Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  This would be like that, wouldn’t it? I had to either find a way to leave or become someone who is regularly strangled, who fears for her life.

  Never again, he told me. It never did happen again. But still, it was a new bar, an event that had moved the poles of our relationship. I pictured an explorer in the arctic, picking up a flag and trudging farther into the snow to set a new marker, some brutal new extreme.

  There is no poetry to be found in the moment when a man has his hand wrapped around your neck and it might be the end for you. In the afterword for her memoir, Heart Berries, writer Terese Marie Mailhot is interviewed by poet Joan Naviyuk Kane about the stakes of being a Native American woman writing about her life. They talk in particular about Mailhot’s stories of abuse. “People seem so resistant to let women write about these experiences,” she says, “and they sometimes resent when the narrative sounds familiar. It’s almost funny, because, yeah—there is nothing new about what they do to us. We can write about it in new ways, but what value are we placing on newness? Familiarity is boring, but these fucking people—they keep hurting us in the same ways.”

  What value are we placing on newness? Why should it be new? The entire point of writing it down is acknowledging how profoundly, heartbreakingly not new it is. How obvious.

  I openly flirted with the idea of leaving him. It’s what I should do, I said. What any sane woman would do. I wouldn’t blame you, he replied. But I stayed.

  I felt I’d provoked him. Helpless as I felt watching his irrational anger flare, I sometimes enjoyed playing my part, pushing him to his edge and watching him dangle there. He instinctually clenched his fists when he got that angry. He tried to leave the room but I followed him, continuing the conversation, continuing to escalate.

  Walk away from me, he said slowly through gritted teeth.

  No, I said, fitting as much hurt and haughtiness into that tiny syllable as possible. Talk to me, I pleaded. Why are you walking away? He was walking away because he was afraid he would hurt me, and a part of me wanted him to. If I could push him far enough, he would do something or say something that would confirm again immediately that he was the bad one, that he was a savage. Maybe he would do something that would break this spell once and for all.

  Soon after this incident—“the incident,” it is called, still, in my head—K started talking about sobriety with renewed conviction. He let the justifications go—his philosophies of heroin addiction as some kind of ethos, some punk removal from society. He stopped explaining away his behavior or even talking about it and began to turn himself toward help, texting old friends in the program, going out in the evenings with a paperback Big Book and coming home with a Starbucks cup.

  Are you gonna try again? I said.

  I have to, he said.

  There was so much hurt, so much damage between us that the entire pursuit was shaded with told-you-so energy, as early bids for sobriety often are. I’ll show you, I could practically see him thinking. I didn’t care. Whatever it took.

  chapter twenty-seven

  When I talk about the vomit, blood, and piss of addiction, the lying and the shouting and the strangling, I am speaking in the idiom of drug addicts, of addiction memoirs and AA meetings with their “I-was-so-fucked-up” bravado. If you know these people or read these books, you will have heard these tales. They are some combination of ghost story (meant to haunt you), fight story (meant to entertain you), and humble-brag (meant to impress you). A shock that gives way to healing. If you get around a certain type, they will go on. Blacked-out road trips, pills plucked from puke (lest they go to waste), reluctant trick-turning, overdoses in Burger King bathrooms, burglary with babies left home alone. One constant is failed love affairs, the list of names that could be dashed off like tick after tick scratched into a prison wall or a bedpost. Each one of those names representing an elaborate web of hope and misery, a Greek tragedy. The trail of people like me left in their wake.

  I write in this idiom, I think, to be taken seriously as a member of this tribe. And yet I am not one.

  The paradox of living with a drug addict is that you can never really “get” what it’s like; then again, neither can they. K was the person with the most acute expression of this disease that I’d ever seen, the person whose life chances seemed to plummet by the week. He was the one doing all the vomiting, who knew what it was like to wake up dopesick on a slate-grey rainy morning and have to go out into the cruel world to find his next shot. He was the one who, on the way to the bathroom at seven-fifteen in the morning, took long, frigid slugs from the handle of vodka in the freezer and then shut his eyes tightly, snapping his fingers through the brain freeze. He was the one who logged months—one time more than a year—sober, doing push-ups in the living room, incessantly meeting his sponsor for coffee, toting the spiral notebook in which he wrote down his feelings. The clean-smelling, gum-smacking wholesomeness of that hope against hope! Only to go back out—more drugs, more lies, back in the same grinding routine. Hundreds of days of effort seemingly gone within seventy-two hours. Only he knew what it felt like to fuck up that grandly. He was also the one who got to be high.

  But he couldn’t see what I could, couldn’t see his own fallen face when he was really strung out, the maudlin sad-clown downturn of his cheeks and mouth, which made him look like the man who used to sleep outside my office building. He couldn’t see the predictable arc of his drunk, from flushed and manic and loving to slurry and angry—usually around 11:15 A.M., when I could expect mystifying, hateful text messages alleging that I’d cheated or deconstructing one of my character defects—to apologetic later, though often a bit too exhausted to be truly contrite. He couldn’t see just how painfully obvious were the wounds of his childhood, nor how lovable he was, nor how much he shone when he rose to the challenge of doing right by the world. It was easy for me to believe that in fact I knew the contours and the impact of this disease every bit as well as he did—maybe even better.

  I started to mentally prepare for K’s death—to brace for it, and maybe even to hope for it a little. It’s humiliating—a form of neglect—to be the widow of a living man, a man who would just as soon be dead. His absence at my side began to feel flagrant, conspicuous. It was infuriating. So there were days, I admit, when the idea of his death, viewed from a certain angle and in a certain light, looked like it might offer relief. I was always waiting for the phone call at that point anyway.

  I let the movie play in my head. I knew I couldn’t prepare for what it would feel like the moment I heard that piece of news and knew it was really true. You can’t prepare for that. So I imagined everything after that—the Internet friends who would surface to tell their stories in tiny type beneath photos of him in his youth. I imagined that it would be lonely, that the future—a kind of forever quiet—would open like a trapdoor in the floor.

  We didn’t share any friends. He’d burrowed deeply into some underworld where I wasn’t welcome, and he adamantly kept me from that world. One day he texted me while walking from a record store down to the Mission. The cops are talking about me. They’re after me, he wrote. Meet me. I told him I was in the city with Claire and that we weren’t heading home for a little while, but if he wanted to meet up with us, he could get a ride back to the East Bay. I told him where we were parked, across from the Whiz Burgers on Eighteenth and South Van Ness, and said we’d meet him there. He got in the back of the car when he got there and started telling us a story we couldn’t quite understand, speaking in junkie tongues, a paranoid tale about being pursued by the cops, by a rival, some graffiti writers who were looking for him. Everyone was looking for him, and he just had to get out of the city, he was so grateful that we could take him. Thank you so much, he said. Next to each other in the driver’s and passenger’s seats, Claire and I exchanged furtive glances. With the windows down, we muttered to each other and he was too distracted or too high to hear. What is going on? Cl
aire asked nervously. I looked over at her. He is beginning to lose the thread, I said. He’s losing his mind.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  When K gets sober, we enjoy a couple months of unadulterated relief. Joy. Glee, as I watch him transform back into the gorgeous boy I fell in love with. He is rewarded—with steaks, with sex, dates, and drawings from the children. He moves back in. It’s as though he has returned from a mission to space.

  For dish towels and picture frames and a rug for the kids’ room, we go to IKEA and inhabit briefly every small space decorated with sample furniture, every other imaginary life. It feels, finally, like we are a normal family. It’s good to be back, he says, as we sit awkwardly on a too-firm sofa, and I can feel my wide, happy smile drawing back either side of my face.

  Then, more time passes. He goes out all the time (“Damn your old meetings!”) and is on his phone all the time. I find that I am angry at him every day for not doing the dishes, for not even thinking to clear the table, to put away the clean plates and bowls and mugs in the dishwasher, to dismantle the jagged, many-tined and -tonged horizon line of the silverware holder, the part of unloading I most hate. We have the usual, timeworn conversation:

  ME: [banging around the kitchen passive-aggressively, dropping a ladle into the utensil drawer from a considerable height]

  HIM: Do you need help?

  ME: Uh, yeah, I do. [Sigh.] I need you to occasionally do the dishes.

  HIM: Right. Well, all you have to do is ask.

  ME: But I don’t want to have to ask. It defeats the purpose if I have to ask—that means I’m still entirely in charge of the household and am simply delegating a task. It’s not the same as you taking the initiative to do something.

  HIM: You want me to want to do the dishes?

  ME: Yes.

  HIM: [Laughing] That’s never gonna happen, honey.

  But then one day I hear him doing the dishes, and here’s what I do not think: Yes! No, there is no yes at all. I think: He is running the water too long. He’ll damage my nice pan. He doesn’t know where anything goes. I am so accustomed to thinking of him as unwilling and unable—useless—that I find it is very hard to stop. And, of course, he has not exactly become useful overnight. Wanting to do the dishes, to lighten my load? That was never gonna happen. He is, as ever, comfortable with my exhaustion, depletion, frustration. He is doing the thing I wanted but surely he can’t be doing it right. I have to fight the impulse to go into the kitchen and take over, or oversee. The impulse is not an abstraction. It feels like an itch inside my fingers.

  Sometimes, even this degree of unremarkable domestic discord pleases me. Months later, I hear about the impending separation of a couple I know. They are seemingly perfect—wealthy and attractive, with a large, clean, beautiful house and one small child. (“Big house, no sex,” my mother used to say.) Their separation will surprise everyone, but I soon learn the even more surprising details—that their marriage is dissolving quite like mine did. The husband has been unable to extricate himself from a long affair with an ex. How immature! I think.

  The revelation of the couple’s separation happens the same week as the anniversary of my wedding to my now ex-husband. I wake up that August morning with a feeling of confusion that lingers through coffee and only resolves once I realize what the date is. I stand in the bathroom looking into the mirror and I think about how different my face looks from the one I saw in the mirror on my wedding day. It isn’t possible to trace exactly how it’s changed. Well, a few new lines are, in fact, quite traceable, but otherwise it’s just a knowing, a sense of temporal weight gathered in the cells of my skin. “Tragedy plus time equals comedy,” I always read in profiles of comedians. It’s a pithy formulation, but not always true. Tragedy plus time is just a strange, stoic silence, the hovering grey of a Bay Area morning—the sadness of the toast crumbs, but many years on, at the relieving but ultimately still wearisome point when the crumbs don’t make me cry. I find I can accommodate all the small, sedimented griefs of my life, and I know that more are coming. Isn’t tragedy plus time just adulthood?

  I feel bad thinking about their kid, who will have to endure divorce. At least mine didn’t have years of memories of the family together to sift when we split. Then again, they didn’t get to enjoy those years of having an intact family. I think back on the depression I felt in the first year or two of marriage, which manifested largely as shattered perspective. A hypersensitivity that made me tear up at the crinkling sound of a stranger’s bag of chips. I couldn’t see people’s faces properly. I would home in on the under-eye bags of other passengers on the subway.

  Sarah and Justin are splitting up, I tell K later that night as I’m preparing dinner. I mention it casually, though I have known for a while that it was really happening. In truth, the other couple’s split has been reverberating like a cymbal crash throughout my week. But I haven’t wanted to share it with him and subject it to his laser-focused scrutiny. Moreover, Al-Anon reminds me that it has nothing to do with me. It’s not my life, not my business.

  I haven’t mentioned my wedding anniversary to K either. He is sober and at this point the mention of my ex-husband isn’t likely to start a fight, but still I stay silent. I keep opening my mouth to say something and then think better of it. Why do I want him to know?

  The life we are leading by this point is one that for so long lay beyond my wildest dreams, an outgrowth of that seedling of a fantasy I planted so many years earlier and set about watering in my psycho hothouse way. The picture of my life I stared at so long, like a madwoman, willing it to change, to grow. Here it is, at last: K and I, sober, cooking dinner and dissecting other fucked-up people’s relationships like a real husband and wife.

  He takes a long pull from one of the bottles of cherry kombucha we bought at Whole Foods just the day before—two for five dollars on sale. One for me, one for you, he’d said as he put them in the cart. But he’s already drunk one—I know because the empty is in the recycling bin—and the one he’s now opening is the second one. My bottle. I have to try to pry the tentacles of my mind off of each of these things as they happen. Convince myself that they are insignificant. I cannot stop myself from noticing them. Or (often) mentioning them.

  That one mine? I ask casually as he wipes his top lip. I move browning cubes of eggplant around in a frying pan with the turquoise spatula from my old wedding registry. It has also browned around the edges from years of use. A hundred pancakes. A million eggs.

  I don’t know, it was just in the fridge, he says.

  Does he really not know? Surely, he remembers one for me, one for you. He leans against the counter and continues to take long, annoying man-sips. Who wants the divorce? he asks.

  What?

  Who wants it, Sarah or Justin?

  Oh, I say. Justin, I guess? Well, actually, probably Sarah. He’s been having an affair with an ex-girlfriend. He just can’t quit her. So much for the perfect family.

  K laughs gruffly, unsympathetically. What an idiot, he says. Haven’t you told them we’re the absolute best-case scenario and we’re still miserable?

  That’s cute, I say, but inside I relish the comment. That we could have made it this far, to this other form of misery, the one borne of stability, familiarity. I think of the poor divorcing souls, how she’ll probably call me soon, as the moms do. I think about an affair: the torment, the hidden texts, the clandestine calls, the sense of stealing something forbidden. I have empathy; I can understand how such things happen. But I am dizzy with gratitude that the urgency powering such an idea seems remote, that I can no longer really relate.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  Just after dinner, my ex-husband calls. He is still at work. I picture him at his office desk, though the memory of what it looks like is years old. I haven’t been there in ages. I wonder if he has a pho
to of the kids somewhere visible and if so, which one it is.

  Where are my diamonds? he asks when I answer the phone.

  What diamonds?

  It’s our diamond anniversary, he informs me. Ten years.

  It’s ten years? I ask, stricken. God, I groan, I thought today was nine.

  Ten, he confirms playfully. I can hear him smiling. He is newly engaged to his girlfriend, whose ring I’ve seen in person recently and looked at again on Instagram.

  My parents used to do this, too, talk on their anniversary even after they’d split. It became complicated by the fact that their wedding day, also in August, fell on the same day as Jim’s birthday. I imagine my mother had to sneak away, or wait until Jim was out of the house, to call my father and sigh the heavy, reciprocal sigh of the divorced. It can be such a comfort, that sighing, but the shared history and information it wordlessly communicates is a threat to all but the most confident partners. Around them, we are careful not to relax too much into that old proficiency. Tragedy plus time plus comfort equals something our current partners don’t find particularly cute.

  For our paper anniversary—one year—I commissioned a friend to tattoo on me the image of a love letter, a small envelope sealed with a heart above a banner with my husband’s name. It was done shallowly, shakily, a bit drunkenly, in our kitchen one night while our then-five-month-old son was asleep. I straddled a wobbly chair and eyed the sticky patches on the cream-colored linoleum floor while our friend worked with the buzzing gun, outlining the tattoo on the back of my right shoulder. Once it healed, he’d come back, he said, to fill in the violets in purple, the heart in red. We never did finish it, though. It’s still without color, and now badly faded.