Tsunami Across My Heart Part 6

"I liked it because of the way they loved each other. It was so intense, so pa.s.sionate, and so complete." And he was nodding across the table.

"It's not that they didn't have their problems..." he said, "But..."

"They worked them out together." We said in unison, and the momentum somehow began to build between us.

"Right!" I said, "They did. They were in it together. He would have walked over hot coals for her..."

"And she would have walked over hot coals for him."

"And they DID." We both said in unison together once again. It was a little unnerving to have that rhythm and we both paused, about to speak again.

And even after regrouping we said in unison for a third time, "That's just exactly what I want." What I wonder, are the odds of that?

Looking at one another and sort of laughing, catching the spark in one another's eyes, I looked down at my plate and twirled an onion on top of my steak. My heart was surging in my chest. I felt so much love and connection for him in that moment.

His cell phone rang and reality struck as it inescapably would have to. His coworker checking in with him, did he want to play billiards at the local watering hole? "No, I'm going to turn in soon." He said eyeing me, and I smiled quietly in return.

After dinner he slid his key across the table towards me, and placed it under my hand, and said, "It's room 421. Meet me after I call my wife? Go up ahead of me and get undressed. I need to discuss the latest Martha Stewart-esque renovation and prevent our inevitable interruption."

He took forever, and from the window above I watched him pace outside in the parking lot over some detail of a renovation with his terminally unhappy wife. He came upstairs to find me unclothed, but for my expensive lingerie, sighed and said "She's always got to make everything so complicated and perfect and I wish she'd just leave me out of the details."

I kissed him to quiet him, the less I knew about her then the better off I'd be I reasoned. I stripped him naked again, kissed his mouth, tongued him and placed my hands across his nakedness, all manner of shyness long gone between us and my heart beating in unison to his. He pulled me into his bed and the memory of the first time he'd pulled me into a hotel room bed echoed in the back of my mind.

It was tremendous all over again. This time though, I felt worldlier, more confident, and he seemed uncertain of himself like he never had before. I felt the need to restore him to his former sense of strength and prowess. I wanted him to remember the way he'd felt with me. Nothing had changed, no matter the history or anything else the feelings were still strongly resonating between us.

Pa.s.sion was unabated and while he didn't say the magic phrase this time, he smiled when he was inside of me with such utter bliss and moaned in such a s.e.xy way, I knew he felt s.e.xually complete with me. I shuddered on top of him in my own revelry, my own need and came upon him with a fury collapsing on his chest, heaving. Shortly I pulled away and he breathed heavily as he continued to recover. I laid there quietly in the dark next to him, breathing hard, my right hand cradled in his left.

My breath quieted. I was thinking of his last visit to Atlanta after my good bye letter, and smiled at the audacity he had to send me shopping with Dana, his absolute b.i.t.c.h of a customer, and how I had never confronted him with what he had done. Not caring what his reaction might be some fifteen years later, I said, "I cannot freaking believe you could have been such an a.s.s-hole as to have had me go shopping with Dana the last time I saw you in Atlanta."

"Why?" he said laughing, sort of amused at my sudden burst of fire.

"I can't believe you had me take another one of your lovers shopping. I mean what kind of b.a.l.l.s did that take Eric?" I turned away from him in the bed and stole the covers in defiance.

"Lovers??? WHAT the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" he says with incredulousness ringing in his voice as he rolls over and looms above me sidling back underneath the blankets with me. There was no reason to hold back now, to lie. What was there but truth between us at this point?

"Dana. She told me you were lovers while we were shopping." I said turning back towards him again, our skin touching, warm, electric between us.

Eric laughs right out loud, heartily, spontaneously. "Believe me, I never f.u.c.ked that woman and it wasn't for lack of trying either."

"Oh right Mr. Clinton. That woman?" I raised my eyebrow challenging him with doubt.

He laughed at my reference, and said "No really, really. It wasn't for lack of effort on my part. I chased her all over the country and she blew me off time and time again. I never got into her pants. In fact, once I asked her to dinner in New York City and she climbed into a cab with another man, slammed the door in my face and drove off while I stood there in the street watching the cab disappear. She was a heartless b.i.t.c.h." I had to laugh at that one myself.

He is still laughing, and says that he and his wife, who also worked for Dana, had watched her cause trouble like that to disrupt people's lives for her own personal amus.e.m.e.nt over and over and over again. She'd been sick about the way she would wreak havoc on people's lives. "I so wish I could tell Roxanne this one. She would die laughing"

"Yeah, that's not all she'd die of if she heard this one." I said sardonically.

It was funny enough I guess, that Dana had lied in the way she had, in an ironic way, but suddenly the shock of the lie sort of overtook us like the culmination of high tide seeping up, up and then overcoming us completely. We both were lying there in the dark and the quiet absolutely stunned. I was thinking. He was thinking too in our new found silence.

After a few minutes I said tearfully in a strained whisper, "I just have to wonder what might have happened between us if she hadn't told me that lie Eric. I see how unhappy you are, how unhappy I've been, and I can't help but feel robbed."

He was quiet for a few more seconds, and then he reached over and held my hand. "Yeah, I know, it's totally unbelievable."

I confessed the comfort in our shorthand, how amazed I was at my pa.s.sion for him so many years later, how my feelings for him never faltered. But I didn't understand then that it was my ability to completely be me and only me under the intensity of his gaze that meant the very most. My ability to be unfalteringly myself was the gift that he had given me, the comfort he gave me. He was a mirror into my own soul, when I felt lost and alone, which had been all too often. Realizing he could never be mine was a bitter pill to swallow.

At the time I didn't realize that my confession was the recipe to my freedom, to my sense of wholeness and completeness, even away from Eric and the relations.h.i.+p we'd accidentally created. That I had to be willing to lay it all on the line and risk being whoever I am, despite the chance I might not be accepted. I have always been so different than everyone else; at times the masquerade has been a necessary shelter from the storm of standing out in the way that I inevitably do.

He fell asleep and I could hear the steadiness of his slumber. I wanted to fall into him and stay there forever. But, I couldn't stay all night. He had a coworker there. I had someplace to be the next morning. I got up, got dressed in the dark, kissed him gently, lovingly, good bye. It was finally the very last time I saw him and it's been years now.

While at times that I have typically found myself alone, I have longed for him...I know that whatever happens with him and his marriage has to be only between him and his wife. They have to reconcile their own ability to give each other the room to be their authentic selves, to see if they can mirror their true selves to one another and to overcome all the obstacles they have to becoming their best versions of themselves. She is forever critical of him. She diminishes his masculinity. He is emotionally selfish and difficult with her, and he doesn't appreciate or cherish her or what she does for him. He denies her the part of himself she needs, no craves, the very most. Her love never measures up against his demands, and his never measures up to hers.

It's a horribly lonely marriage. It's so much worse than physically being alone, because within it there is no hope for real companions.h.i.+p. I think to myself that I'd be annoyed with the way he takes her for granted myself. She aspires to Martha Stewartdom, makes a gorgeous home, a wonderful mother, and he feels his abundant providence should be all he should have to give.

That's not enough to build a happy marriage on; it's got to be a total and complete mutual submission of self to one another. You have to be willing to see your faults and rise above them and this righteous indignation on his part was just selfishness and nothing more.

I know this. I do.

I don't know if what we shared in terms of our loving aspirations for ourselves, what we wanted in real love, the language of love that was alike for both of us, might have meant. But even right there in that moment of total unison for me, Eric could not, did not see it as the signpost to ultimate love for him, for me or for an "us".

It was simply a coincidence of commonality, and I? I saw it as the ultimate signal of unity and connectedness and it felt like the ultimate betrayal and the ultimate loss had been bestowed upon us by Dana.

Chapter 24.

As I pulled out of the dark parking lot and contemplated what might have been, rivers of tears streamed down my naked face. Driving home in the car the darkness inching toward dawn, even then I realized that before Dana, he'd been reticent, that he'd put off my enthusiasm and he'd couched his "I love you." to me in an offhand, qualified and noncommittal way. Despite Dana, I'd never had the expectation of fidelity, and that he could have continued on with talking to me about "us" years before like he'd said he intended and yet he never had.

No matter all of that, the realization of her lie completely, totally, shook me up for days. I felt I had been robbed of the man that I should have been with all along. I feared on some intrinsic level that he was my one, true and only enduring love and that Dana had stripped me of my rightful place in his heart with her lie. What was worse, I'd never have the right or the opportunity to that opportunity to love and to be loved again.

For the days I ached over it, I talked to a few friends, even confessed the event to Rabbi Ohr. I cried, many, many tears. Yet they all said the obvious. No coulds, woulds, shoulds...if it had truly been meant to be, it would have been, and if Eric had truly loved me in the manner I wanted him to, nothing would have prevented him from being with me fifteen years before, and he had never pursued permanence between us. And for now, that the relations.h.i.+p was forbidden, I couldn't take what was not mine and expect to make something beautiful out of it. It was tainted if I didn't respect the truth that we were not together for a reason, even if I didn't understand it.

Eric never tried to make us a whole, private, unit...and wouldn't he betray me the way he had his wife? I didn't know really if it were true, maybe his ability to be himself without threat could have made the difference?

Maybe it would have healed us both of our implicit pains? How could you explain this feeling lasting through so many years?

I tried to leave thoughts of Eric behind yet again. Even though I didn't see him again, we still talked on the phone, or wrote. If I didn't initiate contact with Eric, and I rarely did, and three silent weeks pa.s.sed from me, then he would call me. I knew how miserable he was. I knew how hard it was. I wished I could make it better.

In moments of weakness we'd allude to a reunion. Eric and I came close several times to revisiting our relations.h.i.+p again. We were hot for each other all over again. He wanted me to meet him. He wasn't being prudent or careful; he was being demanding and I wasn't really going to get what I wanted. He thought the same of me and my sense of logistics.

I thought I'd never pa.s.s on the chance to be with him no matter what, yet the next day when the appointed time to touch base came, I wouldn't call and neither did he. Our feelings were there and every bit as real as they had ever been. No matter how much I wanted him or loved him or needed him, this just couldn't bring anything but pain and heartache to us both, to our children, to our communities and I had to accept that a civil marriage was as deserving of my respect as a spiritual one was, no matter if I had found him first, loved him first or best, it just wasn't right, it was a lie and he wasn't mine.

I wrote one afternoon while reflecting upon him once again. Trying to understand why my feelings for him never ceased to subside in their effect. As the wave of him washed over me I wrote him, "The amazing thing to me is how clearly I can hear your voice, see your face, or feel your body within my body or the way you touched my heart from the times we were together. I have entirely forgotten others, but you, I never can forget. I don't understand why when I feel lonely I think of you, that somehow we would have had a different outcome if not for Dana, or our addictions/histories, or maybe my attachment to David. Sometimes, I don't even like you very much, and think you are a pain in the behind. Yet for 17 years of my life you are unbelievably, enduringly HOT as h.e.l.l."

He responded, "I know. I understand. You are for me, just exactly the same way."

And as I read his response, predictably the tears flowed. For a while this stayed between us and I kept thinking of all the 'what ifs' there were between us. I got a gift from Pam, my maid of honor, my former roommate and one of my closest friends who truly understands but knows our tortured history. I opened the box and found a book from her hoping to ease my pain about Eric while ribbing me and teasing me about its futility. The t.i.tle read, "He's Just Not That Into You."

Sighing, I think that she's only known about all my drama forever, and she's never really cared for my push me pull you affair with Eric not when it was new, not when it was recycled, not when I was married, and certainly not after I was married and he still was. The book was funny and one scenario after another revealed that it was true. Eric was simply just NOT that into me, and never was in the ways I was for him. I felt ridiculous, silly for carrying a torch for him for that long.

A few days later, the sting of my fool hardiness fresh from this book, the sting of another unrelated romantic disappointment at hand, I call her and the phone is ringing and her calm voice answers on the answering machine. I call to tell her that I love her despite the fact that she sends me this ridiculous book revealing the exact depth of my foolishness and humiliation over Eric.

I feel as though I'll never get my attempts at love right. I am awkward now. I am shy when I shouldn't be. When I try to reach the same level of vulnerability and reveal myself completely, I blush or stammer or just bail out completely. The woman who brazenly steals away into her apartment with the man she just met and has to have seems to have disappeared into the ether.

And while I say that I don't think I can trust a man again, the truth is, I can't trust me again. Look at who I chose in a mate. Look at what David did to me emotionally, psychically, look at what he did to my body, and if you could hear him deny it today... it would sicken you the way it sickens me.

I called Eric again, in need of comfort that only he could give. I tell him of my struggle with this, yet again. "Eric, I spent the weekend writing this story of you and I and I read that book "He's Just NOT That Into You."

And I realized of course that you were NEVER 'that into me' or you would have made 'this' happen. It's always been me that has romanticized us."

"It's true." he acknowledges, but he also says "It just wasn't the right time, I wasn't ready." And while a lot of that may be true, ultimately if I'd been the one, would timing have mattered at all? I don't' think so, much as I hate to believe this.

He says, "I see my efforts at repairing this marriage, and I know the kinds of things I am writing and saying to you as I sit on the therapist's couch and I know I shouldn't be doing this to myself, to my wife, to you. I shouldn't be seducing you."

For the tenth time I reiterate that I can't understand how I could feel so strongly for him for so many years and not have it mean more than it does...and isn't the still unspoken part really how it could mean so little to him?

Eric says, "Do you understand it? Do you understand the reasons you feel what you feel for me? "

Yes d.a.m.n you, I understand it because you are all I wanted in a man and you ask me questions like that... but that's not what I say out loud exactly. What I say is "Yes I understand it." and I list all the qualities he possesses the way he makes me laugh, the way I can reveal myself, the way my pa.s.sion is out of control with him. I say that I also know in my heart of hearts that he never wanted what I wanted and that is the real reason behind our failure to ever have anything real and enduring between us.

"No, I am not 'in love' with you, though I do love you and care for you." He says.

This stings so deeply and I say "I am not 'in love' with you in some childish infatuated manner. You know, I don't have to turn our lives upside down and I'm not sure what has kept us apart all along would ever be different. I do not want to be blamed for the failure of your marriage, by your wife, an attorney, or by myself or our peers. I want you to reconcile this on your own, and if you can repair it and make it authentic and close and real, you should. I do love you. I honestly want what is good for you Eric. My love for you isn't about getting what I want."

Part of me wondered if the end of his marriage wasn't inevitable. I wondered if he were free what it would mean. Sitting through a dinner, freely sliding beneath his covers to savor him again? Contemplating what it might be like to actually be in the same city at the same time with the same understanding of ourselves and each other and simply exploring what would happen if we both were free to be true and authentic to ourselves and each other in a way I didn't believe I could ever be with anyone else.

As I confessed my feelings and then realized the significance of my love and adoration for him, how long he had rippled through my life, and why I could not seem to forget him, my throat tightened and my voice became raspy with my attempt not to openly shed tears. I'm silent for a moment and apologetically confess the tears with the sound of my voice anyway. "I'm so sorry."

He says "I'm so sorry to make you cry."

I tearfully reply, "No, you aren't making me cry. It isn't your 'fault'; it's only the way that I feel." For whatever it is worth, my tears as they fall, they become small round pebbles that drop into the water, plopping, bouncing up and then down again, and rippling across how many more years and how many more feats of love and purpose? How many unanswered whys are there to be? I can't know anymore now about the significance of this particular love, and the affects of its lesson upon my soul than I knew when that first stone was cast almost two decades ago.

"I don't want to banish you from my life; I don't want to send you away. I value our friends.h.i.+p and we DO have a heart connection. I want and I need a heart connection. But, I need to have it with my wife if I can. I need to have it for her and with her and our son. I need to appreciate and cherish her in the way that she wants to be cherished and she says that I don't, and if I can't... I need to accept that and have the strength to leave this marriage."

"Eric, I don't want you to sleep with me because you know that I love you and that you know that you can seduce me into your arms. I want you to be with me because you love me, want me, and need ME."

Probably the hardest and truest words I'd spoken yet and I spoke them knowing that the answer was that he didn't love me, want me or need me, not the way I wanted it. I said it knowing he is not the man I need, that my children need. I said it knowing that once I admitted this that he'd understand that he was truly playing with fire and that my feelings for him were not casual, even if the friends.h.i.+p was genuine. He would understand that he mattered to me in a very real and significant way.

Once again I listened to him declare that he loved me, that I'm special to him and that I matter to him, and have for years, but that he is not "in love" with me, and that it's always been this way for him.

And so, we said, "Good bye." And I think it was truly, finally, the last time we said good bye because when I tried to call to ask if he'd wanted to know what was new, there was no answer, and a lot longer than three weeks pa.s.sed without a word from him.

I tried to make sense of how he could care so deeply, have such a strong connection to me but never wanted it to be as much as I hoped it would be. It didn't all together make sense to me, and I suppose, in a thousand subtle ways, this must be the point of the story for me, how and why what he called a "heart connection" that he didn't even share with his wife and the mother of his child was of less significance to him than it was to me.

I realized with the freedom of this last and final rejection of my devoted affection that the thing that made this romance so lasting for me was that I never masqueraded as someone else to Eric. He had my humor and my intellect and my pa.s.sion in a raw way, there were always surprises in what I might say or do, but they were delightful, unique, unspoiled. He didn't think I was crazy, he knew I was, and he knew it in a way that made him joyfully laugh right out loud.

There was so much freedom in this for me, and the thing that I learn here, after so many spoiled years with David, and the scant years of freedom I've had shaking in fear of it being destroyed all over again, is that I must, without a doubt, approach whatever new love is in the offing with the same abandon of the s.h.i.+elding of who I really am. I must be authentic and true to myself in a way that doesn't offer me a false sense of protection.

My nakedness must be complete and the physicality is nothing compared to the rawness of emotional and spiritual nakedness I have to deliver to the man that truly can love me completely, and that will celebrate my love for him as though nothing in the world mattered ever again.

It is only the falsity of my presentation to other opportunities for love that leaves me stranded.

So, I wonder why it is that I can look at this pond where I cast that stone and see its gla.s.sy surface, quiet, apparently undisturbed and it could have taken so long to deliver this lesson home. Maybe "in love" meant infatuated and real love meant that I saw his shortcomings and faults and that he was the one person I risked exposing all of me to. While I loved Eric, letting him go was necessary and inevitable because what I truly wanted for him was the freedom to be himself, to avoid the h.e.l.l of a broken family that I endured, to have peace of mind and to have a happy, healthy whole family. I wanted him to be whole, and if I was hanging on to a fantasy, then that would never happen, and he wasn't mine no matter how much I'd wanted it to be true. He never had been.

I loved him.

I truly did.

And I let go.

The stone has settled, landed, its wave building, cras.h.i.+ng, surging, receding and then pummeling the sh.o.r.e again and again. The storm is over and suddenly I find myself upon this sh.o.r.e making my own imprints and I can turn back and appreciate what I've left behind, what I discover on my own in a different way than I have before. My need to mirror myself in him was somehow released in the realization that my ability to be purely authentic was intact and only reflected in him, that this gift I'm free to give again every day in the way I dare to be authentic in all the things that I do in my life.

There's a peace for me in knowing this and there's a peace in me for being sure that it is finally unequivocally over too. While at one time I could not imagine there would be a time in my life when Eric was suddenly free from Roxanne that I wouldn't attempt to scoop him up and make him my own, now, I can't imagine settling for less than receiving what I so willingly give.

The wave has taken over the sh.o.r.e and while it may have devastated everything it also pulls it all back into the sea again and it leaves the sh.o.r.e clean and pure all over again. There is a renewal upon the sh.o.r.e. You can't see all that once was, it's sandy slate is wiped clean again and again and hope is ever new upon it.

There is so much promise, even now, even for me, and I dare to desire more to want more and to have more. I realize that things, they come full circle. The love of a woman for a man, the love of a man for her, together, as was meant from Above, they become complete, their yearning to know and love one another become the representation of what G.o.d meant for us from heaven above. The total revelation of self to each other, the ability to expose who you are and mirror back to yourself through your lover, and for you to mirror back to him his greatest self. It's the way that G.o.d meant for it to be; that we have the challenge of seeing our greatest possibilities and our greatest obstacles to becoming that which we were meant to be in one another.

In our love for one another, we are revealed, we are completely healed.

end.