The Silver Linings Playbook

The Silver Linings Playbook Page 43

Best Intentions

Pat,

It's been a while, hopefully long enough.

If you haven't ripped up this letter already, please read until the end. As you have discovered, I am a much better writer than I am a speaker at this point in my life.

Everybody hates me.

Did you know your brother came to my house and threatened to kill me if I made contact with you? His sincerity scared me - enough to keep me from writing earlier. Even my parents have reproached me for pretending to be Nikki. My therapist says my betrayal might not be forgivable, and by the way she kept repeating the word "unforgivable," I could tell she was very disappointed in me. But the truth is, I did it for your benefit. Yes, I was hoping that once you found closure and got over Nikki, you would want to give me a shot - especially since we are such great dance partners, we both enjoy running, we are in similar housing situations, and let's face it, we're both fighting hard to maintain our grip on reality. We have a lot in common, Pat. I still believe you fell into my life for a reason.

Because I love you, I want to tell you something I have never told anyone - except my therapist. It's sort of screwed up, so I hope you will be able to handle it. At first I wasn't going to tell you, but I figured the situation couldn't get any worse, and maybe a little honesty could go a long way right now.

I don't know if you know this, but Tommy was a cop. He worked for the Meadowville Police Department and was assigned to the high school sort of as a counselor. So half of his hours were spent working with and counseling troubled teenagers, and the other half of his hours he was just a regular cop. I'm telling you this because it is important to understand that Tommy was a good man. He did not deserve to die, and his death absolutely proves that life is random and fucked-up and arbitrary, until you find someone who can make sense of it all for you - if only temporarily.

Anyway, Tommy was really good with teenagers, and he even started a club at the high school designed to raise awareness about the dangers of drinking and driving. Many of the parents thought the club condoned underage drinking, because it was not an anti-underage-drinking club but just an anti-drinking-and-driving club, so Tommy had to fight really hard to keep it afloat. Tommy told me that a lot of the high school kids drank every weekend, and underage drinking was even condoned by many of the town's parents. And the funniest thing to me was that the kids came to him and asked him to start the club because they were worried that someone was going to get hurt or die if their friends kept driving home after parties. Can you imagine talking to a cop like that when you were a teenager? That's the kind of guy Tommy was, people trusted him instantly.

So Tommy organized assemblies and even put together this teacher karaoke night where students could pay money to hear their favorite teachers perform the current hits. Tommy could talk people into doing things like that. I'd go to these events, and Tommy would be up on the stage with all those teenagers, and he'd be singing and dancing with the other teachers, all of whom he had convinced to dress up in wild costumes - and parents, students, administrators would be all smiles. You couldn't help it, because Tommy was such a burst of positive energy. And he always gave speeches during these events - listing facts and statistics about drinking and driving. People listened to Tommy. People loved him. I loved him so fucking much, Pat.

A funny thing about Tommy was he liked to have sex a lot. He always wanted to make love. I mean, as soon as he got home from work, his hands were all over me. I'd wake up every morning and he'd be on top of me. We could hardly eat a meal together without his hands sliding under the table, searching for my legs. And if Tommy was home, there was no way I'd ever get through a television show, because as soon as a commercial came on, he'd be rock hard and giving me that look. It was pretty wild, and I loved it for the first ten years of our marriage. But after ten years of nonstop sex, I got a little tired of it. I mean - life is more than sex, right? So one bright sunny morning, after we had just finished making love under the kitchen table, the teakettle whistled, so I stood and poured two cups.

"I'm thinking maybe we should limit sex to so many times a week," I said.

I'll never forget the look on his face. He looked as if I had shot him in the stomach.

"Is something wrong?" he said. "Am I doing something wrong?"

"No. It's not like that at all."

"Then what?"

"I don't know. Is it normal to have sex several times a day?"

"Don't you love me anymore?" Tommy asked me with this wounded-little-boy look I still see whenever I close my eyes at night.

Of course I told Tommy I loved him more than ever, but I just wanted to slow down a little with the sex. I told him I wanted to talk with him more, take walks, and find some new hobbies, so sex could be special again. "Having this much sex," I told him, "sort of takes the magic out of it." For some odd reason, I remember suggesting that we go horseback riding.

"So you're telling me the magic is gone?" he said, and that question was the last thing he ever did say to me. So you're telling me the magic is gone?

I remember talking a lot after he said that, telling him we could have sex as much as he wanted and that this was just a suggestion, but he was wounded. He was looking at me suspiciously the whole time, as if I were cheating on him or something like that. But I wasn't. I just wanted to slow down a little so I could appreciate sex more. Too much of a good thing, was all I wanted to tell him. But it was clear I had hurt him, because before I could finish explaining, he stood up and went upstairs to take a shower. He left the house without saying goodbye.

I got the call at work. All I remember hearing was that Tommy was hurt and had been rushed to West Jersey Hospital. When I got to the hospital, there were a dozen men in blue uniforms, cops everywhere. Their glistening eyes told me.

Later I would find out that Tommy had gone to the Cherry Hill Mall during his lunch break. They found a Victoria's Secret bag full of lingerie in his cruiser - every piece was my size. On his way back to Meadowville, he stopped on the highway to help an elderly woman whose car had broken down. Tommy called her a tow truck, but then he stood at the nervous old lady's window chatting with her, keeping her company while she waited. Tommy was always chatting with people like that. The cruiser was behind him, the lights were going, but he was standing at the edge of the highway's breakdown lane. Some driver who had drunk his lunch dropped his cell phone, and when he bent down to pick it up, he pulled the wheel to the right, crossed two lanes, and ...

The lead in the local paper read "Police Officer Thomas Reed - who was responsible for starting Meadowville High School's Anti-Drinking-and-Driving Club - was killed by a drunk driver." It was all so ironic, almost funny in a sadistic way. There were so many cops at his funeral. Kids from the high school made our front lawn into a living memorial - they stood on the sidewalk with candles and flowers. When I refused to go outside, these teenagers sang so sweetly to me through the first few evenings, a chorus of sad, beautiful voices. Our friends brought food, Father Carey talked to me about heaven, my parents cried with me, and Ronnie and Veronica stayed at our house for the first few weeks or so. But the only thing I could think about was how Tommy died believing I no longer wanted to have sex with him. I felt so guilty, Pat. I wanted to die. I kept thinking he would not have gone to Victoria's Secret on his lunch break if we had not had the fight, and then he would have never passed the old woman in the broken-down car, which meant he would not have been killed. I felt so guilty. I still feel so fucking guilty.

After a few weeks I went back to work, but everything in my mind got switched up. My guilt turned to need, and suddenly I was craving sex very badly. So I started to fuck men - any man who was game. All I really had to do was look at a man in that certain way, and within a few seconds I knew if they were going to fuck me. And when they did, I would close my eyes and pretend it was Tommy. To be with my husband again, I'd fuck men anywhere. In a car. In the coatroom at work. In an alley. Behind a bush. In a public restroom. Anywhere. But in my mind, it was always under the kitchen table, and Tommy had come back to me, and I had told him I wasn't tired of having sex, but would make love to him as many times as he needed, because I loved him with all my heart.

I was sick. And there was no shortage of men who were eager to capitalize on my sickness. There were men everywhere who - with glee - would fuck this mentally ill woman.

Of course this led to my losing my job, therapy, and many medical tests. Luckily, I did not contract any diseases, and I'd be happy to get tested again if that ever becomes an issue for us. But even if I had contracted AIDS or whatever, it would have been worth it to me at the time, because I needed that closure. I needed that forgiveness. I needed to live out the fantasy. I needed to fuck away my guilt so I could break out of the fog I was in, to feel something, to feel anything, and begin to start my life again, which I am only now beginning to do - since we became friends.

I have to admit that during Veronica's dinner party I only thought of you as an easy lay. I sized you up in your stupid Eagles jersey and figured I could get you to fuck me, so I could pretend you were Tommy. I hadn't done it in a long time. I no longer wanted to have sex with strangers, but you weren't a stranger. You were handpicked by my own sister. You were a safe man with whom Ronnie was trying to set me up. So I figured I would begin to have sex with you regularly, just so I could fantasize about Tommy again.

But when you held me in front of my parents' house, and when you cried with me, things changed - in a very dramatic way. I did not understand it at first, but as we ran together and ate raisin bran at the diner and went to the beach and became friends - simply friends, without any sex to complicate things - it was sort of nice in a way I hadn't anticipated. I just liked being around you, even if we didn't say anything.

I knew I had feelings for you when I began to cringe inwardly at the sound of Nikki's name. It was obvious you were not ever going to get back together with your wife, so I called your mom and got her drunk at the local bar, and she told me everything about you. You didn't see me, but I was in the driveway when she came home so loaded and you helped her into the house. I drove her home that night. After what happened to Tommy, I don't drink at all. We've been meeting every week since, Pat. She needed a friend; she needed to talk to someone about your father. So I listened. At first I was just using her for information, but now we are sort of girlfriends. She did not know about the letters I was writing as Nikki, and she was really mad at me for a while after the Christmas episode, but she knows about this letter obviously, since she delivered it for me. She is a very strong and forgiving woman, Pat. She deserves better than your father, and maybe you deserve better than me. Life is funny like that.

I wrote those letters hoping to provide you with the closure I somehow found through casual sex after Tommy died. Please know I began the liaison scheme only after I was certain that Nikki would never agree to talk to you again under any circumstance. Maybe you will never be able to forgive me, but I wanted you to know I had the best intentions - and I still love you in my own fucked-up way.

I miss you, Pat. I really do. Can we at least be friends?

Tiffany