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If scrubbing my father’s blood can remove just the slightest bit of blood from my hands, I will do it forever, and nobody should be allowed to send me a meal train as consolation. I do not deserve a meal train. I don’t deserve anything.
When you hate yourself enough, there is a sharp tinge of satisfaction in unhappiness.
“I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about,” my father almost shouts at me now. I look at him, confused—even when we used to talk all the time, we didn’t talk like this. “I thought it would help you if you went out like the other girls, if you got a boyfriend. You seemed lonely. But I was a chump. There was nothing for you there. I didn’t know you were going to end up with a completely different kind of life—some kind of life I didn’t know there was.”
[...] It was the season my blue-eyed, crooked-smiled, trusting husband was spending a fat wad of cash remodeling a house he believed he would die in, with me by his side. It was the season of accumulated dread from years of carefully parceling out sex I didn’t want to have, with a couple of glasses of wine beforehand to get myself through it with good cheer and a headache in the morning—the season of artificial smiles and an underlying simmering snideness and derision to which I was not entitled but which leaked out of my mouth and showed on my face nonetheless. It was the season I lost control of a narrative I finally understood I’d never had any right to control to begin with.
It was the season when, after years of Sphinx-like secrecy, I left increasingly blatant breadcrumbs—had been scattering them without much intention or control ever since, six months prior, my husband had privately told me at Emily’s wedding (after first shouting at me in the hotel courtyard in front of my lover and his wife) that he knew I didn’t love him anymore and was afraid I was only waiting for the kids to leave so we could become “a clichéd empty nester divorce.” It was the season I could no longer pretend that ignorance was bliss, that my husband was anything resembling happy.
[...] Was it not having to look at him directly; was it the unusually lively nature of our dinner conversation; was it the crushing guilt of our expensive renovation; was it rainwater having filled the cistern of my body for so many years that I was a vessel running over; was it simply the goddamn booze that led me to utter Unsayable Things like Marriage has been difficult for me for a long time and Monogamy is harder for some people than for others, until at last my husband, not a jealous creature but certainly not a stupid one either, turned more sharply in his chair to see me fully and said my lover’s name aloud. His name had flitted between us all evening, but finally my husband asked directly whether I was talking about him, and I said, almost casually, as though I had not spent more than three years in vigilant avoidance of revealing such a thing—my god, so simply in the final hour—“Yes.”
Barely missing a beat, my husband asked whether I was in love with him, his voice also strangely nonplussed as though we had conversations of this nature all the time—as though we were a couple who commonly discussed our extracurricular romantic entanglements, maybe even used them as foreplay. Momentarily, in the firelit lounge, I felt like I was living one of my recurring dreams: that euphoria of waking and believing my husband knew and had given me his blessing, had either released me or granted me the freedom to pursue my own life. All at once, the dream seemed right in my hands to grasp: so close, so attainable. All it would take was my saying yes—the truth will set you free—and so I did, and though I held my breath for several seconds, the world did not stop spinning on its axis; the walls of the resort did not come falling down, water from the park flooding our lounge like the Titanic. Rather, my husband said more quietly, though still calm, Have you slept with him? or maybe Have you had sex with him? (how often I tried to remember later which phrasing he used: the euphemistic or the literal)—and I, who prided myself on being a reader of people, felt a jolt of elation that the worst had already passed: I had admitted my love and my husband was still sitting there looking at me, a worried but almost loving expression on his face, and so I affirmed again, “Yes.”
Here is a thing you don’t know unless you, too, have left someone it nearly killed you to leave, and that is when you cleave from someone who doesn’t want to break up, you have to find a cold steel core inside yourself to stand firm; you have to become a more unfeeling version of yourself, that same Stepford You who, in your naïveté, in the thrall of your first taste of honesty in three years, you believed you’d now cleanly left behind. You have to resist nostalgia, resist memory, resist the plurality of love. But at the finality of never spending another night together again, that façade of myself cracked, leaving only the unprotected, naked me under its shell. And so it became the season I sobbed hysterically, pleading, “Don’t go, you can’t leave like this—I’ll do anything you want.” It became the season of rushing into his closet and sinking onto its floor in a ball, a howling animal made as compact as I could get as though this would make him pack me, too. Instead, he said sadly, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Not anymore,” and zipped his bag. It was the season he left the room while I screamed in blind pain on his closet floor. [...]
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?