by Olga Grushin
I did not love my husband when I married him.
I never loved him—and deep inside, I must have always known it.
Oh, of course, I was infatuated once—more, I was smitten, for he was handsome, he was brilliant, he was worldly, he was rich, he was ambitious, he was generous, he was absolutely everything a sad young girl with clouds and dreams for feelings could have wished for. And yet I did not love him, not in the deep, true sense, not in the way Melissa loves Tom, not in the way I love my children, not in the way our stern, no-nonsense, widowed mother loved the three of us. But as a child, I had often found her love heavy, demanding, disapproving, damaging even, so I had come to long for a different kind of love to find refuge in, to escape to—an easy love, a pretty love, a fairy-tale love. There is no easy love, of course, but at twenty-one, at twenty-two, I could not have possibly known it, and when something much like it came dazzling into my life, all my future selves, all my unrealized chances, all my untold stories seemed but a paltry price to pay for it—and a price I paid gladly. No one had robbed me of anything—I myself made the choice to give away my freedom, to give away my fire. And it never even occurred to me that I could say no, because how can you say no when fate singles you out, raises you out of the common muck as someone special, someone deserving of an ideal life, a life in which everything is easy, everything soft, everything gentle, and no one ever barks a harsh word, and no one ever slaps you, and no hard-drinking fathers die of heart attacks at the age of thirty-eight, and no hardworking mothers, old and gray before their time, cry nightly at the kitchen table before growing grim and estranged. But in this ideal life, everyone glides with the oily predictability of porcelain figurines in a decorative music box, one-two-three, one-two-three, and your days are like a never-ending teatime, everything polite and elegant and gilded just like some picture of a smiling princess in a powdered cake of a palace in a fairy-tale book. And maybe this life has no depth, and maybe it has no spark, that may be true, everything may well be somewhat flat, everything slightly dulled, even kisses may well taste of dust and ice, because proper fairy tales do not need any depth and you yourself tossed passion away when you married a seemingly flawless man whom you never loved, whom you were not in love with, whom, in truth, you never even wanted to take to your bed, for there had always been something in him, something too slick, too cold, too perfect, something that you disliked, something that held you off. And yet, at the time, it all made such sense, and you were like a young hopeful fly carried away by a luminous drop of sweet nectar, intoxicated, blinded by the luster, not knowing that the fresh-smelling sap would soon calcify into hard amber and you would be trapped in all that suffocating golden light, you would be trapped, trapped, trapped—
“It will be all right, everything will be all right,” Melissa is repeating, holding my shoulders as I weep, speaking to me in that soothing tone I have heard her use with her daughters.
Gloria sets down her glass, abruptly.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she announces, “but I’m a tad inebriated now, and you’re bawling anyway, so what the hell. The cad hit on me when I met him. Put his hand under my skirt. The last time I ever wore a skirt, I believe. Remember that gallery opening I invited you to? You’d only just gotten engaged. I didn’t tell anyone because I thought you loved him. I should have, maybe. Probably. But I was young. We were all so fucking young. Look, I’m sorry, all right?”
“Oh my God. He hit on me, too. At the rehearsal party, the night before you got married.” Melissa releases my shoulders. “He followed me into the ladies’ room and tried to kiss me. I was mortified. That’s why I acted a bit funny at the wedding. And why I never liked visiting you in later years. I felt horrible. Just horrible.”
“Oh, me too,” Gloria says. “Me too.”
The three of us look at one another across the widening hush.
“Would it help in any way,” Melissa begins, tentatively, “if Gloria and I testify at your trial? I mean, it may not be much, but all the same . . .”
And then everything speeds up again, the way things tend to in my life when something momentous is happening, and I am too overwhelmed to focus on any one instant for long, so everything runs together, in a stream of blurring snapshots, from the late-night, somewhat slurred, telephone call to my lawyer, to her conversations with my sisters, to the rushed meeting arranged for the very next morning, only one day before the trial is scheduled to start, where I find myself, bleary-eyed, with an incipient headache and my heart in my throat, sitting at a blond-wood conference table across from a sleek-suited man representing my husband, his cuffs crisp like abstract sculptures, his golden cuff links blinding, and my own lawyer, dumpy in comparison yet formidable and calm, is issuing demands, and the man is fuming and bustling and whispering into his phone and then subsiding, retreating, until, hours later, yet somehow all at once, numbers are thrown about, and days of the week are bandied back and forth, the talk of summer vacations, college payments, and suddenly there it is, a stack of papers crisp before me, still warm from the printer, the divorce agreement. I sign, here, and here, and here, and the sleek man disappears with the stack as I sit at the table, gasping a little, stunned by the magical speed of the events unfolding—and when the man returns, his cuffs seem less crisp, dampened with sweat, and my husband’s many-angled, spiky signatures darken all the pages underneath my own tremulous scrawls.
And just like that, we are done.
And oh, of course, there are details and clauses to pore over, weekends when the kids will stay with him, modest financial concessions granted to me—all of which I will process later, later. This is the bare substance, this is what I know right now: There will be no trial. He will keep all his money. I will have Angie and Ro.
* * *
• • •
I walk through the evening city happier than I have been in my entire life. I feel light as a feather. I feel like singing. I feel as though my feet are not touching the ground. All clichés, and all perfectly true. I am going home, to prepare for the children, who will be returned to me tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow . . . And so what if my neighborhood is far removed from the cool, rarefied heights of Fifth Avenue, so what if my apartment is small, my building shabby, my furniture secondhand—none of this is important, and all the important things I have in abundance. I fly home through the darkening streets, and am already fumbling with the keys at the front door, so happy, so happy, when a voice hits me in the back.
“Jane.”
I freeze, the keys clutched in my hand.
“Jane.”
I inhale, turn slowly.
Roland.
My former prince.
He stands on the sidewalk, hands shoved into his pockets, slightly out of breath, as though he has been running after me for some blocks. His haircut is expensive, his suit immaculate, his shoes shine like mirrors, and yet he seems disarrayed, he seems nervous, his figure not nearly as imposing, his face not nearly as handsome as I remember it. I have not seen him in months, but it feels like years. In fact, it feels almost as if I am now seeing him for the first time ever—seeing him in real life, outside my memories, outside my fantasies.
And he is not as I imagined him.
“What do you want?” I ask. “Are we not done?”
He begins to talk, his mouth sneering, his voice harsh. Everything, he tells me, has worked out just as he willed it, because I am a fool and he had me where he wanted me from the very beginning. He never intended to have full custody of the children, he has no time for it, he has a business to attend to, demanding it was just a trick to make me give up all my financial claims. I could have walked away with millions, but instead I left everything, everything, on the table, so easily manipulated, so naive, did I not realize that he would have signed away so much to avoid the publicity of the trial, there was never going to be any trial anyway, I played right into his hands . . . And he talks,
and he talks, and I can tell that he wants me to grow angry, wants to stomp out the happiness he must see in my face—but oddly, whatever words he says, they seem to have no effect, for I hear, am surprised to hear, other words moving just beneath them, words of uncertainty, words of hurt.
Why did you make me believe, right at the end, that there might be some hope for us, after all? That night, the night you left, why did you kiss me? Why were you not there for me when my father died?
Why did you marry me if you felt no passion for me?
And as I look at him, standing crumpled and angry on the sidewalk, his mouth working around barbed words, his eyes pained, I realize that I, too, will have to face the wrongs I have committed. With time, I may even be ready to acknowledge the truth behind his cardboard cutout in the shape of a storybook villain. Perhaps my ever-so-sage therapist will tell me that his clumsy passes at my sisters before our wedding were his own cries for help, his own attempts to escape the fairy-tale marriage that fate was driving him into yet which he felt wrong in his bones—and someday, perhaps, I will even listen to her. Someday, but not today, for it is still too early to be magnanimous.
I want this night for myself.
In the middle of his tirade, I move to the door, turn the key in the lock.
“Jane, wait!”
Someday, but not yet.
Without looking back, I step inside, and the door creeps closed behind me.
* * *
• • •
The foyer is stuffy and dim—no liveried concierges, no visitor log books, no flower arrangements, no mirrored expanses here. As I stride across to the mailboxes, I glimpse something scuttling across the floor. A cockroach, I think at first—I have seen a fair share—but no, it is much too big to be a roach. I stop to look. A rat, or maybe an unusually large mouse, hobbles toward me across the lobby. My first impulse is to scream and run, as incoherent exclamations flash through my mind—my poor children, they aren’t used to this kind of thing, this place is worse than I thought, but of course it’s only temporary, I will work hard, I will work so hard to get us out of here—and then I am arrested by the sight of the creature’s white, staring eyes.
The poor thing is blind.
And in that instant, while I hesitate, the mouse, or perhaps the rat, rises to its full height, slowly, laboriously, twitches its whiskers, squeaks at me, and lifts its right paw, looking for all the world as though it is giving me a solemn benediction, a benevolent blessing—or else thanking me for something. I gape at it, openmouthed, about to burst into a jittery laugh (“history of mental instability,” the divorce papers said), when a small secret door unlocks somewhere deep, deep within me, swinging open just a crack, just for a moment—but a moment and a crack are all it takes.
It floods back, it all floods back—the fairy godmother, the glass slipper, the blue-and-white palace, the chatty teapots, my friends the mice, the vile potions, the treacherous mirror, the nettle shirts, the witch, the curse. And as I stand in the middle of the dim foyer of a rent-controlled building in the lower reaches of Manhattan, I hold the immensity of both realities in my mind, and I say to myself: Perhaps all of this is the same story, only seen from two different angles, like one of those trick paintings—birds if you look from one side, horses if from the other, both if you move far enough away to take everything in at once.
Because maybe, maybe, I simply could not face the darker facts of my marriage—my discomfort at being a rich man’s idle wife, my constant guilt over not doing enough for my children, my postpartum depression, my brief addiction to pornography, my longer addiction to prescription pills, my unacknowledged attraction to one of Roland’s underlings, my obsessive spying on my husband along with my pathetic attempts to explain away his philandering, to shift the blame from him at all costs, to myself, to his women, to anyone and anything, my growing desperation to forget the bitter truths of so many awful, shameful moments—oh, such layers of self-deception I practiced, possibly out of some nebulous notion of ideal love, but just as possibly, only so I might go on living with my own cowardly choices . . . And all the years I spent sifting through, shaping, reshaping the past, trying to pinpoint the exact moment at which our marital happiness dimmed, embroidering upon the myth of our perfect romantic beginnings—until the kind old Roland Senior died and I found his papers and learned of the clause stipulating that Roland Junior needed to marry before the age of twenty-five in order to come into the ownership of his trust. Then, at long last, our screaming confrontation, and my therapist trying to dissuade me from drastic measures, and my subsequent visit to a lawyer who frightened me so, a shrill, man-hating witch—or so she first appeared to my eyes—droning at me, “Law is not strictly a science, it’s more of an art,” her professionally suppressed yet palpable excitement at the realization that my ex-husband-to-be was the wealthy heir of a windowsill empire, the first mention of the word “divorce” striking me with the force of a lightning bolt blazing out of the dark stormy sky . . . They say, do they not, that divorce is akin to insanity, so perhaps all these other truths I now remember are only stories I once told myself to keep sane, to mask the crude ugliness of things ending, to transform the chaos of pain into some semblance of order, of higher sense. And maybe that is what all fairy tales are, at their heart: generations of unhappy women throughout history who lost their mothers to disease, fathers to violence, daughters to labor, sons to hunger, who were beaten, abandoned, exploited, orphaned, collectively trying to dream themselves into a life that made sense, spinning tales of man-eating ogres, crystal shoes, poisonous apples, and true love—thinly veiled metaphors of everything gone wrong and everything hoped for on lonely winter nights.
And then again, just as likely, it might be the other way around. Maybe, once upon a time, I was indeed an ordinary fairy-tale princess, like many other such princesses, a princess with her cardboard love for a cardboard husband, living a cardboard life in a cardboard palace, stuck within the confines of a predetermined tale, going through predetermined motions, a fate akin to death, a fate worse than death, yet all the while, in my gilded porcelain teacup, in my beautifully curled blond head, dreaming of another life, of another place—a place full of surprises, full of choices, a place I could sense, glimpse, almost touch now and then, in my rare moments of non-cardboard, transcendent emotion, whether genuine joy or genuine pain. Perhaps, then, when my heart was kindled once and for all by a real love for a real child, for two real children, I managed to do something truly magical—to break through the theatrical decorations, to will myself out of my one-dimensional prison and into the three-dimensional world, this world around me, this life, this city, this moment.
And whatever the truth—whether once upon a time I was a wretched housewife distracting myself with fantasies to while away my empty days or a depressed princess battling the tedium of stale fairy-tale coupledom—I have never felt more clearheaded, more awake, more present, more ready to jump into the thick of life, than I do now, and no other place has ever seemed more thrilling, more unpredictable, more crackling with possibilities—with real magic—than this dim lobby with an old cranky elevator and a blind mouse, before which I stand amazed, overwhelmed, holding both lives superimposed in my mind, one balancing the other.
The elevator thuds as it arrives, and its door shudders and creaks. My next-door neighbor, an ancient lady wrapped in bundles of gray and brown shawls, makes her unsteady way out into the lobby, and sees me, and stops.
“Are you all right, dearie?”
“I . . . yes, I . . . I thought I saw something run into that corner.”
Together we peer into the shadows.
“Ack,” she says. “Must be rat.” Her strong accent has a whiff of the Old World about it, strange places, dark stories. “Shameful, state of this hovel. Someone should call exterminator. Good day to you, dearie.”
She sounds like a fairy-tale witch, I think, amused; looks like one, too, wi
th her hooked nose and the warts on her chin. Mesmerized, I follow her precarious progress toward the front door, then, shaking myself awake, press the elevator button. As I step inside the poorly lit box, I am touched by a fleeting feeling that I was thinking something important, maybe even something vital, a mere moment ago, but the thought remains uncaptured. I may remember it later, I tell myself. For now, there is so much to do: the children are coming tomorrow, tomorrow, there is no time to waste.
My place is small, but I spend hours cleaning it until it shines, cleaning late into the night, cleaning as I have never cleaned anything in my long life of cleaning. When every last doorknob is gleaming, every last dust bunny banned, I sit down by an open window and look at my city, the magical city that never sleeps. I look at the wide night sky with a scattering of pallid, urban stars, and the shining rivers of headlights streaming below, and lamps coming on and blinking out in other windows, illuminating or concealing other lives, other stories—and only a stone’s throw away, there are dogs, and sirens, and boys, and flowers, and women young and old, and lovers, and beggars, and poets, and pretzel carts, and wine bars, and bookshops, and laughter, and sadness, and triumphs, and losses, and kisses, and fights, and miracles, and quests, and discoveries, and heartbreak, and life, life, life.
That night, when I go to bed, I dream of being a witch. I dream of being a sleeping beauty. I dream of being a gingerbread house. I dream of being a prince. I dream of being a falling star, a rushing wind, a rustling forest. When I wake up in the morning, the sun is pouring through my window, and everything looks unexpected. Perhaps, I think, I have finally dreamed myself into a new story, a story with no commonplaces—an entirely different, as yet unknown story that will be a new beginning after the familiar end.