“All I am is three things,” he finally says, matter of fact. “I’m a teacher. A husband. A father. And only one of those things satisfies me. Only being a father brings me satisfaction.”
My heart sinks into the passenger seat. My twenty-five-year-old heart, the one that fell in love with him, the one that twelve years later still thinks of him as so much more than just “husband” or “father” or “teacher.” My thirty-seven-year-old heart hurts, too. It’s sustained the sturm und drang of the past six months of our marriage, and now this. This. The anger rises up in me, hot like a kettle about to boil, ready to scald him if he isn’t careful, and me for certain.
Day Four. The Day I Learn She Exists. You know this story: the post-sex conversation about a woman at work he’s friends with and how she propositioned him once but of course he didn’t do anything.
Of course not, of course.
Day Five. The night before we’re getting on a plane to go on a trip. We’re packed and ready and have actually gone to bed at the same time, for the second night in a row, when in the darkness, he says quietly, “I hate this house. I hate living here. I hate having to fix things and cut the grass and shovel the snow and paint.” And I say, “You’ve never painted a thing! I painted every room in this house!” As if that’s the point I should be making.
The truth is, I also hate our house. And so I turn on the bedside lamp, sit up and tell him. I tell him I hate that no matter how much we fix it up, there’s always something else that needs to be fixed. That the only things we spend money on are things for the house. That most of our “down time” is spent on the house, too, something always to be swept or moved or mowed or dug up or built or painted. And honestly, I hate the neighbourhood, it’s just too far from downtown for me, my commute is unbearable, and I miss the culture of downtown living. Mostly, I tell him, I miss living in an apartment; I’ve never liked living in a house.
We look at one another and smirk. Here we are with common ground and we didn’t even know it. We both hate living in this house! When I got pregnant, it had been our shared dream, to have a house we’d live in for the rest of our lives, but it wasn’t right for us, it wasn’t us.
“We belong downtown!” I say and he smiles. He leans over and grabs me, wrestling me into his arms shouting, “We belong in a condo again!” and I laugh. We kiss hard and long, like we just remembered who we were.
“Fuck it, let’s sell the house. Let’s buy a condo and start over again!” we say, and all the air comes back into our relationship in that moment, as if we really believe selling our house will fix our marriage. We have sex all night long and talk about condos during rest periods.
The next day we get on a plane and on that plane, we’re excited, like everything old is new again. We kiss and laugh and talk about which downtown neighbourhoods we want to live in. We reaffirm our marriage, we hold hands, we say, “This is going to be the year,” and “Let’s try this. Let’s try this. I think it’s going to work! So do I!”
The Blitzkrieg is over. It’s ended on a high note, if you can believe it.
We go to Jamaica with Birdie and two other families and have a week like no other together. Every moment is sexually and emotionally charged, his shiny dark eyes alive again and always looking right into mine, his hands all over me. The laughter and warmth is back, the goofy charm and the sexy roguishness. It feels like 1999 again. My friend The Bright One is with us and she and my cousin keep teasing us, calling it our “second honeymoon.” It feels like it, it really does. On New Year’s Eve we kiss on the beach while a crowd of people party around us, Birdie and the other children asleep on chairs pushed together. We dance and he tells me this will be the best year of our marriage, and I almost believe him.
When we get back home, the “second honeymoon” feeling lasts about two days before he freaks out on me. I cry and scream, “Nothing has changed! Nothing has changed!” and he spits back, “Of course not! We’ve tried, but things are not getting better!” None of it makes any sense to me. I feel crazy and confused, insecure and unsure. Everything I say or do could be innocuous or could throw him into a rage, and I never know which it’s going to be.
We fight and then make up. We try and then fail. We look at condos, and our real estate agent comes over to assess our house. I’m as confused as ever, walking on eggshells. He says things like, “I despise the term husband, and the things you have to do as a husband,” on the exact same day as he says, “I love you, I love you, I want to be your husband.”
Another day, he says, “This is done. I am a shitty husband. This is done. I am not a good husband.” And I protest, “I’m willing to fight for you! For this marriage!” which I am, although he’s right, he is a very shitty husband and has been for a while now. This flip-flopping, this uncertainty, I don’t know how he can vacillate so wildly or whether I can withstand it.
I won’t have to for long.
One night we’re making dinner and it suddenly erupts into a huge fight. This time, it’s The Husband who throws an object clean across the room. The object is a cutting board with a pile of freshly chopped parsley on it. The parsley flies everywhere, green snowflakes on our kitchen floor. On my clothes. All over Birdie. My father is there and he scoops up Birdie and runs out of the room with her, shouting, “Calm down!”
The Husband does not calm down. I run upstairs crying and scribble furiously into my notebook: All I said was “Why aren’t there serviettes on the table?” What is the matter with him?! Why is this happening?
Later, we will jokingly say to people that our marriage ended over serviettes and parsley. No one else finds this funny.
We go to bed that night not talking. And the night after that, a Friday, he goes out for drinks after work with his colleagues and he just doesn’t come home. For the first time in twelve years together, I wake up in our bed. Alone.
The following afternoon, he shows up and we sit together on the edge of our bed. We hold hands. He says he wants to talk about how we can make our marriage work. We go for a drive and spend hours in a crappy pub talking about our relationship. He says over and over that he wants to make our marriage work.
I say, “You have to be in it. Are you in it?” and he says, “Yes.”
As we drive back home I feel hope again, like maybe we are coming through the fire. And then he casually mentions the woman from work. Her.
I say, “Was she there at the bar last night?”
“Yes.”
I don’t know if I can even tell you this next part. God I wish I had a glass of gin right now, but I said I would do this so here’s what happens next:
I say, “Is that where you stayed last night? Her place?”
He drives, staring straight ahead, and as flat as the road we’re on, he says,
“Yes.”
HERE’S WHAT I CAN TELL YOU
I can tell you this. When The Bomb first drops, it feels like the hand of God reaches down and pulls everything out of me — entrails, guts, what’s left of my heart, my breath, all sound. I am motionless, airless, frozen, everything has exploded and yet, I am in some kind of cryogenic state. Life is an instant blurry, swooping mess, like I’m underwater.
I open the car door and run out into the thick snow. We’ve pulled over to the side of the road, into the entrance of the cemetery where my grandmother is buried, and my uncle, and my cousin who died too young. The weirdness of this is not lost on me, even in the shock. It’s freezing out, my coat is open and I have no mitts or hat or scarf, but I just run and run to the cemetery gates. They’re locked.
I feel like throwing up into the snow. I can’t stop shaking, or crying, or screaming. Alternately I just stand