One night as I lay in bed, I felt not the dulling of the crushing pressures, not the release from obsessive worry that I would hope from the pills, but rather an intensified kind of worry, a throbbing, focused, and much more tangible dread. Did Dennis actually love me? Did he even like me? Or was it merely an act of tolerance? As my mind stopped racing, my attention seemed to settle over the state of my relationship.
I left our bed and went upstairs to his office and turned on the light, and I felt a tightness spread from the top of my chest, up my neck, and into my face. I looked at his desk chair, the yellow Post-it notes stuck to the top edge of his laptop screen. The envelopes, papers, bills—all his work up there—were organized, laid out, and arranged with meticulous care.
It felt like there was a ghost or a spirit in the room, as though the arrangement of the yellow Post-it notes, the crisply ordered documents stacked flush on the desk, the overwhelming neatness of the office, of the room where Dennis spent all his waking life: it was all so horribly sad.
I pictured his face, and I knew at once what I had been refusing to know. I wanted to touch the space bar, awaken his laptop, and read his e-mail. I wanted to search for a message, “To: New Person, From: Dennis. Dear New Person, When can I see you again? It is nearly over with the Broken Guy.”
I backed away from his computer and looked instead at the photographs, mostly of me, on his bookshelf.
Dennis’s level, even smile made him look like what, exactly? Like he was trying, like he was doing his best to be happy, because I was pointing a camera at him and our relationship was new and I had dazzling ideas about us as a couple that I pitched, ever the ad guy.
In another photo, I am wearing a baseball cap. We were in Central Park that morning. It was a Sunday. My first book had been published, and there would be another; I had such fierce optimism and determination in my eyes, unmistakable: the phoenix rising once more from the ashes. Or the ruthlessly ambitious vessel of need. Which one was it? I leaned in closer. Looking at those eight-year-old pictures of myself, I saw such hope in my eyes.
Eye on the prize.
I realized I was the goal, achieved. I was what that guy in the photograph wanted to be. The relationship did last. We did build a life together and a home. I did publish a book, and damn, I even got pretty well famous, as far as authors go.
Then that old hollow feeling returned, the one that used to make me feel like I was filled with echoes and wind, the light at dusk in a living room where all the bulbs have burned out and the shadows are crawling in. I felt something tear inside my mind, a splitting, not unlike how my mother would describe her own psychotic breaks after the fact. But this tear was not explosive; it was surgical, precise. The ripping of a scrim.
It was the revealing of clarity, shimmering jewellike in the center of my mind.
I was awakened.
My heart was broken.
I knew, too, so was Dennis’s.
I turned off the light, quietly padded downstairs, and crawled back into bed. I turned on my side and pressed my body up against Dennis, and he moved in his sleep to meet me, chest to back, his arm over mine.
I spoke. “This is how we used to sleep, remember? Before the dogs?”
He made a sleepy sound.
And I said, “Do you still love me?”
And he replied, “I still love you.”
And in exactly the same way that my nose now dissected my morning coffee into the fat of the fatty milk, the sour note of alkaline, an almost chocolatey nut and chlorine in the water, I heard the truth that thrummed in frequency with the tone in his voice.
Half-asleep, he’d replied, “Yes, I still love you.”
But what he’d actually said was, “No, I do not.”
Adderall had cleared the cobwebs from my mind. The very cobwebs upon which I’d built my life.
* * *
For two nights in a row, Dennis worked on the “bookkeeping” in his office until almost four in the morning. I only thought to ask him about it when I realized he looked like a meth addict; strung out and sweaty and just bad.
“There’s a discrepancy, and I’ve got to locate it,” he said.
“With what?” I asked. “Where is it? What are you talking about?”
“It’s in the checking account. My calculations don’t match the bank’s.”
I felt like I could possibly freak out over this. We would be indicted on fraud charges and led away in handcuffs to serve prison sentences in separate facilities.
“How much is it off?”
He told me it was less than ten cents but that it was important to locate the source of the miscalculation.
I experienced a Shelley Duvall in The Shining moment, where she reads Jack’s novel in progress and it’s hundreds of pages filled with the same text: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
I said, “Ten cents. You’ve been locked away up here for two days going insane over a dime? That’s madness, Dennis.”
This had the undesired effect of making him angry. I wanted to make him understand: your time is more valuable; your life is more valuable. But it was like opposing somebody’s religion. A transformation of thought was just not within the realm of possibility.
As I looked at him hunched over his desk looking like a man in his late sixties, I thought, I’m terrible for him. If this is the result of almost a decade together, this is proof that we don’t work. I’d been in enough relationships with completely wrong people to recognize when I’d done it once again.
I left Dennis in his office and walked downstairs. I looked out the darkening window at the oak trees in the backyard, silhouettes against the fading sky. I thought of oak barrels, slowly aging scotch, the flammable feeling in the back of the throat when you take the first drink after a long, long dry spell.
I opened the refrigerator and took out a Diet Coke.
How the fuck did I get here? I thought. If I was going to be completely sober for the rest of my life, if I couldn’t even have one drink at the end of a long and brittle day, then the life I lived needed to be a life from which I did not seek escape.
I went into my office and dashed off an e-mail to Christopher. “Trick question: if your checkbook was out of balance by ten cents, would you spend two nights searching for the error?”
He wrote back in five minutes. “Trick reply: no.”
His e-mails always made me laugh, even when they were only three words.
Nonetheless, I was in the mood to drink every bottle in the glass-front wine refrigerator we’d installed under the oiled soapstone counter in the living room. I hated my life. It was just exactly that simple.
* * *
Splitting the atom. This is what I had to do. As a couple, we had been reduced to what could be reduced no more. All that remained was to split the universe wide open.
I don’t like the word divorce, because it tells me nothing. “They’re divorced” leaves me wondering if this is what they both wanted and if now they are good, no-longer-married friends who go see live music together and ask each other why it was never this easy as a couple. Or had unhappiness in one of them metastasized over the years until just watching him chew a piece of Trident gum made her grit her teeth in hatred? Or was there a betrayal, and did one spouse want to work through the hurt and anger but the other wanted nothing more to do with the marriage? That was my problem with the word.
With death, however, you may not know how or when, but none of that really matters too terribly much in the end, because death means dead and dead means nothing, gone, no more. I have lost people both ways. Through murky, ill-defined divorce and through the sledgehammer that is death.
Death was easier.
No matter how much ambiguity I still felt about this man, despite moments or sometimes whole days (and in the beginning, whole months) of craving him from the very bottom of my sternum, I could not escape or pretend away or second-guess the titanium truth that he was gone from my life, though he just hadn’t departed it
yet. There was not the slightest possibility of a second chance. My bad behavior, all of my mistakes, everything I failed to say or he failed to answer was now sealed into the immovable past, opaque to later examinations, I was afraid.
It is an awful, just sickening feeling, I discovered, to live with somebody, to exist in the midst of sharing a life, only to realize it is utterly doomed. It was botulism of the soul. I’d had such ambition for building a life together, because I wanted that strength of character and security. But I had overlooked the most important thing: he wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t right for him. Merely wanting us to be right and good together wasn’t enough. It was only enough to sputter through about a decade.
I lost the ability to sleep. It was like I forgot how. I lay there and simply waited for something that did not arrive. There was no tiredness in me, but there was an exhaustion that ran much deeper, roiling like a river.
I also lost the ability to care, even slightly, about anything. I wasn’t suicidal, because deep inside the suicidal impulse, when you cut it open and look at the pit, you see faith, which is like hope without the question mark.
People cannot get what they need in this life, so they decide to give themselves the relief of an end. They care enough to generate a desire and then take the action required to fulfill this desire. It isn’t logical; there is no relief with suicide. But they believe there is. They know there is. That’s faith. And I lost that. So I wasn’t in any danger of swallowing the correct pills or cutting myself and bleeding it all away.
I was without that tiny hook you feel each day, the one that makes you change the sheets or go to work or feed the baby or eat. So while I wasn’t even remotely suicidal, I was now the easiest of targets. My firewall was off. Had I found a tumor on my chest, noticing that it was there is all the action I would have taken.
* * *
We never laughed, Dennis and I. It was just not something we’d ever settled into with each other, an easy, over-nothing-really kind of laughter. That simply never came.
Years before we moved to Massachusetts, a magazine photographed us at Dennis’s apartment on the Upper West Side. They’d placed us side by side on the sofa, and the photographer had said, “Okay, big smiles!”
We obliged. I think we both felt somewhat stiff and awkward.
She said, “Okay, now let’s see some laughter.” This proved more difficult. As a countermeasure to our grim attempts at joy, she encouraged us to go bigger. “Throw your head back!”
The pictures that ran in the magazine were atrocious. Manufactured happiness, complete with glaringly obvious flaws from the manufacturing process. But instead of hating these pictures, I now understand I should have learned from them. The awful photos were in fact my teacher. I just chose to skip the lecture.
Dennis was not a funny man. He was serious, intent on locating flaws, errors, and miscalculations. And I was not funny when I was around him, which was continuously. So if I ever had been funny, I wasn’t anymore. I felt geriatric, like we should go ahead and move into his dad’s nursing home.
One evening, I could no longer stand the awful, good-mannered silence that had swallowed us. I asked him, “When did you realize you had fallen out of love with me? Do you remember?”
There was silence, so I helped things along. “Was it a week ago? A month? Two months? Years?”
At first, he said nothing. He cleared his throat, and then he coughed. By this point, I was no longer expecting an answer; that door had already closed. I would go upstairs and get something carbonated to drink.
Then in a voice so soft and low he could almost deny its existence, he said, “About a year. Less than a year.”
Even as I asked the question, I half believed in the possibility that he would reply, “I didn’t fall out of love with you.” This would have sent me back to reevaluate everything. But because he had an answer, this made the thing I knew already to be true into an actual true thing that existed outside my own head.
He then said he had never felt so unattractive in his life, that he never expected to be in such a relationship, and that if he was ten years younger, he might not want to stay in it. He said he was too old and tired to start again, so we should just make it work.
How Cary Grant of him, I thought, masking my hurt and surprise with sarcasm.
I was making the bed as we had this conversation. I told him, “I don’t want to be with somebody because he has a strong sense of duty.” I imagined that if Dennis knew he had financial security, he wouldn’t have stayed with me.
Earlier that summer, I started wearing a tiny stud earring in the hole I’ve had in my left ear since I was a teenager. He presented me with a box for my birthday, saying, “I noticed you started wearing an earring, so.” I opened the box, and there was a pair of blue topaz earrings, surrounded by diamond chips. A ballerina setting, I believe it’s called. Like Princess Diana’s engagement ring. I laughed at first, because I thought it was a joke.
Dennis was deeply hurt by my reaction, and I realized instantly he’d been serious. He’d actually expected me to wear the earring, which would have looked lovely on somebody who wore glittery sweaters at Christmas and low beige heels. Inside each gift he gave me, I always sensed a little hidden package of anger. He was resentful as hell that he was the only one out there in the yard with the leaf blower. He did not approve of a man wearing an earring. But to be supportive, he’d bought me earrings for my birthday. But they were stained with his own judgment on the subject. So while they were hilarious when I thought he was kidding, they became insufferable when I realized he was not.
Perhaps the feeling overriding everything else was just the sad realization that this gift was physical evidence—proof—that he didn’t know the very first thing about who I actually was. As though he’d been too busy studying me for flaws and incompatibilities to actually get to know me.
* * *
As the nights ground on and I worked more, I started feeling even more depressed. Emotional gravity set in. A swell of “This can’t be real” overtook me, and it seemed like the most horrible thing ever. I realized just how out of love with me he was. He didn’t even like me. But I generated cash. I was alone with him in this terrible dream house. It was exactly like Maggie and Brick. “I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage, that’s all.”
I couldn’t be with somebody who couldn’t stand me. That’s crazy.
If I vacuumed the downstairs? Dennis would hear the vacuum and come downstairs and vacuum over again. If I dusted, he dusted the areas I just dusted. So I just stopped attempting any of these domestic chores because, frankly, I didn’t give a fuck if the house was dusty. We live in a universe filled with dust. To fight it is to fight against the flow of time itself.
If I moved something in the medicine cabinet because I used it every morning, when I next opened the cabinet, it was back where he’d placed it, behind the taller things that are mostly never used. This is how it was: the warfare of our relationship played out wordlessly through a medicine cabinet.
He said he wanted to work on us. But his eyes said, “It’s too late.” And they had great shards of rage in them.
The only reason we were together now was because it’s a lot of work to break up. I saw him at eight in the morning when he walked the dogs. Then again at midnight when he said good night to them.
* * *
So there I was in bed at two in the morning. But instead of sleeping, I had my laptop on my thighs, and I was squinting at the screen and typing a quick piece of code—chmod + x ~/.scripts/culturealarm—so that my computer’s arcane Linux operating system would wake me each morning with the top video on YouTube.
As I strained to double-check the tiny white monospace characters of my command in the terminal emulator window, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was like a great shadow had crossed a wall or lightning had flashed in the distant corner of the room. I could not identify what I had seen, but inexplicably, I felt the rush of blind y
et unmistakable lust.
Lust was disconcerting; it was not a part of my feeling world but rather something I vaguely remembered from my twenties with George, a sensation from the last century reserved for doomed bankers.
I clicked the Linux nonsense out of the way and spotted the coy slideshow widget on the desktop. While I was focused on my exacting, geeky task, my right eyeball had been busy scoping out the photographs without my knowledge. The slideshow widget fed from a file of photos somebody recently sent. They were not my pictures, but I knew most of the people in them.
“Who the fuck is that?” I said, but only in my mind because the person I vowed to spend the rest of my life with was asleep on the other side of the mattress. I checked on him to make sure he hadn’t heard the racket going on inside my body, but he was asleep. So I looked back at the widget and leaned forward, nearly pressing my oily nose to the screen in order to scrutinize the picture.
It vanished, replaced by a photo of a collie.
I actually flinched, as though I had lost my footing and stepped off the edge of a backyard deck, my body anticipating the crack of the hard earth. A quick jab at the picture frame thing with my pointer brought back the previous image.
I stared. My throat was dry. A prickle of sweat stung my head.
It had actually only taken a mere thousandth of a second for me to recognize the person in the photograph. Hardly surprising; there are more neurons in the brain than there are stars in the known universe, and recognizing somebody one has known for ten years and speaks to every day—either in person or in e-mail—is not such a drain on one’s neural resources. Not like, say, being the first to decipher hieroglyphics.
But tucked inside that fraction of a moment, it seemed to take an eternity for those familiar features to at last resolve into.… what? And before they did, before I was able to name the person, I was able to form the feeling: “I would die for him.”
First, I felt love. Second, it was like a fist had been jammed into my crotch and pressed against my balls, an ache. I felt ownership, primal, just a mouth going, “Mine, mine, mine.” And there at last it was: absolute recognition. And: Are you fucking kidding me? Not again. This. Is. Not. Possible.