Sentimentality

Synonyms: death of literature / emotional manipulation practiced by hacks and universally feared by “literary” writers / a thing glutted out by us ecstatically in emails and texts. Topics for further research: Why is it so difficult to convey love and joy yet so easy to find language for everything that was foolish, grandiose, or selfish about our affair? Why can’t I describe the quality of your eyes when we sat in the dark on the floor of the Gershwin Hotel bathroom, me on your lap, just kissing, for two hours? Why did it particularly undo me when your drawing “The Map of My United States” arrived coincidentally on Valentine’s Day, when you probably didn’t know what month it was? Antonyms: all of postmodernism.

On the night my father died, I walked back to the Pad alone under the same blood moon, but this time I didn’t watch it in the sky. I didn’t think about my father on the walk to what was now, in some sense, my home. I wanted, more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, to turn back the clock and climb into the bed in which my ex-husband would be sleeping tonight: to undo the revelation of my affair, to go back to being a woman with a double life, lying to everyone in my midst. Or maybe I wanted to wind the clock back even further: to have never met my lover at all; to have never stood close enough in his proximity to understand that everything that had ever passed as intimacy or desire in me in all the decades of my adulthood had been only a facsimile of something, the polite version, the academic signifier rather than the hurricane signified. Maybe I wanted to undo everything I now knew, that meant I would never be safe inside a box again. [...]

[...] He wanted, perhaps, for me to long for such letters from him, even though he was not a man who would ever write them—he wanted his desires to be the gift I was hungry for, and was furious that I was only thinking about myself, even though he was also only thinking about himself. Now, nearly two decades later, I understood the difference between loving a person and loving the idea of a person, and what you think that person reflects about you. My ex-husband and I had loved each other that way, mutually, both looking past the other’s reality, projecting our own fantasies off the other’s walls, not seeing what was right in front of us, or worse, seeing but not caring, both trying to wrest the focus back to ourselves.

When we were still married, my husband used to tell me it was an honor to provide for us so that I could write, so that I could run a press and champion other artists, so that I could be available for our children. He said all this helped him to find value in his work, to think of himself as a patron of the arts and a good provider.

Sometimes when we would fight, he would scream at me, Who’s making the money and supporting this family?

A lover moves out of his wife’s apartment and becomes a boyfriend. A boyfriend piles all his scant belongings into a U-Haul and relocates to Chicago full-time and becomes a life partner. A life partner files for divorce, proposing marriage on the final day I am fifty, and becomes a fiancé. A fiancé will utter vows he has written and can—unlike all the clandestine correspondence we once shared—say aloud before our family and friends and, presto, become a husband. And just like that, I will be a wife again.

There are too few words for who and what human beings are to each other.

Language is a territory still mostly uncharted.

We are the cartographers, every day, still mapping the human heart.

[...] My residual guilt isn’t about knowing that I was never going to love my husband the way I needed to again—the way I believe people should love each other if they are going to use up all the days of their fleeting lives on each other. I don’t feel guilty anymore for the fact that I could already glimpse the picture on the other side of our intense parenting years—our children busy with their own lives, at college and out-of-state jobs, our retirement years alone together—and knew I could not stay inside that frame. My leaving was never about retribution for any fault of my husband’s or any mistake he made, but rather that I believe with the core of my being that everyone has the right to choose what ships to go down with versus when to get into a lifeboat and save themselves. There is no one who doesn’t have the right to leave a consensual relationship between adults: no marital atrocities required.