"And you have to leave me for this?"
"I do. I have, inside. But I guess we can stay married if you want. I just need to go."
"Is there another man?" I had to ask.
She rolled her eyes at me. "There's no other man. That's the point. There's always been a man. You, the boys, my dad."
I knew that tone of voice. "Damn." She held my gaze. I shut my eyes, took a deep breath. "Okay." I had believed in my marriage, had built it from ideas and compromises, from culture and family, from time spent and opportunities abandoned. But what had I actually accrued? Fossilized roles. A catalog of habitual behaviors that transformed from endearing to quirky to annoying. TV replaced talk. Logistics substituted for love, familiarity for friendship, condescension for compassion. The will to create the marriage seeped away, an invisible pinhole leak in a bike tire, a bucket that never gets filled. Did I even still want to be married to her? I just assumed I did, like so many other assumptions I'd made in our pretty conventional life together. "You're sure." It wasn't a question.
"I've been living with it for five years. It is unfair, springing it on you like this, but you don't really want me anymore either, except in bed. Or you won't, pretty soon. But we'll be grandparents to the same children. I'll be your friend," she said, "after a while. Your loving ex. If you'll have me."
"That's charming," I said. "Friends with benefits?"
"Maybe. If it's okay with your new wife."
"Jesus fucking H. Christ. New wife? Got her all picked out for me?"
"Calm down, Stephen. You're an attractive man, you like having a wife. You'll find someone."
"Salve for your ego? You don't have to feel guilty if I'm with someone else?"
"I feel guilty for dragging it out, but get this through your head: It's not about you. I respect you enough to let you go. I hope you'll give me the same courtesy."
"Thirty years down the drain." My pride was no match for her practicality.
"Twenty-eight, but I hope you wouldn't think that. We have our kids. We had good times. A good run."
I felt sad and relieved and free and devastated, all at once. "Fuck, Sheila."
She smiled at me. "Okay. We've always been good at that. Now?"
My first instinct was to tell her to fuck off, but what the hell. It was always worth it when she did the offering. We got to the bedroom, got naked and it got very intense. She was hungry and abandoned and I was insistent and relentless and we both were pissed. All our pretenses were gone; it was the most honest sex we'd had in a very long time. We ended up the evening having a good cry and a long talk before sharing our final pillow.
The next morning she packed a couple of suitcases, went to her brother's and she was gone. The divorce was handled by courier and a few phone calls. She finished moving out when I was at work. She told our kids that she loved them, that they shouldn't expect to hear from her for a while, but they were welcome to call her if they wanted to. True to her word, she was easy with the settlement. She refused alimony. I sold the house, liquidated everything except my personal retirement fund and the classic 1972 MG I had spent a fortune keeping up, paid the various expenses, split the balance down the middle and that was that.
Fifty-four, divorced, alone. That wasn't the plan. The kids would mature, Sheila and I would walk the streets of Europe hand in hand, explore the forests of Thailand, swim in tropical oceans, fuck on tropical beaches. My college sweetheart, the mother of my children, a woman I would have been content to spend the rest of my life with. She's off finding herself and suddenly I am, too. Blissful arrogance, blind ignorance.
Just like my own father?
I was angry at her for keeping herself so secret from me, and at myself for not noticing what the fuck was going on. I spent too many vodka-sodden nights sitting in my chair, staring at the view, hand on my dick, remembering Sheila under me, grasping my arms, pulling at my back, legs wrapped high, breathing, sweating, a moan, a gasp,
her body is mine!
... One empty orgasm after another. How had I settled for so little? I couldn't imagine finding the will to try it again.
I went deep down a lot of ratholes. She hates me for nothing I did; she hates me because I did nothing. I want her to fail, to come crawling back, begging for my attention, burning with regret five or twelve or twenty years from now, lonely, distant from her grandchildren, so I could taunt her with the memory of the life she left behind. But what life? We never really chose it, like grown-ups should; we were babies. Marriage was an unconscious meme we bought into at the start. It had "delivered her into my possession," "I took her as my wife," and she was shackled there, our home a beautiful prison in which her salvation ultimately could be delivered only by my dispossession.
On top of all that, I had no place to put my dick! Castration anxiety's corollary: loss of the socket rather than the plug. I had allowed her to become the gatekeeper to my satisfaction, and then she changed the locks. I'm no longer a variable she has to account for, to compromise with, to feed or clothe or clean up after or get supported by. A role I didn't even know well enough to break out of, nothing I actually did. A crime of omission, a free benefit of the patriarchy, vulnerable to a woman who learned herself and then acted on her own accord.
When I could get over myself, I appreciated her courage. That helped. Made me competitive, at least. So, a new mantra: less abstraction, more honesty, less future, more present. Decisions embroiled in any internal subjectivity were better left unmade. I've said "I don't know" more in the past year than in the previous twenty-eight combined.
My friends were on me to start dating, but the mere thought of getting that close to someone again produced a deep physical anxiety in me. Whatever I had done to her, I didn't want to do it to someone else. Or have someone else do it to me. So, a year alone: peace and loneliness were matched companions, and the mourning I kept to myself. I went to work, ran, went to the gym, saw my kids, bumped into friends at the coffeeshop;
It's enough,
I kept telling myself.
Lower your expectations.
Yeah, right. I was living hurt, but my body's wisdom diluted it; you can survive, but not thrive, and not notice the difference--until you're touched by someone you love. I only saw people I trusted, and Ann and Gary were at the top of the list. We'd been the three musketeers in college, partying and studying together. By senior year, Gary and I started a software company, Ann and Gary became a couple and Ann and I lifelong running partners. Unless it was snowing or one of us was out of town, we ran. The first few months after Sheila left, other than feeling sorry for myself, running was the only thing I wanted to do, and I did a lot of it with her. After a couple of abortive attempts at advice, she mostly had obliged my silence with a minimum of reproving glances.
"You ready?" Ann was standing at the door to my office, her fifty-four-year-old body long and lean in her Vancouver summer outfit of low-cut running briefs and shimmel.
"I'm ready," I said to her. "Too many damn meetings this morning."
"Well, let's go do something else, then." I followed her down the hallway and out the door. I'd always appreciated her body; not my type, particularly (I preferred Sheila's softly rounded bustiness) but appealing in her confidence, posture, presentation, how relaxed she was in running clothes or business suits, in the fashionable dresses she chose when they went out, or the bikinis she still could rock. We ran down the street and into Stanley Park. It was a day for intervals, and after she destroyed me on our favorite thirty-meter hill we ran at an easy pace under the Lion's Gate Bridge and around the park, back toward the office. Today, though, the talk was less than desultory.
"So, Stephen, we're starting to get worried about you."
"Me? Why?"
"You've been divorced for a year."
"Thirteen months, ten days."
"Have you had any dates?"
"Old friends. My kids. You."
"We think you need a woman in your life."
"I have women in my life. You. Arlie." My secretary. "Carol." My daughter. "Rosario." Housekeeper. "Jeanne." Therapist. I ran out of things to say.
"You know what I mean. You've got be missing something."
"Not really."