by Erin Duffy
“We have history, Claire!” he said. He stood up from the table and bumped into it, causing some of my tea to slosh out of the mug and drip off the edge onto the floor. I wondered how long it would take me to care that it had happened. A few months from now, someone would probably come see this house when it was up for sale and sit down at my table, and her elbows would stick to it because I never cared enough to clean up the sugary tea that Owen made me to ease the shock of his infidelity. I didn’t give a shit about the spilled tea, or the unalphabetized cookbooks, or the dirty kitchen towel that needed to be washed. I cared that he didn’t care enough about me to tell me that he wanted to be with someone else. I cared because if I hadn’t forgotten my wallet, this might’ve gone on for months, or years, and I never would’ve known it. How long could he have kept lying to me? How long would I have failed to notice? It wasn’t a fling. It was a relationship. It was a relationship that started in the halls of their high school in 1995, and continued in the breakfast nook of my kitchen in 2016.
“Everyone has history!” I screamed back. “What kind of explanation is that? Just because you dated her twenty years ago doesn’t mean you get to sleep with her now! Marriage means you let go of history, and you focus on the future. Did you not pick up on that when you were talking about forsaking all others? Are you that dense that you don’t even understand what a marriage means?” We were now into the insult part of the program. Next up, breaking of sentimental objects, followed shortly thereafter by hysteria.
“I don’t expect you to understand, and I’m sick knowing that I’ve hurt you. I didn’t want you to find out like this.”
“How did you want me to find out, out of curiosity?” I asked. I was pretty sure there was no good way to break this kind of news. I found it interesting to discover that he did.
“I wanted to at least be able to sit you down before you had to see it for yourself.”
“Oh,” I said. “So you were going to tell me about this. Thank you for being so thoughtful as to wait until I could be safely seated. Do you love her?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“You just did.” Extreme heat now enveloped my entire body and I knew what it felt like to be trapped inside of a box that was on fire. For the record, it sucked.
“No, I didn’t. I enjoy being with her. She likes to do things. I travel so much, and when I’m home you don’t want to do anything. You’re so tired all the time.”
“She doesn’t have a baby! That’s the best you can give me? ‘I cheated on you because you sleep too much?’ Are you kidding me with that?”
“You always do this,” he said. I didn’t like that this conversation seemed to be steering back into the “it’s your fault” lane.
“Do what?” I challenged.
“You never take responsibility for anything! I can’t have a conversation with you about anything! You’re impossible to talk to!”
“This isn’t a conversation!” We were now yelling so loudly I glanced at the window, praying it was closed. It wasn’t. Awesome. “This is my finding out that you cheated on me and that our marriage is over. This isn’t a conversation. It’s an assault on my head and my heart. I’m allowed to react however the hell I want!”
“You’re right,” he said, suddenly remembering what exactly had happened to me today. “If you want to go to counseling, I’m willing to try it. I’m willing to work on our relationship if you are. As bad as this is, I don’t want to lose you. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking at all. I’m sorry, Claire. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Counseling? You can’t possibly think that I would ever take you back after you did this. You’re not that stupid. Is there any part of you that thinks we can make this work after what you did? Do you think I’ll ever trust you again, ever?”
“No,” he admitted. “I don’t expect you to take me back.” He held his head in his hands, and then quickly ran his sleeve across his eyes. He was crying. The only other time I ever saw Owen cry was when Bo was born. That was the beginning of something. This was the end of something. Sweat began to pour down my arms.
“I’m sorry, Claire. I really am.”
“You can apologize for the rest of your life, Owen, and it won’t undo this. We will be eighty years old and you can still be apologizing and it still won’t be enough.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“There’s nothing to say,” I whispered. “It’s over. You knew it would be over the second I found out about this, and you did it anyway. You brought her into our home. You sent me away so that you could play house with your girlfriend and our son. I don’t know who I married, and I don’t even know who you are anymore, but I know that we are over, and that’s something I never would’ve expected. Not ever.”
“You can have the house,” he said, because that was the way to make your wife feel better after telling her you don’t love her anymore. “I’ll pay you alimony. I’ll obviously give you all the child support you need. I won’t make this any harder on you, or on Bo, than it already is.” I hadn’t thought about what would happen when this conversation was over—the logistics of everything—the packing of suitcases, the removal of toothbrushes and deodorant from the medicine cabinet, the monthly checks that would now arrive in the mail. I hadn’t thought about how we were actually going to untangle our lives and go forward separately. The only thing that had concerned me up until now was the emotional fallout of this mess, but there was more to it. The physical disconnection might actually hurt more. “As awful as this is, it doesn’t have to be ugly,” he informed me. “We can try and be friends.”
“It’s a fucking divorce, Owen. It’s ugly. I’m not doing any of this conscious uncoupling crap where we still have dinner every Saturday and you live in the basement or something. You picked someone else over me. It doesn’t get any uglier than this. Don’t try and convince yourself otherwise. And I don’t want the stupid house.”
“What do you mean?” Owen asked, because that was the part of this conversation that was hard to believe.
“I want to go home,” I said, my stomach heaving. I’d never wanted to be home more in my entire life. Fight or flight instincts were kicking in, and I was going with flight, as in, the next one to Chicago.
“You are home,” he said, because he apparently was a lot more stupid than I’d ever thought possible.
“Home to Illinois. I want to just take Bo and go home. I’ll worry about putting my life back together there.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t take him to Chicago. He’s my son, too,” Owen said, and I immediately felt my mouth go dry. I hadn’t expected him to put up a fight, which, in retrospect, was me being more stupid than I’d ever thought possible. He loved Bo. Bo might be the only person on earth he loved other than himself.
“You weren’t thinking about him when you banged your high school girlfriend. Why are you bothering to think about him now?”
“You can be mad at me all you want. I don’t blame you. I’m mad at me, too. But you can’t leave here with my child and think you’re going back to the Midwest. It’s never going to happen. Never.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. It hadn’t occurred to me that I couldn’t go home. I’d been trying to figure out how fast I could pack and book tickets out of here.
“It means you can’t leave. I’m sorry.”
“Well, if you were my father, and I was seventeen, and asking for the car keys, that would be an acceptable answer. As I am most certainly not seventeen, and you are most certainly not my father, that means shit to me. I’m going.”
“It’s illegal, Claire. I’ll fight you until the very end. You can’t go anywhere with our son without my permission. I’ll give you the house, and all of the money you need. But I’m not giving you Bo. No shot in hell that happens.”
The reality was beginning to set in, and it felt like a sharp punch in the chest.
“I’m going to see a lawyer,” I said, which was meant
to sound threatening, even though I was sure that was what he expected me to do.
“I think you should. I promise you, though, no matter how much you hate me right now, you’re not going to be able to move. Bo’s life is here. Our life is here . . .”
“There is no our life. Not anymore. There never really was. There was your life, and me isolated in this stupid house in this stupid place that you moved me to. I never had a life here. I’ve just existed.”
“There’s your life, and there’s my life, and they both happen here.”
I had a hard time computing what had happened to my life in the span of a few short hours. How did I miss the signs? We had a nice morning together. Owen gave me a gift, and made me coffee, and encouraged me to hurry so I didn’t miss my spin class. He kept telling me to go, to get up, to leave the house, to trust that he and Bo would be fine without me for the day.
He kept telling me to leave.
Without warning, I put my head between my legs, and vomited all over the hardwood kitchen floor that Dee Dee promised me was original.
Chapter 3
THE FIRST FEW days after you find out you’re getting divorced are kind of weird days. You don’t really follow through with the plans you thought you had because they all suddenly seem pretty stupid. For example, Owen and I were going to take Bo to the swings on the playground and then maybe stop at the grocery store on the way home to buy some organic apples, and an organic chicken, and some dinosaur kale for dinner, and now these seemed like pretty silly things to do. I didn’t need apples. I didn’t need chicken. I didn’t really need dinosaur kale when I thought I needed dinosaur kale because I didn’t actually like it, I just felt like I should. We’d talked about going to the aquarium, or maybe heading up to Boston for a weekend, or maybe driving to the beach on a sunny afternoon and having a picnic. It was safe to say that we weren’t going to be doing any of those things now, so my calendar for the foreseeable future had suddenly opened up. In light of recent events, I decided to forget about all of my previous plans and make some new ones. I removed my wedding ring and placed it in my top drawer underneath a pile of socks that I never wore, but for some reason hadn’t thrown out. The affair had been going on almost the entire time we’d been here, and I’ve been walking around town with my stroller and my diamond ring like an idiot, and that wasn’t going to happen again. It was going to live in my sock drawer until I figured out where to sell it.
I knew Owen was going to come by at some point to get all of his clothes, and I knew he was going to do it soon, and that was why I decided that I had to destroy them. Women throw their husband’s clothes out of the window and onto the front lawn all the time, but that seemed like a cliché, and also I didn’t actually know when he was planning on coming to collect his things, and didn’t want to risk having his wardrobe all over the lawn for weeks on end. People in suburbia talk. So, keeping the destruction confined within the walls of my house seemed like a better alternative for now. I grabbed scissors from the drawer and cut holes in the pockets of all his pants, so that he’d lose his change, his keys, and anything else he threw in there, but he had made me lose my marriage and my mind, and those didn’t seem like fair trades, so after I was done with that I moved on to his dress shirts. I cut nipple holes in all of his button-downs, and half of his golf shirts, and that made me feel marginally better, but it was fleeting, because really all that did was ruin a round of golf or make him late for work, and that didn’t seem sufficient, either, and so I looked for something new again. I gazed at his blazers hanging neatly on the racks, and thought about how not that long ago I tucked love notes in his pockets, and had to resist the urge to slam my dominant hand in the doorjamb to punish it for being so stupid. There would be no more love notes in his pockets, or his shoes, or his bags, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t leave something else instead. I spastically hurried down to the kitchen, grabbed a bag of dried beans from the pantry, and brought them back up to my bedroom. For the next ten minutes I proceeded to put handfuls of them in his shoes, in the pockets of his sports coats, in his winter coat pockets, in his baseball hats, in the small zipper compartments of the travel bag he carried with him on business trips, in his tuxedo, and even in the jar of pomade he used to style his stupidly perfect head of hair. I stepped back and exhaled. I needed to catch my breath because cutting holes in pockets and golf shirts, and scattering beans all over someone’s belongings was more tiring than you’d think. He would move, and he would take his clothes with him, and he’d never again find another love note from me, but for years to come he’d find beans in his belongings, which would drive him crazy, and remind him that once upon a time he drove me crazy, too. Throwing clothes out of the window was fleeting, but beans could be forever. When I was done cutting the pockets and the nipple holes and hiding the beans, I laid back down in my bed and realized that those things didn’t even begin to punish him enough for what he’d done to us. It was a start, but going forward I was going to have to get creative, and that was fine, because I had nothing but time and a lot of creative energy to expend, not to mention the fact that I was royally pissed off.
It was a good thing that I got to work on the clothes and the beans, because two days later Owen showed up and packed a few of his bean-filled bags and left the house to move in with his mother. I waited a while to call my parents and Antonia to tell them what happened. I would’ve thought that I’d have called them right after he left, but I didn’t. I watched him leave with his shoulders slumped forward and his head hanging low like he was ashamed of what he’d done, but I wasn’t buying it. He let it go on for too long. He let her in our home. He wasn’t ashamed he cheated on me—he was ashamed he got caught. It took all of my strength not to chase him out into the front yard, and beat him with the golf club he kept in his closet in case someone broke into the house in the middle of the night and he needed to scare them away, but I didn’t. I decided that I was going to try and handle this mess with some dignity. I didn’t know how successful I’d be, but trying to bash in his skull with athletic equipment couldn’t be a good place to start.
It took me some time to process everything, and for some reason, I just wasn’t ready to tell anyone that it was over. I was embarrassed, because I felt like admitting Owen cheated on me somehow meant that I failed—that I wasn’t a good enough wife. I was angry, for obvious reasons, and hurt, for obvious reasons, and numb, for obvious reasons, and I felt it was best to hunker down with Bo and keep our personal crisis to ourselves. There would be plenty of time for people to know, but only a few days to deal with it in peace, and I wanted to make those days last as long as possible. So I did. I didn’t leave the house for over a week. Owen still had some clothes in the closet, and I still had my scissors and a giant bag of lentils. I was good.
I missed my job, if for no other reason than a job would have allowed me to not feel like I was failing in every aspect of my life. My mind wandered, a meandering string of thoughts that skipped and hopped through various scenarios of how different things could be for me right now if only I hadn’t stopped working. I was good at what I did, and if I had joined that start-up I would’ve been part of an amazing company that I’d helped build from infancy. There could’ve been venture capital money, and then an IPO, and then I could’ve been present to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange while throngs of sweaty businesspeople applauded and cheered and screamed. But I’m not. Instead, I’m in bed in Connecticut, because I quite dumbly decided that I’d rather be someone’s wife and someone’s mother over someone who rang the opening bell. I exercised my right as an independent, modern woman in the year of our Lord 2015 to leave everything I’d worked for and move east for a man, and nobody tried to stop me. If I’d left my life in Chicago for any other reason—say, to join the circus, or try my luck in Hollywood, which, for the record, might have actually worked out better for me—I’d have had more than a few people tell me to reconsider. But I left for a husband, and so instead I got a goodby
e card signed by my colleagues and congratulatory hugs on my way out the door.
That was messed up.
And so here I was, living where I didn’t want to live without the person who was responsible for my living here. Even worse, I didn’t have a job, and I didn’t have a life, and I didn’t have an IPO, and I could be angry at Owen for all of that, but the truth of it was I was angry at myself, too. I didn’t hedge my bets, and instead I went all in on the wrong thing. I gambled on Owen—on us, and our family, and what we could do—and I should’ve gambled on me and what I could do for myself instead. If I had, well, things likely would’ve turned out differently. That was something that I’d have to reconcile at some point, after hours of expensive and intrusive therapy, innumerable self-help books, and probably a few bottles of vodka, too.
By the following Saturday I was ready to talk, if for no other reason than I was afraid if I dodged any more phone calls from Antonia she’d think I was dead, which in some ways, I was. My parents were understandably shocked when I told them what was happening, but it didn’t take long for my father to tell me that he never really liked Owen, and that I could do better, or for my mother to remind me that any man who was unfaithful to a woman with an infant wasn’t the type of man I should be married to. This was all useful information that did nothing to make me feel better.
If I could’ve held off telling my parents forever I would have, because once you tell other people about the worst day of your life, you can never again pretend it didn’t happen. It wasn’t bad enough that I had to deal with the horror of my failed marriage, but now my parents would have to deal with it, too. All of the time and the money spent on my wedding and it was over before I got most of my pictures out from under my bed and into an album. All of the people who came to toast us and to celebrate the beautiful life I was about to have with my new husband were going to wonder what was wrong with me that I couldn’t even manage to make it last two years. I wasn’t sure why I felt shame, but it was overwhelming.