THREE
What do you do with yourself when the love of your life has left you?
The light in the room must have changed gradually, the slice of sky visible through the basement windows shifting from dark blue to the faint pink of sunrise. But I didn’t notice it had gotten bright out until the sun climbed high enough to shine directly onto my small patch of floor. I hadn’t slept. I was stiff from spending the whole night curled in a ball on a concrete floor. But the physical pain suited my mood. Something compelled me to try to act as normal as possible—almost as if I were on autopilot. I decided to go to work. I hauled myself up the basement stairs, showered, and changed my clothes, doing my best not to look around the house as I moved through it. I went outside and got in my car and drove the fifteen minutes to work. I was so distracted I probably could’ve run down half a dozen people on the way without registering the thuds.
The Toronto office of MKTG was in a nondescript low-rise office building off Yonge Street. I shuffled to my desk feeling numb and dangerously over-stimulated at the same time. Not many of my co-workers were around and it was a quiet day. I felt completely detached, as though I were outside of my body, watching myself move through the day. Of course I tried calling Jane, at her office and on her cell, only to get an automated answering machine voice. I tried over and over, to no avail.
Around three in the afternoon I decided to stop and get some lunch. I had no appetite, but I hadn’t eaten since the airport in Charleston. I also needed to get some air, even if it was still frigid out. I shrugged into my jacket, pulled on my hat and gloves and headed for a deli a couple of blocks from the office.
I could feel the leaden weight of my legs, and the freezing air burning my lungs and tearing at the exposed skin of my face, but I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was floating somewhere above and ahead of my body. I observed myself bent into the wind, trudging up the street, the pain and humiliation written on me so clearly I might as well have been wearing a sandwich board with MY WIFE JUST LEFT ME stenciled on it. Everyone I passed could tell. How could they not? A voice close by me cut through the wind. “Hey, buddy, I had a rough night. Spare some change?”
He wore a bulky, stained overcoat over layers of loose clothing all turned roughly the same brownish gray by dirt, time and human grease. His face, hidden under at least a week’s growth of beard, put him in his mid fifties, though he could’ve been younger and just worn by life. He had flattened himself a seat in a snowbank at the edge of the sidewalk, with a blanket under him to protect his legs against the cold. He wore big, clunky winter boots, beside which lay a pair of garbage bags that seemed to contain the rest of his worldly possessions. His eyes were trained on my face and lit with something I couldn’t identify.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Spare some change?” he repeated.
“Yeah,” I said. I found my wallet in my jacket pocket and freed a five-dollar bill. “Here.”
His eyebrows gave away his surprise. He took the money and looked me over again. “Hey, thanks,” he said. “Rich guys don’t usually give me anything.”
I was far from rich; and it was uncharacteristic of me to stop and talk to homeless people, plus I never gave them money. But in that moment there was something about him I could relate to. Though he wore his struggles more visibly than I wore mine, we’d both had a rough night.
He reached into his coat and pulled out a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. “Want a drink?” he asked, moving the bottle a few inches toward me.
Normally I wouldn’t even think of accepting a drink from some homeless guy, and I’m not a big drinker at the best of times, but his offer actually seemed to make sense in that moment. “Yeah, sure, what the hell,” I said, taking the bottle from him. Whatever was in it tasted like lighter fluid. I let it burn the back of my throat and felt it light up my empty stomach. I handed the bottle back. “Thanks.”
He took a drink of his own and then slid his hand back into his coat, to conjure a pack of cigarettes from an inner pocket. “Wanna smoke?” He held out the pack and gestured at it with his chin.
I didn’t smoke, either, but that didn’t stop me from pulling a cigarette from the pack. “Thanks,” I said as he handed me his lighter and tried to stand, then stumbled and tipped back into the snowbank, instead. I slipped a hand under his arm and helped him to his feet, then lit the cigarette he’d given me and held out the flame for him to light his. I handed him back the lighter and took a long drag on the cigarette. The smoke felt good in my lungs, calming, like it was the first full breath I’d drawn that day. I didn’t cough. I exhaled a cloud into the air. “How’d you end up on the street?” I asked.
His answer was long and confusing. It involved a farmhouse and a beautiful wife who’d dumped him; friends who’d betrayed him; his grade-five teacher and the government, both determined to strip him of everything he owned. After staring at my computer screen all day, I found this a welcome conversation. When my cigarette was done, I thanked him and told him to look after himself. “Yeah, buddy,” he said. “Come back tomorrow. I’ll be here.” I walked off toward the deli and never saw him again.
The rest of that first day and the two that followed it are lost in a haze that would become familiar to me over the coming days and weeks. That first week I called and texted Jane dozens of times, asking her to meet with me or at least to pick up the phone and explain why she’d left and where she’d gone. No answer. I spent hours obsessing over every detail of our relationship, looking for clues that might explain her departure. I worked as much as I could, thirteen- and fourteen-hour days that often ended well after nine. At home I sat on the couch and tried to drown out my thoughts with beer and television. It didn’t matter what was on—reruns, reality shows, infomercials—I just let the TV play until I could quiet my mind enough to fall asleep. I avoided the bedroom Jane and I had shared and slept on the couch, instead. I stopped cooking and cleaning and let the empty pizza boxes, soup cans, half-eaten frozen dinners and bottles pile up on the kitchen counter.
A few friends reached out early, not because they knew what had happened but because both Jane and I had fallen off the face of the earth. I didn’t return their calls or emails. Jane and I had always been seen by our friends as “the ideal couple”—successful, deeply in love—and I was embarrassed to now acknowledge that maybe not everything had been as perfect as it had seemed. And how could I admit that I had no idea why? But at the same time I somehow knew that I needed to take solace in other people. I just wasn’t quite ready yet.
The loneliness reached a degree of intensity that made it truly unbearable. I had to tell someone, so I picked up the phone and called my younger brother, David.
Dave and I had grown up very close. We did everything together as kids. I started playing organized hockey at the age of five, and two years later he followed me into it. From then on hockey was the cornerstone of our relationship. We collected and traded hockey cards and pooled our money to pitch in on hockey magazines. We read everything we could about the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens, and spent countless hours watching their games on TV. When we weren’t absorbing the sport, we were out playing it. Every winter we played standard hockey in organized leagues, but also in forms we invented (as only kids can) when we couldn’t get on the ice. The two of us played hockey on our knees in the family living room using our hands and a Ping-Pong ball or Popsicle sticks and an old pencil eraser. We scuffed up the basement playing with a tennis ball and full-sized hockey sticks. In the winter we ruined countless garden hoses trying to flood our backyard to make a rink, and in the summer we played in the street.
Because Dave was younger, I’d always felt protective of him. When our dad got mad or was being unreasonable, I did my best to shield Dave from him. No matter what happened, good or bad, we were always in it together. But that didn’t mean we’d chosen the same path. He married straight out of university and settled down in the same Nova Scotia town where we’d both done our
undergrad degrees. He became a teacher and then a school administrator, and he and his wife had two beautiful kids. His life was a model of stability and here I was calling him with mine in shambles. I’d failed in my marriage and that made me feel I’d failed as his older brother. I was no longer the person he could lean on. When he picked up the phone, I could barely get out the words. But somehow through the tears I managed to tell him that Jane had left.
“You shouldn’t be alone,” Dave told me when I’d finished. “I’m on my way.”
Visiting me meant leaving his wife and children, taking time off work and flying all the way from the east coast to Toronto. He’d made the decision in a matter of seconds. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. All I could say was “Thank you. I’m glad you’re coming.”
One day later Dave was in my living room. He could stay only for a few days, but his support—his mere presence—made it possible for me to get through that first week. Dave did whatever he could to keep my spirits up and my mind off Jane. He sat with me, helped me clean up the house a bit, took me to see a Will Ferrell movie that he knew would make me laugh. There was no elaborate technique to his methods of distraction, and only a few deeper conversations about what I was experiencing, but his very presence helped. I shudder to think how bad things might’ve gotten if he hadn’t gone through so much trouble to show me someone in the world still loved me.
The day Dave left I fell back into a haze of depression, and the next day I finally heard from Jane: “I really don’t want to see you,” her text read. “I need more time to think.”
I texted her back immediately: “This is crazy. We need to talk. Talking is going to help as much as thinking. We can talk and think together. Please come back to the house and we can have dinner tomorrow.”
Her response: “I’m not ever coming back to the house. Ever.”
“Not at the house then. But we do need to talk.”
“I’ve thought about it and I want to be alone,” she answered.
I should have been crushed, but after more than a week of total silence communication of any kind felt like a step in the right direction. After a few more texts we finally agreed to meet for lunch at a restaurant a couple of days later.
The night of that exchange of emails I went out and bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in my life. I’d always been very anti-smoking and used to lecture my smoker friends about quitting. I took the pack and a few beers to the enclosed porch at the back of the house, sat in the dark and chain-smoked. Snow was falling softly. The porch was clean and quiet. It was peaceful at first. But after a while memories intruded. I found myself thinking of my grandfather. The first time I introduced Jane to him he was an old man living in a federal veterans’ home. He looked her up and down, smiled softly and said, “I hope you will marry this boy.” She beamed at him. He passed away just two months after Jane and I got married—our wedding was the last time he went out in public. Suddenly I felt his absence keenly.
There were many times growing up that I’d felt disconnected from my father. As a result my grandfather had often provided support and encouragement when I needed it most. As a World War II veteran he was a man who lived his life with the intensity and joy of someone who’d almost lost it. He was never short on advice, and as I’d been lucky enough to have him in my life into my forties, he’d helped me through most major decisions or problems I had faced.
I thought about what my grandfather would’ve done in my situation—the advice he would have given me. And that’s when I started hearing his voice, as though he had joined me right there on the porch and was lighting up his pipe.
You don’t see people smoking pipes anymore, but men of his generation loved them. As a kid, the smell of sweet cherry tobacco was one of my favorite things. In my mind’s eye, he told me as he took a puff of his pipe, “You shouldn’t smoke. Don’t do it just because I do. Your mother would not be pleased.”
“Okay, Grandpa,” I answered.
“You know, I started smoking during the war. Not saying it’s right, but it helped calm my nerves when the bombs were going off and things looked really bad.”
Things were looking really bad for me right now, and I actually felt okay smoking knowing that he used to.
Grandpa continued. “If you have a problem, the first step in dealing with it is to ask yourself, ‘How did it start?’ ” He always said that when I came to him looking for help.
“Okay, Grandpa. How did it start?” When I finished my smoke, his voice dissolved.
I’d already spent hours searching my memories for clues about why Jane had left, yet the process had yielded almost nothing. Out on the porch I decided that despite all the love I had for her and how happy and proud I was to be her husband, maybe I was the problem. Maybe some flaw deep within me had caused her to go. If I could fix it, I reasoned, I might get her back.
The restaurant we’d agreed to meet at was downtown, part of an upscale strip cutting through an otherwise pretty run-down area of the city. The place was maybe half full, the diners a sea of business suits. She’d chosen a table for four in the middle of the room and was facing the entrance, with her coat and bag piled on the chair beside her. Her hair was pinned up from her face and she was wearing jeans and a dark sweater I’d always thought made her look too stern. She spotted me and fanned her fingers in the barest hint of a wave.
It felt strange not to hug her. The greeting we did manage was awkward and strained. A waitress came by and asked me if I wanted anything to drink, which gave me a little bit of time to recover my wits. When she left to get my water, I asked the first of the many questions that had been driving me insane. “Where did you go?”
“I found a place,” she answered. “I’m going to live there for now.”
I waited for her to continue. She didn’t. The waitress returned, and walked into a thick silence. “Here’s your water,” she said, setting it in front of me on the table. “Can I get you two anything to eat?”
Jane ordered. I hadn’t looked at the menu and didn’t have much of an appetite, so I asked for the same thing she was having. The waitress took the menus and left. Another thick silence descended.
“So, you’re not going to tell me where you’re living now?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to. It’s none of your business.”
“Jane, you’re my wife. Of course it’s my business.”
Without consciously noticing, I’d raised my voice slightly. No one around us seemed to have taken much notice of me, but Jane stiffened as though she’d been slapped. “No, it’s not actually your business,” she said, one notch above a whisper. “And we’re not going to have this conversation here.”
This wasn’t going well.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“I just can’t deal with marriage right now.”
I didn’t try to keep the hurt from my voice. “Do you mean, ‘deal with me’?”
Maybe feeling that she’d gone too far, she looked at me with a measure of sympathy. She drew a breath. “I want to be on my own,” she began. “It has nothing to do with you. I’m just more comfortable alone.”
“This is crazy. Our marriage isn’t disposable. My emotions aren’t disposable—and I feel you’re treating me like I am.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “But I don’t want to be married. We’re different people and we need to just move on with our lives and find how to be happy that way.”
As she was talking, the waitress brought our food. She put the plates down, offered the obligatory fresh-ground black pepper and asked if we wanted anything else. When she left, I made my big play.
“We need to go to marriage counseling,” I said.
“Colin, it really won’t change my—”
“Hear me out,” I said. “I’m not just going to walk out the door without making an effort. I want us to go try counseling. If I have to chang
e or fix something, I will. If we go and, after three months or four months or however long it takes, a professional marriage counselor looks us in the eye and says, ‘There’s no hope of rehabilitating this,’ then I’ll be the first one to shake your hand and wish you well. If we don’t at least try to fix this, we’re crazy.”
I’d planned the speech and rehearsed it in my head a million times, but when it came to saying it, I got out maybe half of what I’d intended. Jane’s face was completely unreadable, a mask. “I’ll think about it” was all she said. She then made an excuse about having to get back to the office and bolted without saying another word. She’d eaten everything on her plate. I hadn’t taken one bite, so I had my food packed up. As I walked out of the restaurant, I noticed a homeless guy on the street corner. I gave him my lunch and some money in exchange for a smoke. I stayed and talked with him for a while. Despite the misery of living on the street, he seemed happier than I was. I had to get out of there.
It took Jane another week or so to agree to counseling. I found a couples’ therapist online and booked an appointment. Jane tried to back out two or three times in the lead up but turned up on time for the first session. Our counselor’s office was full of plants and had two overstuffed, comfortable armchairs. The counselor seemed way too happy given the circumstances. Pictures of her family—united, happy, beaming—hung everywhere. It felt like she was showing off. I was having a hard enough time going to counseling in the first place. Her happy, smiling family wasn’t making it any easier.
During the sessions that followed I had ample time to ask the many, many questions I had. Why had Jane left? Was I a terrible person? Had I done something wrong? Was I boring? Did I leave my socks lying around? Had she met someone else? Jane answered question after question by shrugging. When pressed, she’d give one- or two-word answers. Most of the time, she merely stared out the window, avoiding eye contact. The counselor took notes and tried to get Jane to talk. In our last session she said, “Jane, you do owe him a bit of an answer. Is there anything you can share about why you left?”
Free Days with George Page 3