Wreck and Order (11 page)

At Brian's office Christmas party, men and women alike congratulated me on my catch, told me how lucky I was, Brian was such a great guy. Of course they didn't have to spend a weekend with him when he was withdrawn and self-absorbed, barely registering my presence, exhausted from giving his best self to his coworkers and clients. I had these thoughts consciously—I even wrote them down in a notebook I kept hidden at the back of my desk drawer. But this thinking didn't seem like an indication that I shouldn't be with Brian specifically. Rather, the distance between the good impression Brian made on acquaintances and the disappointment he caused me at home seemed a confirmation of my belief that marriage was a secret so painful you had to keep the secret even from yourself.

Brian loved the fact that two of his friends got engaged the same month he did. I didn't like his sly pride in conforming, but it was relaxing to know he understood the business of living. And I would break down his defenses over time. He would stop protecting himself from me the way he protected himself from the world by hiding behind its rules. I would be so grateful to be the sole trustee of his full self that I would no longer desire Jared or anyone else.

When Brian and I were walking in Central Park one evening, a little girl stopped dead in her tracks in front of us. She pulled on her mother's hand and stamped one foot. “But I'm
ser
ious!” she said. The father scowled. “You're five. You're not serious about anything. You don't understand how anything works yet.”

Brian chuckled as we scooted around the crying girl. “What a relief to hear a parent with some balls,” he said. I swung the hand he was holding, looking at the sky, turning away from his harsh pronouncement just as I turned away from my body in the presence of his polite, hardworking mother and quietly dignified (Brian's phrase) father. I knew Brian would want kids and I hoped I would, too, someday. I liked the idea of being needed. But I could already imagine myself cringing when Brian called me “the mother of his children” with pride and bitterness, the same pride and bitterness he would feel for forgoing the chance to fuck his female underlings at work, consigning himself for life to the bombed-out ruin of my vagina and saggy, stretch-mark-riddled stomach and nipples sucked into long, inflamed, livid daggers. I begged my brain to shut up when I had thoughts like this. Brian was going to be a good husband. He put his hand on my lower back and steered us out of the park.

Since getting engaged, I'd become serious about
Fifi
again, in my way. I wanted something that was mine. On the days I wasn't working at the bookstore, I would set myself up at my desk—coffee, notebooks, giant Larousse dictionary—before Brian headed out to the office. But as soon as he closed the door behind him, I often got back in bed with a novel, giddy with the ease of being alone. An hour before he was due home from work, I would drag myself back to the desk, plow through French words without feeling them, just so I could tell my fiancé that I'd done my five hundred words for the day, and he would believe in me, in my project.

I met my friend Laney for coffee and told her I was scared of getting married. We'd gone to high school together and reconnected through Facebook. She wore crimson lipstick and platform boots that laced up to her knees. A helmet of black hair framed her taut, bluish skin. Her ripped T-shirt ended just below her pointy breasts. Sipping her large mocha soy latte with an extra shot, she told me about the guy she'd met at a party the night before. “He had this rape-and-pillage vibe going on,” she said. “I knew he would be all—” She pumped her hips in the air and then made a circular tossing motion with her hands, like a sailor throwing a bag of spoiled rice overboard. “I don't think we even spoke before we got in a cab together. I just stared at him across the room and told him with my eyes: I am totally buying what you're selling.” She took a long swig of her coffee and told me with her eyes that she had totally bought what he sold. Then she looked away, sighing so loudly that the sound was offensive rather than poignant. “I don't think anyone else hates men and fucks them as much as I do. Marriage couldn't be worse than that, right?”

“Yes it could,” I said. “It could be that, just with less fucking.”

“Oh, darling, every lady needs a husband,” Laney said, affecting a British accent and smoking an imaginary cigarette. “It's our cross to bear.” We played rich Brits for the rest of the morning.

Laney was always inviting me to dance parties in warehouses or burlesque shows on roofs. Brian had tried to be nice, but after we got engaged, he told me frankly that he never wanted to see her again. “She seems really damaged,” he said.

“Anyone who's made it to thirty without getting damaged is barely alive,” I said. “And besides, damaged people are funnier than other people.” I told him that Laney had recently said to me, “I'm pretty sure the only reason I've never been date-raped is because I was always willing to do whatever the guy wanted.”

“That's sad,” he said.

“But it's also funny.”

Brian and I started fighting nearly every weekend because I wanted to go to some concert or beer garden or friend's party, and he was working or tired from working. I liked being alone on the nights he worked late. But if I was going to be forced to be around another person, unable to lose myself in daydreams or loud music or books, I wanted to at least have fun. I erupted at him one night when he canceled our plans to go to an all-night dance party on a boat. I'd gotten us tickets weeks earlier. “I'll pay you back,” he said.

“You are willfully boring,” I said. We were walking home from dinner. We paused in front of the Brooklyn Museum and screamed at each other on the majestic steps. He called me vitriolic. I felt a quiver of excitement at his word choice. We exhausted ourselves and started walking toward our apartment.

“This is the same fight my parents have been having for forty years,” he said as he hung up our coats.

“I don't want to have this fight for forty years.”

“So let's not.” He took my hand and led me to our IKEA couch. We sat side by side in the dark. The sky was pretty through our bay windows. Fluid black shapes swam through a still-blacker canvas. Brian wrapped his arm around my shoulder. He tilted my chin back with his index finger. My mouth kissed his mouth. My shoes sat beside the couch, side by side, empty, the insoles coming loose at the heels. I'd bought them for four dollars at a stoop sale one Sunday afternoon. I was so glad when I spotted them, gladder still when I asked the price. Now they stared up at me, alive with need, animals waiting to be fed. I buried my face in Brian's arm.

The next weekend, he canceled a series of Friday meetings to take me to Cape Cod. We slept a lot and drank a lot of not bad wine and walked on the beach. No one could say we were not having a nice weekend. It was April, far too cold for swimming. One night at sunset, I pulled off my clothes, ran and dove, emerged shrieking. “You're crazy,” Brian said, grinning at my blue, goose-pimpled flesh in a way that looked physically taxing.

Brian didn't want to know I was cheating on him. But he was often cold to me after Jared's visits, perhaps sensing my inaccessibility as I caught up on sleep and readapted to calmer days. His coldness felt only right to me, until he failed to invite me to a party for Obama's inauguration. I learned about it on Facebook, where he posted a photo of his coworkers standing before an enormous projection of Obama's face, each raising a glass of champagne.

“You didn't tell me your office was having a party today,” I said when he got home from work. “I had to watch the inauguration all alone.”

Brian shook his head and dropped his bag on the couch. “Please don't start. I'm starving.” I followed him into the kitchen. “What, you didn't get your fill of the champagne and hors d'oeuvres at the party? It looked really fun. Judging from all the bragging you did on Facebook.”

He took a bag of Tostitos out of the cupboard and started eating from the bag. “It was really fun. Mostly because we finally have a president who cares about things that matter. But it was an
office
party.”

“There were spouses in the photos. And you knew I wasn't working today. I even asked you last night if you thought you could come home early to watch the—”

“Get off my back. Today was a big day for everyone in the world. Can we please just celebrate that? All you ever think about are your own feelings.” This was Brian's classic response if I complained too much about something he found trivial. It never failed to unhinge me.

“We are not fucking talking about Obama right now. Don't you fucking hide behind the first-black-president bullshit. He is half white! And if you think he's really going to change anything, you're just naïve.”

This wasn't exactly what I meant to say. I was excited about seeing a black family in the White House; I was excited to have a president who spoke in eloquent paragraphs. But I was cautious. What I meant was that power shifted continually back and forth between the two parties without society changing in any concrete way, that political battles were just a distraction from actual problems facing actual humans, so that people who really wanted to be a force for good became activists, not president. I had been awash in thoughts like this all day. I would have liked someone to discuss them with.

“You are unbelievably negative,” Brian said. “Finally something good happens in our country and you can't just let me be happy about it.”

“I am not negative! You just don't want to accept basic facts about reality.”

“I guess now you're going to tell me I could die at any time.” This had become a (minor, I'd thought) point of contention between us, how frequently I urged Brian to make decisions based on the fact that this could be the last day of his life. The words were theatrical, but I was genuinely encouraging him to move away from materialist evaluations of good and bad. Which may have been just a touch self-righteous. But I wasn't evaluating myself right then; I was expressing myself.

“You are going to die, Brian. We all are. Get used to it!” He was carrying a jar of salsa and the bag of chips toward our bedroom. “You can't spend your whole life ignoring anything that makes you uncomfortable.” He closed the door to the bedroom and pushed in the lock. “Like the fact that you're an incredibly selfish lover,” I shouted into the closed door.

As I was walking away, the door flew open. Brian grabbed my arm. “You are a crazy bitch, Elsie. I feel really fucking sorry for you.” He yanked down on my arm with each word. “You freak out when you don't have an orgasm. That's not normal. That's fucking crazy. You need to see a shrink.” He released my arm and marched to our front door. “Get the fuck out. I'm sick of your shit. Just leave me the fuck alone.” Stunned, I stepped into the hallway. Brian tossed my coat after me and slammed the door. A moment later, it reopened a crack. Keys flew at my feet.

I walked across the street to the snowy park and screamed. Once I was hoarse, freezing, and spent, I went home, feeling something like relief that Brian had lost it. It made the tension between us explicit. Now we would be able to really talk about it.

Brian was sleeping in the living room, his long legs draped over the end of our small couch. He would be so apologetic in the morning. Only when I got up the next day did I notice his two suitcases waiting by the front door.

He got ready for work quickly, without speaking to me. I was sitting on the couch, staring at the suitcases, asking him to please please talk to me. The skin around my eyes was soggy and purple. Finally he took a seat on the edge of the couch, careful not to touch me. “So last night I saw a side of myself that I never want to see again.” This was the first time I'd heard Brian frankly admit to an emotional struggle. I reached out to touch his face. He recoiled, hunching his shoulders. “Let me get this out. You make me feel crazy.” He was speaking to the floor. “I've always been a calm person. I don't lose my temper. I'm really even keel. Everybody knows that about me.”

“Honey, it's okay to—”

“And I'm not going to take a chance on that happening again. What happened last night. I cannot be with someone who makes me behave that way.”

I put a hand on his thigh. He stiffened. “Honey, please, it's okay to lose your temper once in a while—it shows you care—if we could just talk about what we each did wrong—”

“That kind of thinking is exactly why I cannot be with you anymore. It's like you think we live in a war zone. Like every fucking thing matters.” He closed his eyes and took a breath. “Stop. You're not going to make me angry. I'm not doing this anymore. I don't want every day to be possibly the last day of my life.” He looked up and spoke to our silhouettes, reflected in the shiny black surface of his flat-screen TV. “I just want my days to be normal days.” He wanted me to move out at the end of the month. He would pay for movers and a broker's fee. He would stay with a buddy until I had cleared out.

“I don't even know what a broker is,” I did not say out loud, making him laugh at my worldly incompetence, because I was crying too hard.

A psychologist would call abandonment my “trigger” feeling. I begged Brian not to leave. I promised to be good. I sobbed that I couldn't live without him. I acted every bit as pathetic and desperate as I felt. But then, acting the way I felt had never endeared me to Brian. He pulled his jacket out of my grip, said he was sorry but there was absolutely no way, none at all, he was decided. I stood openmouthed at the window after he left, watching him fit his suitcases into the back of a taxi.

I moved into a cheap basement apartment I heard about through a coworker; she technically had a room there, but spent all of her time at her boyfriend's. Buddhists say shock is a helpful state: It stops the mind. I bought used furniture from sidewalk sales, unpacked my books and notebooks, hung up my thrift-store dresses. But making the bed aggressively one morning, I tore a small hole in the bottom of my fitted sheet. The ability to act without thought wore off at that moment. The hole grew larger night by night. I would wake up in the dark with my feet caught in the hole. Sometimes I told myself that I made mistakes with Brian because I was not meant for stability. Other times I imagined our reunion—Brian at last effusive, me at last calm and content. In the predawn hours, various such lies wrestled each other at the edge of a cliff, until they all fell off, tangled in each other.