Kate Nason - Everything is Perfect: A Memoir

When, in the wake of my husbands betrayals and the national scandal that engulfed us, my marriage blew up, the story ran everywhere. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, People, Time, NewsweekI collected them all. To these I added articles sent to me by friends as far away as Tokyo, London, and Berlin, all containing pictures of me theyd clipped from their hometown papers. Then I gathered the countless handwritten pleas from reporters clamoring for interviews, and along with notebooks and journals scrawled with my musings, I stuffed everything into a bulging bankers box labeled THE BOMB. A box I banished to the attic.

For years, this eventthe entire decade of my thirtiesplayed through my mind like a mythical journeycomplete with heroes and villains, trials, tests, and triumphs. I lived with these memories turning them round and round in my mind, in an attempt to make meaning from my trajectory.

Not until my kids were grown, some fifteen years later, did I dig into that box and begin to write this story.

Correction: the story wrote me.

Often at dawn, before my head came off the pillow, a sentence would download fully formed into my brain. Those sentences unleashed a trove of memories, and all those ghosts came out of hiding.

I did not choose this story. I did, however, choose this husband. This was not my first mistake, and it was not without a whisper of intuition. My life had been a series of missteps, some leading to joy, others to heartbreak. I had lessons to learntrusting my intuition chief among them. Ive had many teachers along the way, some like this husband, I chose. Othershis womenarrived unbidden. The places where their lives intersected mine were unavoidable plot points in my journey.

This is a true story told from my memories, journals, and all those press clippings. I have chosen to use pseudonyms for my central characters, and the conversations herein are not likely verbatim due to the passage of time, though theyve been recounted just as I have recalled them.

In a world that strives to reduce us to good or bad, black or white, red or blue, victim or vixen, we must be careful not to oversimplify. Our stories are complexnuanced. It is in this complexity that we find compassion. Each voice, each story, helps us chart our way forward.

There are many sides to every story. This is mine.

I ve often thought how lucky I am that my marriages blew up in such spectacular fashion. No slow moldering. No long years of quiet misery. No need to justify my exit.

My first marriage lasted a matter of months, but Ill save that story for later. Its the tale of my second mistake I wish to tell, and it is quite a doozy. My second husband proposed ten times. It was more a campaign than proposal. The important thingand Id like some creditI said NO nine times. I loved him deeply, was wildly in love. And yet Id made a vow at the end of my first marriage: Never again would I marry. Ever.

But something elsesomewhere deep, I knew I could not trust him. My intuitionthat still-small voicethat whispered no was still so small I hadnt learned to heed it.

So that tenth proposal? I caved.

In January of 1998, just seven years into my second marriage, the press arrived en masse on our doorstep. A barrage of reporters surrounded our home, all shouting for details regarding my husbands longtime affair with a former student, our frequent babysitter, someone Id considered a friend. A young woman now at the center of a national scandal.

We were advised to give a press conference with hopes the madness would stop.

Most of that night spools through my head in splintered snapshots: the blinding light of camera flash, the thrash of my heart as I stepped out the door, the chatter of my teeth in the January cold, a shaking in my limbs I could not steady.

There on the same porch that had served as a stage for my daughters one-act plays and sheltered my sons vast Hot Wheels roadways, we faced the crowd. Their booted feet trampling my flowerbeds, microphones on boom-sticks thrust in our faces. And beyond, a forest of white spires piercing the night sky from news vans and satellite trucks clogging our quaint, tree-lined street.

Flanked by my uncle and a lawyer, my husband and I waited while they addressed the crowd. Then my uncle motioned for us to move forward, and there in the strobe of light caught in winter-bare branches, I stood next to the man Id married for better or worse as he confessed his affair. He confessed his sins, in front of all of America, and admitted his guilt in a way our President could not.

For a tiny moment, I took heart in this, hoped wed be okay. But underneath that hope was something deeper, hotter: I despised him.