Bianca's Take May 2016

The snow was blowing in sideways as I struggled to open the door of the quaint West Village restaurant.  The doctor wasn’t there yet and the host frowned as he eyeballed the reservations list for his name.  Nothing.  I decided to wait at the bar for him to arrive.

Traffic in the city was a nightmare on that blistering cold Sunday evening, and I waited with a glass of champagne twenty minutes before he finally arrived.  I was wearing a snug fitting black Tom Ford dress and black patent Louboutin pumps.   He walked up to me and without saying anything, pulled me in tightly for a long hard kiss.

We were seated in the back corner of the restaurant and barely came up for air the entire meal.  I felt like a teenager who couldn’t keep my hands off my new boyfriend.  When we finished our dinner, we decided to forgo dessert and head back to my place.

We ricocheted along the walls of my apartment as articles of clothing hit the floor one by one.  Our desire for each other was unreal.  I had never felt so alive. 

Afterwards, I lay my head on his chest.  But I could sense that things had changed.  The unexpected shift in his mood was palpable.  He was distant.  Tense.

“What’s wrong?” I asked hesitantly after a few minutes of silence.  Things had been going so great.  He sat up abruptly and leaned over me, his eyes wide.  I didn’t know the man behind this intense gaze.  He appeared to be looking through me, not at me.

“Bianca, I am going to hurt you.  I mean, I feel like I am going to hurt you.  I always do this to women.  Things will be going well and I will completely fuck it up.  I don't deserve you.”  He said to me, now only inches away from my face, breathless. 

“What do you mean?”  I asked softly, attempting to calm his fears and ran the tips of my fingers lightly along his arm.

“I’m going to fall for you, then push you away and hurt you.  And I’m going to blame it all on you.  Just wait.”

I didn’t know what to say.  I didn’t want to believe it.  That was the night I started lying to myself.  Things would be different with me.  They had to be.

I was pissed.  I was wide awake at 6am and couldn’t go back to sleep.  I was hoping for a restful night so that I was fresh for date night with the doctor.  I had refused a line of really good blow the night before for that very reason.

I had a full day ahead of me.  While the doctor was out volunteering at an addiction recovery center, I’d be getting pampered at the Ritz Carlton spa.  I felt a slight pang of guilt over that, but only for a minute.   I needed a little relaxation.

The day before had been an intense one, mainly because of what the doctor decided to share with me about his past.  Why did he want me to know all of that so soon?  I had a feeling that there was a motive behind his disclosures, but I couldn’t quite comprehend it.

As my eyes focused and the sunlight spilled into my apartment, I reread the story of his dream.  A dream about death.  Was he becoming uneasy about our affair? Or had his revelations about his past made him anxious?

After messaging a bit with the doctor, I headed out to meet some friends in the West Village for dinner and drinks.  I needed to take a step back from the intensity of the relationship and get a fresh perspective from my girlfriends.

While we waited impatiently for our table at Via Carota, I filled them in on my newfound romance over some pink bubbles at the bar.  Their mouths dropped open as I read a couple of the sappiest lines from our love letters out loud.

They couldn’t believe this had all developed in only a week’s time.  I still couldn’t either.

“I have the feeling this is not going to end well, Bianca.  Like with you at the bottom of the Hudson River.”  Cameron nervously joked as we stood outside in the cold, smoking a cigarette together.

I rolled my eyes and we made our way inside to our table after waiting a mere ninety minutes to be seated.  The place was packed.  I was already feeling tipsy, but was determined not to have a hangover the next day on my date with Mark.

After we finished the meal and settled the bill, the girls continued on to the next bar.  Despite their protests, I decided to put myself in a cab and head home.

As melodramatic as Cameron was, I couldn’t help but allow my mind to go there.  How would this all end?

The day I left my husband was like any other sunny spring day in New York City.  Except that I woke up with a fever of 103 and violent chills.

It didn’t really matter though.  Nothing could have stopped me that day.  I was on an escape mission.

“When do you know when it’s time for divorce?”  I remember Googling.

When you are Googling divorce.  It should have said.

There was no blueprint, no manual for how to leave your marriage of less than a year.  I knew people would judge me, but that was no reason to stay.  And so, just before my thirtieth birthday I found myself searching for an overpriced Park Avenue divorce attorney.

I had been so terrified of surviving on my own, but it was time to go.  I had been secretly saving money for the last six months and I knew I could sell my ring and get money for a deposit on an apartment of my own.  I was determined to take no money from Richard.  I knew that emotionally it wouldn’t be worth the fight, and I wanted to prove that I no longer needed a thing from him.

I had gotten a safe deposit box to store all of my important documents and booked a hotel down the street in case he kicked me out on the spot and I needed a place to stay.  I had even packed an emergency suitcase with everything important.  The kind of things you’d grab if you were fleeing a burning building.  In a way, it kind of felt like I was.

He came home from work at 7pm on the dot.  He took his usual seat on the sofa and that’s when I took a deep breath and said, “We need to talk…”

It was almost four years ago to the day.  I stood behind the double doors of the cathedral about to walk down the aisle in my custom ball gown, but all I wanted to do was run.  Maybe I had subconsciously chosen a sensible 2” heel for that very reason.

Our engagement had been a short one.  Too short.  The more time that passed, I knew it was getting too late to call things off.  Deposits were paid, dresses altered, invitations out, multiple parties thrown.  I was dying inside.  This wedding had been hijacked by his family and morphed into an event of which I was simply a guest.   I knew roughly one third of the people attending my own wedding.

There, standing behind the doors of the church I closed my eyes and listened to the string quartet drone out the melody of Canon in D.  I had another two minutes (I knew this because we had timed everything meticulously at the rehearsal the day before, and I took note of my escape window just in case I really did decide to flee.)  I wouldn’t though.  It would be the scandal of my small town if I did.  The story would never escape me.

I didn’t even question how things had gotten this far.  I knew.  With every red flag I chose to ignore and every ounce of disrespect I tolerated from him was another green light forward towards this very moment.  When we were dating, Richard and I had broken up and gotten back together so many times I could hardly count.   And every time we rekindled I had convinced myself that I somehow needed the toxicity of this relationship in my life.

He had his moments of being a loving and kind partner.  But they were becoming increasingly scarce, like tiny islands in a massive body of water.  In between islands I found myself swimming furiously to find land again.  To me, it was worth it to get to the island.  I was completely fatigued from swimming.  And yet I had resigned myself to the fact that there was little else out there for me and that it was “time” to get married.  Where I come from, you’re an old maid at thirty.

And so, standing there on my father's arm the doors opened in front of me and I took the first step down a road that I perceived to be my last one.  A voice in my head was screaming “Mistake!  Mistake!  Turn around, go back!”  But it was most certainly too late now.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had just made my scandalous escape that day instead.

I sat on a bench by the river, reading the doctor’s messages.  I was frozen solid hearing his stories of abuse from his childhood.  I was conflicted, but continued to engage in the conversation.

A part of me was completely freaked out that he would confess all of this to me so soon.  But then I felt selfish for thinking that way.  This man was subjected to unspeakable abuse as a defenseless child.  I felt like a jerk for feeling spooked by his admissions. 

Still we had only known each other for a week.  This was all a little too soon.  Maybe he was encouraging me to open up to him as well.  And he did seem so lonely.  Was my role in his life truly meant to be more than just an arrangement?

My mind was racing.  I wanted to stay and help him and I wanted to run from him.   I decided to keep reading…

I woke up and felt like a weight had been lifted.  After our first bump in the road, things seemed to be smoothed out between me and the doctor.

The weather was crisp but nice, so I decided to take a long walk by the river with Marty and clear my head a bit.  I wanted to take some time and process the wild shift of events that had happened in my life in six days time.

Was he right, were some relationships simply beyond good and evil?  He was falling for me so fast.  Maybe he was seeing in me what other men had simply missed in years past.  It was flattering and overwhelming to have someone of his notoriety express such intense feelings toward me.  And it seemed that he hadn’t felt this way in years.  It felt good, and strange, and surreal all at the same time.

I felt invincible.  Like I was finally being appreciated for just being me.  And I liked it.  I felt so high.

Just like every morning, I had received a long love letter from the doctor.  I decided to reread it on my sunny walk along the Hudson.

I flung open the door wearing my sexiest silk robe when the doctor arrived.  My mind was swirling with a mix of emotions.  I was relieved to see him but also had a pit in my stomach.  He put the bouquet of roses he brought on my entry table, grabbed my waist and pulled me in tightly for a kiss.  For the first time, I was very nervous to be with him.  What the hell was I doing?

I was grateful that he had made the journey to my apartment straight from JFK.  So I decided to keep my mouth shut and show him just how happy I was that he had come to pay me a visit.

It didn’t fly.  As soon as he kissed me, he pulled back and asked what was wrong.  I smiled and insisted everything was fine, but it was as if he could read my mind.

I led him into my bedroom where I had lit candles.  He sat me down at the end of the bed and asked me again.

“Bianca, what is wrong?  You’re different tonight.”

How did he know?

I sighed and began to cry.  I was suddenly regretting everything.  Why had I let things get this far with a married man?  It had only been a week, I could end things now.  But I felt paralyzed for some reason.  I looked up at him.  I wanted the entire situation to just disappear.  I wished I had never met him.  But at the same time I didn’t want to lose him.  It was an unexplainable tug of war inside me.

I told him about my fears of getting hurt.  I confessed what Fillip had warned me about.

“Fine, then we can just end things, Bianca.  No big deal.”  His ability to cooly brush things off made me more conflicted.

“No, no.  I want to see where things go.  This is special what we have.” I replied.  Who was I?  I found myself fighting for a relationship that didn’t even exist a week before.

We spent the next hour together, mostly with me trying to get back to that space where I had justified the affair in my mind.  It was all becoming a bit too much for me.  But if I didn’t bury my feelings of doubt, I’d never get the chance of seeing where things went with him.  I put on a happy face and we fooled around, but it was a bit awkward.  We didn’t have sex.  I just couldn’t connect fully to him that night.

He got dressed and as he slipped on his jacket and shoes, he encouraged me to think long and hard if this was what I wanted.  He was so cavalier as he shrugged and suggested we could just end things right then and there.  This wasn’t the Mark I knew.  I was frozen.  I gave him a lukewarm kiss goodbye and closed the door softly behind him.

I had some thinking to do.