I turned around with tears in my eyes and begged him: “You can’t do this! You can’t give me a card like this! You can’t show me that you are the man I know you are, the man I always knew you were when we met”—generous and loving and big-hearted, and not the resentful man that he had become in the last few years—“and then tell me that the only way you can become that person is by leaving me!” I sat down at the kitchen table under the bright hanging light and put my head down on my crossed arms and cried. Chris just stood there, hands in his pockets, staring down at the ground.
And now here I was telling this whole story to Melissa a few months later. “I hope he’s right,” I said as I walked back into the kitchen with Melissa to refill our glasses. “I hope he finds out who he was meant to be and lives it. It’s the only thing that will make all of this okay.”
Melissa was at the sink, rinsing a plate, as I finished this thought. She stopped cold and put down the plate and looked up at me and said, practically yelling at me, “Stacy, where is your anger? I mean, come on, I know you’re a big thinker and you can explain anything, but are you even human?”
Her outburst stopped me short. Was I a freak? I know I’m a ruminator, always tinkering around in what other people do and why, but why was that not “human”? To want to understand how my husband could just walk out on me and our son? I wanted, I needed, to get inside his head and see what was so impossible for him to tolerate in our life that he believed he had to get out of our marriage to survive. He was my best friend, the person who knew me better than anyone else in the world. Why didn’t people understand that that was a very hard thing to give up? Melissa was angry at Chris the way I’d been angry at my friend’s husband when they were struggling in their marriage; Melissa didn’t have to know what it felt like to be living in this amorphous In Between.
“Uhh, I don’t know where my anger is,” I offered in a small voice. “I’m just trying to get through this, and feel okay about it. I’m angry sometimes.” I had been angry that night when Chris gave me the card; for a split second, I’d felt indignation rip through me. But the anger had been washed away instantly by a flood of grief, grief that I still loved him and that clearly part of him still loved me and yet, somehow, we weren’t going to make it anyway.
I didn’t think I could take that love and just stuff it down inside me, or wave a magic wand and turn it all into anger. I needed to see why Chris felt like he was dying in our marriage to able to break up with compassion—in the same way that understanding why Gregg and Melissa supported Bush had helped me interview the President. But that night at the sink with Melissa, I so much wanted to borrow her certainty. Her tone made me feel like there was a grand prize that I had forgotten to look for, that maybe I had the winning ticket tucked away somewhere. But as I thought about it, I couldn’t imagine what I would cash it in for. I simply couldn’t believe that anger was the prize.
But I did get angry sometimes. Really, really angry. In the weeks after the house started to take in water, when Chris and I were trying to figure out how to handle the crisis, I had spoken to some lawyers to get counsel on whether we could sue the people who’d sold us the house. We’d discovered that aside from what the next-door-neighbor knew, the real estate agency that had represented the sellers was also aware of the house’s flooding problem. In talking with various lawyers, I discovered I had made some dumb mistakes in the closing process, such as using the house inspector that was recommended by the seller’s broker. Chris was being a jerk about it, telling me that the lawyer who had represented us in closing should have caught those mistakes, that the lawyer wasn’t any good, had never been any good. Of course, I was the one who had found that lawyer. I was the one who had handled the closing. I had done the whole deal for buying the house: figuring out how much we could afford, making the bid, getting the mortgage, figuring out how to scrape together the money to cover our cash shortfall in making the down payment, booking the movers and the painters. And now I was the one who was trying to figure out how to get out of this mess without our losing everything. Chris’s criticisms felt like attacks against me. I could feel my blood starting to boil as he sat there on the sofa, being angry at the world, and insinuating that he would have done things better or differently.
I lashed out at Chris, cursing him for his attitude, especially considering that he had done nothing—nothing!—to make this deal happen. Soon we were in the familiar ruts of marital discord. Chris’s take: I’m a know-it-all; I’m hostile and unhappy; I don’t let him do anything; I’m hateful; he’s aggrieved. My take: He’s a discontent; he’s useless; if I ask him to help me I get punished by his misery; he can’t function in the real world; he can’t deal. I am holding Zack on my hip as this familiar fight is taking its course, and he’s started to cry. Chris reaches over and takes him out of my arms, and as he backs away from me to take the baby upstairs, he fires off his final words: “You are crazy and this is why I can’t stand to be with you!”
I screamed at him as he was walking upstairs, “I hate you! And when you leave you will get nothing! Nothing! Not a penny of my money!” I was bent over at the waist, so that I could propel as much volume and power into my screaming as I could, using every cell in my body to attempt to erase him and this terrible feeling of being unseen, misunderstood, of having my good intentions turned around and thrown in my face. I screamed until I was depleted, and when I stopped, I was trembling. I plopped down on the sofa, spent.
I was humiliated by my loss of control, and by the fact that I’d implied that the money meant anything at all in this mess. I tried to forgive myself, understanding that I was trying to take something—anything—away from him, to find a way to stand up for myself and say “I reject you” in a way that was deeper, bigger, wider than his deciding to walk out on me. But I could see that my rage wasn’t going to let me do that, because as I sat on the sofa, my self-righteousness was replaced with disgust. This can’t be who I am, I told myself.
Anger like that has its seductions. The times I was really angry at Chris, I felt as if the anger hid everything I didn’t want to see or feel, just as when, as a little girl, I would clean my exploded-closet of a bedroom by getting on my hands and knees and pushing all the discarded clothes and belts and shoes on the floor under the bed. Of course my parents were going to look there, of course I knew I was still going to have to put everything away in its proper place, but it was such a fast and easy solution it was impossible to resist. And anger is the same thing. In the white heat of anger, I feel right, I am right! He’s a dumb bastard and I am the queen of the desert! But after the anger, I inevitably come crashing down and have to face all the confusing feelings that a breakup leaves on the shore after the tide of love has ebbed: I am to blame, I am worthless, I will never be loved again.
Once, in the middle of the night, during yet another relentless rainstorm after Chris had moved out, I heard the dread sound of drip-drip-drip coming from one of the leaks on the third floor. I’d had roofers in to fix the leak, but they hadn’t succeeded. When I stepped into the cursed guest room to review the scene, I saw the sodden towels that were already on the floor under the drip, but I also saw another puddle in the middle of the room. And then I realized that our fat cat, Stumpy, had peed all over the photographs that lay on the floor in messy piles after having been rescued from the flooding basement. They were precious images of my high school and college years, not saved in any digital file. I sank to my knees and started separating the photographs, sorting them into piles of ruined and not-ruined ones. I tried to gently pry the damaged photos apart, to try to save these images of my younger self, the girl who thought she could make anything happen in her life, the girl who thought she could protect herself with her fierce will and bottomless drive. I cried for her, for all she had believed, and I was devastated by the knowledge that everything I had hoped was true about life was false: there was no way to create your own destiny. Fate did that for you instead.
I found myself fill
ing up with a fury that had to be directed somewhere. Why was I was the one stuck with the aging cat and the broken-down house and the full burden of the mortgage? And Stumpy was Chris’s cat; Chris should have taken him when he moved out.
We had adopted two furry gray kittens the week we’d returned from our honeymoon, and MeMe, the girl cat, had been “my” cat. Thinking about how sweet and tender Chris had been two years before when he’d had to tell me she had died now made me unspeakably bereft. After a wedding, I had run into a deli to buy some beer and he’d gone home and found MeMe lying on the kitchen floor. As I left the deli, I saw Chris standing there in the pouring rain in his tuxedo, his hands crammed into his pockets, a look on his face I’ll never forget: love and sadness and responsibility. He’d come to tell me so that I wouldn’t walk in, unprepared, and see her cold and dead. We’d walked home, his arm around my shoulders, me crying into his chest. MeMe was gone and now the man who’d known her funny, girlish mews and little paw dances was gone, too. I feared I’d never be able to stop making the list of things only Chris knew, I’d never stop feeling dizzy at the parts of me that were being taken away.
I got the phone and went back to the third floor, calling Chris even though it was 2 a.m., my hands shaking because I was so angry. It just had to be his fault that everything was gone. My voice echoed in the empty room as I screamed at him, tears streaming down my face: “Why do you get to leave it all behind! Why am I the one with everything on my hands! Your son! This goddamn leaking house! And the cat, who’s peeing all over everything! It’s bad enough you leave me. But you just get to walk away? From everything? And leave me with this whole mess?” Chris tried to calm me down, assured me he’d take the cat, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would ever be enough to make up for what I was feeling.
After I’d hung up the phone and put fresh towels under the infernal drips and washed my face, wiping off the tears and the dust, I stared in the mirror for ten minutes, looking at my sad eyes, the hollows under them, the blotchy skin, the way my mouth turned down. It was 3:45 a.m., and I would have to be up with the baby in about two hours. I felt empty and sick, gutted from the screaming and the crying, and ugly inside and out. I had to like something about myself, but in that moment, I couldn’t think of anything. Living in my anger in that way had erased it all.
Melissa wasn’t alone in looking for my anger. As I started telling more and more people that Chris and I had separated, I was overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to warm their hands in the heat of my rage. Their instinct was a convivial one, a way of joining me and supporting me, but I didn’t understand at all why people had a reflexive instinct to link arms with me in outrage, to fan the flames of my anger and assure me of my “rightness.”
Friends and strangers alike were inspired to do their own forensic studies on my relationship, with a breathtakingly similar methodology. Almost everyone asked me the same three questions:
“Is it because you married so young?”
“Is it because you made all the money?”
“Is it because you worked too much?”
I know people meant well, but these questions told me everything I never, ever wanted to know about how they saw my relationship. At first I tried to beat these reasons away, taking each as it was offered and trying to flick it away like a Frisbee. I’d remind people that only in New York City is getting married at twenty-five considered crazily young—the average age of a woman getting married in America is 26.5! And Chris liked my money just fine! We spent it together. And he made plenty of his own money. It’s not like I emasculated him! (Or did I? Did I? Have to file that one away to think about later, when I’m alone in the dark staring up at the bedroom ceiling praying for sleep.) And as far as working too much goes? My goodness, no! Chris had always needed a lot of alone time. After all, he was working on side projects that he wanted to be the main event in his life, important stuff. It was good I wasn’t always around, mooning over him and wishing he wanted to go curtain shopping with me.
I gave a slightly different answer each time I was asked, but the weird, disconnected sense of culpability I felt was always the same, as if the questioner were pointing a finger at me.
I’d gone from being a woman of definite opinions to being a nervous, uncertain little girl, defending actions and pathways taken that I shouldn’t have needed to defend—that the old me would never have stooped to defend. But now, whatever anyone offered me, I would feel an automatic flinch and I’d have to look at whatever reason they were holding up to me and think: “Are they right? Do they know more than I do? Did I do this to myself?”
And then there was the question that, in one form or another, every single person asked—which, I learned, means it’s the question that counts the most:
“Did you have any idea?”
“Were you surprised?”
“Was this out of the blue? Or did you . . . ?”
What goes unsaid in that last iteration is “. . . know you were having a hard time? Did you know you were in a bad marriage? Did you know you weren’t going to make it?”
Did you see it coming?
Bit by bit, I started to realize what was happening. People were trying to puzzle out what had led to the end of my marriage in the same way I was, and they wanted to know what I knew. But not because they wanted to know if I could have saved my marriage: they were asking these questions because they wanted to save their marriages.
At first the fact that people had seemed to have instant sympathy for me kept me from seeing that this was what these exchanges were actually about—them, not me. I desperately wanted to be comforted and assured that I was the Good Guy. But after a while I started to feel nauseated by their comfort, as if I’d eaten too much cotton candy. A lot of these people were essentially strangers, who’d never met Chris, who didn’t even know me that well. For all they knew I was a screaming shrew, an unabashed adulterer, a cold, dead fish. How could they know whether I was right or wrong, how could they know who was to blame? With each new conversation about my separation, my vision became more clear: I could see the questioner trying to put all the pieces regarding the end of my marriage into place; he or she barely even needed to talk to me to come to a conclusion. Asking me these questions and steering me toward their own answers was a way for people to keep what was happening in my life at arm’s length, just in case divorce proved contagious.
But divorce is no virus; it’s lung cancer: We live in a world where people believe that somebody has to have caused a divorce. Someone smoked those cigarettes, was the unbearable wife, the unfaithful husband; someone worked too hard, nagged too much, didn’t like sex enough—whatever your personal anxieties about your own relationship are, feel free to project them onto me. My divorce has to be somebody’s fault, because making that so means the rest of the world can go around believing that Forever After remains a viable promise, no matter how high the numbers of failed marriages climb. People didn’t need to know my story, because they already had The Story in their heads, the simple narrative arc that apparently defines every single divorce story in America: “till death do you part” turns to “due to parting, you battle to the death.” A promise is being stolen, dammit, and someone’s gotta pay.
But the details matter. The life I’d lived was still alive in the details. The person I had become was created by those details, thirteen years of becoming me that I did not want to give up. When I found myself faced yet again with the same questions (that are, confoundingly, personal and impersonal simultaneously) I had to bite my cheek sometimes to keep myself from screaming. This story may sound familiar to you, I would think, wishing I felt brave and strong enough to speak it aloud, but it was mine once.
People wanted me to be angry at Chris, but I was starting to get angry at them.
I didn’t want my marriage to be so easily reducible to a cliché or, worse, a statistic. I wanted people to help me honor my marriage. I didn’t want to tie it neatly and attach it to a brick an
d then toss it to the bottom of the river along with everyone else’s.
At first it had been tempting to accept the easy commiseration people were offering, I needed company so badly. But I started to realize that in doing so, in letting others shape my story, I would be emptying my marriage of its contents. And that would mean emptying myself as well. I had to find a way to hold on to the best things I’d ever thought about myself and not give them away. I had to imagine that woman I wanted to be on the other side of all this—calm, whole, forgiving, healed, wise—and keep her image in my head and walk toward her. I couldn’t get distracted by what other people were trying to solve for their own lives; I needed to stay focused on whatever was true for me. And I would have to learn to separate myself from whatever Chris was trying to solve in his life, too. He didn’t belong to me anymore.
But we did still share Zack, which made it difficult for me to learn where to start putting up boundaries. I kept stumbling over them when they appeared in places that surprised me, and I’d feel the cutting hurt all over again.
On an early-summer Saturday evening, I’d invited Paul and Marnie and their son, Luke, who was six months younger than Zack, over to the house for a backyard playdate, so that the two boys could crawl around on the lawn. Zack and I started playing a game we called “Boiiiing!” that entailed my lying on my back and pushing him away from me with my feet and followed by his falling backward in a fit of laughter. After a few rounds of this, Zack started screaming in pain. Eventually I figured out that he had hurt his right foot; he couldn’t stand on it, and couldn’t stop crying. I tried to ice it; more screaming. I called the pediatrician, who predicted a diagnosis of “toddler fracture” and said he’d need an X-ray. So I strapped Zack into his stroller and the five of us headed out to the local emergency room nine blocks away.
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