Chapter Twenty-Eight Running Slowly
Twenty-Eight
Running Slowly
I missed David so much that I began identifying with historical figures like Thecla, the first-century Turkish saint. After refusing to marry, she was stripped naked in the square and thrown onto a pyre to teach other girls not to second-guess their destinies. But before she was burned alive a storm came to put out the flames. I just wasn’t quite sure what in my life was the fire and what was the rain.
I started paying close attention to people I met who’d radically changed their lives. Based on little indicators like how much they drank or how easily they smiled I tried to judge how happy they were. At a party at the home of someone who had fallen in love and left his wife, I spotted one of his children eating tacos at the kitchen island. I guess it must have been hell for a while but then eventually there was his new wife talking about wallpaper and him getting ice for everyone’s drinks.
I began to have an almost erotic fantasy of being settled enough that David and I could get into bed together at the end of a long day, watch an episode of Law that if he was the cause of us breaking up he worried I’d resent him. Other times he’d float less stoic options: “We could run off together slowly ?”
Whatever we had gotten into, it certainly had not been fast. This was not the final scene in The Graduate where they look at each other in shock at the back of the bus.
I still refused to believe that’s what was happening. And yet when you give birth you can’t put the baby back inside you. David and I had love between us; there was no returning it to wherever it came from. The philosopher Ortega y Gasset said, “In loving we abandon the tranquility and permanence within ourselves, and virtually migrate toward the object.” He said there’s a remarkable similarity between mysticism and love—both he called forms of enchantment.
Still, I’d heard so many sad stories about divorce and its aftermath. My eleventh-grade English teacher was beautiful, with long red hair. She’d dressed up as Hester Prynne when talking about The Scarlet Letter and as Athena for teaching Greek myths. She talked to her women’s literature students like we were her peers, which in retrospect was inappropriate but felt like respect at the time. She mentioned that when her husband left her, she thought people were whispering about her: “Maybe she wasn’t good in bed.”
Another time during a conversation about body image she pointed to her clingy maroon turtleneck dress and said, “You know what? I looked at myself in the mirror earlier and I said, ‘Ms. Davis, that dress is so snug everyone can see the outline of your nipples!’ Then I thought, Why should I be ashamed? Women have nipples! ”
A few years after I graduated I came across an article about her. Since I’d lost track, she’d moved to California and started teaching there. One day she’d left her school keys behind with a farewell note on her classroom’s blackboard, went to a body of water, and drowned herself, like Virginia Woolf. According to a news article I’d found, she’d left behind a teenage son.
There is an online community of women called What Would Virginia Woolf Do? It provides valuable information about hormones and navigating workplaces, but every time I see that name I think, We know what she’d do. She’d fill her pockets with rocks and walk into the river Ouse.
By her words and her example, my mother had instilled in me the virtue of holding on, of sticking it out, of remaining steadfast. Other people had tried to tell me that a divorce isn’t necessarily a failed marriage, that successful marriages can successfully conclude. Thinking of my mother and my grandmother, I argued with such people. By definition, a marriage—a promise to stay joined until death—is a failure if it ceases before you die. Which aspect of “?’til death do us part” did these people not understand?
Then one day my mother came over to pick up something, and I asked if I could talk to her. I told her how bad things were, and how I was in love with neither Helen nor Tom Hanks but a man named David, and I asked her what I should do. I said I’d taken to heart her advice that every time you leave one relationship and go into another you don’t have fewer problems—just different ones, and so I’d done my best to live by her mantra, “The way you stay married is you don’t get divorced.” But now I was struggling.
I waited for her to tell me I should stay and tough it out. She paused before speaking and then she said, “What I should have said, was ‘You don’t get divorced—until you have to.’?”
“What?” I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. With a wave of her hand she’d just overturned one of the main edicts by which I’d lived.
“When I was the age you are now and having a hard time in my marriage, I wasn’t in love with someone else. I don’t know if that would have changed things. It might have. I’m happy to see you asking for more out of your life. You might live many more years. You deserve more than you’ve been letting yourself have.”
I thought about my mother’s desire for me to have more. She didn’t have regrets, and said she’d had a wonderful life. But she also thought I was right to question staying.
I showed her a photo of David and me together.
“Oh! I get it,” she said, zooming in on him.
As though she’d seen something in the photo, as with one of those Magic Eye pictures where the hidden image suddenly reveals itself, she said, while looking at my phone, “He loves you so much.”
I burst into tears.
You can’t guarantee that good things will happen to you, but you can make it so that if they do people won’t say you don’t deserve them. My mother’s and grandmother’s lives seemed more relevant to the discussion of what to do now than any academic questions about sexual ethics. I wanted to see what it could be like now to let love and creativity be more of a priority than obligation or responsibility.
The next time I saw David we again spent most of the day in bed. These out-of-time hours with him felt like, as author Akhil Sharma said of the days he spent falling in love with his wife, a picnic without ants.
One night, I began drowsing with my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, when I thought I heard his heart stopping. In that moment of imagined death, scenes from a shared life flashed before my eyes, only it was a life we hadn’t lived yet. We’d fallen asleep and woken up together for thousands of nights. We’d fought and made up. We’d walked through cities all over the world in every kind of weather. We’d hosted dinners with our friends. We were grandparents together. And now it was over. He was gone! Tears started running down my face.
“Why are you crying?” he said, suddenly wide awake. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s dumb. I imagined you dead and I was sad. Don’t die first. I couldn’t take it.”
“Me either,” he said. “We should try to die at the same time.”
“Or let’s not die at all?”