A memoir and the writing life: pentimento

Pentimento means "an underlying image in a painting, as an earlier or original draft that shows through, usually when the top layer of paint has become transparent with age."

". . . The paint has aged now and I [want] to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now."
--from Pentimento: A Book of Portraits by Lillian Hellman


The oil painting above the fireplace is a portrait of Laura when she was 75. You see a strong, independent, self-reliant woman, eyes filled with wisdom and joy. But if you look closely, you can also see vestiges of pain and suffering.

If you use your fingernail to scratch off the veneer of oil paint, you may see a different story painted underneath, if you have the heart to see. I will tell you, and only you, the story of her love, and I will tell it only once. So lean in, listen closely, and brace yourself. For to incarnate and personify such suffering can unsettle a soul.

Underneath the old paint, almost translucent now with age, lies another picture entirely.

It is so faded that I can hardly remember it--my original dream--a dream of love and family. I am Laura in the painting.

I am in my late twenties, and a friend has set me up on a date with Bill. When he comes to the door of my apartment, I am struck by his dark good looks. He is rebounding from a woman that he had lived with for several years. I am rebounding from my first marriage and all of the men that I dated, or didn’t date, in my 20s.

Despite women’s liberation and my being a professed feminist, the society and popular media of my childhood and teen years have taught me that a woman is nothing--no thing--without a man. And my family and society have taught me to think of myself as unattractive. So I am perhaps thinking that if I attract a handsome man, then that would prove to the world that I am attractive.

My hormones are also still at their peak, and because I did not bond with my father, I’m not looking for a tall, blond guy like him, but rather for a dark, shorter guy--with looks like my pretty mother, whose love seems to have eluded me. Having come from a damaged family, I am looking to create a family of my own.

I am looking for someone to love, and yes, someone to love me.

But all those thoughts are subconscious at this time. Not pieced together until much, much later.

On our first few dates, Bill tells me how his father had lost a million dollars and had gone bankrupt in the 1960s when Bill was in high school and how they had to move from a mansion, which he shows me, to a smaller, ordinary house, which he also shows me, and how he had to go from a private to a public school.

I do not question why he is telling me this story some ten years or more after the facts or how his father went bankrupt. His story makes me feel compassion for him.

I meet his family--his charming father and his odd mother, who reminds me of Miss Havisham--and his three sisters--one of whom is Bill’s twin. The twins Bill and Mary are the youngest in the family. The older sisters tell me how petted by their mother Bill was when he was a little boy, how he always got his way, and how he was expelled for misbehavior from one private school after another.

Bill laughs those stories away--making everything sound like a lark. Besides his sense of humor and good looks, I am also attracted by his intelligence.

After we have dated for about a year, Bill shows up at my new condo, telling me that he’s given his notice to his apartment complex and is moving in with me. We are already spending nights at each other’s places, so that seems like the logical next step. But he does not ask me--he tells me.

I consent.

After living with Bill for a year, I decide that he is definitely not the man that I have been searching for. I ask him to leave. But instead of leaving, Bill asks me to marry him. Every fiber in my being screams, “No!”

I say, “Yes.”

And so like Odysseus, I begin my odyssey through all sorts of hellish scenarios for the next ten years. It is a trip on which at times I will doubt my own sanity and sink deeper into my own loss of self.

You must remember that I want to love someone. I do not choose wisely, but I do choose to love Bill.

I give and give and give, and Bill takes and takes and takes.

At 33, I give birth to our daughter Ellen. She is the darling of our lives. Bill is crazy about our little girl. When he is home, he is a really good father--changing diapers and giving baths and helping when she is sick. He also helps out around the house--vacuuming, picking up, and washing dishes. Bill always thanks me when I cook dinner for us.

But whatever Bill wants to do, he does.

He wants to go out once a week and “shoot pool” with some friends. Then once a week becomes twice a week. Then it becomes overnight because he had drunk too much beer, and it is dangerous for him to drive home, so he sleeps on the couch of a friend, or so he says.

I believe him.

Then as things progress, I never know if Bill is coming home at night or not. I make dinner and make excuses. And sit in our living room until the early hours of morning, looking out the front window, waiting and waiting and waiting for his car lights in the driveway.

I blame myself. If only I were prettier or more loving, Bill would come home to me.

In my daytime life, I am a respected teacher at the local high school, and I care for our toddler and our home. My parents call me to complain about each other and about my sister. I do not tell them about Bill.

The only thing that seems to keep Bill at home is roses. He plants roses in the side yard, then in the front yard, and then in the back yard. Bill spends all of his daytime hours working on his rose bushes. People drive by to see the lovely roses in our yard. Vases filled with roses adorn our house for six months of the year.

When I confront him about his nighttime absences, Bill gets angry. His quick temper strikes a chord in me from my childhood, and I curl up inside myself. I resolve to be stronger. Surely things will get better.

I tell no one what is happening. I cry in the shower, and my tears wash down the drain. I am desperate.

I become pregnant again, but I cannot bring another child into this life. Tragically, I lose this baby to the vagaries of life.

One night I meet Bill at the door at 3 a.m., demanding of him once again, what is going on? With tears streaming down his cheeks, he tells me that he is a cocaine addict and is “morally bankrupt.” I am shocked, but I am relieved to know what has been going on. I feel compassion for him.

Now I have an answer to the conundrum, and now I can fix the problem.

Later that day, I call a friend who works at Cumberland Heights. She tells me that Bill needs to come in for treatment immediately. Of course, that is the answer. I am so sure that we can still be a family, and I am determined to love and support Bill.

I attend family week at the treatment center and vow to do everything “right” to make this nightmare go away.

The week that Bill is out of his month-long treatment, I get word that my 64-year-old father has died suddenly of a massive heart attack. We travel to South Carolina to bury my father.

With our 4-year-old daughter, I stay on to comfort and help my mother. When I call home late at night and get no answer, I know that Bill is using again. I am devastated.

Leaving an ailing mother who thinks that I will somehow come live with her and take care of her, I come home to a relapsed husband. I struggle with what to do. So worrisome is the situation that I no longer sleep at night.

Bill begins to steal money from my checking and savings accounts, and he steals from and depletes Ellen’s college fund that my father had started for her.

Ten months creep by. I call and visit my mother in SC as often as I can. I get an in-home nurse to care for her. Then I get a phone call that my 65-year-old mother has died of a cardiac arrest.

We travel to SC to bury her. We have to stop on the side of the road while I get sick to my stomach. I stay on in SC with my 5-year-old daughter to settle the estate.

Bill goes home to Tennessee and continues to use cocaine. He loses his job and is out of work for a year, collecting unemployment.

I feel as if I am coming apart at the seams.

Someone tells me that Bill is like two different people--the man he is out in the Nashville dive bars, and the man he is at home. But I know that the man in the bars bleeds over to the man at home.

Convinced that Bill is possessed with a demon, our minister conducts an exorcism on him.

I do not want my marriage to die, but I discover that Bill has been sleeping with various women for the past few years, has had numerous one-night-stands--some of the women I know. I have been so naïve.

I ask him to leave. Blaming the drugs/alcohol, saying that addiction is a disease, and saying that I married him “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health,” Bill refuses to leave. He becomes more and more rageful. Each time his anger erupts, I crumble inside. I become afraid of him.

I do not comprehend what is going on. The harder I try, the worse things get. It’s as if I lead a double life. At school, I teach ethics through literature, yet at home, I live in an amoral environment.

Teaching is one of the things that saves me though; in the classroom, in its present moments, I can forget for a while what my life at home is like.

One Saturday when Ellen and I are away from home, Bill brutally kills one of our pets in a fit of rage. I notice that the kitten is missing and ask him where the she is, and he answers, “I killed her.” He shows me the caved-in hole in the garage wall where he claims that he threw her. I am horrified and sickened and repulsed. I never tell anyone.

Even after I tack up a poster over it, that hole in the garage wall haunts me for many years to come.

As things escalate, I fear for me and my daughter. One night, she and I are forced to crawl out her bedroom window and go to one of the neighbors, who refuses us sanctuary. We walk up the street to friends, but Bill comes to their door and pounds on it, demanding that Ellen and I come home.

It is Christmas; we go home.

As Bill continues to promise to do better and goes to another treatment center and fails again to stay sober, this cycle of separations and reunions continues through countless times, through countless months, and through countless years.

Countless more times, he does not come home at night, and countless more times, my hopes are crushed.

I remember this one time in particular--indicative of so many other times. It is a snow day, so we are out of school, and 7-year-old Ellen and I make a wonderful snowman with a straw hat on his head and a red scarf around his neck. We can hardly wait to show it to Bill. As our snow-wet clothes dry near the warm wood stove, we make homemade vegetable soup and cornbread and call him on the kitchen phone, telling him we can’t wait until he gets home to see our snowman.

But once again, Bill never comes home that night.

The next day, the snowman melts and with it all my dreams of family. As the 12-step program teaches, I am truly “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

I give up.

I realize that I must let this man go for the sake of my daughter. I do not yet see that it is also for my own sake.

As I tell Bill for the last time that he has to leave our home, that I want a divorce, he and I sit in the old rocking chairs on the front porch. My love for him is still as tangible as the gold wedding band that I remove from my finger and tuck into the palm of his hand, curling his fingers around it.

I tell him that because I love him, he must leave. That it must be my enabling him that keeps him in his disease of addiction. He tells me not to give up on him. But I had already given up.

Because Bill objects to the divorce and fights to stay married to me, the divorce takes two long years. Because Tennessee is a no-fault divorce state, I am forced to write Bill a check for $20,000 to be able to keep the house. Because I have a lousy lawyer and am not thinking straight and still have a lot of fear of Bill, he gets custody of Ellen for every other weekend. For the next ten years until Ellen is in high school, child visitation is a constant drama, a constant worry, and a constant heartbreak. But that is mostly Ellen’s story.

I was just beginning to realize my own crazy addiction to Bill. Why did I allow myself to be sucked into such a relationship with such a man? It would take me the next two decades--until into my early 60s--to figure that one out.

First, I had to take the time to find myself. The time to become the woman in the painting--the one whose eyes are filled with wisdom and with mindful joyfulness and with those ever-so-small vestiges of released pain.