Tips for Living(2)

“May I ask what you think of the paintings, Nora Glasser?”

“I think they’re beautiful and complex. Ethereal and political at the same time,” I said. And then an irreverent urge took over. “But I have some not-so-great news.”

“Oh?”

“They’re out of focus.”

Without missing a beat, Hugh’s expression turned somber. He nodded and frowned. “Yes. I’m afraid I was experimenting with a new process. I put Vaseline in my eyes when I painted them.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He winked and cracked another irresistible smile. “So were you.”

I was practically melting from the heat we were generating.

Once we started sleeping together, Hugh began painting me. After The Nora Series showed in New York, his career skyrocketed. He called me his muse. “You’re my dark, beautiful Jewess,” he said. There was no one I’d rather spend time with. From then on, Hugh’s was the first and last voice I heard almost every day for more than a decade. We were the passionate couple. We were the couple who loved to debrief in bed at night, feet entwined. “You first,” he’d insist. “Tell me everything.” If I occasionally expressed worry about the women who flirted with him? Hugh reassured me. He even invoked Paul Newman’s famous quip on fidelity.

“Nora, why would I go out for a hamburger when I’ve got steak at home?”

We’d just come back from a vacation in Rome—sorely needed after my second fertility treatment failed—the week before the maroon panties and blonde hair detonated in our bedroom. I became so depressed afterward that I slept for the better part of four days. Finally, rising like Lazarus, I dragged myself into the kitchen so Hugh could tell me one more time that it was “a fling,” that I was “the one.” Apparently he met the woman, an art school grad student, while he was opening a gallery show in Austin.

“You were visiting your aunt when she called. She was in New York for the week and asked to drop over and see my new work,” he said. “She brought wine. I had too much, Nora. Before I knew what was happening she . . . I’m sorry. Please, don’t let this wreck what we have. Please. I don’t care about her. I don’t care about her at all.”

I wanted to believe we would make it through. Please don’t let this wreck what we have. I read books on how to heal from the trauma of sexual betrayal. “Don’t expect miracles.” “Rebuilding trust takes time.” “Whatever you do, don’t ask for details,” they advised. During my long, emotional talks with Hugh, I tried to stay away from these land mines. “He succumbed from all the baby-making stress,” I rationalized, and began to inch toward forgiveness. But less than six months later, as I was rummaging around his studio to find the zester that had gone missing (Hugh was forever borrowing kitchen utensils to achieve new and interesting textures with paint), I abandoned all hope.

Behind the antique Japanese screen that hid Hugh’s paint-stained industrial sink, I saw the canvas leaning against the wall. It was an obvious takeoff on Annie Leibovitz’s famed Rolling Stone cover—the one with naked John Lennon curled up in a fetal position around fully dressed Yoko. In this version, it was Hugh who was naked. And he was wrapped around a roundly pregnant Helene.

I stared at the painting, barely able to breathe, my body collapsing into its own fetal curl on the floor. This is not fixable. From this we can never recover. He’s stuck a knife in my womb and I am bleeding to death. This is dying. Then I heard the studio door open and the floorboards creak behind me.

“Nora, I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“But I wanted a baby. That was my baby. You broke us. And you broke my heart.”



I made a silent vow that day in Hugh’s studio: I will come back to life no matter how long it takes, and I won’t be a bitter, angry woman.

Easier said. I started having violent fantasies of mowing Hugh and Helene down with a car. Then I was pulling a pistol out of my trench coat pocket like some 1940s gun moll and shooting them in their bed in flagrante delicto, which was more visceral and satisfying. I played that fantasy over and over again in my mind. It was so upsetting that I started seeing a therapist. Dr. Feld was the only one besides Hugh (and maybe Helene if he’d shared) who knew I’d actually drawn blood.

“Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened?” Dr. Feld had asked, looking at me gravely during our first session, pen poised to write on his yellow legal pad.

“I attacked Hugh’s work. Physically.”

“When was this?”

“After I saw that painting in his studio. I couldn’t get off the floor at first, I was so upset. Hugh kept saying we had to talk about this calmly. He kept calling the baby a ‘mistake.’ He said he didn’t plan to get Helene pregnant, but it happened and she made the decision to keep it. He was waiting to tell me until after the baby was born. He thought I would be open to ‘an arrangement’ once I saw the child.”

“What kind of arrangement?”

“He wanted me to go on living with him and become some sort of stepmother. ‘Since you can’t seem to get pregnant,’ he said. We’d been trying. My ovaries weren’t cooperating.”

“You must’ve been very hurt.”

“I was devastated. I accused him of sadism. He argued that I was being ‘bourgeois and narrow-minded.’ He said, ‘Europeans make these arrangements all the time.’ Correct me if I’m wrong, Dr. Feld, but isn’t it usually the wife who bears the child? Not the mistress?”