We Are Magnificent

Written in response to the news that Arnold Shwarzenegger and Maria Shriver have separated.

When we stand together, our silhouette reflects the prominence of the bones in our faces. He holds my hand in his and my hand practically disappears into the lines that, some might say, tell the story of the life he has lived and will live and could have lived. We often stand in front of hundreds or thousands and sometimes, by the grace and wonder of technology, we stand before millions. As he holds my hand and I hold my head high, he leans down, and whispers, “You are a precious, delicate thing. I always close my eyes when he says these words. I try to hold on to those moments, which are also precious, delicate things.

My husband and I are best when we are alone. We are not understood. My people, those who call themselves my family, they consider themselves refined. My people are well accustomed to the scrutiny that comes with a good name, a name that rose out of the ashes of bad deeds. They look down on my husband with his strange accent, how his vowels never close and stretch on, endlessly. They spend all their time back East, on a well-manicured island, gin-soaked and red-faced, making messes of their own lives. My husband does not really have people. There are those he left behind, but they are secreted. He is a man of myth. The people who consider themselves his people now, they work for him or have worked with him on the silver screen. They have walked the red carpet with him or admired him from near or far. His people shout his name like exultation. They adore him, nakedly. They look down on me too because my hair is dark and my sentences are complete.

His body hulks and his personality looms even larger and the world wonders how I can ever find space for myself in a room I have to share with my husband’s body and breath.

I never explain myself. We never explain ourselves.

We should not have to.

Ambition is a curious thing, the way it can take hold of a man and twist him into the worst version of himself. I love how ambition turns a good man. I love seeing the truth of a man when he takes what he wants from the world without compromise. I see the truth of my husband. He is extraordinarily ambitious. When we are in public he smiles widely, waves his arms high in the air, holds his hands open, reaches for everything he wants. When we are alone though, and I hold him in my arms, running my fingers through his hair, tracing the broadness of his shoulders, he is a much smaller man. He is often quiet, nearly hollow, as he mourns the man he will never be allowed to become because of an accident of birth. “My children,” he says, will become everything I cannot.” It is a heavy burden, but one our children bear with dignity.

We share a home, several homes in fact, so they are houses more than homes unless we are together and then, I convince myself they are homes. I smell him in our bedroom. The sweet stink of his cigars clings to his clothes and the balcony off our bedroom where he goes to smoke before bed. I smell those cigars on his fingers, those fingers which he loves to slide into my mouth, smiling as I swallow down to his knuckles, as he shows me what he can make a woman do for him. I taste Havana.

We honeymooned in Cuba, flew there on a private jet under the cover of night. My chest was tight as we landed and I stared into the mysterious darkness. I am a woman who is known for always doing what is right. My husband and I often marvel at how incorrectly I am understood. On our honeymoon, we were doing something wrong and it was exquisite. A woman with my last name has no business in Cuba but when he suggested visiting that forgotten, forbidden island, there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be.

On a secluded stretch of beach with the kind of clear blue water you only see in movies and lost places, we stretched out on chaise lounges while brown men in orange shorts and white Polo shirts brought us drinks and freshly rolled cigars. I lay back, one leg crossed over the other, in a bikini that showed my new husband just how much I belonged to him. He wore a skimpy pair of shorts reminding me why I married him. The muscles on his body have their own muscles. He bulges. His body is terrifying. We drank and smoked and basked. We were reckless and wild. I straddled his lap and rocked myself against him beneath the bright sun, in the open air, and I did not care who watched as he filled me and wrapped his giant arms around me and took me. We were extravagantly loud. We were Americans.

The rum flowed endlessly and we drank until our livers grew tender. We danced in nightclubs, our bodies surrounded by darker, sweaty bodies, the mass of lips and limbs writhing to the beats of guaracha et bolero et guajira y son. Late each night we would stumble back to our villa. He would hold my heels, by their thin straps and I would wrap my toes around the cobbled stones beneath my feet. Every time we made love, he whispered in my ear, “We will always be together.” He covered my body with his until I nearly disappeared. The weight of him was sometimes more than I could bear, all flesh and heat and sweat, but I learned how to enjoy the impossibility of being loved by him, of allowing myself to be broken by him.

Now, we have been married so long I’ve stopped counting the years. We have three children of our own but there are others — a small army of young boys, six in all, each a year apart, each with the strong bones of my husband’s face. They follow us from house to house and home to home. They move in step formation with the anger of fatherless children who live behind glass walls and want to reach but cannot. When they walk, the ground trembles. When they stare at my children, their lips are shiny wet, their teeth bared sharply. My husband rarely looks at them, and if we are sitting outside and these fatherless boys pass us by, not only does the ground tremble, the boys hiss, their rage burning our skin. We have no choice but to endure. We remain silent.

I threatened to leave my husband once, after the angry boys with his face threatened my golden children. I found the boys out by the pool, menacing my children and I shrieked, a desperate sound heard for miles. Their mother came running out of the house, the woman who has taken care of my family for nearly as long as my husband and I have been married. The two of us shielded our children, our bones threatening to piece our skin. We stared at each other, for one brief moment acknowledging the ugliness we share. I pointed my finger at her, my hand shaking. I said, “You keep yours away from mine or I will rid this place of all of you.” She did not look away. She held her head high. My husband is incapable of loving a weak woman.

That night, in our bedroom, my husband sat, his tie hanging loosely around his neck. He looked tired. I did not go to him the way I normally do. I did not massage the dense ropes of muscle in his shoulders. I did not kiss his forehead while holding my hand to his chest. I told him I was leaving. I did not cry. I did not elaborate as there was little left to be said. He said, “Must you always be so calm,” and I said, “I am the furthest thing from calm.” I said, “My children. Our children,” and he said, “They are all my children.” After our children and his children fell asleep, he woke me. He held a finger to my lips, said, “Shhh.” I wrapped a robe around my body and followed him, barefoot. We went outside and the grass was cool and damp beneath my feet. My husband led me to one of our secluded gardens, far from the house, sat me down on a stone bench. I waited quietly. Moments later, he returned with the mother of those fatherless boys, the six young men who share my husband’s face.

She was silent, defiant. I could see her defiance in how she held her body, stiff, proud. He wrapped one hand around her throat and squeezed. He looked upon her tenderly, his eyes shining. She did not move or try to claw at his arm. She simply stared at me as my husband broke the construction of bones in her neck and as he strangled the air from her lithe, overworked body. I did not look away either. I owed her that. When she was dead, my husband laid her gently on the cool grass. He looked at me, said, “It is you I love most.” He spoke the truth. I watched as he ripped her chest open, reached into the bloody warmth of her and pulled out her heart. He set her heart in my hands, still warm, still pulsing softly. Those boys did not make the ground tremble after that though they still moved in step formation. They did not menace my golden children. Nothing will break fatherless boys faster than the loss of a beloved mother.

When my husband decides to become the leader of men in the greatest state in this country, I protest. I tell him what we have should be enough. I tell him we have shared ourselves with the world for long enough. I tell him how such ambition has long ruined the men in my family. He promises he is different, says his blood is stronger and together, our blood is stronger. He asks me to grant him this one final wish after what he has done for me. We stand at the top of a marble staircase, camera flashes filling the room, the air thick with an energy that sets me ill at ease. The crowd below us is silent as we smile down on them. They wait. Like me, they see the truth of him and want him nonetheless. My husband holds my hand, tells me I am a precious, delicate thing. I say I am not so delicate. I know what we look like to the hundreds assembled before us and the thousands upon thousands we cannot see. We are magnificent. I study his jaw, the blunt line of it, the skin stretched tan and taut. We stand tall, our spines like steel. We looked straight ahead, part our lips, reveal our perfectly white teeth.