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He tried not to smile while she spoke. He tried to squint seriously like he was consulting on a patient, but he couldn’t help it. It hadn’t occurred to him that his news could ever be received as anything but tragic. He thought he’d have to look at his shoes in sadness every time it came up, out of some kind of respect or decorum. But he had suffered enough. He had suffered for years in the limbo of failure and self-immolation that was the end of his marriage—that was the end of any marriage. Yes! This will be fun! He looked out the window just then and saw that it was summer. It was summer!
He’d initially been democratic in his search parameters on the subject of age. Anyone over twenty-five who wasn’t yet dead was fair game, he’d figured, though he quickly began to tire of looking at the young ones. It wasn’t how it ached to see their youth, how their skin still showed glow and bounce, how they delighted in the seam of their buttock folding over the top of their thigh like it was on springs—though it absolutely did ache to see those things. It wasn’t how they so clearly believed it would always be like this, or perhaps how they knew it wouldn’t and so decided to enjoy it; that would be worse, if they were enjoying their youth because they knew it wouldn’t last, because who had the sense to do that? 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.
It’s not like I wasn’t busy. I was an officer in good standing of my kids’ PTA. I owned a car that put my comfort ahead of the health and future of the planet. I had an IRA and a 401(k) and I went on vacations and swam with dolphins and taught my kids to ski. I contributed to the school’s annual fund. I flossed twice a day; I saw a dentist twice a year. I got Pap smears and had my moles checked. I read books about oppressed minorities with my book club. I did physical therapy for an old knee injury, forgoing the other things I’d like to do to ensure I didn’t end up with a repeat injury. I made breakfast. I went on endless moms’ nights out, where I put on tight jeans and trendy blouses and high heels like it mattered and went to the restaurant that was right next to the restaurant we went to with our families. (There were no dads’ nights out for my husband, because the supposition was that the men got to live life all the time, whereas we were caged animals who were sometimes allowed to prowl our local town bar and drink the blood of the free people.) I took polls on whether the Y or the JCC had better swimming lessons. I signed up for soccer leagues in time for the season cutoff, which was months before you’d even think of enrolling a child in soccer, and then organized their attendant carpools. I planned playdates and barbecues and pediatric dental checkups and adult dental checkups and plain old internists and plain old pediatricians and hair salon treatments and educational testing and cleats-buying and art class attendance and pediatric ophthalmologist and adult ophthalmologist and now, suddenly, mammograms. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner.
That first night, on the phone, Toby was so grateful that I wasn’t going to make him pay for his abandonment of me or treat him like an injured kitten that he became giddy, and he laughed more and so I laughed more. 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.
I asked him the questions he hated: So then what happened? It’s so drastic and hard to end a marriage. Something had to have happened. Did she cheat on you? Did you cheat on her? Did you hate her friends? Did the kids kill her libido? But marriage is vast and mysterious and private. You could not scientifically compare two marriages for all of the variance of factors, most particularly what two specific people can tolerate. I made my face placid and curious, the way I did during my old magazine interviews, pretending the stakes were just regular when really everything hung on the answers.
I told him I’d left the magazine two years before, that I was trying to work on a coming-of-age novel about my youth. What I didn’t say was that it never held my attention long enough for there to be progress. I kept the document up on my computer, but minimized, and I only turned to it every few weeks before feeling overwhelmed about what it was that I was trying to do with it. A book should convey your suffering; a book should speak to what is roiling within you. I thought maybe I could do this through a good young-adult novel, but YA novels were all fantastical things these days, with werewolves and sea creatures and half-bloods and hybrids. My story was small and dumb. Nothing even really happened in it.
[...] The waitress came to our table. Toby ordered a chicken Caesar salad with no cheese and no dressing.
“So like a piece of chicken and lettuce?” she asked.
“I guess so, yes.”
“Do you maybe have any diet lettuce for him?” Seth asked. The waitress looked confused and Seth laughed, which made her even more confused, so she gave up and walked away.
i like this running gag
When they first married, Rachel made sure that whenever she got home from work on Fridays, sometimes earlier and sometimes later, they would do the thing Toby had grown up doing: lighting the candles, blessing the wine and challah. By the time the kids were born, though, she was already on what she called her “trajectory,” and Fridays became the nights that Toby played a game of chicken with Rachel. She’d miraculously become available when the Rothbergs or the Leffers or the Hertzes invited them over for a Friday night dinner. But otherwise, she’d call and say that she “needed” to stay at work because she “needed” to get things done, knowing (she had to know) that she was being outright dishonest in her use of this word—that it was actually her resistance to spending time with her children and to some notion of a traditional role as a mother that made her want to work that much. Rachel knew how to work. She liked working. It made sense to her. It bent to her will and her sense of logic. Motherhood was too hard. The kids were not deferential to her like her employees. They didn’t brook her temper with the desperation and co-dependence that, say, Simone, her assistant, did. That was the big difference between them, Rachel. He didn’t see their children as a burden, Rachel. He didn’t see them as endless pits of need, Rachel. He liked them, Rachel.
[...] If he was honest, he didn’t even know that Rachel would ever date again, so disgusted was she by the confines of marriage, so ruined had she been by the compromises of another person trying to have an equal say or even just an opinion in her life.
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He wondered if he sounded like this from his parallax view. He wondered if there was a version of this story in which he was the villain. He wondered if Rachel was sitting in some ashram somewhere telling anyone who would listen what a victim she was. A victim. Yes, of a husband who put his own career aside and raised the children and gave them consistency—the children they’d both wanted! A husband who rooted for her at her every milestone of success. What could she possibly say about him? That he was “unambitious”? He was as ambitious as he was allowed to be. There isn’t room in one marriage for two people who are hogging all the oxygen. One of them has to answer the phone when the school calls. One of them has to know where the vaccine record is. One of them has to do the fucking dishes. It was entirely possible that the only version of a story like this you ever heard was from the aggrieved party, the one who made the sacrifices and thought that the sacrifice gave you one up on your spouse, but it didn’t. It only made the spouse feel more entitled to take. Trust me, Tess’s husband was somewhere right now, one woman sitting on his face while another sucked him off, and he was certainly not talking about the ways Tess let him down.
or they both feel like the aggrieved party in some way