Crush

Chapter Thirty-One Look to the Weasel

Thirty-One

Look to the Weasel

When I went to pick up uncontested divorce paperwork at the county clerk’s office, I wandered the courthouse looking for the room number I’d written on a sticky note. I was lucky to find the place just a few minutes before they took an hour-long lunch break. The somber, bespectacled civil servant in a navy sweater over a tie and button-down handed me the documents. Behind him an unseen woman sang along with Diana Ross on the radio. The “Contested Matrimonials” clerk sat by the window like a child in time out.

“Okay, so this page is the form you’ll need to get to the defendant,” my clerk said. “Are you in touch?”

“Perhaps more than is strictly necessary,” I said, and he laughed.

As I went off to fill out the documents, I felt like I’d been let into a secret club, one with mechanical stampers and drugstore notaries who for two dollars will sign their name and affix a seal on your separation agreement.

The next day, after getting the pages notarized, I was about to go through the court’s metal detector to drop them off when I remembered: “The postcard!” I said. “I forgot the postcard!” You were supposed to include a stamped postcard so the court could let you know when you were officially divorced.

I walked back out of the court and down the block to a shop and paid $1.50 for a postcard. Then I looked up the closest post office to buy a stamp. It was the Federal Plaza building. I had to go through a big lobby with an “FBI Heroes” scrolling display and signs about immigration and naturalization services. At the post office a young blond guy was complaining to the postal lady about his boss. He needed plain stamps for a mailing. He was going to have to send a photo of the stamps to his boss before buying them.

“They’re flags,” she said. “It’s the most basic stamp there is.”

“You don’t know my boss,” he said. “One time I got chewed out for getting Yogi Berra stamps.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe he was a Red Sox fan! If a stamp was a team that wasn’t mine I’d throw it back in your face! What about a classic stamp, though? Peanuts ?”

The young man shook his head sadly.

When it was my turn, I asked for Lunar New Year stamps, but they were out. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll take anything but the ‘Love’ ones.” The ‘Love’ stamp showed a simpering cat holding a giant heart.

“You don’t like cats?” she said. “I don’t love cats either.”

“No, I like cats. I’d just prefer something less sappy. This is going on a divorce postcard.”

She nodded, riffled through her cache, and handed me a sheet of “Mighty Mississippi” stamps.

“Exactly right,” I said, and gave her seven dollars.

Back at the courthouse, I gave the clerk my forms. He looked them over and stamped them in big block letters: UNCONTESTED.

“Where’d you get this postcard?” he said.

“Down the street.”

“You know what this is?”

“The Polo Grounds.”

“I figured you’d be too young to know that.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty old.”

Then I took the papers to a room on the first floor where I found myself alone with two solemn, impeccably dressed women behind the counter. A quiet room. It looked a lot like my elementary school’s main office with big wire baskets and paper labels, light streaming through the windows. One of the women was watching a political speech from a decade earlier as if it were a breaking news report, but she looked up to say, in a tone of voice that was neither cheerful nor ominous, “Good luck.”

Moving was expensive, but start to finish the divorce itself cost just $325, plus the cost of the postcard. Paul and I were still cordial. And yet, I struggled to metabolize the present; there was no way to step back and consider either the past or the future. When Veronica’s younger daughter played Roses and Thorns, the how-was-your-day game Paul and I used to play with Nate each night at dinner, she picked things that had happened nanoseconds before. Veronica would say, “What about earlier today? At school? Or at softball?” And still she would say, “Nope. My rose was being served these mashed potatoes.”

Veronica said, “That’s what it’s like when you make decisions when you’re in a heightened state of emotion. You only see that instant, not the whole picture. Try to take in each new piece of information you receive now. See if it’s useful in helping you determine how you want to spend your afternoon or the rest of your life.”

While Paul and I were friendly, it was still odd when Nate and I went over to Paul’s place, which used to be our place. I saw the plants I’d planted in the pots, the sisal twine I’d wound around the pipes to keep the baby from burning himself when he started crawling, the dishes I’d bought at Ikea. When Paul and his girlfriend hosted gatherings together there, she served food out of pots we’d received as wedding presents with serving spoons I’d used for toddler Nate’s mac and cheese. It was like being shown around by a Christmas Carol ghost, being made aware of what changed and what didn’t without me around, and of all the ways that I was no longer the same person I’d been when I lived there.

I left one of their parties early to go home and watch the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice . I’d remembered very little of it from when I saw it in the 1990s except Colin Firth in the wet undershirt. But this time around, watching it alone in bed, I was struck by the moment when Elizabeth Bennett finds Darcy completely changed and says, “I can’t imagine what’s caused him to become so altered.” Her aunt says, “Can’t you?”

There is a kind of trauma high, a pink cloud that follows something very terrible or very wonderful, and I was in it. I kept walking in the wrong direction, and I kept falling down. My blood seemed to want to escape my body. Blood seeping out from the finger I cut slicing oranges and crusting on my knee where I’d nicked it on a table corner in the dark. For so long I’d enjoyed thinking of myself as a responsible person, an excellent citizen. And now I could no longer check “married” on official forms; my credit score was down a hundred points; my kid was forever a child of divorce; I was covered in blood; and my phone screen had a thousand cracks.

For the first time in my life, a life spent driving just three miles over the speed limit, I was pulled over by the police.

“Do you know why I stopped you?” the cop asked as I handed him my license and registration.

“No, but I’m sorry, whatever it is,” I said.

“You have a taillight out.”

“Oh, I didn’t know. I’ll get it fixed.”

“It’s okay. No reason to cry about it.”

“Am I crying?” I reached up to my face and found that my cheeks were wet. “Sorry, it’s a weird time.”

He handed me a fix-it ticket. “Get that light replaced and you’re all set. Maybe sit for a minute and calm down before you pull back out. Drive safe.”

“Thank you, officer,” I said.

“I got a ticket,” I said the next time I spoke to Veronica. “I keep falling down. I’m a mess.”

“No, you’re just more whole now,” Veronica said. “Take some time off if you can. Realize that even if you’re not working all the time you deserve to live. And go see David again already.”

He and I met up in Florida. One morning we drove to the ocean at dawn. He read to me while we waded in the water and smiled at the dogwalkers. On our way back to the car I tripped in the empty parking lot. As I was falling, I saw his face turn to me, panicked. He spiked the water bottle he was carrying and reached out. He pulled me back up and dusted me off and looked me over and asked a thousand times if I was okay.

As we kept walking, I assured him that yes, I was fine. And that he’d been very sweet. I told him that I’d fallen on a sidewalk next to Paul when we were fighting. He’d been afraid I was going to yell at him for tripping me—and so he’d yelled at me before he checked to see if I was hurt. The spiked water bottle was healing.

“Well, it would have been more reparative if I’d kept you from falling down in the first place,” David said.

But how could I ever regret how anything had gone, even the less than perfect parts, when all of it had brought me to this place—my skinned knee stinging but David leaning over from the driver’s seat, his hair salty and damp from the ocean, his hand gently pulling the strap of my bathing suit off my shoulder?

In The Angel That Troubled the Waters , Thornton Wilder wrote: “Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.”

I made new friends. At a party for a young writer whose book I’d blurbed I fell into conversation with two men. I asked how they knew each other. One was an old friend of the host. The other was his boyfriend. They’d met a few months earlier online. When the boyfriend left to mingle, I said, “You two seem very in love.”

“We are,” the man said and sighed. “And I’m a little old to be falling this in love for the first time. Being in love is the best thing that’s ever happened to me and the hardest. I’ve come to realize that so many things I thought were important just aren’t. I’ve had to rethink everything I thought I knew.”

“They don’t tell you how being in love is hardest when you really care , ” I said. “Well, I guess they did in Moonstruck .”

“Do you love him, Loretta?” my new best friend said, quoting Olympia Dukakis.

“Aw, ma, I love him awful,” I said, quoting Cher.

Together, both of us quoted Olympia Dukakis: “Oh, that’s too bad.”

“Remember how they go to the opera?” he said. “When I dreamed of having a partner, I imagined us going to plays and the ballet. For the rest of our lives we’d be doddering around theaters, holding hands. But on our first date, I took him to a play. In retrospect, it wasn’t the best introduction for him, but I love Beckett. Through all of Endgame , he sighed loudly. So loudly that people were turning around. I’ve asked him since if he wanted to go to things and he’s said no.”

“I know we just met,” I said, “but I’ll go to the theater with you.”

“I might take you up on that,” he said.

David and I resumed our perpetual book club. We read Annie Dillard together, and we both circled what she said about weasels: “The thing is to stalk your calling…. I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”

Since David and I had started talking, I’d had more new experiences than at any time since babyhood, when I was learning to walk and talk and eat solid food. Loving him had been my liberation. Everything had blown up and everything seemed deliriously possible.