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He understood divorce in a macro way, of course. But he had not yet adjusted to it in a micro way, in the other-side-of-the-bed-being-empty way, in the nobody-to-tell-you-were-running-late way, in the you-belong-to-no-one way. How long was it before he could look at the pictures of women on his phone—pictures the women had sent him eagerly and of their own volition—straight on, instead of out of the corner of his eye? Okay, sooner than he thought but not immediately. Certainly not immediately.
More than that, a person shouldn’t be made horny when he felt like garbage. The intersection of horniness and low self-esteem seemed reserved squarely for porn consumption.
One day he would not be recently divorced, but he would never forget those questions, the way people pretended to care for him while they were really asking after themselves.
Toby hadn’t dreamed of great and transcendent things for his marriage. He had parents. He wasn’t an idiot.
He knew that was an unpopular point of view for a man in his position—our friend Seth would barely believe him if he confessed this; his own Hr search parameters had begun at twenty and expired at twenty-seven despite the fact that he, like us, was forty-one. “Why not nineteen?” Toby asked. “Or eighteen even? That’s legal.” “I’m not a perv,” Seth said, even though there were literally hundreds of women who would absolutely have classified Seth as a perv.
Toby had been in college for two years by then, long enough to learn that high school had not been an anomaly.
I was going through something right then, too. I had left my job as a staff writer for a men’s magazine about two years before. I was now what was called a stay-at-home mother, a temporary occupation with no prospect of promotion that worked so hard to differentiate itself from job-working that it confined me to semantic house arrest, though certainly I was allowed to carpool and go to the store.
But also: No one had to tell me it was harder to have a job and be a mother. It was obvious. It was two full-time occupations. It’s just math. Because having a job made you no less of a mother; you still had to do all that shit, too. Keeping track of your kids from afar isn’t easier. Entrusting them to a stranger who was available for babysitting by virtue of the fact that she was incapable of doing anything else is not something that fills a person with faith and relaxation. Now that I have worked and stayed at home, I can confirm all of this. Now that I stay at home, I can say it out loud.
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I owned a car that put my comfort ahead of the health and future of the planet.
But marriage is vast and mysterious and private. You could not scientifically compare two marriages for all of the variance of factors, most particularly what two specific people can tolerate.
Being at the hospital was like being inside the future, but as it was imagined by science fiction films in the last part of the twentieth century, not the actual future we ended up with, where everything just turned out being smaller and flimsier than it used to be.
Guys, a woman comes in complaining about anything, she gets sent away with a script for antidepressants.
Rachel sat in awe of it: The harmony with which they passed chicken to each other, the banter at each other’s expense, the review of the week. How they all gathered, how they sat down, how there was a basic rhythm and ease to it. They had all been gathering like this for so long that they knew how to do it; it was, Rachel later said, almost arrogant the way they all flaunted their comfort and ease.
She couldn’t explain it. Only later would he see that when something created annoyance in her as a result of envy, that was how she knew she wanted it.
His mother had always told him to look at his neighbors and ask himself if he wanted his children to turn out like them, because they would. Neighbors, she’d said, were a far more powerful force than parents. Neighbors were how you voted for a child’s future.
The stories he heard from divorced women were all the same—not the details, but the themes: This thing I thought was just a whim was actually an important part of my spouse’s identity, and still I’m surprised. This thing they had always been doing they kept doing and still I’m surprised.
It’s crazy that the friends you’re fondest of from your youth sometimes resemble people you would cross the street to avoid as an adult.
I can’t think of that without thinking about poor Adam, about how the gift he gave me was a lack of volatility, and as a result he gets a less volatile me—a less eager me, a less humid me.
Sometimes you saw couples who seemed wild about each other, always holding hands, sitting on the same side of the table when they ate out, even when they were together alone. Rachel would say that those people were putting on a show, that they were covering up a real poison in their relationship, and that was the only time Toby ever felt like she was on his side: when she was working as hard as he was to make their misery seem normal.
And he’d ask, “Do you ever notice that you speak to me like one of your employees that you hate? And that you’re really nice to your clients?” And she would say, “God, Toby, do you really need me to put on a show for you, too?” And then she would do a sickly sweet impression of he wasn’t quite sure what—a 1950s housewife? A version of herself she thought Toby wanted her to be? “I’m so glad my hubby is home! Should I get you a martini?” Her voice would be bouncy and bright and he would think for the first time that maybe he should murder
“Ah!” Toby said out loud. He was momentarily triumphant for putting all of this together; then he remembered that the loser points in this scenario actually accrued to him.
Rachel hated tea. She drank coffee. Tea, she said, was a too-complicated way of drinking water. It was useless and she had no patience for it.
So Sam was an insomniac. It was nice that even sociopaths could be haunted by their decisions.
I watched Toby watch me at my pool club. Every family was just like mine: chubby, domineering mother; clueless, servile dad; disgusted child; happy-go-lucky child who just wants to know if the slide is open; sometimes there was a third child if the chubby, domineering mother and the clueless, servile dad had started early enough.
In general, we only ever spoke about our children with each other. I didn’t know if they were having better conversations and I was just excluded, or if this was all there was to talk about.
But no one was watching. People didn’t look at me anymore. I’m allowed to go into bathrooms that are only for customers now anywhere in the city. I could shoplift if I wanted to, is how ignored I am. The week I turned forty I’d been sent to profile one of the New York Giants. I wasn’t given access to the locker room, and my lanyard said RESTRICTED PRESS: NO LOCKER ACCESS in bright yellow and it covered half my torso. I walked into the locker room anyway and stood right there among all their penises, and the very people who had issued me the lanyard walked by me as if I were there to set up for
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Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you’re a lot of kinds of women, you’re still always just a woman, which is to say you’re always a little bit less than a man.
anyone who has ever been to just one session of couples therapy could tell you that beyond your point of view lies an abyss with a bubbling cauldron of fire, and that just beyond that abyss lies your spouse’s point of view.
Toby had heard from other doctors who worked with a poorer clientele that less fortunate people are more accepting of these things. Not the rich ones. Rich patients couldn’t believe that money couldn’t help, that their positions and club memberships and status couldn’t help. They couldn’t believe that nobody was coming to save them. But nobody was coming to save them.
Toby sat, stunned, and realizing that his entire problem in life was that he could still be stunned by information that revealed what seemed to be true most of the time, which was that things weren’t what they seemed.
“Maybe it was the Beggar Woman’s curse coming true.” “I don’t remember that one. May you find yourself being lap-danced upon by a filthy-minded lawyer burping on sparkling rosé bubbles when your dick stops working.”
AGAIN I’LL SAY IT: Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you. The only exception to that rule is the friends you make in college.
I couldn’t bear being this suburban mom who was alternating between screaming at her kids and being the heartfelt, privileged witness to their joy. But the people around us—the haranguing mothers and the sexless fathers—I kept trying to find ways that I was better than these people, but all I kept landing on was the fact that the common denominator was me.
“I never misrepresented myself,” he’d say. That was a favorite, as if people weren’t supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.
Everywhere she turned in her own home, there was a new insult. She would wake up in the morning and walk out the door with Toby and the kids and before she headed in the direction away from school, she would hear the doorman talk about what a hero Toby was for taking his own children to school. She would bump into one of the teachers from school and the teacher would say, “It’s so amazing the way your husband drops them off every morning.” She wanted to say, “Isn’t it amazing how I pay the fucking mortgage? Isn’t it amazing how my children have schedules that are more complex than the
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When she turned forty, she decided to stop pretending she wasn’t angry about all of this. She didn’t want to make life hard for the kids, but she also saw how much energy it was sapping from her to pretend that she still liked Toby as much as she used to. She had liked him! She’d loved him. God, she had loved him. He was the first person who delighted her, who
Now all he wanted was to go to therapy. But she’d been to therapy with him. He wanted to scream and throw things outside of therapy, and then he wanted to go to therapy and sit and be reasonable. She wanted to know, if you could be reasonable in the first place, why wouldn’t you always be reasonable so you didn’t have to go to couples therapy?
She always thought divorce would come from hate, but her anger was never based in hate. It was based in disappointment that someone she loved misunderstood her so deeply.
I did want it. Or I wanted it mostly. Or I wanted it in the background. Or I was bored. Or my personal hierarchy of need had advanced to the point where once you question the necessity of the stable marriage, the only way to go is down. Or I was just destined to be a miserable person, no matter what marital state I was in. Or New Jersey is a place that people choose very often over New York and I should just get over it. Or I just wanted some independence and some time alone to watch whatever I wanted on television without being judged. Or I wanted my abdomen to look less like a topographical
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You can’t fix this, I realized. Even our crises had to be small and polite. What I did was forgivable; what Rachel did was unacceptable. But ultimately it was the same for us both: The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older.
All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person. If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart person does, the constraints of this world on a woman.
I would admit to finding small joys with the other women in my neighborhood who were in their forties and all felt like exiles of relevance, too.
