5

THINKING ABOUT MY husband kept making me heave; sweet, soft retches. I managed the bouts of nausea with lemon rind or by peeling the skin from my lips. It took us time, orphaned little souls that we were, to leave one other. And the decision took days, and the trees growing in my chest were losing their leaves, I pulled them off while saying something, but it was just gurgling mud. One night I stopped waiting with my nose glued to the glass, I didn’t take a Xanax, I didn’t check my phone, I just went to sleep and in my dream my eyes looked down the barrel of a revolver, and when it was about to shoot, I stood up and said I was able to sleep, this is over. But it wasn’t over, it had become a cowering body at rest. The decision would be delayed so much and made so gradually. We slowly went about pulling the plug, gradually pulling out the hunk of flesh so the blood would shoot out like pumpkin seeds, like whispers or firecrackers. The pain was easier that way. At first, he didn’t come home; later, I’d disappear. Sometimes he’d pick up a book and stay. Or mutual friends would come over, and we’d make a little exception. Or he’d stay the weekend to water the plants if I was away. Or anything. My husband hadn’t yet left, he was still my husband, and his clothes there, in the closet, his shirts, one next to the other, were the backs of a corpse. And even though the solitude sometimes drove me crazy, I entertained myself with the simplest activities. That was the secret. Back then, I didn’t have children. I don’t have any now, either. That isn’t totally true. But I had friends, and friendship frees, saves, lifts you up. Moreover, I wrote letters. I’ve named two men so far; with a third I maintained a regular romantic correspondence that threatened to disappear at any moment but didn’t. It grew increasingly intimate, denser, realer, an unusual correspondence at the time because it was material: paper, fist, and handwriting, none of these emails. Sometimes, only sometimes, a postcard or a book was delivered to my office. Of course, the whole matter of the marriage had ended long before, but I come back to it because it was one of those obsessions that nourished the trivial activities with which I kept myself on the edge of sanity. The marriage had gone up in smoke, even though my husband’s name was etched in my ID. It had ended not because the fights wouldn’t end, not because we had lovers or secret correspondences, not because we had silently discovered each and every one of each other’s lies, it would have had to survive with the damned betrayal like a stone in my pupil, growing hard within our bodies. It wasn’t because our pets had died, we’d survived the death of the dog and plants; not because we didn’t have anything in common, there were so many things in common that we no longer knew who was who.