That may explain why, in the summer of 1999 and in the death throes of my marriage, I decided to read a book about other people’s bad marriages. I brought it along as ballast when my husband and I traveled to Texas to witness two of my perfectly happy friends getting perfectly married. The book was Group by Paul Solotaroff, a field guide to the life-lived-less-than-well. Solotaroff had done a kind of gonzo reporting in the psychotherapy world, sitting in on a year of group therapy with the understanding that he would write about it at the end. The result was a riveting account of troubled sex lives, entrenched personal foibles, and pending divorces. It was a book about therapy to be read as therapy.
Shortly after we returned from Texas, three weeks shy of our first anniversary and two days after our wedding pictures finally arrived from the photographer, my husband and I got divorced. I should say we decided to get divorced; in New York at that time, you had to wait a year to finalize the state’s version of a “no-fault” divorce on the charmless grounds of “abandonment.” The morning before Labor Day weekend, my husband initiated what I could not, stuck as I was in the story line of ever after, no matter how unhappily. Within weeks, we’d cut off all communication and put an ocean between us.
Divorce is hard enough when you know that you’re done with a marriage; when you still feel like you’re in the middle of one, it is gut splitting. It was as if my entire existence had rested on a magic carpet rather than a concrete foundation, and it was ripped out from under me. As a married person, I had banked on the idea, however illusory, that I knew the beginning, middle, and end of my—of our—story. If I wasn’t married, then I wasn’t part of the narrative that had gripped me so fully and wholeheartedly from the moment we’d gotten engaged. It knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t breathe.
When I was nine and packing a suitcase with one of my brothers on the second floor of an A-frame rental in the Catskills, the suitcase shifted, sending me careening backward over a balcony, twelve feet down to the hardwood floor below. I still have a mental image of my feet overhead, hair obstructing my view, and then a whump as I landed and reverberated back up like a ball momentarily drawn by the suction of a vacuum cleaner, the air forced out of my lungs, before I slumped back to the ground and went into shock.
“T-t-tt-t-t-t-t-tt-t-t-t-tt-t,” I jabbered mechanically for a long minute (this part I don’t remember) while my brothers giggled nervously. As soon as I regained consciousness, everyone was herded into the car home. I was given the front seat for the first time, rather than the Way Back, where I’d usually hang my head in misery under a cloud of stale Salem smoke and car exhaust. But I couldn’t even appreciate this first-class status; I leaned my stinging head against the window, consumed with shame. I had fallen like an idiot in front of everyone, made a ridiculous noise, and now we had to leave early, ruining the weekend for everybody. A bowl rested in my lap in case I threw up, an urge I suppressed with all my might, determined not to make things worse.
This was exactly how I felt now. Once again, I had failed spectacularly for all to see. I’d summoned my family members, all my friends—the Mathieus had flown in from France, for goodness sake—everyone I knew and loved and wanted to think well of me to my wedding barely a year earlier, and now I’d ruined it, wasting everyone’s time and money, and losing their respect in the process. Everyone had been let down.
I had always known that one day I was going to get in trouble and now I had; the only benefit I could think of—and I didn’t think of it until later, when I’d recovered enough to start thinking again—was that I would never let it happen again. Not that I wouldn’t get in trouble again; I knew I would. But I would never let myself be caught so off guard. The mistake had been thinking I was somehow above fucking up royally, that I was safe. But I had been just as vulnerable and oblivious as anyone else, and reading all the books in the world couldn’t have saved me.
And I was pretty sure nobody would let me forget it. It’s terrible to feel cast out of the smug married club, the group that could show up at the ten-year college reunion with all their boxes ticked off, cheerful toddlers scampering underfoot. Now I would be a blight, a cautionary tale. There might not be any other divorcées there. Everything that married people knew—whom they lived with, what their plans were next weekend and next year, what they wanted out of life—I suddenly didn’t know anymore. The baby names we’d picked out, for naught. My two former cats, living with a stranger. Our plans to retire in Bali. The stories we’d share with our grandchildren. My entire sense of the long-term was gone.
The day-to-day was no easier. The first instinct was to call my ex-husband for comfort, to tell him how hard it was to get from morning to night and then through those long nighttime hours. But on whom do you unload your pain when the person you unload it on is no longer there and, worse, is the person who inflicted it? Talking to other people wasn’t much easier. “I had no idea!” was the common response. Or: “You never know what goes on in a marriage.” Even when it’s your own.
Whatever other people said to me, no matter their intention, felt less a consolation and more like judgment. Not only was my ex being judged, but the wisdom of the marriage itself, the quality of the person going into it and staying there, the implications, me. If he was so awful, why did I marry him? If there were such problems, how could I not have known? What the hell was wrong with me? The author of a bad story, one with a no-good, fool heroine and an ugly ending.
And it was hard to get out. The marriage didn’t last long, but I hadn’t known that would be the case when it began. Everything had been planned with an eye to forever. In the early, heady days of romance, I’d given my husband unprecedented access to Bob. He’d loved my Book of Books so much he’d asked if it could be his as well. I’d let him fill his own completed books into Bob’s pages, starting from the back and working forward, toward mine, becoming part of my diary and as much a part of me as anyone ever had. At some point, perhaps in our dotage, we imagined our two book lists would meet at Bob’s center.
When we split up, I ripped out those pages and gave them back. (He asked.) I’d been so careful, so self-protective, for so long. I should never have let someone else write in my Book of Books. I swore never to break Bob again. For now, I put him aside, the damaged record too painful to revisit.
Because the marriage ended inconveniently on a three-day weekend, a shift in plans was required; the scheduled visit to the in-laws clearly no longer in the cards. Somehow, my weepy body was relocated upstate to my father’s house in Woodstock. Was it the second night after my husband put an end to things? The third? There was one night in Brooklyn, wailing in despair, inconsolable; the rest was a blur.