to the possibility of my rejecting him. I have become so used to
measuring all the ways he falls short that I have stopped counting who
he is, what he offers. I have to leave this marriage or I’m going to die, I
had thought. And perhaps the months and years I’ve spent apart from
him have helped me come of age, have helped me discover that there
is no we until there is an I. Now that I have faced myself a little more
fully, I can see that the emptiness I felt in our marriage wasn’t a sign of
something wrong in our relationship, it was the void I carry with me,
even now, the void that no man or achievement will ever ĕll. Nothing
will ever make up for the loss of my parents and childhood. And no
one else is responsible for my freedom. I am.
* * *In 1971, two years aer our divorce, when I am forty-four years old,
Béla kneels and presents me with an engagement ring. We have a
Jewish ceremony instead of the city hall union we decided on more
than twenty years before. Our friends Gloria and John Lavis are our
witnesses. “is is your real wedding,” the rabbi says. He means
because it is a Jewish wedding this time, but I think he also means that
this time we are really choosing each other, we aren’t in Ęight, we
aren’t running away. We buy a new house in Coronado Heights,
decorate it in bright colors, red, orange, put in solar panels and a
swimming pool. For our honeymoon we travel to Switzerland, to the
Alps, and stay at a hotel with hot springs. e air is cold. e water is
warm. I sit in Béla’s lap. Jagged mountains stretch out against the sky,
colors shiing over them as over water. Our love feels as stable as the
mountain range, as enveloping and Ęuid as a sea, adapting, shiing to
ĕll the shape we give it. It isn’t that the substance of our marriage has
changed. We have.