CHAPTER TWENTY
We’re Not Getting Divorced
“We’re not getting divorced,” Dante said, and his voice carried the particular finality he used for decisions he considered already settled, the tone of a man accustomed to having the last word simply because he was the one speaking it.
“I am.”
“Vivienne, please. It’s late. Go to sleep. We’ll talk about this tomorrow, when you’re not...”
“When I’m not what?”
He didn’t finish the sentence, because there wasn’t a version of it that wouldn’t have made things considerably worse, and I watched him understand that even as the silence stretched between us.
“You keep saying that,” I said. “That we’ll talk tomorrow, when I’m calmer, when this isn’t the wrong moment.
There is never going to be a right moment for you to hear this, Dante, because you’ve never once created space for a moment like this to happen on purpose.
It’s always been an emergency that interrupted something more important. ”
He ran a hand through his hair, pushing up from his chair to pace the length of the study once before turning back to face me. “You don’t mean this. You’re upset, and you have every right to be, but seven years doesn’t just end over a folder you found on my desk.”
“Do you hear yourself right now?” My voice cracked slightly, frustration bleeding through despite my effort to keep it level.
“You’re doing it again. Reducing this to a folder, the way you reduced the chair to nothing, the way you reduced the anniversary to a scheduling problem.
I have told you, in detail, everything this actually adds up to, and you’re still trying to negotiate it down to something smaller so you don’t have to sit with the whole of it. ”
“I’m not trying to negotiate anything down. I’m telling you that a marriage doesn’t end because of one bad month.”
“It’s not one bad month. It’s seven years of small moments where I’ve had to decide, over and over, that things were fine, that I was being reasonable, that a good wife absorbs these things gracefully. I have been absorbing things gracefully since I was twenty-two years old, Dante, and I am done.”
“So what, you’re just going to walk out? Leave everything we’ve built because you’re angry at me?”
“I’m not angry,” I said, and I heard, even as I said it, how true that actually was, how far past anger I’d already traveled. “I’m finished. There’s a difference.”
He went quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, almost pleading. “Tell me what you need from me. Whatever it is, I’ll do it. I’ll fix this.”
“Do you hear what you just said?” I asked quietly.
“Tell me what you need and I’ll do it. You’re still trying to fix this for me instead of asking me what I actually want, which might not be something you can simply provide, Dante.
Some decisions aren’t yours to make on my behalf, even when you’re trying to make them in my favor. ”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking for, then.”
“I’m not asking for anything. I’m telling you what I’ve decided.”
“Do I need your permission to leave too?” I asked, quiet, testing a question I hadn’t fully let myself consider until the words were already out of my mouth. “Is that also a decision that gets made in a room without me?”
That stopped him completely. For the first time since I’d sat down with that folder an hour earlier, he looked as though he understood that I meant it, and for a moment, I thought he might actually say something that met the size of the conversation.
Instead he said, quietly, almost to himself, “I don’t know how to do this without you.”
“That’s not the same as knowing how to be married to me,” I said. “You told your own brother our marriage was built on obligation. I’m relieving you of it.”
I walked out of the study and up the stairs, my legs steadier than I expected, and he didn’t follow me, and some old, stubborn, still-loving part of me had wanted him to, even as the rest of me understood, climbing those stairs alone, that walking away tonight was exactly what needed to happen, regardless of what either of us wanted in the moment.
* * *