Liars

by Sarah Manguso

John would do what he wanted, I was crazy, he was the partner of a crazy person. Whom he loved anyway, dearly.

In the beginning, everything about him had shone, but as time passed, I noticed that he used the word phenomena as a singular noun, couldn’t spell the word necessary, couldn’t write a coherent paragraph. Next to him, I was brilliant. Next to me, he was beautiful, charming, and initially capable of hiding all the things that, in my wrinkly little heart, made me consider him inferior.

I didn’t want to go. We’re a team, he said, and then went without me.

I wrote to Hannah, Tonight I learned why my mother always squealed and shrank away when my father tried to touch her: She was a fortress. And inside that fortress was rage, and in the center of that rage was the pain of the insult of being treated like a stupid maid. My fortress is the same, with smaller hips, surrounded by a corona of migraine.

And yet no married woman I knew was any better off, so I determined to carry on. After all, a person can be grandiose without being a clinical narcissist.

I was a layer cake of abandonment and hurt and fury, iced with a smile.

I wanted neither a divorce nor a disdainful partner, so there I was, hoping for a third option.

John still talked over me, told me my feelings were stupid, blamed our fighting on me, left the room in the middle of a conversation, and said it was a reasonable reaction to my being crazy.

It wasn’t happiness; it was the temporary cessation of pain.

Maybe we can get through this without counseling, a wife said for the two-billionth time in human history.

John didn’t just need to win the fight; he needed me to agree that it was my responsibility never to say anything that might make him feel as if he’d ever done anything wrong. Feeling that he’d done something wrong really threatened his sense of entitlement.

I thought about all the wives who had lived before birth control, before legal abortion, before the recognition of marital rape and domestic abuse, before women could buy a house or open a bank account or vote or drive or leave the house. I wanted to apologize to all the forgotten and unseen women who had allowed me to exist, all the women I’d sworn not to emulate because I’d wanted to be human—I wanted to be like a man, capable and beloved for my service to the world.

He asked, Why are you still with him? That’s what most people would ask if I told the story to them like that, in one sentence.

The purpose of marriage was to get stuck, I thought, so that one was forced to fix the marriage in lieu of leaving.

But qualified women aren’t likable; likable women aren’t qualified. The only way to get the job is to be ten times better than the best man and likable, which means willing to absorb any amount of misogyny in any form from anyone with a smile on your face, forever.

Not for the first time, John told me something I already knew, but he told it half wrong. Thank you for teaching me what I already know, I said. Well, I’m a man and I’ve been drinking, so I’m pretty much an expert on everything, he said back.

I wrote to Hannah, Even a decent marriage drains the life out of a woman. During our worst fights I refer to our divorce as a sure thing, impending. Yet I don’t know anyone with a better marriage. It really is absolute shit, being a man’s wife. I swear up and down that if I outlive this marriage, I will never be with a man again.

At that moment I believed my husband didn’t value me, my work, or my life. At that moment, I wanted out of the marriage. At that moment, if we hadn’t had a kid, I’d have left. The feeling wasn’t resolved; it just got set aside.

I think our husbands just learned an important lesson, she texted to me, but I doubted it.

I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.

And I was a woman who had tied her wagon to this man. I’d been persuaded to live off the fruits of his late-stage capitalist privilege. I’d chosen to have a child with him, and then I’d chosen to stay because I’d thought we were a team. Because I’d wished we were a team.

You’re just getting angrier and crazier, John said, watching me do laundry and dishes and pay bills and apply to refinance his school loans.

I clung to my little story. It wasn’t all lies.

John laid into me for getting, as he saw it, too angry about things. He wouldn’t accept that the root of my anger was that he dismissed and ignored me.

He sounded as if he’d do anything to save our marriage—anything but curtailing his arrogance or going to a single session of individual or marital therapy or apologizing for anything ever.

When John forgot to pick up the dry cleaning and I blamed him for it, he insisted that I give him credit for trying. It’s not my fault, he said, believing it totally. By then I’d started responding, Nothing ever is.

I can fix this, I thought, while he told me that I needed more medication, more therapy. I decided not to initiate interaction with John and respond minimally to his initiations. That’s how we’d avoid conflict. My marriage took on the color of sleet.

I decided that I just wouldn’t be hurt when John tried to hurt me. I wouldn’t react. It was already starting to work.

Not one of my married friends had a spouse who wasn’t impossible most of the time.

The betrayal had happened a long time ago, the marriage long gone to dust. Nothing had changed but my awareness of it.

You don’t think of a potential life outside your marriage unless you’ve already destroyed something essential about it. Once you can think like that, you’ve created the possibility that it could end. Close to the end, I’d begun to imagine that new life. I’d thought it would be like turning a page. But then John left, and I was in an unimagined time.

Inflicting abuse isn’t the hard part. Controlling the narrative is the main job.

Maybe I’d made it too clear to John that I didn’t need him anymore, if in fact I ever had.

People had started saying, You’ll get through this mere days after John left, but what I needed most was to be plunged into a massive holding tank containing all the possible endings, even the one with my corpse floating face down in the water. I needed my suffering to be acknowledged. After that, maybe I’d think about getting through it.

Then she asked if I’d like John to apologize. I said, No, because the word of a liar is meaningless. She never asked again.

I was still trying to explain to myself how I’d become this person, this discarded wife, when I’d never even wanted to be a wife in the first place. I wrote in my notebook, Please let there be a lesson at the end of this.

Then I understood that within John’s reality distortion field, no apology was necessary. He was on great terms with his ex-wife.

But then I remembered that each day was the only day, and I yoked myself to it and dragged it grimly forward.

The difference between John and a fascist despot is one of degree, not type. Don’t try to make your sad little divorce story about the behavior of sociopathic tyrants, I thought, but I wasn’t making it about what it was already about.

That’s why I’d stayed. I was stubborn. I’d refused to admit I’d been wrong about him.

I felt deeply that I wasn’t meant to have a partner. But I’d had a partner for fourteen years. But he wasn’t a partner.

I looked at photos of John from the beginning and saw his kind, gentle eyes. But they weren’t the eyes of a kind man anymore. They were the eyes of a predator.

Was I angry only because I’d chosen someone who would always be less intelligent, less successful? Had I done what men do when they marry beautiful, compliant idiots?

Did he have me confused with the lunatic he told everyone I was?

The prospect of dying while knowing that you are loved, in the company of the other—that’s the marriage vow. The core experience of spousal betrayal is having that happy scene torn away from you. But dying alone, cradled by the universe, continuous with the rest of its energy, wasn’t something I dreaded anymore. Worse things had already happened.

A wedding vow is a mind game. You have to guess whether the person currently on his best behavior will someday value your physical, emotional, and financial health above the convenience of being able to just break the contract. This guessing game can’t be done with any degree of success. It’s not even a guessing game. It’s a coin toss. You’re basing a lifelong plan on the behavior of a person who might change, or change back, to someone else.

My denial phase lasted fifteen seconds, I praised myself, but then I remembered that it had lasted more than fourteen years.

A husband might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement. You can throw all your love and energy and attention down into it, and the hole will never fill.

My god, how I’d loved thinking about our long marriage. I’d loved thinking of myself as having the capacity for mature love, which I’d experienced as self-erasure and processed as achievement.

Marni wrote, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I was disallowed from feeling my own success for years because my husband needed an average woman. When that was no longer possible, he went out and found one.