1

Before that summer, the summer of fear—

It makes me cringe to know that I sound like a tabloid wife. I can't talk about what happened, even to myself, in a way that seems real. The words that come to me sound like something I've read in line at the supermarket.

Before the summer of the stalker, the summer I looked at my husband and saw a stranger, I was drinking in a bar with Rae and having a conversation about intimacy. It was a conversation I'd had many times before, with any number of thirty-something women who were worried about their chances of marrying in time to have children. Rae was thirty-six, the same age as me. She was our realtor, and it seemed she was also becoming a friend.

I had married just two years before, and now had a one-year- old daughter. (I was also a few weeks into my second pregnancy, but didn't know it yet.) As a result, my part in this time-worn dialogue had shifted from sharing the despair to dispensing counsel. Usually these women had spent their time—as I had, myself, until very recently—investing in a series of untenable characters, men whose inability to commit was as clear as the color of their eyes.

"I do want a family. I do," Rae was telling me. "And I know I've got to get on it soon. But I don't know if it would be fair to date right now because the truth is I'm still getting over some- one else."

"Oh," I said. "So—you just ended a relationship?" "If you can call it that."

"Let me guess: married man?" "Worse than that. Even worse."

Hearing this, I couldn't help leaning in.

"Okay, how should I put this...let's call it a ten-year tryst. With a stone-cold thug. The guy's a gang leader and a dealer, he's done all kinds of time. And no, we didn't have an official rela- tionship. We had nothing but insane, unbelievable sex. Trouble is, it was so good with him that no one else does it for me." Rae shot me a sidelong glance. "This is probably more than you wanted to know."

"Not to worry," I told her. "I want to know everything." This, at least, was the truth. And then I said my usual lines.

I know just what you're doing, because I spent almost two decades doing pretty much the same thing. If a man was mar- ried, or engaged, or living on another continent, or certifiably insane, or gay, or a priest, or a prison inmate serving a life sen- tence, I was all over him. A few of these categories were in- vented for emphasis, but not many. On the other hand, if a man was single, appropriate, and well-intentioned, I couldn't run away fast enough. And when my relationships never seemed to work out, I decided I wasn't lucky in love. It took me years to understand that I was afraid of commitment myself, that the suffering was essentially self-inflicted. But even once I could see what I was doing, it took many more years to be able to change. Because that's what I was used to; that's where I was comfort- able. It may have been bleak and lonely, but in some sense it was safe.

And Rae asked the usual question in response. "So how did you cross the road?" she wanted to know. "How did you get to the other side?" And here I had another practiced answer.

You know, I don't think it's quite like that...at least for me, it's more of an ongoing process, and to be honest, I still struggle

*with it. But I think you have to reach the point where you want it more than you don't want it. Where you're ready—*really ready—to let it into your life. I've come to believe that intimacy is available to anyone who's truly ready to give and receive it.

That conversation took place in the early spring.