Munchausen Marriage - Part X

I never stopped to think what married life would be like with Werner Forman. I really didn’t know my partner very well, and from the beginning I could sense that things were going to grow stranger and more confusing with each day. 

THIS IS PART 10 of a TEN-PART STORY

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

Just by virtue of my mother’s presence, Werner snapped to and once again became a functional human being. He began, openly, to handle the baby -- not to change her diapers, but to pick her up out of the crib and hold her, a mixed blessing as the months passed because he became so bossy and controlling about her care. In Werner’s opinion, for instance, breastfeeding should only continue the first year, and he became furious when he walked in on me nursing Jofka after she’d turned one. I loved the early morning feedings and was loath to give them up, another crack in the marriage.

But by now the marriage was doomed. I had fallen into a classic trap, thinking the birth of a baby would save it; instead, the marriage deteriorated, and I reached the point where I could barely stand being in the same room as Werner. Over the summer of Jofka’s second year, I traveled to the States to spend time with my parents in a rental house in East Hampton. The house was on a bay, overlooking a small marina. One night, after the rest of the household was in bed, I took a glass of wine and went outside to stand at the edge of the property. Beneath me, there were signs of activity on a small sailboat that had been covered since I’d arrived at the house. A man in jeans and a T-shirt was pulling off tarps. He saw me peering down and waved. Then he called out, asking if I’d like to join him for a glass of wine. His name was Yaacov, a trim, sexy Israeli, about thirty-five years old. We flirted outrageously and by the next day he made himself at home in our house, charming my parents and using the kitchen and bathroom for his own purposes. Nothing ever happened between me and Yaacov, but I had a vague crush on him, an attraction that led to the final demise of the marriage -- I just didn’t want to be with Werner anymore. Perhaps I didn’t want to be with anyone.

I’d spent years married to a man whom I allowed to dominate me and it was time to break loose, start a new life, be with younger people.

The problem was, how to tell him?

In the end, walking up Third Avenue in Manhattan, we had a very frank discussion. Werner asked if I still loved him and I steeled myself and said no, not in the same way as in the beginning. And that was it. I spent the summer in New York. A friend offered me a job teaching writing in the Massachusetts prison system and I accepted, even though I had no credentials whatsoever. Without too much thought, I moved to Cambridge where I found a house for me and Jofka, and started a job visiting prisons all over the state of Massachusetts. It would be a time of misery. I’d spent eight years with a difficult, brilliant man who totally controlled my life, and now I was free to explore a new kind of existence, one that would involve a growing addiction to alcohol even as I went on to complete my education and begin a long sought-after career as a writer. As for Werner, he continued his close friendship with my mother, and, until he became quite old, continued to live in the small house we’d bought together in West Hampstead, a house that became so overrun by Werner’s towers of boxes that he eventually had to leave it and move into a residential hotel. And there he remained, in a room gradually filling with boxes, a stooped, elderly man whose mind had failed and who no longer remembered the years he’d spent with me, or the fact that he had a daughter. 

Cover Image: Edvard Munch Lithograph

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