5. Why Does It Hurt?
WHY DOES IT HURT?
FOX
She’s packing.
I can hear drawers opening and closing, the soft drag of a bag across the bedroom floor, the silence between sounds.
She’s not frantic or even angry.
She’s doing it all quietly, patiently, and deliberately, which is worse.
Frantic and angry, I could work with. Deliberate means she has decided.
I stand by the dining table with my second glass of wine that I have only half-drunk, looking at the table we ate at, at the two place settings she put out—cloth napkins, the good wine, the lamb that took three hours—and I try to locate myself inside what is happening.
I cannot.
This is new.
I am a man who always knows where he is.
Geographically, professionally, emotionally. I maintain orientation the way I maintain most things, through control and distance, through the administration of proximity to anything that could move me off my axis.
It is, I’m aware, not an attractive quality.
Percy has told me so in various forms over the years, most recently and most directly, approximately two months ago, when I told him I thought Lucy and I were heading for divorce, and he looked at me like I’d said something in a language he didn’t understand.
But I knew where I was then. I knew where I stood and what I felt and what I intended, and I could describe it all in complete sentences, which is the only test I’ve ever applied to my own certainty.
Right now, I cannot find a complete sentence anywhere.
I should feel relieved.
This is what I want, what I have been moving toward for months, what the honest version of me has been trying to find the words for when I looked across the breakfast table at my wife and understood that I was doing her a profound disservice and have been for a long time.
I do not feel relieved.
I feel like a piece of shit.
I top off the wine.
She comes down a half hour later.
She has one bag—a large duffel.
It’s a dark green canvas, with a white stripe, lived-in in the way her things tend to be, used until they’re useful rather than replaced when they’re merely old.
She’s been crying. I can see it on her face. In her eyes.
Fuck! I hurt her. I am hurting her. This is not what I wanted.
I want to say something, anything, but I know there is nothing to say.
I learned that once before, the night we came home from the hospital after she lost the baby, when I stood there trying to find the right words, and she looked at me with an expression that said what we both knew: that I couldn’t assuage her any more than I could myself. She’s looking at me the same way now.
I straighten from where I’ve been leaning against the kitchen doorway.
“You’re going to Dina’s.”
“Fox.” She says my name the way she does when I’m stating the obvious, a syllable that contains a whole sentence’s worth of “you know the answer to that.”
She sets the bag down by the front door and comes back through the hall.
I watch her do a sweep of the downstairs the way she always does before she leaves—checking things, the unconscious domestic circuit she runs every time she walks out the door of our house, that she has run her hands over every corner of since she moved in, since we married.
She stands in front of me and looks me in the eyes.
She’s not angry. I think I would prefer that. She’s sad, and that hurts me; that makes me want to wrap my arms around her, care for her, and take the pain away.
“The ragu will keep for three days. Don’t let it go past that.”
The stone in my chest drops another ten feet.
“Lucy—“
“The fig tree needs water. I did it today, but it needs it every other day until the heat breaks.”
The damn tree that she wanted so badly.
Fuck!
“I know how to water a—“
“I know you do.” A pause. “I’m just saying.”
She’s wonderful.
That’s what I think, standing in my own front hall while my wife is leaving me—she is wonderful, in the specific, irreducible way of people who are exactly who they are all the way through, without caveat.
“You don’t have to go tonight.” I hear the plea in my voice, the one I never thought I would have.
She smiles like it’s costing her.
“I’m not asking you to stay,” I continue evenly. “I just mean you could—”
“I know what you mean.” She picks up the duffel. “It’s too painful.” She says it simply, without inflection, the way she says things that are true and don’t require decoration. “Being here right now is too painful. You can understand that, right?”
Now, she’s pleading with me to see her, feel her pain.
I do. I fucking do.
I understand it the way I understand most things about Lucy—completely, and with the particular helplessness of a man who comprehends a thing and cannot do anything useful with that comprehension.
“I’m sorry.” The words are so inadequate, they border on foolish.
She nods. “I know.” She shrugs and then lets out a small, choked laugh. “I know you are. But that doesn’t really help right now.”
She opens the front door.
“Take care of yourself, Fox,” she tells me.
Not take care.
Not the shorthand version.
The full thing, specific and direct and—I don’t know why this is the part that gets me, why this particular instruction from a woman I have spent months convincing myself I am not in love with is the thing that makes the stone in my chest become briefly unbearable—it sounds like something you say to a person you are choosing to stop being responsible for.
The epiphany hits.
She cared for me in ways I didn’t see, didn’t ask for, and didn’t deserve.
She was responsible for me, and she is handing that back now, and I find I don’t know what to do with my own upkeep.
The door closes.
I stand in the hall and listen to her car start, and I listen to it back out of the drive, and I listen to it go until I can’t hear it anymore.
Then I listen to the silence of our very large house, where I have lived for most of my adult life, and it has never before felt like a reproach as it does now.
My phone rings fifteen minutes later. I spring to where I left it in the hallway, thinking it’s her, she’s calling, she’s asking to come back.
Disappointed to see who it is, I answer.
“Mother.”
I walk back to the kitchen with my phone and empty my glass of wine in one go.
“Archibald, I called you twice today, and you did not call back.”
I look out at the garden lights catching her fig tree, the herbs along the left wall, the peonies my mother called boring, which have come in full and riotous and entirely indifferent to anyone’s opinion. It’s all extremely on-brand for Lucy.
“I’m sorry,” I reply automatically. I am not even remotely sorry, but I prefer to manage my mother rather than educate her that she’s not the center of my universe, as she likes to think she is.
“Dinner Sunday. The usual time. We have some guests, old friends of your father visiting from Atlanta, and I need numbers.”
The way she says it. His friends, not hers. Mother has always been precise about who the people in her life belong to. Not many are her people.
“I’ll be there.”
“Good. And Lucy—“
“She won’t be there.”
A pause. That’s her recalibrating to fathom what’s going on. “Why not?”
Because she’s gone. Because I hurt her. Because I fucked up. Because I didn’t love her….
“We’re getting divorced.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Oh, Archibald.” There’s relief in her voice, like she’s exhaling for the first time freely since she found out about Lucy. “I’m so sorry, darling.”
She isn’t.
We both know she isn’t.
“These things happen,” she continues, as if she had always predicted such a demise of my marriage. “You were in a difficult position, and you did the right thing by her, and now—“
“Mother.”
“I’m just saying that no one can fault you. These situations are hard on everyone, and you behaved with honor.”
Honor. The Bennett word for what covers a multitude of sins as long as you hold your social posture while committing them.
I don’t want to talk to my mother about Lucy. I don’t know why I told her. I shouldn’t have. Telling her feels final. I have tainted my marriage, or what’s left of it.
“Mother, I have to go.”
“Of course. And, Fox”—she clears her throat—“I ran into Reina last week. At the Horton’s benefit. She looked wonderful. I think she’d love to see you. Maybe I’ll invite her Sunday, just as a friendly—“
Is she fucking kidding me? “No.”
“Archibald—“
“I will walk out of your house never to return if you pull such a stunt.”
“I’m only saying—“
“I know what you’re saying.” I press the heel of my hand to my eye. “Goodnight.”
I hang up and set the phone down on the dining table.
I look at the fig tree in the dark.
Water it every other day until the heat breaks.
I know now that I have done this wrong.
I have done this so profoundly and irreversibly wrong that I cannot yet see the edges of it. I am still in the middle of understanding how wrong, like a man standing inside an architectural space who cannot know its scale until he steps outside.
I am cornered…again.
Different walls. Same trap.
Except this time, the thing I’m cornered away from is not a consequence—it’s Lucy.