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He couldn’t seem to convey to her that he was a real person, that he was not a blinking cursor awaiting her instructions, that he still existed when she wasn’t in a room with him.
Is a marriage that ends doomed from the start? Was the marriage over when the problems that would never get solved started or when they finally agreed that the problems couldn’t be solved or when other people finally learned about it?
It was that he couldn’t bear to be with anyone who didn’t yet truly understand consequences, how the world would have its way with you despite all your careful life planning. There was no way to learn that until you lived it. There was no way for any of us to learn that until we lived it.
People under forty had optimism. They had optimism for the future; they didn’t accept that their future was going to resemble their present with alarming specificity. They had velocity. He couldn’t bear velocity just at that moment.
We all had faith we’d eventually get over it, though. We didn’t know that a happy future wasn’t guaranteed to us, that it wasn’t our right.
And in our laughter we heard our youth, and it is not not a dangerous thing to be at the doorstep to middle age and at an impasse in your life and to suddenly be hearing sounds from your youth.
“Think about all the times something feels like it lasts forever. Forever seems like the duration of high school, which is four years but that’s only because we’ve only been alive for sixteen years and so four years of that is a huge chunk of our lifetime—a quarter of it.
On the darkest days of his marriage, Toby attended to his hospital business, and out of the corner of his eyes was always the liver, whispering to him that one day, there would be not much sign of all of this damage. He would regenerate, too.
A book should convey your suffering; a book should speak to what is roiling within you.
Across the aisle from us sat two women wearing yoga pants. One was enthusiastically feeding a baby in a stroller, making big eyes and mouth and noises with every bite in a desperate bid to drown out the noises in her head about her life choices.
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.
Was this how dating always was? Were there always this many stories? He didn’t remember the telling of stories, but maybe that was because back when he was young, nobody had stories yet; everything interesting was happening right then, not in the past.
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. Here is how innocent I was and here is how cruel my spouse was.
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.
What a strange thing, a lack of darkness. What a strange thing, for your job to not stress you out, for good things to make you happy and bad things to make you sad. Simplicity is a cool shower after a hot bath. My emotions never tracked quite so logically. Maybe that was what I was drawn to in the first place with him, that his peacefulness was a necessary correction for me. It did not occur to me how I would have to spend my life explaining my darkness and dissatisfaction to someone who didn’t even understand the concept of it.
Here is the problem: You can only desire something you don’t have—that’s how desire works.
No, inside those columned, great-lawned homes were pirates for whom there was never enough. There was never enough money, goods, clothing, safety, security, club memberships, bottles of old wine. There was not a number at which anyone said, “I have a good life. I’d like to see if I can help someone else have a good life.”
Then, finally, a year into her fellowship, he learned that despite her quiet, despite her apparent wish to fade into the background, she was a real person. It was just that she hid herself in plain sight. He began to see everything she did as deliberate. He didn’t feel bad for her anymore. Instead, he just felt foolish, the way quiet, smart people can make you feel dumb just for existing.
Can you imagine what it’s like to have arrived where you want to be at such a young age? That was what she never understood: that ambition didn’t always run uphill. Sometimes, when you were happy, it jogged in place.
Our navy tankinis were reinforced with steel paneling so that our bodies were all mashed and wrung into hourglass figures, while our limbs told the true stories of our discipline and metabolic limitations.
Trust me, I had no sexual or romantic wish for Toby. I just didn’t like the record he was holding. I didn’t like being this way now with someone who still remembered me back at the beginning, back when I was all potential and kinetic energy.
“It’s not New Jersey,” Adam said. “It’s life. It’s being in your forties. We’re parents now. We’ve said all we needed to say.”
Weekends were endless. If you needed to know the most disparate thing about Adam and me, it was that he loved them and I did not. I liked order and routine. Weekends were an abyss that was exactly long enough to stare back at me.
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.
That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman—to tell her story through a man; Trojan horse yourself into a man, and people would give a shit about you.
So I wrote heartfelt stories about their lives, extrapolating from what they gave me and running with what I already knew from being human. They sent me texts and flowers that told me I really understood them in a way that no one had before, and I realized that all humans are essentially the same, but only some of us, the men, were truly allowed to be that without apology.
My voice only came alive when I was talking about someone else; my ability to see the truth and to extrapolate human emotion based on what I saw and was told didn’t extend to myself.
He’d forgotten something essential about life, which was to make sure his children understood his values. No matter how many times you whispered your values to them, the thing that spoke louder was what you chose to do with your time and resources.
You opted in. You didn’t tell them about your asterisks, how you were secretly and privately better than the world you participated in, despite all outward appearances. You thought you could be part of it just a little. You thought you could get the good out of it and leave the bad, but there’s so much work involved in that, too.
For a few years Hannah would straddle being both people, and that was just the worst. Both for her, to endure innocence and maturity in the same body, and for him, to watch the innocence vanish in drips until it was gone.
“It was like the fall of Rome: slowly, then all at once.”
But here’s what he didn’t know, I told him, and what he would learn: A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger. It’s like hating your own finger even after it becomes necrotic. You don’t separate yourself from it. You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate. You’re looking at someone
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I looked at her for a dangerous moment. I wanted to touch her all over her body and remember what it was like to feel like that. I would have eaten her heart or drunk her blood if I could have. But it would come for her, too.
When you are someone who is rejected her entire childhood for reasons that feel impossible to discern, there is little that could happen to you in your future that doesn’t feel like further rejection.
“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.
Still, after all those accusations, Toby never wondered why she was angry. He just hated her for being so. The anger was a garden that she kept tending, and it was filled with a toxic weed whose growth she couldn’t control. He didn’t understand that he was a gardener to the thing, too. He didn’t understand that they’d both planted seeds there.
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?
This was their marriage; this was their family. It was theirs, they owned it, they made it.
On the plane, every time she blinked, she accessed a level of nauseous almost-sleep that was not quite sleep.
She kept nodding off but then jumping back up to alert until she was a raw nerve ending, her eyes bugging out and her breath short and terrified.
A voice boomed out and talked about dark matter, which is a substance they know nothing about but that seems to bind objects in space into some kind of rhythm with each other. You can see the objects, but you can’t see the dark matter. The dark matter is the mystery, and yet everything depends on it—you can’t see it, but it drives everything into motion. “What was your favorite part, Dad?” Solly asked as they left. “I liked how he said that wherever you were in space, it felt like you were the center. I really related to that.” “Like as a planet?” Toby laughed. “I liked the fact that you can’t
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We could feel every day of all the time that had passed.
“You are still you,” he said. “You are still crazy and dark and good. I can see it. You haven’t changed as much as you think you have.”
But also, divorce is about forgetfulness—a decision to stop remembering the moment before all the chaos—the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart. Marriages live in service to the memory of those moments. Their marriage would not forgive them for getting older, and they would not forgive their marriage for witnessing it.
It was like those T-shirts all my daughter’s friends were wearing to school now, the ones that said THE FUTURE IS FEMALE in big block letters. How they march around in broad daylight in shirts like that. But the only reason it’s tolerated is that everyone knows it’s just a lie we tell to girls to make their marginalization bearable.
How could I find my way back to a moment where my life wasn’t a flood of obligations but an endless series of choices, each one designed to teach me something about existence and the world as opposed to marring me for life? At some point, I didn’t remember when, I had taken all my freedom and independence, and pushed them across the poker table at Adam and said, “Here, take my jackpot. Take it all. I don’t need it anymore. I won’t miss it ever.”
I dared him in the mornings to ask me questions so that I could tell him about how I didn’t know how to live anymore. God, I wanted to say, how are you supposed to live like this, knowing you used to answer to no one? How is this the arc we set for ourselves as a successful life?
What were you going to do? Were you not going to get married when your husband was the person who understood you and loved you and rooted for you forever, no matter what? Were you not going to have your children, whom you loved and who made all the collateral damage (your time, your body, your lightness, your darkness) worth it? Time was going to march on anyway. You were not ever going to be young again. You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment—that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again. And now. And now. And now and
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It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised
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We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is about trying to remember that moment? We watch ourselves and our spouses change, and the work is to constantly recall the reasons you did this in the first place. Why is that honorable, to live in service of a moment you have to constantly work so hard to remember?
