The path out of a marriage is different for everyone, but for those who leave while their children are small, it is frequently lighted like the exit row of a crashing plane by the crazylove of someone new. One married friend became a dancer at a Portland strip club and ended up falling in love with a regular. She was drawn by the flexible schedule, and of course by the promise of fat stacks of cash, but I think also by the seductive idea of being, at least for a time, the opposite of Wife. A glittering novelty. One day she showed me the parallel Instagram account she maintained for her dancer persona, a parade of dimly lit images of her arched back, the curve of her waist and the skin beneath her belly button, her breathtaking yoga ass in a black mesh thong. In many of the photos, her long hair was visible in titillating tendrils, but in all of them she was faceless or headless. A suggestion of a girl. A rumor. This seemed like a particularly intoxicating freedom.
Even as I always nurtured a ferocious belief in a totalizing romantic ideal, a mate who would complete me and with whom life would be both wildly entertaining and eminently manageable, I lived in fear of becoming Wife. I wanted to be somebody’s everything, but I was keenly aware of how quickly lust could depart the marital scene. (Why? It had not yet departed mine. Somehow it seemed smart to leave before that could happen.) Wife was all embers, none of the fire.
When I was young, I discovered Anne Sexton’s poem “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife.” I even heard a recording of Sexton reading it in her smoky New England drone, spreading resignation thickly over each line like butter on hot bread.
She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.
It goes on, as the lover laments being “momentary,” ephemeral. The cast-iron pot stayed with me always, even as I unwrapped my own wedding-registry Le Creuset. In the poem, it’s meant to conjure the solidity, the reliability of marriage. Such a pot will hold meal after meal. A vessel for sustenance, like the house itself, with a light kept on for a husband returning late. Like the wife, who carries and “sets forth” children, the substance of the family. Sexton writes that the wife’s realness is what makes her “your have to have.” Yet I’ve always seen this scenario the other way around, which may be why I made a better mistress than a wife. A mistress might be momentary, yes, but she is the true have to have, isn’t she? The one that animates, lends that urgency that closes in on a person, makes a person ache. A wife is leftovers in the fridge. I couldn’t bear to be that. A wife is my mother. A beautiful, dazzling, funny woman, smart as a whip, who made the babies and the pots of soup, and still was not enough. Still he lied and chased tail. Went after “littleneck clams out of season.” Later in Sexton’s poem, the mistress goes on to grant the lover the freedom to return to his wife: “I give you back your heart. I give you permission,” she says—and we are meant, perhaps, to feel her loneliness. It’s hard to be temporary. But even that gesture is an invocation of her own power. The ability to return a heart like a gift back to the store, carelessly, as though it simply doesn’t fit.
Another poem, called “Wife,” by Ada Límon, goes partly like this:
Housewife
fishwife, bad wife, good wife, what’s
the word for someone who stares long
into the morning, unable to even fix tea
some days, the kettle steaming over
loud like a train whistle, she who cries
in the mornings, she who tears a hole
in the earth and cannot stop grieving
the one who wants to love you
but often isn’t good at even that
the one who doesn’t want to be diminished
by how much she wants to be yours.
I did not want to be diminished and so I was a failure at marriage. I could not bear to be the object of a forever gaze, of anything but a worshipful gaze. I thought I could become Wife, but I ended up feeling that there was no word for me, or I didn’t want there to be a word for me. I went looking for answers, for solace, in the places where women’s pain lives. I looked in self-help books and found pat, bounded answers—they’ve come up with a thousand different ways to say Stay. I listened to songs and I looked at art, my ear to the ground where the footsteps of the fiercest foremothers had walked, and these said Run. I ran.
chapter sixteen
K and I hadn’t spoken in ten years when he found me on Facebook and tried to flatter me with a long message in which he said he’d been looking for me for a long time. He imagined I would by now have married Ian Svenonius, the dashing frontman of the Nation of Ulysses, my old favorite band. Had I been in the Bay Area all this time? Were we just going about our lives mere miles apart? Wasn’t that rich. He wasn’t looking to cause any trouble for me, he added—a sentiment I would laugh about later—but if I was open to having a cup of coffee, he’d love to see me. I’m a year sober and living in Mompton, he wrote with his signature breeziness, a casual self-mockery meant to disguise an abyss of self-loathing.
Mompton. I was charmed enough by the pun, I suppose, that I chose not to linger on the information it transmitted: he was thirty-nine and living with his mother. In fact, Mompton was Lafayette, a strip-mall suburb forty minutes from the city, where his mother ran a business and a small animal sanctuary out of her split-level home. She had a dog, cats, talking birds, and an enormous pig named Guido.
K and I did have coffee. I don’t remember where. I told my husband we were going to, and he was unthreatened, even slightly uninterested. My depression had descended, and was a palpable presence in our lives, but it manifested mostly in sadness. Crying jags during which I wiped snot on my sleeves, then straightened up, sniffed loudly, and said, I’m fine, I just need to get my shit together. The force of that sadness was worrying, but it didn’t seem destructive. We were happy enough.
K and I met on a busy street corner in front of a CVS, and I can still see the wide smile on his face when he first saw me approaching. I was a mirror, reflecting back the same grin. A moment of guardedness dropping away like a slip falling to reveal a frank and funny nakedness.
I’d chosen my outfit with great care and even solicited the input of Claire, my best California friend, and my mother, who was then living in Berkeley and carried the dozing baby around as I tried on half my clothes. I didn’t mention the word “sobriety” to my mother then—why complicate things when this was only a quick coffee with an old flame.
It was just a T-shirt and jeans I was looking for, but the selection of the right combination felt enormously significant.
What are we going for here? Claire had asked as we sipped white wine at my dining room table a week earlier. Is this like a “you really missed out” situation or more of an “I want you to want me but you can’t have me” type thing?
Those are different? I asked.
Yes, are you kidding?! she said. Her fashion sense was enviably refined. You really missed out is a more demure look, like “I’m a mom now, you missed your chance, how dare you let your gaze linger.” The second one is definitely hotter, maybe a plunging neckline—she paused to laugh—something just slightly more suggestive.
That one, I said, laughing. The second one. But nothing that makes him think he has a chance! I’m married, for fuck’s sake. And fuck him, he broke my little teenage heart.
We settled on a pair of Claire’s perfectly faded black pants, and a worn, thin white shirt that showed just the faintest trace of my black bra underneath. For the oppressive Berkeley chill, I added an old denim jacket and wrapped Claire’s most expensive scarf, a pale apricot piece of bohemiana embroidered in black, casually around me. The encounter was an opportunity to show K what he had missed out on, to let him look in for an hour at the pleasantly contained normative bubble that was my life—rented Craftsman on
a quiet street, marriage to a tall, handsome man with a good job, slick black station wagon, and perfect cherubic son. I had no plans to reveal any chinks in my armor.
There were a number of memories of K to choose from—he had hurt me badly, and I’d been cycling through them all since he’d gotten back in touch—but the one powering me that day we met again was of his parting words to me when we’d broken off our relationship more than a decade earlier. You’re going to be an amazing woman someday, he’d said. I’d been only eighteen, and still—or maybe especially because of the fact—that comment had enraged me. That feigned wistfulness beneath which lurked haughty condescension. Going to be an amazing woman, I laughed to myself. He’d been right, of course. I didn’t know shit back then. But I was no longer a teenager—now I was a wife and mother and PhD student with plenty of heartbreak in my rearview mirror and the fresh memory of childbirth, that searing, spectacular loss of innocence, like an amulet in my pocket. I was tough, wise, and hotter than when he’d last seen me. Just try me, I thought.
I thought I knew exactly what I was getting into. I approached him prepared to do what exes do when they meet after much time has passed: take each other in with shining eyes, talk glancingly about what was, gesture playfully at what could have been, and double down on showing off what is. I remembered his charisma well, how disarming his looks and his jokes could be, but it didn’t even occur to me that he might have the power to unzip the life I’d made and step inside. I didn’t think I would let him. It didn’t feel like there was room.
A few months into my “friendship” with K—the chaste, broad-daylight one that hadn’t yet crossed over into infidelity, the friendship of a thousand sodas—I put my son down for a nap and hauled from the garage boxes of my possessions: zines, photographs, cassettes, journals, old show flyers. On the boxes was my husband’s handwriting. He’d packed the last of the contents of our apartment while I was away in New York, and in his harried writing I thought I could read his annoyance at having had to be the one to do it. NINA: RANDOM SHIT, a cluster of boxes read, in the leaning, elementary-school penmanship of so many grown men. How righteous was the surge of anger I felt. My journals are random shit? This is me! I thought. The me you thought you loved but who you don’t want to acknowledge, the me who suddenly has no place in our you-centric universe! But it wasn’t his fault, nor his responsibility. The objects I thought were so important, that had once been most essentially me, proof of my creativity, my family history, my activism, the punk rock scene that had saved my life and nurtured me, I had left moldering in our dank garage. No metaphors were necessary.
When my husband got home from work the day I hauled the boxes out of the garage, our son was watching cartoons and I was sitting on the living room floor in the middle of a life raft made of unsteady stacks of my old things. He must have known trouble was brewing. He cracked a beer and ordered takeout while I sat refilling a juice glass with Bulleit Rye and communing with my teenage self, trying to remember something about who I’d been, who I wanted to be. I took photos of a few flyers to send to K, who I thought would get it. My heart bulged with longing. I sat in the living room and opened the boxes from my past and it felt like the real me was there. The one K had known, the one I was beginning to think he alone had the power to call forth, back into being.
I went to K’s apartment, the one he’d moved into once he was back on his feet and could leave Mompton. I sat on his floor and looked through his records, a significantly smaller collection than he’d once had because he’d sold everything for dope so many times. It felt just like being in his room so many years ago. Now, on the eve of his fortieth birthday, he was still living the same way, a record spinning on the turntable on the floor, his bedroom door closed to the communal areas of the Richmond apartment he shared with some skinny musician. He went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of water and two green apples and we sat on his bed and ate them. I was grateful for the distraction, the opportunity to hold something and to chew. The sourness made me salivate and made my mouth ache at the back, behind my molars. He got up briefly and changed the record, putting on something low and heavy that I had never heard before. He sat down with his legs crossed on his bed. Crisscross applesauce, I thought.
I want to show you something, he said, but I’m afraid it will weird you out.
It won’t, I said.
How do you know? he asked.
Maybe it will, then, but I still want to see it.
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, then opened the wallet and pinched his fingers around a small piece of paper, which he handed to me. It was a color copy of a photo booth picture of me, aged eighteen, with a chignon and sunglasses, biting the long end of a candy cane. It was one of a series that Rachel and I took at the end of high school, blowing all our cash on a dozen variations of sneers and pouts.
Holy shit, I said. I remembered giving it to him.
I’ve been carrying this in my wallet for thirteen years, he said, much to the chagrin of a number of girlfriends. He laughed quietly. I laughed back. I wanted to be that girl outside of time. That there were women he’d loved less—women who would be furious if they knew that he ended up with the girl in the picture—it gave me the electric feeling I was always chasing.
Well, I still have a jar of your pomade. It’s in my medicine cabinet right now, I said. I sometimes take it out and just huff it and think about you.
Really? he asked.
Really, I said. But that’s not quite as creepy.
It might be creepier, actually. So, the picture is creepy? he said.
No, I said. The picture is—I can’t believe you have that. The picture is incredibly romantic.
By the end of the day, I had kissed a man who was not my husband. Some weeks later, I had sex with him. In the hours we couldn’t see each other, we texted incessantly. I don’t know how the average person survives the period of limerence, that chemical insanity of early love, in the age of text messaging. How we avoid crashing our cars, walking into walls or out of open windows. I remember certain bath times or dinner hours when my husband was working late that I spent wholly distracted by the heat of the phone in my hand. The only problem then was that I couldn’t text fast enough, couldn’t possibly say all that I wanted to say to K. Our high-stakes love also came to involve a lot of down time. How many hours of my life were spent waiting for him to text back? I carried out minute acts of housework or personal grooming in the time spent waiting. Surveying split ends. I peered at myself. Sometimes, I was doing too many other things, replying one-handed while getting dressed or opening a yogurt or wiping a child. So many tiny pauses stitched into my every movement. Literally everything I did was interrupted by him. And our texts, which we joked were being read by some rapt phone-company employee somewhere—if you added them together on ticker tape, they could stretch around the globe nine times or something like that. It almost freaked me out how much we had to say to each other, how much we were willing to peck out painstakingly throughout the day. It was a lot. It reminded me of the notebooks my girlfriends and I passed to one another in junior high and high school where we recorded all our gossip and longing, all our bubbly mental overflow. K and I similarly verified our reality—our individual lives and the great caper that was our relationship—by passing details back and forth. We were building our narrative and keeping each other company. It felt compulsive, but it also meant I was low-level fluttering all the time. I got to flutter. I was enlivened by the insistence of this new relationship, the sense of its irrepressibility.
* * *
• • •
I had brought a new man into our lives but I couldn’t let my husband go. I wasn’t ready to; I loved him. I didn’t want to leave my life behind, it was just that when I was with K, that life fell completely away. It was as if none of it had ever happened, as though I hadn’t already sworn myself to my husband. Time
flattened, there was only now, a string of nows, an urgency both insistent and soothing, or maybe soothing in its insistence. To placate my new lover, I had to pretend I didn’t care about my husband’s feelings, but I was plagued by guilt. Every day I wept in shame and anguish, but I still continued on the path I was on. I felt sorry for my husband, who had to live in the humiliation and confusion of our dissolving marriage. I felt sorry for K, to whom I had pledged my undying devotion and who was waiting for me to free myself from my marriage. Mostly, I felt sorry for myself, for having to lead a double life, to metabolize my husband’s pain, my child’s confusion, my lover’s anger. It didn’t seem fair—I was only trying to be happy. Life just kept happening to me in such unfortunate ways. I was a victim of love, and felt further victimized by not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings.
The people-pleaser’s divorce is a nightmare not because it’s dramatic, but because it can scarcely get off the ground. It can scarcely be decided whether it is in fact happening at all, whether it should. I felt so uncertain about whether I was doing the right thing, about what any right thing was, ever—whether I had a right to happiness, a right to inconvenience others, to bring pain and heartache upon them. Another regularly circulated truism of codependency is that we don’t know how we feel. We don’t know how to access that thing people call a “gut feeling.” Because the bonds that feel closest in our lives were forged in chaos and caretaking, we don’t know how to access that inner truth that is meant to guide us through our lives, keep us out of danger, direct us toward well-being. And even if we can locate a feeling, we often can’t express it. I never, ever, ever, EVER just say what I mean, a young man once memorably said at an Al-Anon meeting. Rather, we seek the outcome we desire through blaming, manipulating, or controlling others, or simply through inaction.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 15
