SWEET SORROW
SWEET SORROW
One Week Before She Disappeared
ABBY
“Sometimes I just want to disappear. I know I have a lot to be grateful for but I don’t like my life. I want something else. Something different. Something more . And if I don’t do something about it soon, it will be too late. I woke up one day and thought, Is this it? Is this really all I am going to amount to? All I am going to achieve? And I just can’t get those thoughts out of my head. Maybe everyone feels like this. Maybe everyone reaches an age when they can’t help thinking that they should have done more, lived more, been more than who they are. I’m not who I wanted to be.”
The woman in black doesn’t say anything, just listens.
Our time is almost up.
“And part of the problem is that I don’t even know who me is anymore. I used to be so independent. I had ambitions and a life of my own, but it feels as though I’ve been fading since I met my husband. And falling. And I can no longer remember whether I jumped or was pushed. I feel as though I haven’t been in charge of myself or my thoughts or my feelings for years. His thoughts about the world are now my thoughts, as though they were contagious.”
I’m being more honest than I have ever been with anyone and I worry that I’m making a mistake. The woman’s face is expressionless. It’s impossible to tell what she is thinking.
“If you’re going to tell me that I have a lot to be grateful for, a lot to be happy about, there’s no need. I know that already,” I say, hearing the defensive tone in my voice. “And while I am grateful for all the good things in my life, I’m not happy. And I have to do something to change that. Even if it means leaving my husband. Our lives are so tangled up in each other and that isn’t an easy thing to unpick. I don’t want to hurt him, but I need to fix me. The only way I can have a new life is to leave the old one behind.”
“Do you still love him?” the woman in black asks, finally speaking.
“Yes.”
“Do you think he still loves you?”
I think about that question before answering.
“He loves who I used to be. I don’t think he’s noticed that I’m not that person anymore.”
We were at a friend’s birthday party when the cracks in our relationship became a little too wide to ignore. One of my friends, not his. My husband has never liked parties, he prefers spending time with his characters and the dog. He complained the entire car journey, all the way to London, but when we arrived he turned on the charm. He drank and he danced and he became the person they all thought he was, the man I had fallen for when we first met. The author. The public persona he presented to the rest of the world and the person I knew had very little in common by then.
Seeing him like that—confident, fun, the life and soul of the party—made me feel strange. I worried that perhaps it was me making him miserable at home. He was often moody when it was just the two of us, especially if one of his precious books wasn’t going well. I felt jealous of the women he was talking to and smiling at. I didn’t like the way they looked at him, or how they laughed at his jokes, even the ones that weren’t funny. One of them even asked him to sign their copy of his latest novel and he was like a pig in mud.
“Your other half is on good form, isn’t he,” said the friend who was hosting the party. It was a statement, not a question. We’d been friends since school and had always been close—she even named her daughter after me—but our lives had taken us in different directions. She had a child; I had a career. I was very fond of her daughter, having known her since she was born, and my friend thought my job was far more exciting and glamorous than it was. She owned this amazing town house in Notting Hill and was always hosting extravagant parties. There would be caterers with trays full of expensive-looking canapés, and endless champagne; she even hired a string quartet once. It was as though she needed the world to think she was happy, even though she wasn’t. Looking back, maybe we were both a little jealous of what we thought the other had. I found myself irritated by the way she and all her mom friends stared at my husband that night. As though he were a genuine celebrity, like a film star, not an author. My opinion of writers changed a little after I married one.
I wanted to leave.
I followed him to the upstairs bathroom and waited for him to come out.
“I think we should go,” I said as soon as he opened the door.
He looked genuinely concerned. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, then I am in trouble. Whenever you say nothing is wrong it means that everything is. Did I do something to upset you?”
Yes.
“No. It’s fine.”
“Clearly it isn’t. I give up. I didn’t even want to come to this party, but you insisted, so here I am and you’re still not happy.”
“Would you be happy if you had to watch me flirt with other people all night?”
He laughed. “I haven’t been flirting . I don’t think I even remember how. I’ve been talking to people because that’s what people do at parties. Would you rather I stood in the corner, stared at the wall, and didn’t speak to anyone?”
“I’d rather you spoke to me.”
The words rushed out of my mouth before I could stop them, and I hated how jealous I sounded.
“We talk all the time,” he said, looking confused.
“No, we don’t. We don’t talk anymore. We don’t laugh anymore. I can’t remember the last time we had sex...”
“Is that what this is about?”
“Keep your voice down. Someone will hear us.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit distant—”
“A bit distant? We’re like two strangers sharing a house.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. You don’t even touch me anymore. Not even to hold my hand.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking my hand in his. It felt warm and strong and nice. “You know I had a deadline and the book—”
I shrugged his hand away. “I don’t care about your books. I’m sick to death of listening to you talk about your books as though that’s all that matters. I care about us. I get that you love the way women look at you while you blather on about yourself and your stories, but—”
“So now I’m in trouble for the way other people look at me?”
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’re looking at them too.”
“What does that mean? Should I walk around with my eyes closed? I only have eyes for you. You know that. You’re always the most interesting woman in the room.”
“ Interesting is an interesting choice of word.”
“It’s true. You have an amazing career. A life. All the women downstairs talk about are endless stories about their children—”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a mother. What if I wanted that too one day?”
He looked at me as though I had told a joke. Then, when there wasn’t a punch line, he looked at me as though I had lost my mind. “But you don’t want children. You never have. I think you’ve been working too hard, you’re stressed, and you’re taking it out on me. As usual.”
Me working so hard benefited both of us, financially and in other ways. I was tired of his complaints about the long hours and late nights.
“I’m sure it’s all very flattering and a nice little ego boost when they flutter their eyelids at you,” I said. “But none of it is real. They think you’re something you’re not.”
“And what am I?”
I bit my tongue. Until he met me, his writing career had hit a dead end. My connections were the reason he was a success. We both knew it; I didn’t need to say it. But I didn’t want to hurt him. I still don’t.
“You used to look at me the way they do,” he said then. “As though you believed in me. As though you were proud.”
“You used to look at me as though you still found me attractive.”
He frowned. “I do still find you attractive.”
Then he kissed me in a way that he hadn’t for so long.
“Stop that. Someone could come up here any moment,” I said, pushing him away.
“I can’t kiss my wife now?”
“It’s been so long I’m surprised you remember how.”
He pushed me up against the wall and kissed me again.
“I remember how,” he whispered, and this time I kissed him back. We stumbled down the hallway like drunk teenagers, tugging at each other’s clothes, until we found an empty bedroom. In the darkness he pulled the hem of my skirt up, my underwear down, and maneuvered me to a vintage armchair in the corner of the room. He fucked me on that chair. There is no other word for it. One of his hands bent me over from behind and held me in place, the other covered my mouth.
Despite what he’d said, I felt like I could have been anyone, and that something had changed between us.
Sex didn’t feel like making love after that night. We took what we needed from each other, when we needed it, and intimacy became even more of a rare currency in our marriage. Then it stopped altogether. I could see in the mirror that I didn’t look how I used to, but he looked better than ever. Some men get more handsome with age. Our jobs became our lives, and the women he worked with—publishers, publicists—all seemed to be getting younger and prettier. It’s hard for a woman my age to compete with a twentysomething with stars in her eyes.
We started to unravel and I didn’t know how to fix us or if I even wanted to. I was always working, he was always writing, and we muddled on. There is nothing sweet about sorrow. Sadness can consume a person if it is allowed to linger too long. It takes root and buries itself inside a person’s soul, until every thought is too heavy, too painful to think. It felt like we had lost the version of us that knew how to be happy. We’re still together but I have never felt so alone.
“He thinks he still loves me,” I tell the woman in black, realizing that I have allowed myself to wander and get lost inside memories I would rather forget.
She waits for me to say more, but I don’t.
I have forgotten how it feels not to feel lonely.
Sometimes at night, while he is sleeping right next to me but seems so far away, I remember how things used to be. Retired feelings of desire return and I can’t sleep unless I do something to satisfy them. When I am sure he is sound asleep, my fingers creep beneath the sheets, silently slide down my tummy, and find their way between my legs. I’ve learned to be silent as I touch myself the way he used to touch me. Sometimes I pretend that it is his hand, his fingers, him, even though he is unconscious and uninterested. Other times I pretend that other hands are touching me. People I know, people I don’t. I’ve never cheated on my husband in real life, only in my fantasies. I thought I could fix us. Find a way to make things work.
Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.
Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.