Especially since I don’t particularly like the morning sun I feel so compelled to seek. Regardless, I only feel at home in places that face west. I currently live in an apartment that faces east. Despite my best attempts to comfortably inhabit this apartment, I have failed. I’ve faulted the gray paint I chose (“November Rain,” clearly formulated for seasonal depression junkies or, more damningly, per a decorating blog, “for the sage green set”), the window treatments (there are none), the fact that our books are kept in the guest room and so sometimes it looks like nobody interesting lives in our home. There’s sun upon waking, yes, but it feels like a reward I do not deserve and don’t want.
Probably it’s due to some combination of light and egresses and ghosts, but for sure I experience a panicked flight reaction when I enter certain interior spaces. I told the woman about a room to which I recalled suffering an immediate allergic reaction. I had just married my first husband.We’d blown all of our money on the wedding and had just a few hundred dollars left, and so we decided to spend it at an old inn in Camden, Maine, with cheap off-season rates. My first husband called these three days our “mini-moon.” The moment I entered our mini-moon room, however, I needed to leave it. For no apparent reason I felt on the verge of hysterics. Or maybe there was a reason. The room had been renovated so that, while legitimately Victorian, it now vibed faux-Victorian. I worried that this room would reify what I already felt—I did not belong in this marriage. I was faux to my core. If we stayed in this room, I thought, my first husband and I would be divorced by sundown. I made up a story about how I needed a bathtub and not a shower with massaging jets. The porter showed us a second room, one that still had its old clawfoot tub, and one that didn’t make me think,
We are doomed
. This room faced west.
Still, the west-facing room could not protect me from all bad omens, and Camden, in late October, plagued by rain, was full of them. My first husband and I read books each afternoon by the fire in the inn’s library, and drank tea. I was reading a biography of Edith Wharton. Wharton, I learned, married a man she did not love because she felt societal pressure to do so. (I didn’t feel societal pressure to marry my first husband, but I did feel pressure, most of it self-inflicted.) She had a fulfilling life despite her bad marriage, and, besides, she wrote many novels, which is what I hoped to do. Maybe, I reasoned with myself, I hadn’t made a terrible mistake. Maybe a bad marriage would prove good for my career, too.
Aside from wedding decompression, my one goal in Camden—a town with many used bookshops—was to locate an out-of-print memoir. Published in the 1940sby a woman who never wrote another book, this memoir detailed the story of a wife (the author) and her husband, who fled Manhattan to homestead in Maine. The husband came from a wealthy banker family; he had artist ambitions, as this variety of black sheep usually does. Their remote, falling-down house—on a point of land accessible only by boat—became, after the adrenaline high of their escape subsided, the site of their marriage’s unraveling. Only the seeds of the unraveling are present in the memoir. On the last page, they are still happily married. In the hermetic world of the book, their love persists. In reality, they grew miserable. I know because Maine is a tiny state and the couple’s decline into unhappiness remained gossip nearly sixty years later. The friend who’d told me about the book had met the husband, by then in his eighties and a widower, at a dinner party. She found him scary, she said, broody and embittered. So great was the couple’s marital misery in the remote house, in fact, it was rumored the husband had murdered the wife (she died under mysterious circumstances).
On the third rainy day of our mini-moon, I decided
Probably it’s due to some combination of light and egresses and ghosts, but for sure I experience a panicked flight reaction when I enter certain interior spaces. I told the woman about a room to which I recalled suffering an immediate allergic reaction. I had just married my first husband.We’d blown all of our money on the wedding and had just a few hundred dollars left, and so we decided to spend it at an old inn in Camden, Maine, with cheap off-season rates. My first husband called these three days our “mini-moon.” The moment I entered our mini-moon room, however, I needed to leave it. For no apparent reason I felt on the verge of hysterics. Or maybe there was a reason. The room had been renovated so that, while legitimately Victorian, it now vibed faux-Victorian. I worried that this room would reify what I already felt—I did not belong in this marriage. I was faux to my core. If we stayed in this room, I thought, my first husband and I would be divorced by sundown. I made up a story about how I needed a bathtub and not a shower with massaging jets. The porter showed us a second room, one that still had its old clawfoot tub, and one that didn’t make me think,
We are doomed
. This room faced west.
Still, the west-facing room could not protect me from all bad omens, and Camden, in late October, plagued by rain, was full of them. My first husband and I read books each afternoon by the fire in the inn’s library, and drank tea. I was reading a biography of Edith Wharton. Wharton, I learned, married a man she did not love because she felt societal pressure to do so. (I didn’t feel societal pressure to marry my first husband, but I did feel pressure, most of it self-inflicted.) She had a fulfilling life despite her bad marriage, and, besides, she wrote many novels, which is what I hoped to do. Maybe, I reasoned with myself, I hadn’t made a terrible mistake. Maybe a bad marriage would prove good for my career, too.
Aside from wedding decompression, my one goal in Camden—a town with many used bookshops—was to locate an out-of-print memoir. Published in the 1940sby a woman who never wrote another book, this memoir detailed the story of a wife (the author) and her husband, who fled Manhattan to homestead in Maine. The husband came from a wealthy banker family; he had artist ambitions, as this variety of black sheep usually does. Their remote, falling-down house—on a point of land accessible only by boat—became, after the adrenaline high of their escape subsided, the site of their marriage’s unraveling. Only the seeds of the unraveling are present in the memoir. On the last page, they are still happily married. In the hermetic world of the book, their love persists. In reality, they grew miserable. I know because Maine is a tiny state and the couple’s decline into unhappiness remained gossip nearly sixty years later. The friend who’d told me about the book had met the husband, by then in his eighties and a widower, at a dinner party. She found him scary, she said, broody and embittered. So great was the couple’s marital misery in the remote house, in fact, it was rumored the husband had murdered the wife (she died under mysterious circumstances).
On the third rainy day of our mini-moon, I decided
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