topic/heartbreak

Caro lay in her frozen bed and stared at the skylight, which was a sheet of clotted ice. She lay in darkness or in moonlight, remembering how, one evening of the previous year, she had come in from work to find Paul sitting at her table writing; and that he had got up and embraced her and asked, "How does it strike you, to find a light on and someone waiting for you?" He had put his mouth to her hair and said, "I have wished that Tertia did not exist." Now it was Caro whom, for his convenience, he wished away.

Love had not been innocent. It was strange that suffering should seem so.

“The worst thing you did,” I said, “was to let me lull myself in a sense of false security. Here I am at forty-four, empty-handed, with no occupation, no other interest in life apart from you. If you had warned me eight years ago I should have made an independent existence for myself and now it would be easier for me to accept the situation.”

“But, Monique!” he cried, looking astonished. “I urged you as strongly as I possibly could to take that job as secretary of the Revue médicale seven years ago. It was right up your street and you could have reached a worthwhile position. You wouldn’t!”

The suggestion had seemed to me so untimely that I had almost entirely forgotten it. “I couldn’t see any point in spending the day away from the house and the children just for a hundred thousand francs a month,” I said.

“That was your answer then. I pressed you very hard.”

“If you had told me your real reasons—if you had told me I no longer meant everything to you and that I too should stand off a little myself, I should have accepted it.”

“I suggested your getting a job again when we were at Mougins. And again you refused.”

“At that time your love was enough for me.”

“It is not too late,” he said. “I can easily find you something to do.”

“Do you suppose that that would console me? Eight years ago I might have thought it less ludicrous—I should have had more chance of getting somewhere. But now.…”

Then one night Ed with his scientific face rejects her for the hundredth time and she looks at her calendar and she sees that the last time they had sex was about a month and a half prior. Forty days of nothing, not kissing or touching. If it had been near Lent she might have hoped it was a quiet Christly sacrifice. But it was October and he had not touched her for all of that month and most of September. But the house went on and the chores went on and the doctor’s appointments went on. Everything else went on. She felt life slipping. She felt that her body was being wasted, that her heart was resting like a steak on a cutting board. And that’s when the panic attacks began. She started to have about two a day. One right when she wakes up when she feels she can’t breathe, and the second at lunchtime because it means there’s a whole second part of the day to live. She started to pick at her face. She would have a nervous moment and walk into the bathroom and press her torso up against the Corian lip of the vanity so she could get her skin up close to the mirror and she would excavate tiny moon craters on her soft, pretty face.

“I’m pretty tired,” she said instead. She faced Mitty and gave her a painfully polite smile. “Give me a hug?” She opened her arms and Mitty, unable to muster an argument, stepped into them, resting her chin on Esme’s shoulder. She swallowed, attempting to drown out her urge to cry. Esme pulled away while Mitty was still holding on. And though the time in which Mitty’s arms were wrapped around her waist was brief, those few seconds felt like everything Mitty needed to know. It was suddenly too obvious, their asymmetry, one of them trying to stay and one already letting go.

Olga’s youth, like that of many intelligent women, was marked by contempt for her sex. In the early days of her abandonment she recalls a figure from her childhood in Naples, a neighbor who lost her mind with grief after her husband left her. Every night the neighbor sobbed loudly. Olga’s mother and her friends whispered in pity, calling her “the poverella” — the poor thing. “The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man.” As a child Olga was disturbed, disgusted, by this woman. “A grief so gaudy began to repel me. I was eight, but I was ashamed for her.” Girls — imperious, unforgiving, not yet women — still believe in the choice to be otherwise. In high school, Olga reacts similarly to a novel assigned by her French teacher:

I made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed to me sentimental fools: I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts. I was young, I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno. I said it breathlessly, all in one gulp, which was something I never did, and my teacher smiled ironically, a little bitterly. She, too, must have lost someone, something. And now, more than twenty years later, the same thing was happening to me.

A couple’s ambivalence can be held between two people: we both feel a little of each side, but one person is yes, and the other one no. When we first started dating, we said, We’ll date for a long time, and then we started on that long time right away. Back then, we thought maybe we would get married on our fifth anniversary. That was tonight, and neither of us brought marriage up. This is part of why I was silent, but I gave myself away by crying. When we left the restaurant, I still hadn’t clearly said why.

My friend Timothy has a genius way of teaching his students to write. He assigns them three hundred words about something or other and writes alongside them, in class. One student writes a particularly lame essay. It’s written very neatly, sentence after sentence with no cross-outs. Unrevised sentences are like molecules of ice; they form a suit of armor by being recited, one after another, holding experience in. Timothy shows the student his own copy, which has a million cross-outs and carrots and a doodly diagram in one corner. “Make it look like this,” he says, waving his hand around his own piece of paper, and the student automatically becomes a better writer. The stiff bonds holding the sentences in neat order are dissolved, and the student’s writing flows like water to fill the cave of the reader’s imagination.

I keep going back and revising this story, hoping that the tensions that hold us still in our relationship will dissolve. I walk past the restaurant a couple weeks later to see the orange color of the light again. If I can understand the things in myself that make me prefer silence to talking, I think, things will change of their own accord. This piece of writing is not meant to preserve a moment for posterity, but to take a memory of a dead moment and make the timbre of that experience speak through it, like a microphone.