For the first few months of our relationship, I couldn’t understand what Marius saw in me. His first wife had been a model, but I didn’t care much about clothes. I was more interested in poetry than Prada, and I dressed in comfortable jeans, flats, and many variations on the theme of sweatshirt. After Marius came into my life, this changed. I started to pay attention to how I looked. I cut my hair and started wearing more makeup. I let him choose my shoes, my clothes, my jewelry. Before we left the house, I would walk by him for critique: “Take off the necklace,” he would say, or “Try the other skirt,” or “Wouldn’t the black heels work better?” Of course, the black heels always worked better. When he thought my fingernails were untidy, I got a manicure. When he wanted less pubic hair, I waxed. My lingerie was a mess of cotton granny panties and white bras, but this soon changed. I watched and listened to his preferences, trying to pick up on his thoughts, trying to make myself worthy of him. Some part of me felt that Marius was too good to be true, that something would happen and he would disappear.
And then one day, that’s exactly what happened. There was a problem with his visa status. Marius would have to leave the country. He’d come to the International Writing Program on a J-1 visa as a guest of the State Department. Part of the fine print of the J-1, he told me, was that he needed to leave the United States before his visa expired—in his case six months—and return to his home country, Bulgaria. He’d been in the US for seven months, which was a violation of the visa, making him ineligible to renew it from within the US. He needed to go home, or face whatever penalties the newly developed Department of Homeland Security had in store.
His anxiety about his visa was exacerbated by the fact that he was divorcing his wife over the Internet. That was the way he described it, as if he’d opted for the Fast Food version of divorce. And in fact, Marius was doing everything remotely, without any contact with his wife. His parents had hired a lawyer in Sofia, and they were giving Marius regular updates by email and Skype about the status of the case. Marius didn’t like to talk about his relationship with his first wife. “There’s no use in talking about the past,” he’d said, and he uttered her full name only one time in my presence. For the remainder of our years together, he referred to her only by the first letter of her name: Z.
Marius was petulant about Z, telling me so many negative stories that I soon thought the worst of her too. Not that I tried to see things from her perspective, that of a woman whose husband visited the United States, leaving her with their child, and then divorced her by email. At the time, I didn’t see how unjust this was and, looking back, I am amazed at how easily I adopted Marius’s opinions. I wonder how the person I thought myself to be—a thinking woman, a feminist—could be so callous and dismissive of another woman’s struggle. But I was. I was only too willing to believe all the outlandish stories Marius told me: That Z’s previous boyfriend had been part of the Bulgarian mafia. That she had sex with her girlfriends, other models who also had mafia boyfriends. That Z had cold-bloodedly seduced Marius for his parents’ money, gotten pregnant, and then threatened to abort
the baby unless he married her. His only reason for staying with Z, he told me, had been to save Rada. He had sacrificed his happiness to give his child life. He was a bodhisattva, or so he claimed. And—although I know now that I should have been skeptical of Marius’s characterizations—I agreed.
A bisexual ex-model with a Bulgarian mafia ex-boyfriend married to an ex-Buddhist monk child-prodigy pianist turned writer? To me, all of this melodrama seemed unbelievably exciting, even glamorous. In the Midwest, these kinds of people were totally incredible, a cast of characters out of a novel. But what was probably most seductive to me, what made me love Marius even more, was that he’d left his exciting and beautiful ex-wife for me.
“I’m so much happier here with you,” he said snuggling his nose into my neck one night as we lay in bed. We’d just made love, a nightly ritual in our first months together, and were lying under the covers talking, our limbs wrapped in the tangle of skin and sheets. “I don’t think I’ve ever imagined that someone like you could exist. You’re perfect for me. You’re not pretending to be someone you aren’t. You’re just yourself. You just love me.”
It was true: I just loved him. I loved everything about him, from the way he cooked to the funny way he tapped his feet in his sleep, to his habit of quoting Buddhist texts at strange moments, to his fear of airplanes to his hypochondria to his adorable habit of looking in the mirror fifty times a day, as if to make sure he still existed. I loved his beautiful green-hazel eyes and his full lips and his long fingers. I loved his creativity, how he woke up every morning and went to his computer to write, how there was always another idea, another project, more and more and more to come. I loved his faith in me. Even though I had not published a thing, he believed that one day my writing would be widely read. He compared me to great writers, feeding my insecure soul. I loved that he promised to be good to Adam, and to take care of him as if he were his own son. But most of all, I loved that Marius made everything seem possible. With Marius, the future was bigger and more exciting than I could ever have imagined. For Marius, there was always some new adventure ahead.
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To reach Dani, email DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
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Rumpus original art by Claire Stringer.
Rumpus original logo art by Max Winter.