Craig came up finally to stay with us. Drina had made friends with the amazingly beautiful super model, Paulina Porizkova. It was August and Craig’s birthday. I invited everyone around to his party, including Paulina, and her children. Then I went to a farm down the road and got potato sacks for races, and pin the tail on the donkey, and all sort of jars to catch fire flies. I cooked and cooked and made everything that I had brought from our freezer in New York—ratatouille, veal stew, a real smorgasbord. Then there was a huge cake, and I still have the pictures of the splendid and beautiful Paulina, who had graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, Recently a man I told this too gave me such a look and said “Weren’t you jealous that you had a Super model at your husbands’ birthday?” I said “No.” Of course, I did not tell him how my husband had, in effect, “fired” me a year and a half after our marriage, when we had a death in the family. I also did not tell him that my husband was pretty busy with others from day one, and never wore a wedding ring. He also used to like to say “One is too many and a million is too few”. But I just thought he was saying that to be funny. But to be truthful, I still believe that if your husband cannot make a deep connection to you and your children, that he finds one too many, than that is about him. He actually did not seem to notice that I had invited a beautiful woman to his party. She is also an incredibly nice person, and has the most amazing way of expressing herself, one of the most intelligent and well-spoken women I have ever met. And she is pretty happily married to a rocker. She doesn’t even wear makeup. She is lovely. I could not possibly have been jealous because I would not know why she would want anything from my husband, anyway. Her life seemed pretty content and full, as far as I could see in our very, very brief friendship (like a few days!).
From the moment I got up in the morning in that house, until late, he was on the computer. Working, working, working, Ellen. ”SHHHH. I can’t think.” The children and I had to go outside.
I had to go to New York for a day for a medical appointment with our doctor, who we shared. While we were not a sharing couple, we shared the same dentist, the same internist, the same hairdresser, the same lawyer. We did not have the same bank accounts, the same credit cards (later I would find out I was the “guest” on all of our two cards, although he had a stack as thick as two packs of cards). We did not share our life together. Still, I had health problems and went alone to New York. It was late August. And I actually have a nearly 300 page journal from that period. My therapist told me to start keeping a journal of things, so that I had something on paper to mull over, she said. I know now, she was hoping I would see the patterns of abuse and abandonment, the language of rage and hatred, the recording of physical events, being locked in bathrooms, on and on. But I had no objectivity and that was what she was trying to get me to see.
August 23, 2001 I was in New York and it seemed dangerous. I wrote “I had the CREEPIEST cab ride ever. I had a driver from Alexandria and the entire ride he demanded I take off my sunglasses so he could see my eyes, what color were they?” “I am sure I saw they were really blue” he said. But it felt oddly threatening. He told me he was a doctor in Egypt. He was angry, he said , to be here driving a cab, sending that money back to Egypt. I forgot about that ride until a few weeks later. By then it would be September 2001, and the children were going back to school. One started on September 10, the other on September 11. I could not wait for school to begin so I could come up for air. I just was so confused by the whole summer, the whole meanness, the coldness that was colder, the pushing that was becoming more overt, less secretive.
