Liars

by Sarah Manguso

It had felt like a neutralizing decision. It had felt like getting even with the harm he’d done me. It had felt like a drop in the bucket of that harm. Which is, of course, exactly how he’d felt about his lying and cheating. How large was his bucket? What else was in it, besides Victoria?

Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.

A year after he left, I felt a stirring of awareness: Maybe he’d known he’d needed to let me go so I could be free to do my work and live my life, and maybe on some deep, secret level, it was an act of duty and kindness. But that’s just me projecting a pretty moral onto a story of deliberate harm. When I was a wife, that was my main job.

There were so many perspectives on those fourteen years, and each one was newly, separately instructive. Once I could stand looking at it from one direction, I discovered another and had to figure everything out all over again.

John had taught me a lesson that felt indelible: that there are no assurances. That anyone might do anything to anyone.