heavens, maybe, words written in clouds, something as unambiguous as the sensation in my whole shocked body the first time I met him and knew without any doubt he was the love of my life.
I drove home, and found myself walking into the house as if it might hold the answer to that question. We’d built the house together more than ten years earlier but even so it had never really felt mine. Although I can’t say it felt as if it belonged to Charlie either. Domestically our two cultures had come into opposition like participants in a nominally friendly sports competition and clashed more aggressively than was necessary. It turned out Charlie prefers clean, modern lines. My taste leans toward the sort of thing that would not be out of place in a brimming African farmhouse. Now Charlie’s low-slung, shiny leather sofa faced my canvas-covered, dog-stained, allergy-hot-zone sofa over the coffee table on which there was a buffer zone of shared interests: a book of Lee Miller’s war photography; a biography of Paul Bowles; orange candles on Japanese-print-inspired holders; Charlie’s weekly newspaper; a world atlas; bills; the children’s homework.
The kids weren’t home from school yet, Charlie was still at work. I went online and ordered a variety of books, from those that promised to rescue a rocky marriage to the sorts of fresh-from-the-fray divorcée memoirs I would ordinarily have avoided. I got used paperbacks because I knew I wouldn’t want them on my shelves after I’d read them. If the marriage survived, they would be a threat—always suggestively winking up from my shelves on the days our union reverted rocky. If the marriage didn’t survive, I knew I wouldn’t want to be reminded of this day forever afterward by their presence.
When they arrived, I stashed the books in their anonymous brown packages behind my collection of obscure Africana, where I knew they were unlikely to be discovered. Every time I went on assignment or to a speaking engagement I stuffed a few volumes into my carry-on. I was distressed to find that many came in the telltale, rippled condition of women on the brink; read in the bath, wept upon, or both. I imagined their previous owners propped on the edge of the steaming tub, taps running, tears streaming. I read them hurriedly, in increasing dismay, and left them in the backs of airplane seats, in airports, in hotel rooms—a guilty trail of contagion.
The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A Twenty-Five-Year Landmark Study
disturbed me so much I tore it into parts and discarded the fragments in separate gas station garbage bins across South Dakota and Nebraska.
Like alcoholic memoirs and their twelve steps to freedom and recovery, divorcée memoirs seem to follow a familiar path: the grim realization that the marriage is truly over; the reluctant acceptance that the unhappy liaison has an ungodly power over the couple; the terror and dislocation that preceded and followed the actual awful act of divorce; the new man and renewed belief in the old lies about love. I had begun to give up on these books at the first mention of a woman collapsing with grief on the kitchen or the bathroom floor. Why always these two rooms? Couldn’t anyone fall over anywhere more comfortable? The sitting room perhaps, the bedroom even? It was only later I discovered that women dissolve in these two places for good reason: the kitchen because it is the place from which we have nurtured our soon-to-be devastated families, and the bathroom because it is private.
“I think it’s over,” I said, stopping Charlie at the front door one morning in mid-August. Even as I spoke, I could hear the mix of anxiety and finality in my voice, as if for several months we had both been watching over a dying relative whose time had finally come. It sounded to me as if I were warning Charlie: if he walked out the door now, he would miss what we had all been waiting for, the moment of death.
“What’s over?” Charlie
I drove home, and found myself walking into the house as if it might hold the answer to that question. We’d built the house together more than ten years earlier but even so it had never really felt mine. Although I can’t say it felt as if it belonged to Charlie either. Domestically our two cultures had come into opposition like participants in a nominally friendly sports competition and clashed more aggressively than was necessary. It turned out Charlie prefers clean, modern lines. My taste leans toward the sort of thing that would not be out of place in a brimming African farmhouse. Now Charlie’s low-slung, shiny leather sofa faced my canvas-covered, dog-stained, allergy-hot-zone sofa over the coffee table on which there was a buffer zone of shared interests: a book of Lee Miller’s war photography; a biography of Paul Bowles; orange candles on Japanese-print-inspired holders; Charlie’s weekly newspaper; a world atlas; bills; the children’s homework.
The kids weren’t home from school yet, Charlie was still at work. I went online and ordered a variety of books, from those that promised to rescue a rocky marriage to the sorts of fresh-from-the-fray divorcée memoirs I would ordinarily have avoided. I got used paperbacks because I knew I wouldn’t want them on my shelves after I’d read them. If the marriage survived, they would be a threat—always suggestively winking up from my shelves on the days our union reverted rocky. If the marriage didn’t survive, I knew I wouldn’t want to be reminded of this day forever afterward by their presence.
When they arrived, I stashed the books in their anonymous brown packages behind my collection of obscure Africana, where I knew they were unlikely to be discovered. Every time I went on assignment or to a speaking engagement I stuffed a few volumes into my carry-on. I was distressed to find that many came in the telltale, rippled condition of women on the brink; read in the bath, wept upon, or both. I imagined their previous owners propped on the edge of the steaming tub, taps running, tears streaming. I read them hurriedly, in increasing dismay, and left them in the backs of airplane seats, in airports, in hotel rooms—a guilty trail of contagion.
The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A Twenty-Five-Year Landmark Study
disturbed me so much I tore it into parts and discarded the fragments in separate gas station garbage bins across South Dakota and Nebraska.
Like alcoholic memoirs and their twelve steps to freedom and recovery, divorcée memoirs seem to follow a familiar path: the grim realization that the marriage is truly over; the reluctant acceptance that the unhappy liaison has an ungodly power over the couple; the terror and dislocation that preceded and followed the actual awful act of divorce; the new man and renewed belief in the old lies about love. I had begun to give up on these books at the first mention of a woman collapsing with grief on the kitchen or the bathroom floor. Why always these two rooms? Couldn’t anyone fall over anywhere more comfortable? The sitting room perhaps, the bedroom even? It was only later I discovered that women dissolve in these two places for good reason: the kitchen because it is the place from which we have nurtured our soon-to-be devastated families, and the bathroom because it is private.
“I think it’s over,” I said, stopping Charlie at the front door one morning in mid-August. Even as I spoke, I could hear the mix of anxiety and finality in my voice, as if for several months we had both been watching over a dying relative whose time had finally come. It sounded to me as if I were warning Charlie: if he walked out the door now, he would miss what we had all been waiting for, the moment of death.
“What’s over?” Charlie
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