945 AM Sasha #2
Sasha looked at a fiddle-leaf fig tree in the corner of Roz’s office.
There were so many things she wanted to share—the problem was that two years ago she had stopped speaking to the only people she wanted to share them with.
She had seen Mia only once since their fight, at a baby shower for Courtney Paulson in the back room of a restaurant in Tribeca.
She tried to make pleasant conversation with her—she even said something like, “Oh, Jesus, thank God you’re here”—but Mia had just smiled at her coldly.
She muttered something about having to use the bathroom, then walked away—except not toward the bathroom, but rather to the opposite corner of the room where Nina Guzman was talking with Satya Patel.
Sasha’s mouth hung agape; she wanted to scream, “You don’t even fucking like them, Mia,” before she remembered that Mia had once said the same thing to her in her kitchen in Montclair, and that now when it came down to it, Mia probably liked Satya and Nina more than she liked Sasha.
For the next hour, she stood entirely and utterly alone, trying to shake off the unsettling feeling that people were talking about her, or shifting their eyes away when she looked at them.
She stayed until Courtney opened all of her gifts, then slipped out through the front of the restaurant.
She still wasn’t sure if anyone had seen her leave.
For the next few hours, she checked her phone more than she normally did, wondering if Mia had texted her with an indication that it was at least nice to be in the same room together again.
She never did. She moved clear across the ocean, and she never did.
But now, with Roz staring at her, Sasha thought of what she would say to Mia about her current feelings, if she had the courage to call her.
On the one hand, she thought that she and Theo should definitely get a divorce.
They had been coming here for, like, a year, and as far as she could tell they had made very little progress.
She was still cast as the Piece of Shit, and he as a victim who had been subjected to her abuse, and there was no indication that any amount of Mindful Noticing was going to change that.
Lately she had even found herself becoming angry.
She would hear Theo say something like “Yeah, I think it’s going to take a little more time for us to move past this,” and an acidic rage would rise up to her ears.
Why couldn’t he stop being such a pussy?
People had affairs all the time. Besides, it wasn’t like she was proud of fucking Mitch Reynolds—in fact, she was actually pretty embarrassed by it—so why did he get to take one of her mistakes and use it to make himself a martyr?
Why did he get to assume that fucking Mitch Reynolds had anything to do with him at all?
What complicated things was that, even when she was contemplating divorce, she knew for certain that she had never loved him more.
It was a love that was so whole and so all-consuming that occasionally when she thought about it, she felt herself becoming frightened and light-headed and needed to lie down.
Mostly she wondered if when her mother told her on her wedding day that a marriage takes work, what she was actually saying was that Sasha would never know if what she was doing was right.
She would have to accept that happiness wasn’t something that she stumbled into, or that was given to her, but was instead a condition she would have to always work to create, like good posture or low cholesterol.
She was never going to be content with being only a wife, or a mother, or single, or old, or young, or anywhere in between, no matter what all the commercials and Instagram ads had conspired to make her believe.
She was a human being. No single one of those identities would ever contain her.
Instead she was going to wake up every day, and smile at her husband, and privately wonder whether he was the best or worst decision of her life.
She said, “We had sex last night. It was the first time in, like, a year.”
Next to her she could sense Theo blushing.
She said, “I initiated it. I also had a vaginal orgasm—which, like, I can’t even tell you the last time that happened. Honestly, I had sort of accepted I wouldn’t come from sex anymore.”
Roz’s eyes brightened. She leaned forward on her ergonomically complex chair.
“And what did you notice about Theo that led to that moment.”
Sasha turned toward her husband. She knew she should make up something to say—that so much of what they had been doing here for the last year was making up the right things to say.
But the truth was the only thing she had noticed was the gray that had taken over the sides of his hair, the way each morning he had to massage the bottoms of his feet with a rolling pin to relieve the plantar fasciitis that pained him when he walked.
Put another way: she had noticed the ways he had become inevitably more himself.
Theo was Theo was Theo, just as Sasha was Sasha was Sasha, and that seemed to her to be the only noticeable thing that mattered.
She turned to face Roz. Before leaving the house this morning she had put on a thin silver necklace, and now with her good hand she reached up to straighten it.
“I didn’t notice anything,” she said. “I was sad that Adam had died and I think I just wanted to feel something else.”