What did we want? We no longer knew. None of our friends knew what they wanted either. If you had told us, all of us, when we were thirteen, sixteen, twenty-one, or twenty-five, that we would grow to be what the world called faithless, we would have protested loudly and said you had no idea what or who you were talking about. We did not think that there would be affairs in our adulthoods because all of us were enlightened enough to marry our heart’s desire or not marry at all; we did not imagine that a life spent writing required the accessory of adultery anymore. We thought that because we were readers, scholars, students of history, we would be protected against a certain amount of stupidity and stasis. We felt that we owed the books we’d read proof that we were as open and free as they had commanded us to be. We had been hoping to do something new, but found ourselves pulled toward the old.
We were angry and didn’t know it, or angry and didn’t think we should be, despite having come of age on an unending stream of women who wielded guitars and rage like swords and shields. Why were we angry? Our hard work might come to nothing, and we had been told everything depended on our hard work. We were not as strong as we thought we were; not as smart as we thought we were. The men we loved were not as strong or passionate as we felt ourselves to be, but they were always less hobbled by doubt; they were always less bothered by how long it was taking to get everywhere, which meant that we were going to have to do everything ourselves, which meant we were going to have to keep dreaming alone. We could have become angry, but we panicked instead. Because none of us were geniuses. Or self-actualized. And nobody had the guts to just say screw it, I’m going to live in a lighthouse where I can write my poems uninterrupted and entertain an unending stream of lovers until my tenderest, most secret spring runs dry. Or nobody had the money. If you had the guts you often didn’t have the money, and if you had the money you often didn’t have the guts. We were dumb dogs. Tireless workers with verbal aptitude. Self-questioning mystics trapped in late-capitalist bodies. Feminists who were unaware that their belief in the eventual rewards of unceasing individual effort made them secret agents for the neoliberal patriarchy. Falsely conscious; filled with bad faith. Bored.
We did not want to admit we were panicked, and it was turning all of us into the worst kind of heartless brute there is: a woman who fears she’s unequal to her hopes.
What’s the name of Anna Karenina’s wife again? I said to Rose one night, and we laughed because of course I meant to say husband. Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin. We never could remember his name. The way we never could identify with Kitty, and felt much more like Levin—questing, restless, electric with dilemma.
I don’t want to be Charles Bovary, someone said to Rose. A musician who was in love with her and refused to be satisfied with riding on the passenger side of her speeding car.
Or, as Charlotte Brontë said, anybody may blame me who likes.
All the men seemed to know what they wanted. Nobody got divorced from or broken up with or thrown out of the house. Another phenomenon our women’s studies classes failed to warn us about: male passivity in the face of threat. Peter made jokes about the bruises that mysteriously appeared on Rose’s forearms and thighs whenever he was out of town, and Mark was either sound asleep or pretending to be when I slid into bed at one in the morning. One in the morning—that was my rule. I had to be back in bed by then. One in the morning: at that hour it was entirely plausible that you’d just lost track of time and had trouble getting a cab. And in the meantime Rose and I pooled the details of our straying out onto many a bar top. As if we were dumping out pillowcases full of Halloween candy in order to dissect and glory in the haul.
What’s going on with Rose and that guy? said some man we knew, one night, watching me watch the musician reach out and touch Rose’s hair as they sat in a corner of a bar—a corner less hidden than it could have been.
I’m not her press secretary, I told him, eyes still on Rose and that guy, wondering how pissed I should be with her for putting me in this position.
If you’re really her friend you should break that up, he said, and walked off.
Rose and I were the only people who could have told each other that we were making mistakes, but we didn’t. When everyone is young—and we were young for a long time, the people I knew in New York—it is hard to confront your friends about the mistakes they might be making. You’re not even sure if you should call them mistakes. You can’t quite see them, either, for the cloud of sociability you’re all generating—a cloud of parties and readings and barbecues and park picnics and concerts and dinner parties and movies and Oscar nights and driving up somewhere for the weekend in several cars.
At four in the morning one Sunday, Mark found me curled up on the bathroom floor at the base of the toilet, waiting to vomit and praying he wouldn’t come in.
You’re disgusting, he said, and pissed in the bathtub.
I slept on the couch. In the morning I crawled in beside him. He faced the wall, still sleeping. I stared at the back of his neck. When he woke up he turned to face me.
I’m hungry, he said. Are you hungry?
I tried hard to arrange my expression so that it did not say Are you out of your mind?
Should we get pancakes? he said.
On the walk over to the diner I took his hand.
Don’t leave me, he said.
I won’t, I said, and hoped I was not lying.
It really didn’t matter, later that afternoon, back home, as we stood next to each other chopping and stirring, listening to the radio and joking with each other, whether love or fear had rooted our feet to the kitchen floor.
I need to leave, I told Rose.
Do you have the money to leave?
I didn’t.
Could you sell a book in order to leave?
I’d tried that. For the last few months I’d been going to a café after school—I was no longer able to write around Mark—to work on a proposal about infidelity that my agent would eventually describe as an intermittently interesting conflagration of anxieties both shrill and muddled. I stopped reading at here, she’d written in her email. You’re writing like all that stands between you and a new kidney is this proposal. I know I don’t need to tell you this, but that’s not how we bring meaningful work into the world. I didn’t reply, and I wasn’t ready to laugh about the rejection, which meant I couldn’t tell Rose about it.
You know I’m not that kind of writer, I said. I can’t Dickens my way out of this.
What about your father?
No. I’d never asked him for money in my life, and I wasn’t about to start by asking him for money to leave my husband. He had not been the kind of father who thought it was his job to stockpile cash in order to make his daughter’s adult life easier. He was the kind who thought it was his job to keep her fed and clothed until she was old enough to leave the house. I wasn’t sure how much he had to give, either. He had a bad habit of losing money in the stock market.
I’ll give you the money.
Absolutely not.
You know you’d do it—well, you have done it for me.
That was a fraction of this.
You always did have a thing about paying your way.
Should I not have? I could not keep the anger out of my voice.
Maybe I should have had a thing about paying my way.
Yes, I said. Maybe you should have.
I’m sorry. Pause. Go be someone’s roommate?
I gave her a look.
Yeah, okay, I couldn’t do that either. A sublet?
It’s like I get poured full of concrete whenever I think of leaving.
I’m worried that you’re going to wait around for something to explode this.
I was afraid of that, too.
Take the money, she said.
I can’t.
Instead I let someone who lived far away write to me: the father of a two-year-old girl named Sarah Ann and the husband of a woman named Jaclyn. Ryan wrote and wrote, and I wrote back, because he didn’t think I was disgusting, he thought I was passionate. He probably needed to feel passionate, or powerful, too, needed to feel that he was more or other than the boy who married Jaclyn when they were twenty-one, more or other than the professor who had not yet published a book, and sending an email to him was like putting a handful of quarters in a vending machine and waiting for the candy to drop, all of the candy.
Rose asked to see one of them, and when she handed the phone back to me her lack of effusion suggested she might have been a little bit jealous.
Nobody ever left me a ticket at a United counter, so let’s call it even, I said.
She laughed. Oh yeah. I forgot about that.
Something’s happened were the first words of his last letter, and then he went on, single-spaced, for a long time, telling me that the week before he had given a respected author, who had come to visit the university where he taught, a ride to the airport, and while the author did not know exactly what was going on with his driver, he could tell that this kid was about to jump out of his skin, which he was, because earlier that morning Ryan’s wife had taken a hammer to his office at home—to his monitor, to his desk, to his chair, to a clock that he’d bought in Vienna during a semester in Milan, the year before he met his wife, who’d never been to New York let alone out of the country. His wife had seen an email to me on his phone, which was now also destroyed like his clock, and all he said when the respected author asked if anything in particular was bothering him was Family trouble, and the author, as if he knew exactly, said the email, what kind of family trouble would give rise to the kind of tense and agitated anxiety that can result from people finding out that you are not the perfect person you thought you were, began to speak to him about the importance of a good marriage to good work, of steady habits to great work, said that Flaubert was right even though you didn’t want him to be. The respected author had married young, too, and he felt that it saved him from wasting his mind and his energy on trying to win a sexual popularity contest when he was too young to handle it, said that the ritual of taco night reminded him that his ego was always going to be the real child at the table, that his wife knew how to cut his ego down to size with her tongue and the respected author did not think he could live without this woman in his life because of it, said he needed a love that lacerated him and made him see that the fame he had meant nothing because his wife knew his real dumb heart and was not fooled for one second by the adulation he received, and that was real life, nothing else was real but the refining fire of her wisdom and the continual disparagement issued forth by his children.
I had been reading all this out loud to Rose but here I stopped. I could not imagine a woman saying things like this—or at least, none of the women I knew. None of us had ever been so secure in our success, if we’d had any, that we felt free enough to denigrate it, or to worship love for making us see how hollow the realization of our success really was. Women might say of family life that it had helped them become better multitaskers. That was what I had heard women say when they wanted to talk about the magical powers of children—children were gifts who had given them a proper relationship to time. Not to themselves.
This respected writer’s work had always seemed a little too pleased with its own cleverness, and the Byzantine, breakneck nature of the cleverness seemed to be an expression of some fundamental innocence. I’d never liked it. But what did I know? I could be accused of harboring some serious innocence myself. If I was not so innocent I would never have squandered my husband’s love and trust the way I was currently doing, would never have seen it or seen time as an unlimited resource.
Keep going, said Rose. I want to know if this letter ends exactly as I think it will or whether people are surprising, like everyone always says they are.
After hearing all this, he wrote, he felt much better able to be reconciled again to his real life, the life that he’d been perfectly fine with until he met me, and I wasn’t real, no offense, but he couldn’t help but think the author was the Jesus worshipped by his wife and his mother at work, trying to show him some sign, some way out and back to the good man he needed to be, even if he hated being it sometimes, in order to remember who he was and that it was definitely not his father, who had run out on him and his mother when he was thirteen.
You know how to pick ’em, said Rose, reading over my shoulder as I sat at my laptop.
His last line, a line he said he did not want to be his last, but he was in a hurry, he was writing this on his mother-in-law’s iPad because his wife had whisked them all back to her childhood home for the summer, and his phone was no longer alive: I keep thinking that you should have children and I should get back to trying to publish a book, and that if we’d had these things in our lives none of this would have happened.
Rose put a hand on my shoulder. I tried to make a joke.
I might have just destroyed the clock, I said.
You know what, yeah. If that’s all that she’d gone to town on, if she’d limited her rage to one significant object, made, you know, one discriminating choice, then you would have known that she was some kind of artist, too, and not just a fucking wife.
Just wives. The phrase was an insult, the way we used it, the way our friends used it. The way my wife, whenever I heard it, seemed demeaning, distancing, an erasure, a complaint. The way my husband never did. Was it the long i, the one syllable, the way it rhymed with gripe and strife, its unfortunate similarity to whine? The way it rung with the sourness of a Catskills punch line and centuries of grievance? Both words, husband or wife: a suitcase you packed all your real feelings into so you could carry your life into public. The woman who had wreaked jealous destruction on objects was just a wife, but she had shown more love for her husband than we had ever shown ours. You could even argue that she had shown more might in the face of betrayal than our husbands had. It was not clear why Rose and I should consider ourselves elevated creatures in comparison. So we believed that possessiveness was the lowest form of female affection. So we lived in New York and dressed the part and argued about books with our friends in expensive restaurants. So what. Rose was just a publicist and I was just a teacher.
I would not ask my father for money, but I found myself telling him about Jaclyn’s husband, because if anyone had the power to shame me into right action the way this man had been shamed by his wife and this author, it would have to be my father, if it could not be my husband.
Did it make you feel alive? said my father. We sat next to each other on the beach in folding chairs, keeping watch on a fishing pole he’d planted in the sand.
Yes, I said.
It turned out my father had served, when he was barely out of his teens, as the other man for an older woman who was the receptionist in the front office of a frozen-fish company where he loaded trucks. Unintentional hilarity: the husband worked for the FBI, found my father loading the trucks one morning, and successfully intimidated my father out of fooling around with his very pretty wife, who, said my father, was probably having an affair with the boss as well.
She was crazy, my father had said of the woman he’d had an affair with. That, I did wince at, because of the misogyny that might have been lurking behind that statement, and at the truth that might have been lurking behind that statement. I’d started to get the feeling that I really was probably truly crazy, as was Rose, as were all of us who were running around the city in the middle of the night, lost and hungry, shooting our excess flame up into the stars like gas flares over the prairies.