I’d found someone for whom making art was central and being in a relationship was incidental. I loved sitting in a room with John, both of us on our laptops, working silently, fiercely. I could feel our energies awake and together. We didn’t need anything else from each other.

But by then I knew that John was often the one who arrived late to a party, overstayed his welcome, and forgot the gift. When I asked him if he’d be better off with a servant-wife than a human wife, he said, I get up and shower and have breakfast waiting for me, and nine times out of ten you do the laundry and think about dinner and remind me to mail things and make phone calls…I can’t imagine anyone being more helpful.

He gave me a look of love. I felt wonderful. Then I felt trapped.

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. And I was a control freak, a neat freak, a crazy person. A long time ago, in my twenties, I’d even spent ten days on a psych ward after a hospital-administered overdose of steroids for my autoimmune condition. John seemed awed by that hospitalization. He seemed to think it was cool, that I was a legitimately mad artist, touched with fire.

I decided to examine my rage, determine what I needed, and rely on John for no part of it. I imagined never needing to ask him for anything ever again.

I thought, If I had the energy I’d leave him, and then I folded up that little thought, wrapped it in gauze, and swallowed it.

Right after I awoke, my shoulders seized up, and John agreed to massage them. I pressed down on a painful knot. Here.

John rubbed all around the knot. He said, Everything is connected. These muscles are all part of a system. He rubbed my shoulder blade, getting farther and farther away from the pain. I dug my finger into the lump, trying to soften it.

Stop it, John said. I know what I’m doing. He didn’t touch the sore spot.

He would decide whether I deserved relief. He would decide whether my pain even existed at all.

John said that he had nothing to give me because he knew his life was harder than mine. I poured tears for a whole hour. He told me I was acting like a spoiled child, that the postpartum period was so much easier than his life, working at the bank instead of being an artist. He refused to take antidepressants, claiming it would take too long to find the proper dose. I wanted neither a divorce nor a disdainful partner, so there I was, hoping for a third option.

Hannah and her second husband had had a baby two years earlier. She said that her husband had also failed to recognize the invisible work of nursing and caring for their child, and that they’d had the same arguments about whose life was harder and why Hannah wasn’t getting any work done.

To solve the problem, she said, I became a lot more patient.

By the time we got back to New York, John had fixated on the idea that moving back to California was the only thing that would ever make him feel better. He said that my choosing to remain in New York and finish teaching my poetry course equaled choosing to keep him depressed. It’s your fault I’m depressed! he said.

Why are you so angry? My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.

It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.

Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless. Infants are angry. Have you ever sat all night holding a baby in the dark who’s screaming right into your face? It changes you, or so my husband used to say. He’d done that one night, sat and been screamed at. I was sitting right next to him, but he always told the story as if he’d been the only one there. All the other days and nights, it had just been me. But that one night had been the real game-changer, apparently.

My mother told me I’d been such a happy child. You loved everything, she said. I became angry early, though. I was precocious.

I pitied men for having to stay the same all their lives, for missing out on this consuming rage.

I didn’t know you would be here, the famous author said when I arrived at the book party. Before he left he put his arm around me for a moment, and I ran my hand down his back like an idiot.

Did you get your Porsche? I asked disdainfully, to punish him for my unmanageable feeling. He’d just received an enormous book advance and wanted to buy himself a vintage 911.

Strong, vibrating shame. I wanted to hit him with a car. I wanted to sit next to him at a dinner that would never happen, his fingers tickling the skin under my knee.

I wrote him the next morning at 7:42 a.m. with clear purpose. I’m sorry I teased you about your Porsche. Please don’t hate me.

Then all I had to do was accept the fact that he wouldn’t write back, and then discreetly masturbate about it for ten years.

But three hours later he wrote back. I didn’t realize you were teasing me until now, so just starting hating you this very minute. Plus, I may get a Jaguar instead and you will want a ride at some point.

In Alberta, in freezing rain, we weren’t allowed into John’s college reunion because, his classmate explained, he hadn’t registered for it. Out of two hundred people in his class, he was the only one not on the list. He explained to me that it was the school’s fault, not his, that he’d pre-registered just as everyone else had, that it wasn’t his fault.

He kept telling me to stop letting it show on my face. To hide how I felt so that no one would know, no one would be able to read the proof of my shame and humiliation, which by then I always felt for John so he never needed to feel it himself.

The next day John slept late and then announced we’d go to the museum for a nice lunch. But if we did that, the child would miss his lunch by an hour and his nap by two hours. I just wanted to have a nice lunch with you, John whined. He’d just wanted to have an expensive, boozy lunch anywhere, with anyone. We went to the museum. The child got a late supper and then melted down at bath time.