My Beloved World Part 21

I can't deny my portion of the blame. The vortex of the District Attorney's Office was all-consuming, and I felt driven to do my utmost on every single case. How many nights had I spent poring over briefs I'd brought home, barely aware of his presence? But Kevin was also finding a new life of his own at Princeton, of which I had no part. One way or another, we had outgrown the first innocent bloom of love and its loyal attachment without having evolved new terms for being together.

On vacation together at Cape Cod in the summer of 1981, our first time there, an unseasonable chill hung in the air between us as tensions kept flaring up over nothing. It was a prelude to Kevin's cautious mention of the changes that had come over us and of how he no longer felt connected to me. Talking about our relationship, about feelings, was not something we did naturally. Even in the early days in high school, when we could talk for hours on end, it was always about some shared interest, or nothing in particular, but never ourselves. How long had it been since we talked like that, like children? Even the memory of those days seemed increasingly distant.

It was late when we got home to the apartment in Princeton after a four-hour drive in uncomfortable silence. I tripped over the mail that had piled up. Tomorrow's business. I fell into bed.

In the morning, I opened an envelope from the DMV. It had taken the whole five years we'd been married for them to send me a new driver's license with my married name on it.

"You know, Kevin, if we break up, it will probably take another five years for them to change my name back again." I was joking, sort of.

"I'm sure they do it all the time."

There are things you may know in your heart for a long while without admitting them to conscious awareness, until, unexpectedly, something triggers an inescapable realization. In that unhesitating matter-of-fact reply was a truth that I could no longer shut out: our marriage was over. When Kevin left for work, I picked up the phone. I had never complained about him to Mami, never mentioned any problems between us. To me relationships are private. In my experience when a friend unloaded about a boyfriend or spouse, the listener soaked up the complaint and remembered it long after the speaker had forgiven the offense. Unless something was really serious, my mother didn't need to know. As this was the first she had heard of any trouble, I was especially grateful that she didn't argue.

"Can I come home?"

"Siempre, Sonia." Always.

Kevin and I talked through the details without rancor. We agreed that I would a.s.sume our credit card debt, since I was the one bothered by it. In return I got custody of the Honda Civic. The only problem was that I didn't know how to drive a stick shift.

Never take driving lessons from someone while you're breaking up with him. Every time I popped the clutch, Kevin was apoplectic, and neither of us needed the added stress. But it was unavoidable, especially since I was running out of time. Marguerite and Tom would soon be coming to Princeton to help me move out. Though overwhelmed and sad and frustrated at still being unable to drive that stupid car, I was determined to get out of the apartment that same weekend, even if they had to tow me all the way to Co-op City. I packed late into the night before finally collapsing in a troubled sleep. I had an extraordinarily vivid dream: I'm in the car, engine idling. I put it in gear, lift my foot off the clutch very gently till it engages, a little more gas, the wheels are rolling. Nice ...

The next morning, Marguerite and Tom arrived. It was clear from her sighs and the strained conversation that this was painful for them too. We loaded up their car as well as the Civic with boxes of books and precious little else. I hadn't acc.u.mulated much of a life if you measured it in stuff. Five years of marriage and barely two carloads. Marguerite, it turned out, knew how to drive a stick, and so she offered to take the wheel. But I insisted on doing it and asked her just to ride with me. As I started the car, the knowledge I possessed in the dream seemed to be real. My sleeping brain must have learned the lesson my waking mind couldn't master because of the tension between Kevin and me. In a hyperalert state, I made it onto the highway and into fourth gear. From there it was a long, clear glide with plenty of time to gather my wits before I had to face traffic in the Bronx.

Mami greeted us with grim cheer as we unloaded boxes from the elevator. The house felt strange in spite of the old familiarity, empty somehow without Junior. He had graduated from medical school and moved to Syracuse for his residency. Mami cooked us a welcome dinner of chuletas, and the smells from the kitchen were more comforting than I could have imagined. Soon enough she and I would start pushing each other's b.u.t.tons, but that night it was a relief to be home.

AFTER I MOVED OUT, Kevin and I began to talk in earnest. We dated intermittently for a year or so and spent the occasional weekend together. It was, in part, an unspoken effort to rekindle a spark, though as such it never took. In the end, it amounted to more of an extended attempt at understanding what had gone wrong.

One night, Kevin really opened up. "I was always proud of you," he said, "but it was hard not being able to keep up. While you were acing Princeton, I was partying at Stony Brook. But I always figured that I was smart enough to make it up. I always had an excuse, always believed I could fix things later. Now I'm working as hard as I can. I love where I am, and I like what I'm doing. It's a struggle in a couple of cla.s.ses; overall, though, I'm doing okay. But it's finally sinking in: even doing the best I can, I'm not going to catch up with you."

It was a painful admission, and I was touched by his generosity in putting it like that. Many men, feeling as he did, would have lashed out to soothe their egos. Certainly, the idea of a wife outshining her husband was something neither of us had been brought up to expect in marriage. But there was more, too. "I want to be needed," he said. "I knew you loved me, but I felt you didn't need me."

He wasn't wrong about that, but it wouldn't have occurred to me as a problem. I'd never seen need as an essential part of love. Weren't caring and affection, mutual respect, and sharing a life really more the point? If anything, need seemed to make the feeling contingent, less genuine, almost as if there were an ulterior motive to loving someone. In retrospect, maybe I was looking at it too rationally. The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself. That way of being was part of the person I would become, but where once it had represented salvation, now it was alienating me from the person I had vowed to spend my life with.

It might be that if I'd been in more relationships before getting married, I would have understood a bit more of what it takes to make one last. Being with someone never seems simpler than it does when you are very young. The ease of companionship, the familiarity of knowing each other for half our lives, had been a glue between us. But as a certain lopsidedness in our natures and our degrees of success became more p.r.o.nounced, with neither of us paying much attention, that glue dissolved. I have feared, at times, that my self-reliance, even more than my prominence, might prove hard for any man to take. My friends and family are incredulous, sometimes annoyingly so, that I could be as content as I appear to be without someone. But whatever security or comfort I find in being single, a happy relationship remains an alluring alternative, and I'm actually optimistic about the chances of having one.

In the spring, Kevin called to say that his thesis adviser was moving to Chicago. There was no one else at Princeton doing the work that interested Kevin, and so he had to follow. He knew there'd be no question but that I would stay behind. My work at the DA's Office mattered to me at least as much as his research did to him. Besides, at that point I couldn't see what I'd be giving it up for even if I'd been willing to. And with that, our efforts to work things out came to an unofficial end.

Kevin's mother, Jean, was heartbroken by our breakup. As rocky as my relations with her had been initially, her prejudice had been worn down by the fact of having a daughter-in-law, and a real friendship had grown up between us over the years. She would later tell me that she realized only after I'd gone how many gestures on Kevin's part-holiday gifts or a thoughtfully timed phone call-had been prompted by me.

In the end, I sold my wedding ring to pay the lawyer who handled our divorce. Saddened though I was at seeing Kevin leave, I was no more sentimental about the formal trappings of marriage than I had been on our wedding day. When I told Judge Rothwax that I was getting divorced and wanted to revert to my maiden name, he started using it instantly and made a point of correcting anyone who still referred to me as Ms. Sotomayor de Noonan. The DMV would take longer to straighten out.

CHAPTER Twenty-Four

MY ABILITY TO compartmentalize leaves my friends incredulous and sometimes even a little frightened. But it works for me. When I'm focused on a project, nothing else intrudes. It's only when I stop on an evening or a weekend that I look down to realize I've walked off a cliff. Fortunately, those same friends are usually down there waiting to catch me.

Every weekend for almost a year, Jason Dolan, with whom I shared cramped office s.p.a.ce, and Ted Poretz, our pal from another bureau, made plans for us three: Sunday brunch, a movie, a party. We never talked about my divorce or what prompted our regular socializing. It was simply their kind impulse to stand by a friend and minimize the possibility of loneliness.

Girlfriends, of course, had a different approach.

Nancy Gold, now Nancy Gray, had been my friend ever since taking the seat next to mine during orientation on our very first day at the District Attorney's Office. By lunchtime we were racing over to the Citibank on Chambers Street together to take advantage of a great promotional offer she'd seen advertised. Later, when Nancy learned I was commuting from Princeton, she offered me the use of her fold-out couch whenever I had a jury sequestered overnight. And then, through the uncertain months when Kevin and I were coming apart, the haven she provided included not only that sofa but easy conversation and moral support. "It's perfectly obvious to everyone but you, Sonia," Nancy would say in her capacity as a natural pract.i.tioner of talk therapy. She drew me out, gave me the full Freudian breakdown, and even tried Kevin in absentia.

There was shopping therapy as well. "Sonia, you've got how many pairs of shoes under your desk? Every single one of them is frumpy. Buy yourself one nice pair, will you?" It was tough love, challenging my ingrained relentlessly negative physical self-image: "Who cares what your mom told you twenty years ago? What matters is how you look this Sat.u.r.day night. Stop censoring yourself. You look great." No, I don't. Maybe not quite as bad as I did then, but great I don't look. Standing beside Nancy in front of the dressing room mirror, I would say to myself: She has such great style. This would really look good on her. I wish I had my own sense of style.

WHEN SUMMER CAME AROUND, I still hadn't figured out my next move, but I knew I needed a break from my mother. We would be at each other's throats if I couldn't get away at least for some weekends. Nancy had a summer share on Fire Island, a group house she wanted me to join, and so I went to check it out. It was quite a scene: more people than rooms, parties, and late nights.

"It's not my style, Nancy."

But she insisted it would be a great way to kick-start my social life. "Never mind the crowd," she said. "I don't know most of them myself." I wasn't sure why she thought that made it more appealing.

"Just try it."

In the end, I refused to be convinced, saying I needed something more sedate. So Nancy introduced me to a college friend who was in another group house on the island, a very different scene, as she described it: shared meals, quiet evenings playing board games and reading. I threw caution to the wind and signed up for that one sight unseen.

My first trip out, the ferry abandoned me on the dock late at night in the middle of a storm that had knocked out the power and phone lines. I got hopelessly lost on the half-mile walk through the dunes from the ferry landing. Knocking on a random door for directions, I was embarra.s.sed to discover I had disturbed somebody's illicit love nest. When I finally found the house and burst in, Mark Serlen, a housemate who'd been dozing, looked as if he'd just seen a sea monster come through the door. But from there on it was a lovely, exquisitely peaceful summer. Every other weekend would find Valerie, her fiance, Jack, Mark, and a.s.sorted other friends playing Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble, reading the Sunday Times or a good mystery, sailing the weathered little skiff, cooking marvelous meals with clams gathered from the bay, and smoking endless cigarettes. I confess that the first night I spent alone there, many things went b.u.mp in the dark and I armed myself with a kitchen knife and broomsticks. But I would eventually come to feel there was no place safer.

We repeated the house share for a few summers, each of us eventually moving on to other arrangements, but the friendships that began at Fire Island continue. The kids have grown up and have their own kids. The summer rituals have given way to other traditions, like season tickets to the ballet year after year with Mark. But at least one weekend every summer I still find my way back to the beach with my Fire Island family.

"YOU'VE GOT TO find yourself a cop," Nancy said. "Cops are s.e.xy, believe me." I began to open up to the possibility of dating again. It was tentative at first, I'll admit, but being outgoing and enjoying the process of getting to know a person in all his curious particularity, I grew to like dating. I wouldn't exactly fall hard for anyone, but I did meet some men who renewed my faith that I might be appealing and who even caused some of that nervousness of antic.i.p.ation that I hadn't really felt since high school. Even a little romance can do wonders, if you are prepared to enjoy the moment and let the moments acc.u.mulate, whatever may come of it.

Probably nothing constrained my dating life as much as living at home with my mother. To hear her screaming from the bedroom "Sonia, it's midnight. You have to work tomorrow!" did not exactly make me feel like Mary Tyler Moore. If I was out late, she panicked. If she couldn't reach me by phone, she would call all my friends looking for me. We were making each other miserable.

Dawn Cardi told me her next-door neighbor in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, had an apartment for rent. By train it was twenty minutes from my office at 100 Centre Street, forty minutes on foot. The neighborhood was great, she said, a kind of Mayberry-on-the-Gowa.n.u.s, only Italian. Many of the families on the block had been there for generations, and they watched out for one another, which sounded something like Abuelita's neighborhood when I was little. I went to see it that same evening. The building had real character, even an original tin ceiling, and the apartment was adorable. Naturally, the landlord wanted a security deposit. I said I could bring a check the next day, not yet knowing where I would get the money. But before I committed, I told him, my mother would have to see the place, not to make the decision, but for her own peace of mind, to be sure it was safe. The landlord liked that so much, he later told me, he called the real estate agent as soon as I left to delist the apartment.

Marguerite would lend me the money for the deposit and take the opportunity to tutor me in certain basic life skills, like handling personal finances, which I hadn't yet learned. To be fair, there hadn't been much occasion. On my mother's salary, plus what Junior and I brought home working part-time, we had always lived paycheck to paycheck. In that context, I had always feared debt as something that could easily s...o...b..ll, a worry that arose whenever Kevin used our credit card for small luxuries. Though I often made loans to my aunts, I was never the borrower. As for saving, I had no acquaintance with that beyond collecting bottles as a child to buy Christmas presents. So Marguerite helped me set up a plan to pay her back in regular installments. When the debt was clear, she had me putting the same amount every week into a savings account. Marguerite knew this stuff. She'd done things in the right order: college, a job, saving money, and then getting married. Dispensing practical wisdom was her low-key expression of profound emotional support.

Moving into Carroll Gardens, I began to enjoy decorating the place, getting a bit of confidence that I could develop a personal sense of style. I realized, to my surprise, that I had an intuition for how s.p.a.ce works, how scale and dimensions affect feeling. Architecture has always had a visceral effect on me. But the affective power of Carroll Gardens had more to do with the people there. When Dawn and I became neighbors, we developed a cozy routine. Getting off the train after a ridiculously long day, often after ten, I would stop at her place most nights before going home. Her husband, Ken, who got up very early for work, had usually gone to bed, but he always left a plate of dinner for me-he's still a great cook. Dawn would pour us a drink, and we'd talk over that day in the life of New York's criminal justice system.

Actually, by then we'd found much more than work to talk about, having discovered our backgrounds had plenty in common. She was the daughter of first-generation immigrants who had weathered the sorts of challenges that can break a family, causing her to cultivate a certain self-reliance early on. And like me, she had a mother with extraordinary strength of character, one whom I would come to know and love like an extra mother of mine, just as I had Marguerite's. Over the years and many holidays, I'd get to know Dawn's entire family: her parents, her kids-Vanessa, Zachary, and Kyle, who became my unofficial G.o.dchildren-her sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, cousins, and in-laws.

I've always turned the families of friends into family of my own. The roots of this practice are buried deep in my childhood, in the broad patterns of Puerto Rican culture, in the particular warmth of Abuelita's embrace and her charged presence at the center of my world, the village of aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and compadres scattered across the Bronx. I'd observed how the tribe extended its boundaries, with each marriage adding not just a new member but a whole new clan to ours. Still, in Abuelita's family, blood ultimately came first, and she strongly favored her own. My mother, being more or less an orphan, poor in kinfolk, approached the matter less dogmatically. She treated my father's family as her own, and when he died, it was to her sister, t.i.ti Aurora, that Mami would bind herself with an almost metaphysical intensity, not to mention filling the available s.p.a.ce in the household. But she continued to expand the family of friends among our neighbors, whether in the projects or in Co-op City: Ana and Moncho, Irma and Gilbert, Cristina, Dinora and Tony, Julia ... they were all family to us.

I have followed my mother's approach to family, refusing to limit myself to accidents of birth, blood, and marriage. Like any family, mine has its rituals and traditions that sustain my tie to every member, no matter how far-flung. My friend Elaine Litwer, for instance, adopted me for Pa.s.sover, and though I otherwise see her family only rarely, joining her Seder nurtured our connection. Thanksgiving is Mami's and Dawn's in perpetuity. Christmas belongs to Junior and to Junior's kids, Kiley, Corey, and Conner, when they came. Travel becomes another source of tradition; friendships that might have faded with distance are preserved because every trip to a friend's city, for whatever reason of business, becomes an occasion to visit. In this way I stay meaningfully connected to old friends, like Ken Moy and his family, and establish new relationships that have sustained me, like those with Bettie Baca and Alex Rodriguez, and Paul and Debbie Berger, whom I met while traveling. We may hardly talk in the intervening years, but we pick up right where we left off.

CHILDREN ELEVATE the art of found families to another level. I adore kids and have a special affinity with them, an ability to see the world through their eyes that most adults seem to lose. I can match any kid's stubbornness, hour for hour. I don't baby anyone; when we play games, I play to win. I treat kids as real people. Sometimes I think I love my friends' kids even more than I love my friends. Over the years, I have gathered more G.o.dchildren than anyone I know, and I take the role seriously. I was only thirteen when my cousin Adeline asked me to be G.o.dmother to her daughter. Erica was my first, and I was more than a little awed by the responsibility and the honor that the request implied. Alfred's son Michael was next, then Marguerite's Tommy. Tommy's brother John has adopted me as his surrogate G.o.dmother. I thought David, the son of my dentist and dear friend Martha Cortes, would be the last, but then Erica asked me to be her own son Dylan's G.o.dmother. Michael and his wife Lisandra have just had a baby girl, Alexia, and they have asked me to be her G.o.dmother.

Kiley is mine in a different way.

When I first set eyes on her, she was little more than a tangle of stick-thin limbs and tubes in the neonatal intensive care unit: one pound, eleven ounces. She was impossibly frail, and then very unlikely to survive, but I stood there awestruck at the sight of her drawing little breaths, a miracle of both life and science. I thought I knew everything about family before that ringing phone woke me up in the middle of the night: Junior, calling from Detroit to say that he had rushed Tracey to the hospital. I got on the next plane.

Junior had met Tracey during his residency at Syracuse, where she was a nurse. She'd followed him to Philadelphia for a fellowship, where they married before moving to Michigan. Now Junior stood beside me before the gla.s.s part.i.tion of the ICU, reciting the clinical details in his best doctor's voice. It was how he kept himself from going to pieces, but I could tell he was very scared. I felt closer to him in that moment than I ever had. It was not just the effect of seeing my little brother going through the worst experience of his life. It was also seeing what fatherly strength and devotion he had learned. Junior, who couldn't even remember Papi, had figured out for himself what it was to be a man.