Chapter Twenty-Nine Pride and Grammar
Twenty-Nine
Pride and Grammar
Emerson said all days are Judgment Day. We are faced with endless choices about how to be. Paul and I decided to be as civilized and kind as possible and to keep things as normal as we could for Nate, who fortunately was enough in his own world not to be paying too much attention to us.
When I went back on tour, Paul hung out again—and then a third time—with Sarah.
It seemed possible that she would become his girlfriend. I felt that I was in no place to argue. I partly wished for it, imagined that then things would become clearer. Paul dropped Nate at a study-abroad program in France and spent a few days there on his own. Noticing that he’d charged champagne to his room, I frowned at my banking app.
I’d taken advantage of my time alone to schedule freelance gigs and readings. As I drove from one city to another, I called Paul. I talked to him through the car’s speakers as he walked through the streets of Paris, stopping occasionally for a glass of wine or an espresso. He said he was trying to go out that night and was disappointed that the French woman he’d met at the bar was out of town.
“Have you been in touch with Sarah?” I asked.
“We’ve been texting some,” he said.
I listened. I asked questions. I stayed calm. I did not say anything to suggest that I was upset. I said I’d have to do the Polysecure work to find a way to handle the feelings that stirred up, that he was or soon would be sleeping with that woman. Well, sleeping with her again. He’d made space for me to have a relationship with David and I needed to make space for him to have an intimate friendship too.
After we hung up, I began lecturing myself: All human beings are polyamorous because we all love various people in different ways. We shouldn’t look at any of this as coming out of deficits: “I can’t get what I want here. I’ll get it there.” We should look at each person as a fellow human being who we…
My thoughts trailed off and were replaced by a blazing rage. I drove for a few more miles and then I screamed in the car, “What the fuck am I doing?”
Why was I trying so hard to be okay with something I hated? Why was I working to make the money, even affording Paul a European jaunt? Why was I keeping a man on the side who made me more myself and with whom I’d had a mystical experience ?
I thought of a line from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead : “And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.”
As I drove on through the late-afternoon rain and Paul fell asleep thousands of miles away having no idea how I felt, I ended our marriage in my heart.
A few days later, I flew to Europe to join Paul and Nate for a long-before-planned trip to Germany to see a religious production put on by the town of Oberammergau. When the Bavarian town survived the bubonic plague in 1633, they promised God that every ten years forevermore they would do a Passion Play telling the story of Jesus. On the Ash Wednesday before they do the play, the town issues “the Hair and Beard Decree,” meaning that no one in the show can cut their hair until after the show wraps.
Having been raised without religion and regretting it, I’d given Nate a baseline faith. He was free to reject it all, but at least he had something to push against. One of his godmothers had given him a graphic-novel version of the Bible, and he’d read it several times. In Oberammergau, we watched the five-hour show (with dinner break). There were dozens of people in the cast, from babies to old people, with a choir of about sixty. There were even camels and horses. The hammering of the nails into the actors’ hands was so realistic I flinched. When Judas hanged himself, Nate leaned over and whispered, “That wasn’t in The Action Bible .”
The trip proved that Paul and I could still travel together, still be parents together, even though our marriage was over. We slept in the same room, but as at home, we did not touch. One night when Nate was out picking up a near-the-Berlin-Wall rock for his friend as a joke present Paul and I had a drink together. We were getting along well. The wine and the foreign city and the night got to me. I was feeling tender.
I didn’t know what this new sense of well-being in his presence meant. Would we be closer now? This was the father of my child, and I’d felt like there was no intimacy left to us, but now I wasn’t sure. It was the first time I’d felt anything like that about him in a long time. Had I been reckless in wanting to leave the marriage?
He said we should talk about what things were going to be like when we got back home.
“Yes, you go first,” I said. I wondered if he was feeling the same way I was, if he would take my hand and look into my eyes, tell me that whatever I wanted I could have, that he was going to fight for me, wait for me, as long as it took. I wasn’t sure that it would make a difference to the outcome. I had a feeling I would still make the choice to leave. But perhaps there would be a sweet denouement.
He took a sip of his drink. Then he said, “We keep getting closer on this whole me-and-other-people thing and not pulling the trigger. I’d like you to acknowledge that I’ll be dating.”
He saw my face fall.
“Why?” he said. “What were you going to say?”
Surely I didn’t really think that I’d be able to find a third path between divorce and never speaking to David again (“If I’m attracted to my neighbor we move”)? When I fell in love with someone else, what did we think was going to happen? Or was this the third path, leaving slowly?
What was clear was that Paul and I had thought we were somehow supremely enlightened. One of our downfalls was pride. La Rochefoucauld wrote: “There are two kinds of faithfulness in love: one is based on forever finding new things to love in the loved one; the other is based on our pride in being faithful.” I’d taken real pride in having stayed married like my mother and grandmother. I felt there was nobility in sticking it out. But was that enough to build a life on—bragging rights?
Friends asked why we split up, and I didn’t know what to say. Was it his cheating? Was it my falling in love? Was it the money problems? Was it a divergence in values? Was it the space between foster parenthood and Sandals Jamaica? Was it that all of this came to the fore in the same year? Why wasn’t I able to name a single cause of death?
Maybe because he pushed me for a more open marriage, and the second I started to take the idea seriously I fell in love with someone else who made me feel like some more essential, truer version of myself that I was then unwilling to abandon. If that’s the story, was it the pusher or the faller who deserves the blame?
Perhaps in our relationship it was Paul’s role to be the one pushing for expansion, my job to contract. Once I started expanding too, the system stopped functioning. Maybe if he’d contracted at that point, then we’d have survived. Maybe I should have done that myself. No one will ever know. There are no control studies when it comes to a marriage.
A friend in graduate school once told me about her grammar dissertation. She said one approach to grammar is proscriptive: “Thou shalt not split an infinitive.” The other is descriptive, explaining what people do rather than what they should do—so, the way we all use “hopefully” to mean we hope it will work out when the word started out meaning something done with hope.
“Everyone wants grammar to be complete, consistent, and determinative,” she said. “That’s not possible. There’s a craving for determinism, but there’s no such thing. The world is indeterminate and uncertain. Looking into the past we can construct a narrative to explain how we got from one place to the other. But if it was plausible, why wasn’t it predictable?”
Plenty of marriages survive worse than what we did to ours. Why didn’t ours survive when others did? A lack of willpower? Too many stresses on it in too short a time? Or had it just run its course? I wondered if we could see our marriage not as cut short but rather completed, a lifelong friendship or kinship entering a new phase. Do we say that because a person dies their life was unsuccessful? All things end one way or another. There are ways for both their duration and their ending to be graceful or miserable. I’d been happy in my marriage for a long time. But we had diverged, and I was not happy in it anymore.
In couples therapy Paul read me a letter he’d written acknowledging his mistakes and saying that he thought we should try again. He pointed out that it would be better for Nate if we stayed together. Images from Afterschool Special s about children’s lives ruined by their parents’ separating flashed before my eyes.
On a call with Veronica I asked her if she thought I was making a mistake getting a divorce. “Children, even fully grown ones, are conservative,” she said. “He would surely want his parents together. But he’s going to be out of the house soon. At some point you need to let this choice be about the rest of your life and not about what your child—who doesn’t really know you as people out in the world, only as his parents—at this precise moment thinks is best.”
I loved my son so much though. I didn’t want him to be sad for a second. And now here I was about to make him sad. Even if he’d understand one day. Even if I’d have wanted my own mother to be true to herself if I’d been in his position.
“Part of being an adult is knowing how to take a loss,” Veronica said. “And this is going to sound mean, but aside from Nate’s feelings, which of course are not nothing, there’s not so much to lose. Whatever man you wind up with or don’t, you’re going to have a love-filled life. And you have a number of compelling reasons to break up. You’re tired of the money problems and the open marriage pressure, and you learned that he was unfaithful and lied about it. By pushing you to be with other men he was guilty of a failure of imagination. He should have known you better. You’re lionhearted. And now it’s too late to do anything about it: you’re madly in love with someone else.
“And whoever’s fault it is, the falling in love is done now. You can’t undo it. When you start out with a bunch of baking ingredients, you can wind up with a loaf of bread or croissants or a cake. But at some point in the process, that’s not true anymore. It is what it’s going to be. Once you’re in that deep, there’s no turning it into another kind of relationship. You can’t un-bake a birthday cake. And honestly, why would you want to? You’d need a compelling reason to stay. You can still love Paul but not want him anymore.”
She summarized her advice this way: “What is love asking your soul to do? Do that. Then imagine the most beautiful future you can. Point yourself in that direction. And go .”
That night I went to a party thrown by a friend in the country. Her long-divorced parents were there, both of them with their new partners, the father cooking food for everyone, the mother telling stories, kids running around with dogs, old and new friends talking and laughing, everyone eating outside together as the sun set and the fireflies came out. I thought of the song “Crowded Table,” and decided that might be a good goal.
If I was going to leave my marriage I wanted it to be because the marriage was over in and of itself and not because I’d found someone else I preferred. And so I’d never told David how seriously I was considering getting a divorce until I was sure. Then one day on the phone I did.
“I want you,” I said.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I want to sleep with you every night. I want to comfort you when you’re sad. If I win an award I want you to be my date to the ceremony. I want us to go to our parents’ funerals together. I want to catch your colds. Do you want that?”
“Pay the fuck attention!” he said. “Of course I do.”