My father stood there not sure what to do. Finally, he bent down and picked up my mother’s blanket and draped it over me.
“Will you be warm enough? I’ll turn up the thermostat.”
“I’m fine,” I said, pulling the blanket’s tassels up to my chin. “I’ll be okay.”
I called Eila in the morning. “I’m so sorry to leave you in the lurch. I’m sick,” I said.
“Don’t bullshit me,” Eila said and I knew she was alone. This was her Sheila voice. It was too early in the morning to be Eila. And I was relieved. I wanted a real person. I was tired of fakes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Everything’s gone to shit. How about that for not bullshitting you? I left my husband and then found out he’s been having an affair with my best friend.” I wasn’t crying, and it seemed strange to be able to say all of this so coldly. I could tell, though, that I would probably start to cry at some point and I might not be able to stop once I did.
“Ah, hell,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“You told me that lives don’t come apart, but I have to say that this certainly feels like things have come apart.”
“Oh, you can’t listen to me when I’m trying to be philosophical. I have no idea how the world works. I live with a Pekinese. That’s all I can muster.” She sighed. “Is there anything I can do?”
I sighed. “Yeah,” I said. “I’d like to know something about you. Something that’s true. Not this Eila stuff. Some thing about you.”
“Something true. About me.” She thought about it a minute. “My father was a son of a bitch. My mother worked as a secretary at a dentist’s office. I was an ugly kid and people used to mistake me for a boy. That’s three things. Does that help?”
“Weirdly, yes,” I said, and it did.
“How much time do you need?”
“I can’t afford too much.”
“Take a week,” she said. “Okay?”
“Yes, thanks.”
After I hung up with her, I dialed Faith at work. I needed help. I asked her to get a few of my things from the apartment.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked in a hushed voice.
“No.”
I refused to talk to anyone. I put on one of my father’s T-shirts and a pair of his sweatpants. Peter left messages. He figured I was at my father’s and called the house phone there too, but I’d already told my father that I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I heard him on the phone in the kitchen, telling Peter exactly this. “She’ll call you,” he said, “when she’s ready.” I wondered when that would be. It felt years away. I had nothing to say to him. I spent much of my time replaying our relationship, but now casting everything in doubt and suspicion. I wondered if Helen was his only affair, if he’d ever expected to be committed to me even as we were taking our vows, if he’d ever really loved me. I was no closer to my definition of marriage, and looking at my life as a scientist, that little experiment seemed to have failed. Nothing was clearer.
The voicemail on my cell phone was cluttered. There were multiple messages from Peter, Helen, and Faith. I deleted their messages as soon as I heard their voices kick in. It was a reflex. No, I said aloud to no one, don’t talk to me. Don’t try to explain.
There was only one message that I listened to.
It was from Elliot.
He said, “I’m not going to hound you with phone calls like I did the last time. I’m only calling this once. Nothing has changed for me. I’m in love with you. I have been for a very long time. It’s the kind of love that won’t stop, although I’ve tried to make it stop.” He sighed. “I don’t know why you think I’m seeing someone else. I’m not. But you were right. I should have thrown myself into the trap. I should have told you even if I thought it was going to doom any chance we might have had. I should have opted for the truth. But I was too scared of losing you.” He paused again. “There’s more. There’s a lifetime’s worth more to say. But that’s all for now. That’s all I’ll bother you with.”
And then he hung up.
That’s when I started crying. Something seemed to tear open inside of me and I couldn’t shut it. I didn’t think about Elliot or Peter or Helen or anyone specifically. I just cried, breathlessly and raggedly, with no end in sight. Even when I caught my breath, the tears kept coming.
My father canceled his classes for the day so that he could stock up and keep an eye on me. While he was at the grocery store, I picked up a pair of my mother’s knitting needles. I opened the box that was packed with yarn. I’d knit that one blanket in college. I wasn’t sure I’d remember how, but my hands remembered, kinesthetically, the way to make the stitches. The tears kept rolling down my cheeks, beaded on the yarn, dotted the sweatpants.
My father came home and, carrying grocery bags to the kitchen, he saw me knitting. He paused for a moment, as if he was going to say something—and what would that be? Would this image scare him? Would he want to warn me? I didn’t look up, and he moved on.
I was mourning, but what I was mourning, exactly, wasn’t clear to me. At first at least, it didn’t need to be clear. Mourning felt restless and the knitting relieved that restlessness in some small measure. I thought that I was mourning my marriage, and I was in a way, but I wasn’t sure that it was mine to mourn. Had it ever been a marriage that I existed in completely as myself? I knew that the painful answer to that question was no. It had come to define me, though, and although I’d never become completely comfortable with being a wife, I walked through life as a known quantity. I had a safe and insular title. I was a wife. I had to let that go.
And letting that go, I had to let Peter go too. I’d been practicing this, I know, in many various ways. My decision to become Elliot Hull’s pretend wife, the kiss in the rowboat, and then, upon my arrival back into my own world, my decision to observe my marriage as a scientist was a decision to disconnect, to step outside of it. Hadn’t I known that I was putting off the lessons that Vivian had taught me even then? That I was trying to postpone living my life with courage and honesty? Although that was the first time I’d done it so purposefully, I was beginning to understand that I’d been standing back, just a bit, for some time. I’d been doing it in the ice-cream shop, even, when I ran into Elliot. I knew, equally well, that Peter’s affair wasn’t entirely his fault. I’m not saying that I should have worked harder to keep him interested. To hell with that! It isn’t any one person’s job in a marriage to hold the other’s attention to keep him from straying. I’ve never bought that old saw. But, in a broader way, his affair grew out of a marriage that I’d chosen, that I helped create, one that I’d never really ever fully demanded enough of, one that I found comfortable instead of engaging, one that I’d never allowed myself to jump into with full vulnerability.
Even though he’d wanted me to be Elliot’s pretend wife and said he was okay with it, he may have known there was something deeper. This didn’t make his affair with Helen forgivable, but I wasn’t innocent myself. I remembered, too, his intimate, drunken voice—“Did you get my messages?”—on Helen’s cell phone. Peter wanted to keep the affair going. Even as he was building to a drunken, jealous rage, he had the wherewithal to speak to Helen in a seductive voice. And, too, I knew that he thought he’d been hung up on by Helen, and maybe that, too, fueled his anger that snowy night.
And let’s not forget Helen in all of this. For some strange reason, I felt more betrayed by her than by Peter. Part of this is because I don’t think of men as being as strong as women, and so I could allow myself to chalk a tiny bit of Peter’s actions up to something particularly male. But Helen? I couldn’t give her this infinitesimal leeway. This was old-fashioned, outdated thinking, and I knew it. I wish I were a better feminist. For this reason, though, her betrayal seemed more calculated, more personal, more vindictive. I kept going back to the way she’d explained the affair. “I’ve shut it down. For good. It’s over.” She was saying that if it were up to Peter, the affair would have gone on and on. Was she t
rying to make herself look good—some hero! Or was she really getting in another jab? Either way, it seemed cruel. My friendship with Helen was over. I could imagine a time years from now—maybe decades—when we might be able to have a conversation that seemed normal, almost like great friends, but the trust was gone, permanently. I was the lucky one, though, because I knew that Helen was suffering, that she’d continue to suffer because she couldn’t really trust herself on a very basic human level.
On all of the intellectual levels, I knew that my marriage was over, that I couldn’t ever really go back to Peter, that I would have to relinquish this role that I’d come to use as a passage through the world.
And I didn’t have Elliot as an excuse.
This was my own doing and undoing.
This should have been emotional on its own terms, in a clear way, but it wasn’t. Every time I thought of Peter, I felt a loss that was more deeply rooted in my life. Every time I thought of Peter, I thought of my mother, her death, my lonesome childhood, that loss. I couldn’t understand why except that you don’t get to choose the time when mourning hits you. Some people mourn before a loss—knowing that it’s coming. Some people mourn suddenly, in public, as if the reality of their loss is only brought into sharp focus when confronted with a group. Some people mourn for years, decades—the loss keeps coming, like a leaking faucet that stains a spot of rust into the tub. I was mourning my marriage, Peter, these years of my life, but they were dredging up the past. I was mourning something that I couldn’t have mourned as a five-year-old girl, something I couldn’t have understood or had the language to come to terms with or the context.
How do you mourn what you might have had?
And that brought me to Elliot, always Elliot. I blamed him for not telling me about Peter cheating on me. It wasn’t his place, no. But he should have told me anyway. Could I trust him now? Was he really not seeing anyone? Who was the pretty woman in his car?
I wasn’t sure that it was at all possible to find my way back to him. Could we start again—at the beginning or the middle? Was everything too impossibly muddy? I was in love with him. That’s all I knew. I was in love with him, and I had to mourn the possible end of that too.
What did the mourning feel like? Imagine flying, the landscape changing beneath you—shifting between deserts, jagged mountains, gorges, and long, twisting bodies of water. I was unprepared for this kind of grieving, how quickly it turned to anger then love then an embattled pride. I felt foolish, wounded, and then unbearably tough. Then for a stretch, without warning, I would feel empty, but soon it would start up all over again.
That evening, Faith knocked at the front door. I looked at her through the window. She was holding a container of homemade cookies and, propped next to her, was my rolling suitcase. Something about her stoic figure made me feel steely and rigid, which I knew wasn’t fair. She’d come to help. She was being a good friend.
My father walked into the living room. “Should I get it?” he asked.
“You can let her in,” I said.
He looked hugely relieved, and I realized how much he’d hated his role as gatekeeper. He must have despised the conflict and having to disappoint people.
I was still knitting, though I had no idea what I was knitting, exactly. A scarf? A shawl? A blanket? I was just practicing, small stitches, large stitches, making rows. I’d gotten faster—the knitting needles slid over each other, the yarn slipped up and over, on and back off, the needles making pleasing little clicks like claws.
I listened to Faith and my father exchange pleasantries then whispers—talking about me and my possible mental state, no doubt—and then she walked in and parked the suitcase. I didn’t look at her. I glanced at her and saw that she was looking at the room, which was still piled with my mother’s knitting and the empty boxes. I couldn’t bring myself to repack them, and I could tell now that this might look like another sign of my instability. Did I look like a crazy person? Knitting amid all of this knitting?
She opened the container of cookies and put them on the coffee table in front of me.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Oh, Gwen,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”
I knitted faster. “Please don’t say that. Don’t give me your sympathy. My husband cheated on me with one of my best friends. Nobody died. So let’s not be melodramatic.”
She sat down, not sure what to do now. She’d come prepared to give her sympathy, but I’d refused it and now it was just an unopened box sitting between us. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going to talk to him? I know he’d love to talk to you.” I assumed that this was part of her mission. Had she talked to Peter at length? Was he trying to turn this whole thing around?
“I’m in the middle of a conversation that has suddenly come to an end,” I said.
She stared at me, unsure of what this meant exactly. “Helen would like to talk to you too,” she said, but she was more sheepish about this. I assumed that Helen had made her promise that she’d give me this message, but she wasn’t so sure that Helen deserved it.
“Tell Helen that for his birthday, I suggest she get him a pair of suede buck golf shoes. That’s what he needs.”
“I don’t think they’re going to be exchanging birthday gifts.”
“Why not?” I said, not sure if I was being as sarcastic as I sounded. “They should make a go of it. They’re perfect for each other.”
She sat back in the cushions and sighed. “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s so awful. It’s so ugly and unnecessary. What the hell were they thinking? Why are they such selfish idiots? I’m just so furious.” She punched the sofa cushion with her fist. This got my attention. I looked at her, really, for the first time. She looked like hell. Her eyes were red-rimmed, like she’d been crying. All the makeup had been wiped away except for two soft gray smears around her eyes. I felt sorry for her, sitting there in her coat, her oversized pocketbook on the floor between her boots. “I don’t deserve to be pissed, not like you do. And I’m not trying to take one single ounce of that anger away from you,” she said. “But I am so pissed—at both of them.”
I realized that this must be hard on her, truly. It had to have upended some of the things that she believed about marriage, or at least made her lose her footing. I was never sure how confident she was in her own marriage—a marriage that had always seemed to me to be a pairing of opposites. I found myself in the strange position of comforting her. “It’s going to be okay. Don’t worry. We weren’t ever that strong.”
“Really?” she said. “You had me fooled. I thought you two were so tight, such a unified force. I always admired how easy you made it look. Not like my marriage. We’re always fuming and bickering …”
“We didn’t have enough to fume and bicker about. Maybe that was the problem.” I thought of Elliot’s mother, the way she’d told me that marriage was a crock, but love wasn’t. I said, just as she had, “I was a damaged girl. I made a damaged decision.”
Faith leaned forward. “What do you mean?”
“I shouldn’t have married him in the first place.”
“Do you really believe that?” she said.
I nodded.
“You two were happy. You were best friends.”
“We were friends, but not confidants.”
She took this in, maybe wrestling with the question of whether she and Jason were friends or confidants. What was their level of intimacy? Were they in danger? She stood up and walked among the piles of clothes and blankets. She reached down and picked up a stack of sweaters, let her hands run over the uneven stitches. She put the pile down in one of the empty boxes, and then picked up some mittens and wedged them into the box as well. This made me bristle, but I didn’t want to tell her to stop. She had nervous energy. She was trying to help.
“Peter and I had portions of our lives that were roped off from each other,” I said, trying to explai
n. “It didn’t just start with the affair with Helen.”
“Do you think he had other affairs? He swore to me that he didn’t.”
“No,” I said, frustrated. “That’s not it. We were cordoning ourselves off. We didn’t share what we were thinking. We made little decisions every day to keep parts of ourselves separate. We roped off one area and then another and then another until we had lovely banter. Banter that could go on and on.”
“You were so funny together,” she said. “I loved your lovely banter.”
“But finally we ended up living side-by-side lives. That’s what made it possible for him to have an affair.”
She stuffed a few tassel-topped hats into the box. I knew that I would take everything out of the box as soon as she was gone, but I let her feel useful in this small gesture. “I just didn’t know. I guess no one can really know another couple’s relationship.”
“I don’t think Peter and I knew either, if that’s any consolation.”
She’d packed the box tight then walked to her bag. She pulled out a picture frame and handed it to me. “Here,” she said.
I let the knitting fall to my lap and I took the photograph. It was, of course, the photograph that Vivian had given me as a gift—Elliot, Jennifer, and Vivian in the yard, the gauzy curtain. I’d forgotten that I’d told her about it, but I had, in the creamery, while I was trying to really explain what had happened, and had failed.
“You said it made you feel better, stronger. It made you feel watched over. I thought you might need that right now.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I looked up at her. “I can’t believe you remembered,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I hope it helps,” she said, and she picked up her bag, readying to go. “Are you in love with Elliot?” she asked, and then she held up her hand. “Don’t answer. You don’t have to answer that. That’s just what Pete said, but I didn’t come here for that.”
I didn’t answer. “Did you come for some other reason than dropping off my things?” I asked.
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