I grew up thinking love was torture. Love was passion, love was drama. I watched my parents fight in spectacular, telenovela fashion. I saw my aunt and uncle throw plates and punches while my little cousins and I hid under the kitchen table.
These couples loved each other fiercely. I’d sit at the top of the basement stairs, long after I should have been asleep, watching them dance close and call each other darling. A spark in their eye, an affectionate pinch of a bum, a laugh like a teenage girl.
So that’s what love’s always been to me: wild and sweeping. Changing from intense anger to soft care at any moment. Of course, my parents and most of my aunts and uncles all got divorced eventually, but by then it was too late, I’d sponged it all up. It’s part of my very blood. Love is infuriating but worth every fight.
Which brings me here, to a place where love is only real if it can rage like a bonfire and also comfort like a fireplace. It’s both, at once, the pain and the warmth.
It’s why my heart is always cranked to maximum.
HE’S COME UNDONE
I just threw a vintage ashtray across the room in his general direction. It was made of glass, and when it hit the wall it sprayed everywhere, millions of tiny pieces all over the room. Some pieces even made it to the kitchen somehow, skidding across the floor.
I am howling, crying, begging him to stop twisting words. We’ve been like this before, but it’s been worse these past few months, these months where something has happened to him and I don’t know who he is anymore. It feels like he’s a ghost in this house, a ghost that stares infinitely at the TV. It makes me sad and then angry. And then, angrier. The more confused and angry I become, the more it leads us here, to a place where I throw a glass object clean across a room.
Suddenly, there’s a tiny voice. “Guys?” the voice says. It’s Birdie. She always calls us “guys” which is usually the cutest, but right now it is 1:00 a.m. and she is four years old and in her pyjamas in the kitchen, possibly standing right on top of tiny pieces of glass.
The Husband springs up like a saviour, shouting at me, “Look what you’ve done!” and scoops her up, cooing to her gently. He whisks her upstairs, comforting her like World’s Best Dad, leaving me here, World’s Worst Mom, I guess. I can only guess. I don’t know why we are fighting like this, or what’s happening. I’m so unhappy. I miss him and us, and I hate him and us, and I feel trapped, but not in a way that makes me want to break free. No, just in a way that makes me want to understand and fix, a trapping we can somehow transcend, together.
So I sweep up the glass. I sweep and sweep. He comes back. He holds the dust pan. He explains the properties of the glass to me, by way of explaining how something so small could shatter into so many pieces.
And then, we sit on the kitchen floor and talk. We stare at each other across this floor that only a few years earlier we put in ourselves when I was pregnant, tearing it up to reveal layer upon layer of linoleum in every pattern imaginable, decades piled on top of one another, an excavation of another family’s life.
On this night, like all the others before it, neither of us storms off. Instead we talk. We talk and talk until we are calm again. Until one of us laughs. Until one person reaches out to the other and we are in each other’s arms. Until one of us says, Sorry, I’ll do better, and the other answers, No, no, I’m sorry, I will do better.
And so, like every single argument we have ever had, this one turns out okay. Exhausted, we go to bed together. We tangle our bodies up purposefully and kiss goodnight. We fall asleep pledging things will be different.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BOMB
THE UMBRELLA
The umbrella is bright green, like a neon lime. I climb into the passenger seat of our car one morning when The Husband is driving me to the subway, and there it is, sticking out from under my seat. Clearly it’s a woman’s umbrella. But whose? And why? I lean over to get it, but it’s jammed under the seat. You might even say purposefully jammed, in hindsight, but you just don’t know, do you? I question The Husband and he seems unfazed, saying it must belong to a male colleague of his that he drove to a football game. I point out it’s a pretty fancy, feminine umbrella but he just shrugs.
All I know is there’s a woman from work he told me about a few weeks ago. It came out of nowhere, that revelation, like a scene in a David Mamet play. Something we were just speaking about, as an idea, not actually talking about, you know?
INT. BEDROOM — NIGHT
The HUSBAND and WIFE are lying in bed. They have just had sex and are looking up at the ceiling, legs in a tangle.
| HUSBAND | What would happen if I was unfaithful? |
| WIFE | Um. What? Uh … have you been? |
| HUSBAND | No. No. But, what if there was someone I was interested in sleeping with? |
| WIFE | Is there? |
| HUSBAND | Yes. |
| WIFE | Who is it? |
| HUSBAND | A woman. At work. We’ve been friends for years. We go for tea every day. We talk about work and Ultimate Frisbee. |
The WIFE takes a deep breath.
| HUSBAND | She propositioned me once. I thought about it, but of course I didn’t. |
| GREEK CHORUS | Oh yes, but he did! He did and did and did! |
| WIFE | Well, I get it. I mean, you’re friends, you can talk about work and she understands and cares about it. And besides, you have no baggage with her. She sits across from you and laughs at the things you say. She doesn’t ask you to take out the garbage, you don’t hate that she never stops cleaning. |
The HUSBAND sighs. He looks uncomfortable.
| WIFE | Has anything ever happened between you two? |
| HUSBAND | No. No, nothing has ever happened. |
| GREEK CHORUS | But it was happening. It had probably happened that very same day! |
And ... scene.
A few weeks later, the car ride, the green umbrella. Maybe they drove to the coffee shop that day because it was raining. But even though I know the umbrella is hers, I don’t push it with him. I honestly think that we’re going through a rough part of our marriage, and that he was finding missing pieces in this woman. I thought he was tempted, but would never actually go through with it. I thought we would work it out, that things would get better.
Am I the dumbest wife that ever lived, or what? KABOOM!
AN EDUCATION
Several times a year, The Husband would go out drinking with other teachers, sometimes after a school play or a colleague’s retirement and always after a long evening of parent-teacher