by
Haley Mlotek
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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.
There was a bar we loved back then. It was red and unhappy, a dour subterranean neighborhood institution where nothing could stop us from being charmed by it. Not its stubborn insistence on overhead lighting, not the rotting pink bar of soap in the bathroom, not an overtly hostile approach to fulfilling drink orders. (I once became genuinely concerned when a friend I brought for his first visit tried to ask to see the wine list. “No, no,” I nervously interjected when I saw the bartender’s jaw tighten. “There’s no list. It’s house red or house white. Pick one, now, please.” He chose the red.)
lmao
My husband came back three days later, ashamed and repentant. I forgave him and mostly forgot. It was only much later that I remembered how it had been that third afternoon when I first started to really hear my friend’s voice saying, Maybe it’s for the best, that my sisters and I had walked to get iced coffees and brought them home to watch bad television in bed, that I had made plans that night with friends he didn’t know as well, that I had decided to go to the library the next day for new books to read. I would have gotten over it then, I realized years after the fact, when I started understanding I would have to get over it now in a much different way.
Was every married couple two children playing house? Did it just feel that way for us, or was it a pantomime for everyone? There was an endless supply of fictions to choose from, the facts of one not enough to make us lose faith in another. Pretending or daydreaming as a child had had such a prophetic quality, as though adult life could only ever confirm or diverge from fate. In my twenties I often thought about whether my teenage self would be impressed with my life. By my thirties I had remembered that my teenage self was very stupid.
Most of the movies that we had both seen were divorce movies. Since my husband had moved out six months before, I had been watching and rewatching anything about breakups, endings, affairs—allegorical or realistic, romances and tragedies, I often described these evenings as though I was self-programming a divorced woman’s film festival.
I knew what I was doing here. I even joked about it, suggesting to other people going through breakups that they redirect their hurt and sorrow into organizing their workplace. Into programming a film festival about their experience. Anywhere else but as something kept inside. The night before we were all laid off, I prepared myself for my last bargaining session to negotiate severance, and then I sat on the edge of my bed and wept—really wept—about everything for long enough until it all became a feeling as large and hopeless as nothing.
<3
One night I watched Take This Waltz, a movie directed by Sarah Polley, filmed near the street I used to live on. The movie has that feeling of an afternoon when everyone is on their front porches, watching the neighborhood drama and everything that can happen on a residential sidewalk. A marriage ends, a love affair begins. I worried the movie would make me too sad, as though recognizing where I once lived was too dangerous. Instead it made me feel the opposite of homesick. I was grateful for how far away I was from what I was seeing.
I was reminded of Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of the class dynamics in his chosen comedies of remarriage. He thought that wealth had to remain a given for at least one character: not because the working or middle class can’t spend time inside their sadness, but because their days don’t have the time to maintain the same dedicated interest in it. “This is why our films must on the whole take settings of unmistakable wealth,” he wrote. “The people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily.” A movie or book about that sadness in between shifts would have so many smaller revelations, the single moments alone and unremarked on, but no less deeply felt. Like when I, on one workday, turned the corner in the hallway of my office kitchen and felt myself to be so completely grateful to be divorced. What would that have looked like? Like any other day, which it was.
<3 <3
Back in the city the season was more appropriate to what I expected and hated: airless, choking heat, sunlight that seemed to burn without warmth. Steam lifted off the sidewalk. The hours were slow and gone before I could count them. The feeling of August was as uncomfortable as the weather. Enough time had passed to know what this summer would be, but there was enough time to convince myself I might still be wrong. It was only four months before my husband would pack the suitcase and move out. In those nights, humid memories of the day kept me awake behind my closed eyes. I read the letters that writers I loved wrote to the people they loved, and circled the ones that felt important even if I couldn’t say why. One I kept with me for a long time, waiting to understand how I knew what it meant—on August 12, 1971, Elizabeth Hardwick had written to Robert Lowell:
I have had a really fine summer, strange in many ways, in others exactly the same. In the afternoons the light drops suddenly, the day waits, and you feel a melancholy repetition, as though you were living moments before, maybe long ago by someone else.
In September she wrote to say that she had started divorce proceedings.
And so I had already met this man late one winter afternoon, when I showed him around my home. I could see why everyone liked him. He was calm, quiet, and nice. He looked right at me as I spoke, and I could tell he kept looking even after I looked away. Something about feeling that gaze made me nervous, jittery, shaken.
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.