Divorce in 2600 words
“Maybe I’m too young, To keep good love from going wrong”
Almost a year into divorce, I mourn being a wife, not the marriage, most.
I miss the back scratches, the weeknight dinners, the inside jokes but I mourn the loss of identity, the comfort of Mrs.
I wonder often if people enter into marriage believing they will stay married forever, or if their true expectations are more aligned with data? I think about societally tinkering with the definition of marriage to allow for flexibility instead of failure. Maybe for some, it’s a good couple of years and a few children and financial security. Maybe for some it’s a spouse a decade? Maybe you do find your forever person, or believe so much in the original text of marriage that even if the person is not meant to be yours forever, you make it so, forsaking your own individual happiness, maybe you’ve bought into the idea that someone else’s happiness creates your own too. Maybe, like everything else in 2020, marriage is a fluid idea, not a static one.
From day one, My marriage is never going to be forever. Maybe we knew it, but I know everyone else knew it. We are kids acting on a toxic mix of impulse and pragmatism, lovers from lands across the sea. We have to get married if we want to date. We dance to “Across the Universe” at our wedding and we begin our adult life as one, not two. We spend our formative adult years together, with each other, full of love if not entirely in love. We learn how to live, to work, to breathe as an “us” and a “we.” We are always together but we lead extremely separate lives. We always come home to each other. For dinner. For drinks. For Guy Fieri. For back scratches and temperature checks. We rely on each other. I rely on him.
—
I am hiding from the office at a bar one friday afternoon, drinking light Mexican beers, re-reading Less Than Zero when my phone buzzes. Every time my phone buzzes, catastrophe floods my being — Ms Clavell’s french accent ringing through my ears “Something is not right, something is quite wrong.” Like Pavlov’s dogs at every unsolicited stimulation of one of these intrusive man-made noises, the gates open and the cortisol floods. The subject matter varies but usually I can count on a variety pack from “They’ve realized I’m not smart as they think I am” “I’m not working hard enough” “I’m as needy as the neediest ex girlfriend you’ve ever had.” That ding suggests that they’ve found out that my whole life has been a non stop, unsustainable roller coaster of razzle dazzle to make for the fact that I’m not really good at anything. Every time I hear that buzz, beep, zing — I am going to jail or getting fired. Every vibration, ping, checkin is an opportunity for minor catastrophe. It always has been. Usually it’s unfounded. Today it isn’t.
I flip my phone over to a screen lit up with the words “Congratulations, you are divorced.” He and I weren’t partners, we wanted different things and though he tried to fit himself into my life, I never tried to fit myself into his life, I am extraordinarily selfish. Our love, like a tea bag stagnating in a mug of lukewarm water. It was fine until it became bitter. I think I always knew we would divorce, but that maybe it would be much more dramatic and glamorous than a $300 internet divorce.
—
In the Nora Ephron adaptation of my life, I like to think it would have gone something more like this:
Open on a board room in a skyscraper in the middle of an unnamed metropolis. Four people sit at a table meant for 25 and a young blonde woman sits in the corner with a notepad, diligently taking notes. The wife sits at the far end of the table, shrouded in a large hat, sunglasses covering her watery eyes (she could care less about the divorce, she is mourning the country house which she had to give up to hang on to the co-op in the city. There will be another man, and more importantly there will be another country house, she has to keep reminding herself. Her face is drawn, but her skin is dewey and her lawyer looks at her like she is the most important thing in the world. She is not like his other clients, wrapped in pencil skirts and dark denim. She is a flower child, an uptown girl, a band aid, rolled up into one extraordinarily complicated woman. He is unaware if she understands the extent to which he finds himself lusting after her, but imagines with her flair for the dramatic, that the idea of having a post divorce drink with her divorce lawyer that turns into drinks that turns into sloppy, but lavish hotel sex might be appealing to her. So he will suggest, assuming all things go well today, that she and he hit Bemelmans after this for a $25 martini and a breath of bohemian bourgeois. Ludwig Bemelmans was, as lore goes, a bon vivant, a womanizer and an avid adventurer in mind, body and soul, her perfect match.
The husband sits at the other end of the table, actively mourning their marriage. Though he knows that they were doomed from the start — too young, too different, her alpha female posturing constantly forcing his hand. He found a common ground with his lawyer in being very cool as they entered middle age, shrouded by wives that took up more than their allotted 50% of everything. Starting a dad band in the wealthy suburbs where they will both, to their chagrin, end up, isn’t out of the question. The newest Tweedy album, they agree, had good intentions but really missed the mark. Unfortunate as they both really looked forward to it.
The husband and the wife stare at each other from across the table. It’s silly to sit so far apart, she thought, as they still cared for each other very much. The lawyers felt it prudent to take any pheremones out of the situation. Sign the papers, take separate elevators down, be done with it. She takes off her diamond and puts it on the table, it is the final white flag. She has a hard time taking the diamond off. When the diamond comes off, the divorce is real and she is just another woman in her 30s looking for any kind of external validation. Without the diamond, the world has no indicator that she had it, validation, and gave it away. A selfless act, truly.
He looks at her, rolls his eyes and pushes a check across the table. The memo says “The final something sparkly” and on the back he has given her directions to his jeweler who will surround the diamond with emeralds and make it into a pendant that she can wear when she wants to feel close to him and take off when she needs her space. He knows this cavalier act is fleeting. Her vulnerability is the thing he loves most about her because it’s the one thing she can’t control. Her intention is to strong arm the whole world, but her innate neurosis and anxieties get in the way on most occasions. But he loves that she desires it and pushes it and fakes it, her control, sometimes overwhelmingly well. He loves her, he’ll never stop loving her. When he looks at her, he still sees her tanned shoulders, her wild Jewish mane, from their first carefree summer together — the summer he got down on one knee in a dive bar and asked her to marry him.
And now he looks at her from across a long table, high in the clouds of a metropolitan life he never wanted. Whenever he asked her what she wanted for her birthday, she would say “something sparkly,” and now when he looks at her from across the table, she was it — she was his something sparkly. But sparkle is fickle, dulling easily, taking a lot of work to maintain. She took a lot of work to maintain. She jokes frequently that she spent a decade training him, that he better not forget everything she’d taught him and that she fully expects a thank you note from every partner of his moving forward.
She takes the check, peeks out from under her enormous sunglasses that he hates, and scrunches her nose at him. A tick that showed up in every single photo of them. She signs the papers with one of the multiple le pens she keeps at the bottom of every bottomless bag she carries, stands up and walks out. She pushes past the advances of her lawyer, past the goodbyes of her former husband and past the infantile receptionist whose larynx was enviably invisible through the collagen rich skin of her youthful neck. She presses the down button, steps into the elevator and glides into a life full of possibility, loneliness, but not longing and all of the sparkly things she could imagine.
Fin.
—
We are still young, without a country house. A year ago, we sell our only real asset, our beloved Maine home, just weeks after I miscarry what might be the thing that keeps us together for another ten years. There is no diamond with which to surround with emeralds and the small amount of cash we carry as savings is split right down the middle.
My phone dings, the congratulatory email shows up and almost immediately a man down the bar glares at me with the intention of coming my way to buy me a drink. I sometimes joke that my star sign is cortisol rising, which it is -always. I down my lite Mexican beer like a fraternity pledge, plunk my heavy metal credit card down, impose a silent pressure on the poor bartender to hurry up and leaving the majority of my chips uneaten, as has become a trend this year, I zip up my leather jacket give the poor boy down the bar a sad smile and run down the stairs onto the sidewalk, full of the hustle and bustle of any other friday afternoon. Cogs in the machines just trying to get to 5pm and that first sip of whatever it is that makes them feel better about whatever it is that ails them.
The day the congratulatory email about my divorce comes through, the only place I want to be is between two dumpsters, my secret spot. A small alley that was put in the plans just for people to walk down and cry when the world is too much. It’s there I go and position myself in between two dumpsters to smoke an ill advised American Spirit when the weight of the world or my world becomes too much. It’s where I go when I need guidance from those who aren’t physically here anymore. It’s where I go when I can’t go anywhere else.
The day the congratulatory email about my divorce comes through, the only person I want to see is my ex-husband. We spend a lot of time talking about what we didn’t want from our divorce — no friends taking sides, there were no sides to take, no arguing over money or things, no bad feeling. Sadness is permissible, anger is not. There are to be no boardrooms, no mediators, no negotiating. Everything is down the middle and though he moves out of our shared home, leaving me with the memories and the mess, he also leaves with me our dog to keep me company and give me purpose. We want a civilized divorce full of love, because if there’s one thing our marriage had it was lots of love. But mutuality, not love is the foundation for marriage. We love each other, but we are both more in love with our own needs.
“Too deaf, dumb, and blind To see the damage I’ve done”
—
If I had to pinpoint the exact time our marriage started deteriorating, I look to April 2016, one month after my 30th birthday when I find out I’m pregnant. I am not ready to have a child, but I wish I were ready, I wish to have a partner who was ready. He cannot empathize fully with these conflicted emotions and I have a hard time reconciling it. I still do. We have an abortion, well I have an abortion and he has a heartbroken wife.
If I had to pinpoint the exact time when we both know it’s over, it would be the weekend of our 11th wedding anniversary, three years later. He has been living in DC for work for a few months, and I visit him. We spend the weekend in his modern, company subsidized apartment on the Potomac River. We love each other deeply that weekend. We eat Peking Duck, get strip mall massages, drink minerally white wine and linger in bed. It is the first time we set no expectations for celebrating our anniversary and it is the first time we exceed them. We look deep into each other’s eyes like we did the summer we met. When I drive home, I sing along to Carole King, tears roll down my face and I know that it is over. It is over. We’ve never talked about it, but I think he knew too. Love isn’t always the best foundation for a marriage, as it turns out.
“Too young to hold on, And too old to just break free and run”
— -
He turns the corner to my secret place. Post separation, he’s a burlier man. His body is more substantial, with a fuller beard, and jackets that take up more space designed to make women look twice. My grandmother used to say that he was completely out of my league and when we made the decision to move to California, she warns me to watch out for “those ladies from Hollywood who would snatch him away from me.” He is extremely handsome, with a set of perfect teeth and an accent that would probably make most women weak in the knees, but whose novelty wore off on me years ago. He lights my cigarette. He pulls me in for a hug. I feel safer with him now than I do when we are married.
I cry. I think about the humid summer night, two months after that last good weekend in DC, that I finally said the word out loud, “divorce.” A week later, we take a trip to Maine and spend a few nights sharing a bed in a friend’s home like we aren’t in the middle of a cosmic shift. Maine is where we are our best, always. Neither of us question the choice, but the consequences of the choice aren’t any less difficult. I stay in Maine for a few weeks. By the time I get home, he has moved out, leaving a tattered t-shirt from his highschool trip to the university of Rome on my pillow. Months later, I wear it under my travel cashmere when I take my first trip as a single woman to Rome. It brings me ease on the plane.
He kisses my forehead and walks away. I know that it’s a commitment for anyone to have me in their life. I am a lot. Sometimes when I am driving, I cry. I think about our adventures, the way he used to grab my tanned knees in the driver seat and smile at me. We were always going somewhere, he and I.
“Maybe I’m too young, To keep good love from going wrong”
Italicized lyrics taken from “Lover You Should Have Come Over” by Jeff Buckley
