student ID showed a picture of a pretty blond girl with huge blue eyes.

  “These are mine,” Alex said. “I found them.”

  I looked over the credit card—what kind of student has a platinum card?—and saw a long Slavic name, a name with so many consonants that I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce it. Nikolai, who could speak Russian, would be able to pronounce it perfectly.

  “One dollar. One twenty-five.”

  “I want one, too!”

  “Give her a quarter, please,” I said.

  “They’re mine,” Alex groaned. “You gave them to me.”

  I examined the driver’s license and read the date of birth. The Russian girl was nineteen years old. Her height was five-ten, and her weight was 122 pounds. These dimensions left my imagination to create a tall, thin, blond nightmare.

  While Nikolai had mentioned that he had a Russian student in his class, he hadn’t mentioned that the Russian student was a beautiful nineteen-year-old blonde with enormous blue eyes. I looked over my shoulder at Alex and Nico, sitting in the backseat, sorting out their booty. The flannel blanket that had been lying across the seat was scrunched up between them. An equation scrolled through my mind, and the equation was this: Blanket + an empty condom package + car seat thrown in the back + a nineteen-year-old blond Russian student + Nikolai out all night. The sum of this equation was not anything good.

  I drove Alex to school and then Nico to day care, trying to keep my cool. There are many possible explanations for this, I thought as I dove home and parked the Toyota in front of our little white house. I’m sure Nikolai will explain everything. I unbuckled my belt, leaned back into my seat, and, suddenly I had what I will call a WTF moment. It was a moment when I would take a step away and look at the larger picture of my life and think, WTF am I doing? This kind of moment happened every so often in my life with Nikolai. I’d had a WTF moment at Maichin Dom, although I hadn’t yet had the acronym in my lexicon then. Now, as I looked over the Russian girl’s perfect teeth and her four-hundred-dollar Louis Vuitton wallet, a very strong, very angry WTF moment hit me. WTF was I doing on this beautiful Friday morning in Providence with a ripped condom wrapper in my hand and a blond nightmare in my mind?

  Nikolai was still sleeping on the couch when I opened the front door. I went to the kitchen to make more coffee and then returned to the living room, where I sat on my favorite faux Eames chair, a yellow pleather affair I’d bought at the Salvation Army thrift store.

  “Nikolai,” I said. I leaned over and pushed his shoulder to wake him up. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy, and he smelled of cigarettes. Of course, I thought, all Eastern Europeans smoke.

  “Hmm?” He opened an eye and looked at me.

  “Coffee?” I asked, offering him a sip of mine.

  He shook his head.

  I dropped the wallet and the ripped condom wrapper on the floor. We hadn’t bought a coffee table yet.

  “We need to talk about that,” I said.

  He sat up. “What’s that?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  We sat there for a good minute, me at the edge of my chair, him on the couch, the wallet and condom between us. Finally Nikolai cleared his throat and said, “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  We sat there for another full minute. The silence between us was like the rest in a piece of orchestral music—a pause between big, raucous kettledrums.

  “No idea at all?” I said.

  He shook his head. I bent over and took out the driver’s license and read, “Nzxhsarradvhda.” He gave me a look, part derisive, part pained.

  “You mean Nadezhda,” he said.

  “Is that how you say it?” I said. “Na-desh-da? Because I can hardly stand to read such an ugly word, let alone pronounce it.”

  “Hope,” he said quietly.

  “Excuse me?” I hadn’t expected him to say that word then, at that moment, and tears sprang to my eyes.

  “Nadezhda. It means hope in Russian. And in Bulgarian, actually.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “So what’s her wallet and”—I nudged the blue wrapper with my shoe—“that doing in the car? The kids found them. Alex asked me what it was. I said it was fucking Sweet Tarts.”

  “Nothing happened,” he said, going into defensive mode.

  “I woke up at two-thirty,” I said. “You weren’t here.”

  “My students went out for sushi with me. And we had a little too much to drink, and then I drove them home.”

  “You and like all ten of your students were in the car?”

  “No, just a few of them,” he said.

  “So you were driving drunk all around Providence with a carload of undergraduates until three in the morning?”

  He covered his eyes with his hands. “I know it sounds bad,” he said. “But I took Nadezhda home. She must have dropped her wallet.”

  “And that?” I said, looking at the blue wrapper again.

  “She must have dropped that, too.”

  We had a long, tense discussion that turned into, over the next hour, a major fight. He became adamant that nothing had happened and that I was wrong to suspect him. Meanwhile I went through all my doubts about him, the ones I’d been collecting since the Red Suitcase Incident. I outlined the pattern of behavior that had begun even before Nico’s birth, in Iowa City, with my journals, and continued with his J-1 visa requirements, and continued after Nico’s birth. I was beginning to understand that this pattern of behavior was deeply rooted in his personality. It had always been there, but I’d chosen not to see it. It was like looking at a favorite painting and finding that the perspective was off, the shadows fell the wrong way, with no correspondence to the angle of the sun. The flaw had been
there all along, only I had been too blinded by love to see it.

  By the end of our fight, our positions had solidified. He denied that anything had happened, and I was left with the equation I’d worked out in the car. I had a choice. I could leave or I could stay. Leaving would mean pulling apart everything I’d worked to build—breaking up my family and my home. Leaving would mean admitting—to myself and everyone else—that I’d been wrong about Nikolai, that I had bad judgment, that I was unable to maintain a healthy long-term relationship. It meant there was something inherently problematic with me for choosing a man who wasn’t honest with me. It meant that I was damaged goods myself. I’d been married and divorced once already. I’d put my children through a lot of difficult changes in the past years. I was too ashamed of my past failures. I couldn’t do it again.

  But staying married created an equally damning situation. Staying married meant that I must suspend my instincts and my own perceptions about what was true and what was false. Staying married meant that I accepted all the past deceptions—the minor ones, like Nico’s vaccination shot, and the major ones, like Nikolai’s J-1 homestay requirement. It meant that I tacitly agreed to accept whatever future deceptions came up. Even if there were no future deceptions, it would mean being forever suspicious. But worst of all, staying married meant that I must push all these feelings of doubt and uncertainty about him down, below the surface of my life, and put on a happy face. It meant living with it. It meant making things work, come hell or high water. Reader, I chose to stay married.

  —

  BUT THAT DIDN’T mean that I was happy to stay. I wasn’t. And, as masking my feelings has never been my strong suit, we began to fight regularly. During many of our fights, I threatened to leave. I told him we should get divorced. The word was uttered in the way the word “bankrupt” is said at the board meeting, the way “terminal” is said at the doctor’s office. It was a locked-and-loaded word. A final-solution word. It was more than a collection of consonants and vowels, but a demon I’d conjured into our lives.