A gloomy winter darkness was settling over the city when I made my way back home across the park a few hours later. I saw Christmas lights blinking cheerfully in our apartment. She’s changed her mind, I thought, changed her mind and decided to stop whining, to “buck up.” I hurried up the stairs in a state of palpable relief, put my key in the lock and yanked open the door. Soft music played on the radio; the kitchen was immaculate, plates stacked in the holder, counters scrubbed. I went into the bedroom. Her cupboard was empty, the hangers still clinking. She must have put on the Christmas lights to lessen the impact of her departure.
At four o’clock the next morning, I rose from my bed like a madman, looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, looked at her empty cupboard again (no, I had not been dreaming) and lay back down in a fever. A sinister daybreak stole over the neighbourhood. Everything looked different: the mailman more coarsely featured; vicious children on their way to school. A pair of black dogs copulated on the front lawn.
Near noon, I called Molly’s father, a sweet-natured man, at his dental practice. Yes, he knew where she was and gave me the name. A girlfriend’s house. More dialing. Yes, she was there. (Everyone so kind this morning; was that, I wondered, because they wished me well or felt sorry for me and wanted to cushion the blow?) Molly came to the phone. Trying to find the right tone of jollity, I said, “Boy, I bet you had a pretty nutty sleep last night.”
Except she had no idea what I was talking about. Molly came over that evening; she looked ravishing, newly minted in a way that terrified me. I could feel my confidence ebbing away. I suggested it would be “all right” if she wanted to come back. No? I proposed marriage; I offered to give up drinking; I did everything but hang upside down from the shower rack by my feet. To all of which she said, sweetly, no, thank you.
Gradually, over the next few days, it occurred to me that this was a nightmare from which I was unlikely to awaken any time soon. I could feel it in my stomach, even before she could manage to say the actual words: I’d lost her. (Was this the black train from my Sparrow Night?)
Crazed with insomnia and not eating, I went to a psychiatrist M. recommended. (Perfect, your ex-wife looks after you when your lover bolts!) He was a vaguely Asian-looking man with a gentle manner and a handy prescription pad. “What does your gut tell you?” he said.
“That she’s not coming back.”
“Then you’re probably right,” he said, and scribbled a scrip for some little green pills that gave me about fifteen minutes’ relief before they wore off. I burnt through a month’s supply in a matter of days.
Not long after (by my standards, anyway) Molly took up with another man, a tall, failed musician (I add forgivingly) who worked at the same television network I did and had a desk not twenty feet from mine. Which meant that I saw him daily. Every time I turned the corner and headed through the newsroom to the elevators, I passed his desk. He worked in a position considerably beneath mine, but somehow, from the second I learned he was fucking my precious Molly, that seemed like a card in his favour: the signature of a rebel, of a man who wasn’t afraid of non-achievement. Whereas for me, my stature seemed like an indictment, a proof of my conformity, as if I had made a team that wasn’t worth making; had joined a golf club that seemed prestigious but once you made it inside revealed its mediocre trappings.
When I glimpsed the musician in the morning, my chest seizing like a car engine, I thought to myself, He has just left her bed; and a whole series of not very original but excruciating images would start up in my imagination. I saw her doing this, doing that. Sometimes, as I passed close by him in the cafeteria or in the queue at the elevator, I thought I could smell her on his skin.
It seemed to me that there couldn’t be a God, that no one could be so spiteful as to have my Molly leave me for—of all the humans on earth—a man who sat a few desks away. I know what you’re thinking, reader. You’re thinking, That’s the point, dummy. That’s why she did it. But I don’t think so. I think Molly chose him because she liked him; I don’t think, to be fair, she gave a second’s thought to where he sat or even worked in the early days of their love affair; and that when she did, she probably would’ve preferred for things to not have played out quite that way. I think Molly was glad to be rid of me, like an oppressive darkness standing over her, but I don’t think she wanted me to suffer. She simply wanted away.
But my God, coincidence can be cruel. One day, it was a late November afternoon, darkness growing over the city, grains of snow pelting soundlessly against the windows, I was drifting around the building up on the eighth floor; I was safe up there. He never went there. But as I was walking down a line of desks, producers busy, getting ready for the evening news, running footage in editing suites, scrolling down computer screens, I passed the desk of a young woman, Evelyn Dunne. I’d forgotten she worked up there. She had cream-white skin that erupted occasionally and a large, attractive bosom which was hard to take your eyes off, even when you were hearing about an earthquake in Mexico City, 25,000 people dead. (“Shall we wait till it gets to 50,000 and then lead with it?”) She was effervescent and friendly and always wore black.
I knew—because I’d seen them together early one morning in the flea market—that Evelyn had “dated” the musician. In fact, I’d met them together once. Molly, who had known him as a child, introduced us, a foursome on the summer sidewalk, no one suspecting how extraordinarily full of surprises life was and that these surprises awaited all four of us just down the road.
I passed by her desk, my head down. I wanted to avoid a conversation, with its inevitable adrenalin-prompting questions. “No, I don’t know what Molly’s up to these days.” Or, “Yes, I have lost a little weight.” I needn’t have worried. Evelyn was talking on the phone and had other concerns. I heard her say in a plaintive voice, a voice that vibrated with upset but tried to pass itself off as high-spirited, “But you never call me!”
In an instant, like being mugged from behind, I realized she was talking to the musician; that she’d been dumped; that he’d stopped coming around, stopped phoning because he had a new girlfriend. And that new girlfriend was Molly. My Molly.
It didn’t seem to matter where I went in the city; I couldn’t escape from the horror that she was gone (how I missed her body, her skin) and that she was fucking another man in all the ways that she’d fucked me. People repeat themselves, especially if it works.
I thought sometimes, imagining them together at night, that I was going to pass out from the pain. And that this pain might be doing actual physical damage to my brain.
Some afternoons, I’d look over; he had his long feet up on the desk, he was chatting breezily on the phone (while I looked on like Count Dracula), and I knew he was talking to her, that they were, as a couple does, exchanging the high points of their day, making a plan for the evening; joking perhaps about a little bit of naughtiness the night before. I was afraid, too, they were talking about me, a whispered, “Oh yes, he’s right over there. Looking pretty wrung out if you ask me.”
I expect my suffering, for she knew me well, knew I was suffering, gave Molly no pleasure. But I felt it gave him pleasure, the sight of me worn thin with jealousy and sleeplessness. I thought this because I’d thought that way about other men when I “took” their girlfriends away. (As if you can take away a happy woman!) But how ungenerous I’d been, how smug, how quietly convinced that superiority (mine) had taken the day. And now I was paying for it. Bent over, a sharp stick up my bum, I’d been forced to my knees, the object of public (I felt) ridicule (everyone knows!).
I entertained thoughts of death. I wished him dead. No, to be honest, I wished her dead. Not O.J. Simpson– style, but a car accident, a brain tumour, something where I might turn up at her funeral with a long face (I saw myself in an Edwardian jacket) and commiserate with her parents in a clear, sincere voice. A voice that sought to pass off relief—he’s not fucking her anymore—as sincerity.
I often thought, getting up in the night t
o change my sweat-soaked T-shirt for the third time, I thought: I’d be better off dead than feeling like this. I looked at my gaunt face in the bathroom mirror, the light too bright, and daydreamed of catching a terminal disease. Not to punish her. But as a release for me. An honourable release. You can despise a man for committing suicide but not for dying of a disease, I “reasoned.”
That February, I woke up too early every morning; it was just getting light. It was always getting light. How will I get through the whole day? This endless, interminable day, a series of grinding, meaningless, rewardless exertions. I wandered naked around the apartment. I imagined her in her bed with the musician, I saw the light come through their curtained windows, I saw them stir slowly from sleep, I saw them . . . why go on? There were mornings when I hurried over to Catherine’s house (my second ex-wife now for six years), when I banged on the door at six-thirty in the morning, when I stood in the darkness of her bedroom saying over and over, “I can’t stand another day of this . . .”
“Get in bed,” she’d say. “Get in bed and go to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep. I cannot endure the horrors of what I see when I close my eyes.”
“Then let me sleep,” she said softly. “I have to sleep.”
How could an ex-wife be so kind, so gentle? How lucky I was.
I waited three months for Molly to come back. I sat on the end of my bed looking over the park that lay just beneath my window; there were children who came there to skate every morning; in the afternoon, teenagers played ball hockey; at night, when the lights overhead came on and washed the ice in a surreal brightness, couples, sometimes with a small child in a snowsuit between them, skated around and around and around; at midnight, the lights went off, poof, the ice fell into darkness; and then little by little, a dreamy oval came back into focus under the moonlight.
I lost twenty pounds. I considered a conversion to Christianity—anything to make her come back. I burst into tears in restaurants, went home with a transvestite by mistake. Why did I never, not once, call her up and say simply, Please come back to me? It wouldn’t have done the cause any good, I know that, but it would have done me good, just to say it, just to have the courage to put out my hand, knowing it was going to get slapped and returned empty. But I was afraid to hear the actual words, their finality. When a woman leaves you, I’ve learned, she tends to have done her homework before she hits the door. The sound you hear is the click of a vault closing and you’re on the wrong side of it.
As winter faded into spring, dark patches appeared here and there in the ice below my window and no one came to skate there anymore.
Going through the laundry cupboard one night, I was looking for a fresh pillow slip, I came across—it almost burned my fingers—an old birthday card from Molly, a yellow card with a big happy face on it. Finding a love letter from a woman who once loved you and doesn’t anymore is a special kind of agony. I opened it up: “How I adore you,” she wrote. “How lucky I am to have met you . . .” It was unendurable to read the words, the glow they gave off. And to then remember that she no longer felt that way, that I hadn’t seen her for months, that she was in another man’s bed now, or having breakfast with him or listening to the radio in the morning while she and he got ready to go to work. She, who had so loved you, was gone forever.
Another Sunday. Having exhausted my sleeping pills and tranquilizers and painkillers for fabricated toothaches, I awoke, again, at a brutal hour, the bright yellow sunlight stabbing at me through the curtains. I threw back the covers, rumbled through the unused clothes drawer, found a pair of sweatpants (a brief nod to Molly’s fitness regimen), put them on and, without even brushing my teeth, fled my apartment as though evacuating an earthquake. I went jogging—jogging of all things!—over to Queen’s Park near the Parliament buildings. Around and around I ran, the sun getting brighter, the park deserted except for the lunatic and the homeless and the heartbroken, when I heard, I swear to God I heard, the sound of large feet clomping behind me, getting closer and closer and closer. I looked over my shoulder—it was him! The musician, out for a morning run, and running, I might add, with a younger, more ferocious, happier stride than mine. He passed me on the left without looking me in the eye and charged ahead. Sorry for me, perhaps. Showing off. Exhilarated after another night of sexually ravaging my Molly. Who knows? But watching him pull ahead, Jesus, talk about a metaphor, talk about God giving you a kick in the groin just when you’re trying to stumble to your feet.
There was no escaping. I saw him all day: his bony elbows, sleeves rolled up, casual, artful; his long musician’s fingers. Ugh. When I left the television studio, I hurried through the spring half-light, the air fresh, couples everywhere, toward a bar on Queen Street. I had an hour or so, a reprieve. They’re having dinner now, I’d think. They’re having dinner with friends: frivolous laughter. Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha. Foolish jokes. Jokes that she wouldn’t have made or laughed at in my presence. (Part of the problem, perhaps.) Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha.
Morons.
But then, as midnight approached, gong, gong, gong, I had a sensation of a worn leather belt tightening around my chest until I could barely breathe. They’re going home now; they’re climbing the stairs to his apartment, they’re going in the door; he goes to the bathroom, clank, she goes to the bedroom, she stands there for a second, thinking about something (what is she thinking? is she thinking about me?), and unbuttons her shirt, thoughtfully (she is thinking about work tomorrow, not me at all), and drops it on the chair; absent-mindedly unhooks her bra, her jeans drop to the floor; she picks them up, folds them and crawls into bed as the bathroom door opens and he comes into the room . . .
Was this, I wondered again, what lay at the heart of those Sparrow Nights on Sanibel Island, the anticipation of some unknown pain in store for me? The alligator under the bridge eyeing me expressionlessly as I crossed over for my morning swim?
Somewhere near two in the morning, sitting on the edge of my bed, staring into the park below, I turned my eyes toward the glowing clock on my bedside table. “They’re asleep,” I thought. And for a few moments I felt relief. Almost as if I’d gotten over her.
On it went.
And then one day I woke up thinking about something other than Molly. And that, as we all know, is the beginning of the end. You wake up thinking about a letter that needs mailing, a bill that should be paid, a toenail that needs clipping, and that is the beginning of the end of her. Time speeds up again; and after a while there are other people in your bed, other voices on the phone. And when you see people in the park under your window, they aren’t an accusation of anything; they are, again, just people in the park. On it goes.
Eleven or twelve years went by, and one spring evening my wife, Rachel, and I and our young daughter were driving home from somewhere when we passed the park, the one right under the window of my former apartment. It was Victoria Day, the grass teemed with parents and children. Dogs chased each other through the darkness. We pulled over and got out. Fireworks erupted, people cried out and clapped; our daughter, a thoughtful baby finger in her mouth, fastened her huge blue eyes onto the spectacle. A Roman candle sparkled and hissed and shot forth a cascade of blue and green and orange exploding balls; and as they reached their apex and began a slow descent to earth, in their light, I saw Molly; she was at the far edge of the park just under my old window; and on each side of her, at shoulder level, stood a boy—they were her twin sons. One of them turned his head up to her ear and whispered something and she smiled and wrapped her arms around him and hugged him. And I tried to remember that winter and that awful spring, sitting on the end of my bed, looking down at the very spot where she now stood with her children; and instead of feeling nothing, which I expected, I felt the most extraordinary sadness, a truly deep grief, not from wanting her back, but for how much I had loved her and how sad I’d been, and how, even though we shared a bed for six years, we had never spoken again.
And then another burst of vermilion exploded
above their heads and she started across the grass with her sons; they passed in front of us, not ten yards away, my wife, my daughter staring at the sky, clapping, Molly walking by, over to the far side of the park, when she reached her hand behind her back; her small hand hung there for a moment and then I swear she wriggled her fingers. It was barely a wave, if that’s what it was at all. Perhaps she was scratching her back. But I don’t think so. I think it was a little wave that said . . . I don’t know what it said, hello maybe, goodbye maybe, or simply, yes, yes.
Then she was gone, and that night, for the first time in years, I had a happy dream about her. I don’t remember what it was, but when I woke up, it seemed as though we had just spoken and it had gone well.
10
The Big Circle
Hollywood, 2008. We are walking along Sunset Boulevard, my twenty-two-year-old son, Nick, and I. It’s early evening, the sky an eggshell blue; traffic is picking up steam; it’s Friday night. We are in town, the two of us, on a book tour, the book in question being an account of how, with my permission, Nick dropped out of school at sixteen and spent the following three years watching movies in the living room with me. It’s a strangely popular book, more popular, in fact, than anything I’ve published in twenty-five years, probably because it’s not about me, but about how much I adore my son. No one can resist a great love story.
We’ve been on the road for three weeks now, in and out of New York a couple of times, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Santa Monica, San Jose and now Hollywood. This is our last stop before we go home and return to our separate lives. For my part, I’ll be sorry when the tour ends, not that I need to be interviewed anymore but because I’ll miss his company. We travel well together. It’ll be a long time before I go through airport security without thinking of him in his stocking feet, the agent waving a metal detector up and down his tall body. It’s peculiar the things one’s memory grasps onto.
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