by
Haley Mlotek
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Here’s one part that doesn’t fit in this story. On the way back from the morning after, when that man and I were walking toward my home, I got halfway down a block before realizing I was alone. I turned and he was stopped at a tree blooming with fragile purple and pink flowers. He was trying to get one off a branch and when he did he handed it to me. I took it the way I took everything he gave me in those months: grateful and embarrassed to want so badly what I knew I would have to give up.
To pick me a flower the morning after hurting me is not the part that doesn’t fit. He was the kind of man who liked himself most for his contradictions, who believed there was meaning to be found in the distance between what kindness and cruelty he was capable of in the same weekend. “I think I would make a great character in a novel,” he often joked in that way people do when their punch lines are the same as their wishes, and he behaved that way, living as though it was up to a reader to figure him out. No, to pick me a flower the morning after hurting me fits into who he was completely. To this day I will still sometimes remember something that he said he loved about me, like the way I would hide part of my face in his pillow some nights, and then be overcome with something that is part shame and part fear. He could remember that, too, anytime he wants. In his memory I am more his than I would have ever let myself be in his life, but not any less than I wanted to be. The part that doesn’t fit about picking me a flower is how long I kept it pressed between the pages of a book. The part that doesn’t fit is how long it took me to throw that dead flower away.
The morning of our next meeting I carried most of my closet in my arms, watched as a consignment store buyer considered what I was offering. She took everything. I left with three hundred and eighty-nine dollars; the hour with the divorce lawyer would be four hundred dollars. I was relieved, though she gave my wedding dress a lower sticker price than my bomber jacket. Why did everything have to be such a metaphor all the time?
I took the cash to the meeting, which was our last. We signed as the lawyer timed us to see how quickly she could finish paperwork for a divorce this clean. We were done in twenty minutes; it would’ve been less if we hadn’t paused to staple a few pages together. We had a full hour booked. “What else?” the lawyer asked. “What’s next?”
I waited. I thought she would be the one to tell us.
so similar to valet story lol
Looking back I can see that I always knew what I would have done. I once knew that my husband was so completely mine, and so every choice that followed was only another version of that knowing. I would do it all again, which is not the same as saying I will. When I think about everything I can remember—as many memories as I can hold at once, and then the ones that come up later, surfacing when I least expect them—I know I would do it all exactly the same, with all the same answers. I would say yes, say more, say never, say no.
Letter from an Unknown Woman is a story about love that can only exist beside an object of affection—love that takes shape around what’s possible, wanting more than what you have while lacking the bravery to live without it. The same month I saw the film for the first time, the critic Molly Haskell published a brutal essay about it, on the topic of soulmates and other betrayals of repetition: “The philanderer is like the serial killer, compelled to repeat his pattern,” she said. “The woman, too, shares the pathology of the compulsive criminal, her sacred love the equivalent of his sacred vice, both thrill to the sense of superiority it gives them over ordinary unsuspecting mortals.”
The theater was full of women in fur coats sitting in groups of two and three—most of them in their sixties or older—and I sat in one of the few remaining seats available by the front of the screen, all that was left twenty minutes before the movie even started. The audience for Unknown Woman was just like the audience at Waiting to Exhale—they knew every line by heart. Mine broke, again and again, thinking about the superiority and the stupidity of that sacred self-righteousness Haskell described. She ends her essay by warning how this form of romance will wreck any life it enters. “How better to own your passion, keep it pure and undefiled, and thus in line with image of self as selfless love than unrequited love?!” she writes, exclamation her own. The untried and the untested, to those lost in their own obsessions, at least mimic the transcendent. Sometimes I look at a couple and I think I can see what it was they thought they wanted—can see so clearly that to each other they represent great risk or great reward, even when the compromises they’ve made are just as transparent.
So I had been watched exactly the way I had wanted to be, like a character in a book—without my knowing but without embarrassing myself, by someone who cared what I thought as well as liked hearing what I had to say. I was too lucky, I thought, too lucky and so inevitably cursed. No one had ever wanted me before and the logic followed, I thought, that no one ever would again. Well, so what? This was all I wanted—this boy who already seemed way more like an adult than I was, solid and reliable and believing in a future I doubted would ever come for me. He got good grades, had fun with his friends, participated in extracurricular activities, and got his driver’s license. He wanted to be a filmmaker and so he made films. He talked about going to Los Angeles. “Maybe I could come with you,” I said.
“Maybe…” he said, and so I didn’t mention it again, but thought about little apartment complexes with palm trees bookending the driveway, getting a job as a makeup artist. Everyone had seemed to suggest that being with someone who wanted to be with you would result in some sort of life-altering change, some feeling of elation or belonging, and they were right. Now that he was there I could think about a future: his. I wanted to go into what was next if it meant I could do it with him.
When I did finally understand that there are two sides to every story, it required letting go of my previous understanding, which is that very basic version fit for kids and other precious idiots. It is not a maxim designed to teach you that no one is wholly right or wrong. It is only that no one ever believes themselves to be entirely one or the other. The side of the story that they tell depends on their ability to consider whether the same is true of other people. Whether you are married or divorced, single or committed, in love or brokenhearted—that, too, is just a list of qualities that can never be the sum total of what a person is. We are always capable of being more than one.
I thought I chose divorce as a subject because it was necessary, by which I meant there was still something unseen and unsaid about what was everywhere. I thought I chose divorce because of circumstances—my grandmother, my mother, my marriage. I had not chosen to inherit or live those stories of separation, but I had, and so the resulting calculations suggest: Shouldn’t I make use of them somehow? I took many small, precious objects that had belonged to my grandmother after she died, but the only one I keep on me everywhere I go, safe in a small zipped pouch, is her gold seashell measuring tape.
Divorce was the subject that chose me. Right inside it was everything I wanted and feared the most: decisions and choices, isolation and entrapment, loneliness and romance. The terror of wondering what story my life would be was a perfect distraction from wondering why life needed to be a story.
Like God, my father expressed himself through absence: it was easier, perhaps, to be grateful to someone who wasn’t there. He too seemed to obey the call of civilisation, to recognise it when it spoke. As rational beings we allied ourselves with him, against the paganism of my mother, her cycles of emotion, her gaze forever dwelling on what was done and past or on the relieving blankness of what was yet to come. These qualities seemed to be without origin: they belonged neither to motherhood nor to herself, but to some eternal fact that arose out of the conjunction of the two. I knew, of course, that once upon a time she had had her own reality, had lived as it were in real time. In the wedding photograph that stood on the mantelpiece, her slenderness was always arresting. There she stood in white, the sacrificial victim: a narrow-waisted smiling beauty, as compact as a seed. The key, the genius of it all, seemed to lie in how little of her there was. In the finely graven lines of her beauty our whole sprawling future was encrypted. That youthful beauty was gone now, all used up, like the oil that is sucked out of the earth for the purpose of combustion. The world has grown hectic, disorganised, wasteful on oil. Sometimes, looking at that photograph, my family seemed like the bloated product of my mother’s beauty.
What I need is a wife, jokes the stressed-out feminist career woman, and everyone laughs. The joke is that the feminist’s pursuit of male values has led her to the threshold of female exploitation. This is irony. Get it? The feminist scorns that silly complicit creature the housewife. Her first feminist act may have been to try to liberate her own housewife mother, and discover that rescue was neither wanted nor required. I hated my mother’s unwaged status, her servitude, her domesticity, undoubtedly more than she herself did, for she never said she disliked them at all. Yet I stood accused of recreating exactly those conditions in my own adult life. I had hated my husband’s unwaged domesticity just as much as I had hated my mother’s; and he, like her, had claimed to be contented with his lot. Why had I hated it so? Because it represented dependence. But there was more to it than that, for it might be said that dependence is an agreement between two people. My father depended on my mother too: he couldn’t cook a meal, or look after children from the office. They were two halves that made up a whole. What, morally speaking, is half a person? Yet the two halves were not the same: in a sense my parents were a single compartmentalised human being. My father’s half was very different from my mother’s, but despite the difference neither half made any sense on its own. So it was in the difference that the problem lay.
I book our summer holiday, the same holiday we always take, to a much-loved familiar place. I tell my husband that we can split the holiday in half, changing over like runners in a relay race, passing the baton of the children. He refuses. He says he will never go to that place again. He wants only what is unknown to him, what is unfamiliar. He thinks there is something ruthless and strange in my intention to revisit a place where once we were together, and the truth is I don’t yet realise the pain this intention will cost me, the discipline I will have to inculcate to endure it. Great if it doesn’t bother you, he says. I say, you want to deny our shared history. You want to pretend our family never happened. That’s about right, he says. I say, I don’t see why the children should lose everything that made them happy. Great, he says. Good for you.
nice phrasing. tho ofc this paragraph makes me angry lol. he's weaponizing his own pain against her, as if it's entirely her fault that he lacks discipline/strength