The child was old enough to tell John what he needed, I reminded myself, and I became more comfortable with taking short trips. During a visit to a college in Texas, I flirted outrageously with an assistant professor who brought me drinks and stood too close to me. The cumulative amount of eye contact we made over two days might have been only ten seconds, but it felt like an entire alternate life.

On the second morning, I went into town with the assistant professor and some other faculty. That afternoon, a graduate student pointedly asked, How was your morning? Then she asked the same question an hour or two later, and I said, I told you, I went into town…before I realized I sounded defensive. You seem to know a lot of people on the faculty. How do you know my advisor? I was cool as a cucumber, cool as a liar. Oh, we’re old friends. We were. But she thought I’d fucked him, and with good reason. I was acting as if I had.

I met a new friend for lunch and drank a glass of wine and then heard myself say to her, I think my marriage might be over. I cried pathetically.

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.

John did the laundry at the laundromat but forgot half of it at home and brought home what he did wash still damp. He didn’t apologize or admit he’d made a mistake. Then he made the child apologize to him for noting that Dad had put his shirt on backward.

Years ago John had said that my ability to self-diagnose crazy behavior and apologize for it within two hours was exceptionally rare for women. I’d held on to that compliment for years, extracting every bit of its warmth.

John put the refillable seltzer bottles in the dishwasher and melted them because he hadn’t read the instructions. He’d put most but not all of the dishes through the washer, wiped no surfaces, cleaned no cutting boards. There was no muesli. The floor needed sweeping. I rage-cleaned and ordered new seltzer bottles.

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.

John seethed at me until I apologized. For what? I didn’t know. He used my not knowing as evidence of the gravity of the offense. Then I figured it out: My offense was having failed to give him credit for picking up the cleaning after he’d failed to pick up the cleaning.

We walked to the nursery for more seeds but the store was closed until further notice.

I made bread with the child but the yeast was dead so we made flatbreads.

John said we’d move to Australia if everything broke down, and for once I was too tired to care.

—
On a night we’d agreed to fuck, John stayed up late talking with Victoria on the phone. He was on the sofa in the living room and his face was pink, his expression the grateful disbelief of a teenaged virgin. He was so animated, he sounded like he was on coke.

After he finally hung up, I lectured him about what I perceived as his flagrant emotional affair with Victoria. We agreed to set Thursday aside as date night in perpetuity.

—
John went for a run and then proposed a fast, reeking fuck. He hadn’t been wearing deodorant.

In the morning, the child got out of bed in tears. Mom, you’re usually good at knowing why I’m crying. But I don’t know why I’m crying now. I told him it was because his body was wise, and that it missed going to school.

Then he gave me a hug and said, This experience is really weird. What a soul.

I spent the rest of the day on the couch maintaining semi-attentive availability, waiting to be summoned by the child. The only artifact of this work was the child himself, who would accumulate the results of my work in the form of a gradual intellectual and moral evolution. I would accumulate my part of it by looking older and more tired.

—
John casually said he was going to go for a bike ride even though we’d planned to do yoga together, and I erupted. John was furious that I was hurt and thought I should apologize for being angry. It’s not my fault, he said, and I neatly finished, It never is.

When I asked John to check my busted gearshift, he said, Move. Then he shoved me out of the way. Instead of getting mad I said, Next time, please just say “excuse me.” The child noticed that I was glum and quietly said ILMF to me, which was our secret word that meant I love my family.

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.

Marni wrote, This isn’t exactly my life dream and I wrote back, We’re too old for dreams. Life at our age was about nurturing young, serving community, and, for the very lucky, some battered, wiser form of love, not a dream of love.

Her husband was kind, steady, utterly committed to her, the object of a long-ago crush. It was the second marriage for them both. He was gray and grizzled but had been comfortable in his middle-aged body for at least a decade, unlike the rest of us, who weren’t sure yet that we were ready to give up. He’d given up years ago. He didn’t seem to regret anything about his life or himself. He seemed like the cool senior, years wiser than any of us freshmen.

I felt good about my relatively youthful body and smooth skin, and about knowing the names and correct pronunciations of Île de la Cité and Berthillon, but in twenty years, what would I feel good about? What stupid things to think about at all.

When I was young I’d sworn I’d never marry. I’d understood, back then, that commitment was a trap that closed off otherwise accessible exit routes. Then I had therapy for ten years and learned that commitment was a gift, the ability to give your heart to another. To forsake all others.

Then, more than a decade into marriage, I had to relearn that it’s also the other thing, the trap. It’s both. I felt stupid, having to relearn something that, thirty years ago, I’d already known. Together, the two truths were heavier than they were separately. I held tight to them both.