by
Haley Mlotek
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I watched them make a home and only sometimes thought of a fight between my husband and me that had seemed inconsequential in the moment and now, in comparison, changed. I would walk back to my own apartment, holding my gloved hands over my ears against the January wind, feeling the blood close to freezing under that thin skin. When I got there I looked around as I thought my husband might have on his way out: the piles of books and the low, long couch my only concession to interior design. I remembered the way he had said, in between other, more serious injuries, We never even decorated.
I wanted to fight him at the time. He was implying that I had never decorated, I thought, that I had left multiple boxes unpacked, full of things I must not have needed or at least didn’t miss. I wanted to remind him that all the apartments we’d lived in had been similarly plain, that my style could most generously be described as sparse. I didn’t. I felt what he meant. I had not made an attempt to make a home for us. I had hoped that just getting married would mean a home would follow. I held on to that fight, not because the absence of decor didn’t matter, but because if I could answer now I would say the truth: I thought I had more time.
What happened after that? I don’t even know how to answer that question. Which after? Here is where I wish I had a straight line to follow. There are some moments that seem to matter. As a condition of his visa, he had to stop working for a period after we moved, and I was working more than ever. He got a job, and then I lost mine. We were never in our apartment at the same time. I began to tell other people things I used to only tell him, thinking I was relieving our relationship of unnecessary stress. I was just creating more things we didn’t know about each other. We fought. I apologized, over and over again, but I did not change. Why had I married him? we asked each other, by which we meant, why, besides the reasons we told other people. I didn’t know. Could we stay together forever, was the question I asked, again and again, but what I meant was would we. I asked questions of everyone, tried to find someone to tell us what to do: Should we get a dog, or go to therapy, or plan a vacation? Should we move back to the place where we rarely fought, where we had stayed together for years and years, the place where we had known something about each other no one else did?
At first our parents and friends seemed to think it was cute, and we agreed. When my husband went to university, his parents—gently at first—tried to suggest he “test the waters,” and when he resisted, they got a little more forceful in their recommendations. Once I overheard my mother on the phone with her sister, saying that sure, our relationship was odd in terms of length and our age, but if we were happy who cared? Our friends offered similar levels of perplexed, begrudging support. Don’t you want to fuck other people? the more direct among them would ask. Well, I don’t know. Sure. Does anyone ever get what they want when they want it? We did break up a few times—all those people, we thought, must’ve known something we didn’t—but we always returned to each other. We knew something they didn’t.
lol. familiar
On that first morning of my first year of being alone, I woke up too early, and looked around the way I imagined my husband might have. I remember knowing completely that he was the love of my life, which means nothing that can be explained except maybe that I knew the back of his neck as well as the palm of his hands. It means that to this day I can still sometimes convince myself I smell him on pillows he never put his head on, that he watched my sisters grow up and on Friday nights he would watch Jeopardy! with my grandmother. I knew his family and loved them, love them still, miss them all the time; we had all the same friends and we knew we were going to hurt them, too, when we hurt each other. He was the person I woke up next to almost every day for what feels like my entire life, and I have slept better every night I’ve slept without him, but on that morning I knew I would never again have one night of rest now that we had left each other. Maybe it helps to know that I thought no one would be able to make me come like he did and in a way I was right. Or how I remembered that whenever I was on a plane with lots of turbulence I would think, I hope I survive the crash because I’m definitely going to want to tell him about it. He was, as of that morning, no longer the only person I would tell my stories to, or the first person I would tell them to. I didn’t know it yet but when he finally became a person I told no stories to at all I would think I had nothing left to say.
Eventually I grew tired of trying to write down my thoughts. I wrote down other things I heard. Perhaps the journal did something to my memory, because since then I have often thought about one story I know is in there. It goes like this: A woman often speaks to me about a man she says she loves but has never been in love with. He was, she would explain, a great friend during a time of real crisis. She had broken up with her boyfriend after years and years, and this man she loved had taken her side, even though he had been her ex-boyfriend’s friend first. He had been through a bad breakup, too. He got it. They would talk a lot about how you can tell a relationship is over when you catch yourself thinking that a person needs to be figured out, when what made you want to get close is the same thing that makes you need distance, and then all your thoughts begin with Well, what’s wrong with him is…
Everything ends. Perhaps I am responding to what I often consider the reassuring bluntness of describing everything that happens after what other books or lives might consider the last chapter—in this case, a divorce. I, personally, like to have reminders that I’ve changed my life before and can do it again. I might make it worse—again—but I can definitely change it. There was a storm. But when I picture happiness, half-awake and pretending I’m only dreaming, I still want what I want: to believe I am living a life without interruption.
The more I read and watched, the more I wondered what I was doing. What did I need from these stories, or more to the point, what was I avoiding? What feeling or action did they allow me to replace? I believed everything I saw, even though I knew it wasn’t real, or even meant to be interpreted as real. I had a precipitous gullibility that I indulged, allowing myself a passive but committed dive headfirst into a narrative, or a character, or an end. No matter how often these concepts disappointed me by being exactly what they were (narrow, for one; embarrassing as a posture to adopt in real life, for another), I still held out a little hope. Maybe I just hadn’t found the right one yet.
In lots of fiction, divorce is not so much a genre as it is an event. Ending a marriage can be a plot point in a tragedy or farce or any combination of the qualities that make both; it can be romantic or dramatic, tearful or a celebration. On the other hand, there is clearly a small yet prominent kind of divorce narrative that could be called its own genre. The conventional marriage plot reminds us that love stories end with a wedding. Heartbreak stories have slightly more flexibility. They can begin or end with a divorce, or the question of separation can be the conflict that drives the entire story. But I do think that over time a clearer pattern emerges, one that intertwines the question of whether people define the law or the law defines people. Traveling backward from Levy and Gilbert, the contemporaries of divorce writing, to the gossipy novels of the 1970s and the bleak suburban despair of 1950s novels, I sense something that connects them together. I see the same in the glossiness of modern divorce movies that come alongside the pained dramas that reference custody battles or infidelities or other betrayals, to the grainy film stock of auteurs and independents, to the stark black-and-white depictions of toothy dialogue in the comedies of remarriage or the grayscale yearnings of Hays Code–era melodramas. It is a genre that knows blame without fully accepting it, a fiction that says: you cannot possibly fault me for telling you this, because either I have been honest or I have been right.
I love movies not because they’re like life but because they aren’t. The only thing that is true of movies and life is that they both have to end. I want them most when they are uncanny replicas of life—moments and experiences used like elements rather than reflections. They warp under being watched.
I can rewatch a movie and find my understanding of it totally changed; remembering memories again and again has the effect of making them seem less trustworthy. I have a tendency to see what I like as complete and what I don’t like as unfinished, even though I think it should be the reverse. It’s the same way that sometimes I talk to a person I once loved and wish I could feel that love for them again. I try to see them under different lights, recall them sitting in different chairs, previous apartments, between subway stops—scenes from a time when I used to notice how they crossed their legs at the knee, or held a pen, before I noticed what I didn’t like or couldn’t trust. Trying to make them the same as I remember them would require forgetting who they are in the moment. When I tell someone to watch a certain movie I am mostly letting them know something that I am almost ready to say.
As I watched, I wondered if every woman who ends a marriage has to comfort her husband through the pain of saying the absolute worst thing he can to a person he wants to hurt as much as he wants to love. Here they’ve located the pain, but will not admit the reason. The reason it hurts is because they have a different relationship than the one they want. Every other hurt will come from that one; there will be no relief. It’s true that if they had been less careful, less kind, less well-versed in the casual legal interventions made on language in the years since no-fault divorce became accessible, they could have hurt each other more. But they never could have hurt each other any less.
Ferd died in 2007, his obituary describing him as “a veteran of the ‘new left’ ” and crediting him as the cowriter and coproducer of The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd. He hosted the launch meeting for DAGMAR (Dykes and Gay Men against Racism/Repression/the Right Wing/Reagan), the first activist group structured around HIV/AIDS advocacy in Chicago, and the demonstrations they participated in contributed to, among other successes, the opening of the AIDS ward at Cook County Hospital. From 1993 to 2001 he was the AIDS coordinator for the City of Los Angeles, and fought for safe housing, needle exchanges, and initiatives for women living with AIDS. He once said a beautiful thing about his own organizing that I paraphrase all the time, because so many moments call for it: once you realize you can’t do everything, he said, you’re free to do anything.