Susan Shapiro - Five Men Who Broke My Heart

FIVE MEN
WHO BROKE
MY HEART

A Memoir

SUSAN SHAPIRO

DELACORTE PRESS

FIVE MEN WHO BROKE MY HEART: A MEMOIR

A Delacorte Book / January 2004

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

All rights reserved

Copyright 2004 by Susan Shapiro

Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without
the written permission of the publisher, except
where permitted by law.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of
Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark
of Random House, Inc.

library of congress cataloging in publication data

Shapiro, Susan.

Five men who broke my heart: a memoir/Susan Shapiro.

p. cm.

1. Shapiro, Susan. 2. WomenUnited StatesBiography.

3. Man-woman relationshipsUnited States. I. Title

CT275.S4392 A3 2004 2003053239

974.7/1043/092 B 21

eISBN: 978-0-440-33475-0

v3.0_r1

Table of Contents

Authors Note

Names, dates, and identifying characteristics of many people portrayed in this book have been obscured for literary cohesion, to protect privacy, and so my husband wont divorce me.

1

July 2000
Mr. Studrocket

I slipped on the black slingbacks Id borrowed from my best friend, Claire. The last time I risked such high heels was at my wedding. I tried to walk without wobbling, praying that the added height hid the nine pounds Id gained since he last saw me. In two decades as a journalist Id never been this nervous for an interview. Yet Id never interviewed anyone Id been in love with before.

I hadnt seen Brad in ten years. In ten minutes he was coming back to see me. Not to say Im sorry, I cant forget you, or better yet, No woman has ever been able to replace you. No, after a decade, Brad was finally seeking me out againto help him get book publicity.

I pulled a tight black T-shirt over my long flowing Indian skirt, adding silver bracelets. Too Greenwich Village, which I feared I was, but sexy, which I feared I wasnt. At least I had a tan. Whipping the shirt off, I switched from my sports bra to a black Wonderbra, turning my respectable breasts into major knockers, a Gloria Steinem acolyte suddenly Living Barbie. I would rather be dead than dowdy for this reunion. I tried a tighter black teemuch betterspraying Opium perfume down my faux cleavage. Lining my lips Midnight Red, I caught a spark from my diamond ring in the mirror. My hand was shaking.

Out of the thousands of days wed been out of touch, Brad could not have picked a worse one to reconnect. Six months before my fortieth birthday, I was staggering through a vulnerable stretch of midlife crisis: my no-book-no-baby summer. That morning Id received two faxes. The first, from my gynecologist, summed up results of the medical tests explaining why, for the last year, my husband Aaron and I had been unable to conceive a child. My reproductile system looked okay but Aarons low sperm count and the lack of his sperms motility was a problem. According to the doctor, the medication hed been taking wasnt increasing the amount of his sperm or making it swim any faster, and fertility-wise, Aaron and I seemed incompatible.

The second letter, from my agent, listed the last five publishing houses that had passed on the novel Id spent five years writing. It felt like she was saying, The only baby you have is ugly, we dont want it.

I threw both letters down the incinerator in the hall, destroying the evidence before anybody else could see it. Rushing back to answer the phone, I thought it would be Aaron, calling from the airport to say his flight was delayed. But it was Brad, the man whose children I could have had twenty years ago, now a Harvard professor, saying, Hi Sue. I just landed in New York. I have a book coming out, as if wed last spoken yesterday. Brads timing always sucked. Today it was so bad it seemed destined.

Hey, thats great, Id said, equally casual, feeling surprisingly jazzed to be on the phone with him. I had an urge to see him in person. What are you doing for lunch?

Coming to see you, hed answered, presumptuous as always, though I had just issued the invitation.

Bring me a galley. If I have time, maybe Ill write about your book, I threw out, turning my big date with Brad into a business opportunity to avoid anxiety. Or was it rage?

What the hell did he meanhe had a book coming out. I was the writer! Id recited Robert Louis Stevensons I Had a Little Shadow by heart when I was two. My mother taped it, I had proof. In first grade I won an award for filling out the most notebooks in the history of Shaarey Zedek Hebrew School, twelve hundred blue notebooks crammed with Hebrew letters I couldnt read. In my family, achievement was redemption.

According to Shapiro legend, my father proposed to my mother by saying: I just got into medical school in the Midwest. You coming or not? They fled the Lower East Side and eventually settled in suburban Michigan. Of their four offspring, I was the first and the only girl. I was quickly followed by Brian and Eric, both redheaded and freckled like my mother, and Michael, the youngest, whose hair was dark as mine. I always thought the defining event of my emotional landscape was being usurped of firstborn power thrice, by three brilliant science-brain brothers. Picture it: Queen Sheba for seventeen months, then dethroned, dethroned, dethroned.

While I had my mothers twenty-twenty vision, my brothers were all nearsighted like my father. They wore gold-rimmed glasses with thick lenses and viewed the world as their laboratory. They dissected frogs in the kitchen sinkmerrily holding up body parts that pulsated after they were amputatedand kept calves esophagi in the freezer and live bees in jars in the refrigerator. (The first to freeze won. Then theyd try to resuscitate them.) By the time I was ten, family dinners were dominated by The Disease Game, where one called out symptoms, the other diagnosed.

Forty-two-year-old Cambodian refugee vomiting blood? asked my father.

Schistosomiasis! jumped in Brian, my oldest, biggest, loudest brother.

Good! You know more than your old man already. My father spooned gravy on his steak. Thirty-four-year-old white woman with perforated uterus.

Could be endometriosis, guessed the middle son, Eric, the diplomat.

Botched abortion, probably, weighed in Michael, the smallest Shapiro. Pass the potatoes.

Id eat alone in my pink room, memorizing Sylvia Plaths Ariel and plotting escape.

I thought Id found it at sixteen, when I started the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Yet on my first day of freedom, freshman year, I gravitated right to Brad, a patronizing, macho biology major.

Do you have a light? I stopped to ask him in the dormitory lobby.

He took the Virginia Slim Menthol from my lips and broke it in two.

Who the hell do you think you are? I yelled. Id already decided to be a raging feminist poet. I had no use for this intrusive, oversized prep in a blue-and-gold sweatsuit.

Im Brad, he said. Dont smoke, its bad for you.

I noticed his gigantic shoulders. Out of all the first-years, his were the broadest. So are you, I said, digging into my backpack for my own match. I found one, lit another Virginia Slim Menthol, and walked away, smoke trailing.

He followed me to my dorm room, where he scanned my schedule (Romantic Poetry, Journalism 101, Modern Drama, Psych. of Deviant Behavior) and declared it worthless. An alliance with a male, fraught with fierce rivalrywhat could be more familiar? I declared him worthless and he wrestled me to the floor. I put him in a choke hold my brothers had taught me, never imagining the hold hed wind up having on me. Or that it would last, off and on, for fifteen years, from age sixteen to thirty-one. The worst years to be off and on in love with anybody.