opened the front door and saw her guest out.
F or three miserable months during the summer that culminated in our separation, Al lived in the house and slept on an inflatable mattress in the basement, his own solution to the impossibility of my getting any sleep if we remained in the same bed. I suppose he had been managing to fall asleep beside the woman he was betraying for some months—he was evasive when I asked when his affair had begun—but in the first few nights after his announcement my anger kept me tossing about, seething in silence or starting up bitter denunciations until he quickly removed himself to the living room couch. The basement, a dank, unrenovated space filled with stray pieces of hardware and boxes of musty books, was not a comfortable alternative, but the girls seldom ventured down there so Al could go to bed after they were asleep without alerting them to the situation.
In the morning he would rush off to the campus, although he wasn’t teaching any summer courses, whileI took the girls to the various day camps for which I had signed them up back in the winter, a lifetime ago. I would make their sandwiches and smear on their sunscreen and drop them off with cheerful hugs—and the minute I pulled the car back into the driveway, I would burst into tears. I couldn’t work; my own emotions trumped those of my latest characters; so I would fill the days with long, sad walks or shopping trips for things I didn’t need. I had decided these were much safer occupations than staying in the house after I had spent one morning hunting through Al’s desk drawers and unsuccessfully guessing possible passwords for his university account because I had discovered you couldn’t instantly call up his office email on his home computer. The thought of what I might have found in his email had I read it frightened me, leaving me with a nasty churning in my stomach, and I was mainly relieved I hadn’t managed to get into it.
Whenever I found myself alone with Al, I alternated between ostentatious silence marked by heavy footfalls or the loud manhandling of objects and noisy attempts to draw him into a discussion of our relationship, which he avoided as best he could and which usually ended with me in frustrated tears. I would demand to know if the affair was still continuing, if he did not love me, if we should not try marriage counselling, questions he mainly answered with sorrowful silence since he knew I wasn’t going to like the answers he might give. Marching down to the basement to confront him at night, I would denounce hisbetrayal, or begging him to stay behind on his way out the door in the morning, I would demand we discuss our marriage. I would quote to him statistics about the failure rate of relationships between older men and younger women, I would tell him his faults and admit to mine, I would insist we work things out. I could not possibly, for my own sake as much as the girls’, just show him the door.
I would persist with talk in the face of his silence, clawing away at the subject, growing more and more desperate as I sensed I was losing the argument, that neither my angry passion nor my reasoned pleading was carrying the day. He would give me a hearing, as though that were his duty, but his answers were brief and unrevealing, little more than “I don’t know” or a shrug of the shoulders. I had this panicky feeling of being outflanked or arriving too late, like one of those dreams when you run into a station with a half-packed suitcase only to see the train pulling away from the platform. I would try to draw him back into old arguments because at least if we were arguing, he was still here. But he would close down my approaches by saying, “It’s too late” or “I think you just have to accept we aren’t compatible.”
“Compatible. What does that even mean? Nobody is compatible. Every person is different from everybody else.”
“Well, some people seem to get on better than we
F or three miserable months during the summer that culminated in our separation, Al lived in the house and slept on an inflatable mattress in the basement, his own solution to the impossibility of my getting any sleep if we remained in the same bed. I suppose he had been managing to fall asleep beside the woman he was betraying for some months—he was evasive when I asked when his affair had begun—but in the first few nights after his announcement my anger kept me tossing about, seething in silence or starting up bitter denunciations until he quickly removed himself to the living room couch. The basement, a dank, unrenovated space filled with stray pieces of hardware and boxes of musty books, was not a comfortable alternative, but the girls seldom ventured down there so Al could go to bed after they were asleep without alerting them to the situation.
In the morning he would rush off to the campus, although he wasn’t teaching any summer courses, whileI took the girls to the various day camps for which I had signed them up back in the winter, a lifetime ago. I would make their sandwiches and smear on their sunscreen and drop them off with cheerful hugs—and the minute I pulled the car back into the driveway, I would burst into tears. I couldn’t work; my own emotions trumped those of my latest characters; so I would fill the days with long, sad walks or shopping trips for things I didn’t need. I had decided these were much safer occupations than staying in the house after I had spent one morning hunting through Al’s desk drawers and unsuccessfully guessing possible passwords for his university account because I had discovered you couldn’t instantly call up his office email on his home computer. The thought of what I might have found in his email had I read it frightened me, leaving me with a nasty churning in my stomach, and I was mainly relieved I hadn’t managed to get into it.
Whenever I found myself alone with Al, I alternated between ostentatious silence marked by heavy footfalls or the loud manhandling of objects and noisy attempts to draw him into a discussion of our relationship, which he avoided as best he could and which usually ended with me in frustrated tears. I would demand to know if the affair was still continuing, if he did not love me, if we should not try marriage counselling, questions he mainly answered with sorrowful silence since he knew I wasn’t going to like the answers he might give. Marching down to the basement to confront him at night, I would denounce hisbetrayal, or begging him to stay behind on his way out the door in the morning, I would demand we discuss our marriage. I would quote to him statistics about the failure rate of relationships between older men and younger women, I would tell him his faults and admit to mine, I would insist we work things out. I could not possibly, for my own sake as much as the girls’, just show him the door.
I would persist with talk in the face of his silence, clawing away at the subject, growing more and more desperate as I sensed I was losing the argument, that neither my angry passion nor my reasoned pleading was carrying the day. He would give me a hearing, as though that were his duty, but his answers were brief and unrevealing, little more than “I don’t know” or a shrug of the shoulders. I had this panicky feeling of being outflanked or arriving too late, like one of those dreams when you run into a station with a half-packed suitcase only to see the train pulling away from the platform. I would try to draw him back into old arguments because at least if we were arguing, he was still here. But he would close down my approaches by saying, “It’s too late” or “I think you just have to accept we aren’t compatible.”
“Compatible. What does that even mean? Nobody is compatible. Every person is different from everybody else.”
“Well, some people seem to get on better than we
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