Divide Me by Zero

THIRTEEN

I don’t remember being baffled or intimidated by negative numbers. My mother taught me about them when I was eight or nine, and I grasped the concept right away. But while it wasn’t baffling to me, it was terrifying. My mother used a large pot and a wooden ruler to explain the concept to me. She half filled the pot with water, then put the ruler in. She made a mark on the ruler where it touched the surface of the water. That would be zero, she said. Above zero there were your regular numbers. Below zero was your negative space; that was where your negative numbers lived. I could barely see the ruler underwater; it looked distorted and scary. I thought of negative space as some sort of dark underworld, and it was right here in the middle of the kitchen, on the table where we ate, in the pot that we used for making soup.

“Let’s do some sums now,” my mother said. And that was probably the scariest thing about the negative numbers, that you could add them up and even multiply them, making their negative value even more negative, which brought you deeper into the underworld.

I had avoided having anything to do with negative numbers for most of my adult life, until Yulia suddenly reappeared in my life with her own take on the concept. This happened in 2006, right after I published the piece about my wedding dress in the Important Fashion Magazine. Yulia said that she read the magazine religiously and it was quite a shock for her to see me there. The last person you’d expect to see in a fashion magazine! Yulia worked as a main media liaison for an international media conglomerate. She used her connections to find my new address, and here she was sitting across from me in a sleek downtown restaurant with a copy of the magazine in her lap, shifting her eyes from me to the photo of me in the magazine and laughing. “Now I understand the magic of retouching!” she said at one point.

Yulia herself looked well, thinner than ever and dressed in an expensive ensemble in different hues of green, including enormous shades in green frames.

Yulia was on her third husband and couldn’t believe that I was still married to Len. No, she didn’t have any kids. No way! Thank God!

She refused to talk about Sasha, but was more than happy to talk about her career. She had gotten a degree in psychology, and worked as a family therapist for a few years, but then she got sick of it all and moved to London. Her current job was amazing. They had already launched a glamorous print magazine and even more glamorous social media club, and a radio broadcast and a TV channel were in the works The entire thing was called the Résistance—spelled the French way.

The name made me laugh.

“Laugh all you want,” Yulia said, “but we are going to topple Putin one day.”

The Résistance was funded by exiled billionaire Nikolay Kotov and had the goal of connecting super-rich and super-successful Russians living all over Europe. The idea was that armed with so much money and brainpower, the opposition would finally have a chance, and Kotov would be the one to head it. Or at least this was how the project was being sold to Kotov. I remembered that Sasha had mentioned the Résistance once. He said that all the talk about forming the opposition was pure bullshit, and a more apt name for the magazine would be Asshole Monthly.

I had to admit that the issue that Yulia gave me as a gift confirmed Sasha’s assessment. I opened it on the bus back to Staten Island and saw nothing but the usual glamorous fluff.

The first piece that caught my eye had the headline “Marusya Keeps Stumbling.” The piece detailed the myriad problems experienced by owners of fashionable teacup pigs. The main problem was that Moscow winters were too harsh for these animals, and it was impossible to find warm pet clothes that would fit a teacup pig, and so people were denied the biggest pleasure of teacup pig ownership—the ability to walk them down Moscow streets on a tiny leash. The photo featured the most adorable teacup pig, her minuscule legs clad in human baby booties. I doubted that Marusya could topple Putin, especially if she kept stumbling.

The rest of the pieces were hardly better, so I skimmed through them, until I found a long interview with Yulia herself, entitled “Doctor Divorce.”

Once again, there was nothing about politics. The interviewer talked about Yulia’s “subversively flirty” clothes before focusing on her past work as a couples therapist.

Q: Yulia Nikolaevna, you were notorious for being very blunt with your patients, even urging them to get a divorce rather than continue therapy. Is that true?

A: Absolutely! In my professional opinion, there is no point in prolonging the agony of a dying marriage.

Q: But how can you tell for sure if a marriage is salvageable or not?

A: I gave my patients a very simple exercise. I called it “A Balance Sheet of a Marriage.” They had to list all the important aspects of marriage, like personality and sex and finances. Then they identified both positive and negative aspects of each element, and assigned value points to each one, because it was very unlikely that any single element of a marriage would be entirely positive or entirely negative. Then they had to tally up the points and see whether the total was positive or negative. If it’s negative—you know what you have to do.

Q: Thank you so much, Yulia Nikolaevna! I’m sure our readers will be tempted to try it!

A: They better!

I don’t know about other readers, but I was certainly tempted. In fact, I couldn’t even wait until I got home. I found a pen in my bag and started tallying points right in the margins of the Résistance.

Good	Bad
Kids:
Len is an incredibly reliable father. If there is an emergency, he will drop everything and be there for the kids. He is great at remembering dentist appointments and buying new sneakers on time. We’re mostly on the same page about the kids’ upbringing. Except that Len wants them to have less contact with my mother, but he understands that’s impossible since we live together.	He doesn’t know how to listen or talk to them, and he doesn’t seem to enjoy spending time with them. He thinks that it’s wrong that I enjoy spending time with the kids. He also thinks that I’m an exceptionally bad parent, and sometimes in the heat of an argument, he will even say that the kids would be better off without me, like if I died or something. To be fair, he doesn’t say that often.
50	-50
My mother: He lets her live with us.	He can’t stand her.
50	-100
Personality and intelligence: He is a decent, honest man. Thorough, reserved. Intelligent.	He is not that kind. His mind isn’t flexible enough. He is not open to new ideas. He can’t ever see the world from somebody else’s perspective.
50	-50
Sex:
We have more than enough for a married couple, and it’s never uncomfortable or deeply unwanted. We know what each of us finds unpleasant and never venture there. And when our married friends or more importantly TV characters mention the frequency of their sex, we find ourselves in the top 20 percent, which is very uplifting.	But it’s so, so boring! I had always imagined sex to be this crazy force. Am I never going to experience the single best thing granted to a human being? Okay, but what if that amazing sex simply doesn’t exist? What if all the people who say that they have had amazing sex are lying? A lot of people I know believe that amazing sex is the stuff of fiction. Why can’t I accept that? Because I know in my heart that this is not true!
50	-100
His job: Len has always had a steady job as a computer programmer and made good money. In addition to that, he founded his own start-up, which isn’t earning any money but isn’t losing any money either.	Len doesn’t have any time for the family.
100	-100
My job: He’s proud of the fact that his wife is a published author. He rarely complains that I’m not making enough money.	He has never read anything I’ve written. Not even a magazine piece. Once a year, when we file our joint return, he will say with a laugh that my combined income from two teaching jobs and countless publications doesn’t make a third of his salary. (It makes more than a third!)
50	-50
Interests: There are several things that we both like. Four films: Pulp Fiction, Fargo, Seven Samurai, and the cult Soviet romantic comedy Irony of Fate. Two novels: War and Peace (only Len skipped most of the peace) and The Master and Margarita (but Len loves it and I merely like it). Easy hikes (but he never has time for that). Sunday breakfasts—baguette with butter and jam, fruit, berries, coffee in a French press, all luminous in the morning sun.	He hasn’t read a book in fifteen years or so. I hate computer programming, and fail to understand how his start-up devoted to database security and architecture is exciting. We ruin those beautiful breakfasts by having one or another explosive argument.
50	-50
Affection: There are times when I feel so much affection toward Len that it makes my heart hurt. Sometimes, I will enter the garage to get something, and see Len sitting at his computer with his back to me. I will see his shoulder blades under a checkered shirt, and the thinning hair on his crown, and his long fingers frozen midflight over the keyboard, and I will rush to hug him from behind and kiss him on the back of his head. And he will lean back to linger in the warmth of my arms and call me solnyshko, which is like “sunshine” in English, but warmer.	But what if this is just habitual affection? Not one caused by genuine love?
100	-1
Future: I know that Len would never leave me.	The thought of being with Len for the rest of my life fills me with such horror.
100	-300

By the time the bus crept up the Verrazzano Bridge, I’d tallied up the numbers.

The result was -201, which meant that I needed to divorce Len immediately.

The thought of divorce made me sick with panic. But I tried to be rational about it. I thought that maybe I should make a separate balance sheet for the divorce. I would assign negative value to the awful aspects of the divorce, and positive value to the ones that had the potential to make my life better. I started with the effect the divorce would have on the kids—the scariest aspect of all.

Negative	Positive
Kids: Will be horribly damaged.	Will eventually be okay.
-1,000,000	10
My mother: We would have to sell the house. Where would she live???	I could probably find a cheap enough apartment with a separate bedroom for her. She would love being with us all the time.
-1,000	0
Basic survival: I can’t survive without Len. He said so himself many times. He said that I lack vital survival skills, like the ability to drive on a highway, understand mortgage payments, and remember to schedule teeth cleanings.	Oh, come on! That’s shameful and ridiculous! I am a healthy, fairly privileged adult living in one of the most affluent countries in the world. Of course I can survive.
-100	100
My job: There is a possibility that nobody would ever publish anything that I write ever again. My name would be completely forgotten and nobody would offer me another teaching job.	It’s certainly possible, but very unlikely.
-1,000	100
Sex: Even if I find a suitable partner, I’m such a “delicate flower” (quoting Len) that it might take years to figure out what it is I want. Nobody has the patience for that. I might never have good sex again.	I will have the freedom to look for new exciting partners. I will understand myself better and know what I want.
-100	100
Love: What love? Love is bullshit. Love doesn’t exist.	I might find real love.
-100	1,000

This time I didn’t even have to tally up the points to see that the negative numbers screamed against the divorce. Divorce wasn’t possible. But I didn’t want to stay in a marriage that was decidedly not working either.

The only solution was to go back to my marriage balance table and fix the results there.

This wasn’t something that my mother taught me. She taught me that the very idea of math was that it was strict, precise, and firmly grounded in reality. She would be shocked and disgusted if she knew that her own daughter was essentially fucking with math. But hadn’t I rejected math in favor of fiction-writing years ago? What if this was something to do with who I was? What if I couldn’t deal with reality unless I could fix it?

I fixed the numbers in my job row first. Why would I decide that the fact that Len didn’t read my novels or stories was a negative thing? Didn’t it give me more creative freedom? I could write whatever I wanted without worrying that it would offend or anger Len. I went ahead and changed the minus sign to a plus sign.

Then I fixed the numbers in my mother row. Wasn’t the fact that Len let her live with us more important than his feelings toward her? Wouldn’t it be worse if he loved her but refused to live with her? I went ahead and eagerly changed the values there too.

I also fixed the numbers in my interests row, because I remembered one more thing Len and I liked to do together—watch SNL, even though Len preferred the political jokes and I the fart-and-shit ones.

It was the sex row that made me struggle the longest. Wasn’t boring sex in a marriage perfectly normal? Wasn’t the boredom what made it so comfortable?

I was about to up the number in the positive column, but then I remembered two recent episodes.

One episode happened on a camping trip. Neither Len nor I was particularly fond of camping, but camping was considered such a wholesome family activity that we couldn’t possibly consider ourselves a wholesome family unless we did it. The only problem was that we couldn’t figure out how to have fun as a family, or as a group. According to the Escher house rules, it would’ve been easier for Len to do something with the kids without me, and the same went for me. For me, the best part of the trip was when Len said that he had to work for a little bit. He had plugged his laptop into an outlet attached to the bathroom facility and sat down at a nearby picnic table, and remained there for hours, while I took the kids for a walk. We tasted some blueberries and lingonberries and wild sorrel. We saw a raccoon, a hawk, and something that looked like a wild pig. The pig inspired us to invent a game called “guess the oink.” One of us had to oink in a certain way, and the others had to guess whether the pig was happy, angry, disappointed, paranoid, jealous, or desperately sad. We all laughed so hard that we lost our way a couple of times. By the time we came back, the campground was full, other tents were set up and other fires were lit, and there was different music playing. We made a fire too, and roasted thick slices of kielbasa and made some tea. Then Len and I engaged in one of our fights. I said that if the kids wanted to pee at night, they could crawl out and pee right by the tent. But Len pronounced that disgusting and said that one of us could take them to the bathroom. I said that the bathroom was filthy, and you could slip on somebody’s shit in the dark and drag that shit into the tent. And Len said that all the shit was in my head. But then we remembered that this was a quality-time family camping trip and stopped yelling at each other. Len agreed that the bathrooms were filthy, and I agreed that we should go there anyway.

I was the one who woke up wanting to pee. I zipped up my jacket, groped around to find the opening, and crawled out of the tent. It was so much colder outside the tent that I almost crawled right back in. I considered peeing right by the tent, but I was afraid that the sound of my peeing would wake Len up. Thankfully it wasn’t completely dark. I could see the path leading to the toilet pretty well. What I hadn’t realized was that I wouldn’t know how to tell which tent was ours on the way back. I couldn’t even remember which color it was. The cars were parked elsewhere, and all the tents and all the firepits looked more or less the same. On one of the middle tents the right flap was slightly open—I must have left it open when I crawled out. I walked there, dropped on my knees in front of the tent so I could crawl in, and opened the flap wider. There I saw two people engaged in the act of oral sex in the soft glow of an iPhone lying in the corner. I was so stunned that I didn’t retreat right away. The woman was lying on her back diagonally to the entrance with her head pressed against the far-right corner of the tent. She was covered by a blanket, except for her left knee and foot, her shoe and sock were still on, as were her pants, lowered to her ankles. She had to open her knees far apart, since her ankles were bound by her pants. Her left knee was round and fat. The man was under the blanket—a lumpy moving mound, with his feet (no shoes, just socks) pressing against the near-left corner of the tent. They were barely making any sounds, just panting a little. I shut the flaps closed and moved away, hoping that they hadn’t seen me. I recognized them as a husband and wife, members of a group that had sat at the firepit right next to ours. All large and heavy people. They had been making s’mores and they’d offered some to Dan and Nathalie. I was confident now that our tent was to the left of theirs, so I crawled there and lay down next to Len. I couldn’t be mistaken, could I? Was that man going down on his wife? In the cold, not-very-clean tent? Yes, he was. I could hear their panting from my tent and see the slight movements of the wall of their tent. I imagined that once the woman reached her orgasm, she would go down on the man and would be as tender and generous with him. And they were what? In their late fifties. At least that old. And they wanted each other so much that they had to do it right there and then. And they loved each other so much that they chose the most tender, complex, and time-consuming of all sexual acts. I couldn’t even imagine Len and me doing that. I suddenly felt so bad that I had to quietly utter that desperately sad oink.

The second episode took place a couple of weeks later and was probably inspired by what I had seen on the camping trip. One Saturday night, around ten o’clock, I went to the garage and asked Len to drive us to the beach. “Let’s look at the moon,” I said.

We left the car in the deserted parking lot and walked to the beach, but it was cold and overcast and we couldn’t see the moon, just the yellow patches of light breaking through the layers of clouds. I was the first to return to our car, and I climbed into the middle seat instead and asked Len to come join me. “It’s warm in here. You’d be surprised!”

Within minutes a police car pulled up. Two cops were blinding us with their flashlights, speaking through a loudspeaker. Saying the same thing over and over again as we fumbled with our clothes. “Are you okay, ma’am? Ma’am, you have to answer. Sir, we need to see her face. We need to see your face, ma’am. Ma’am!” Eventually, they wrote us a ticket for indecent behavior in a public place and let us go. But it was such a nightmare. I was shaking from shame the entire drive back. Len was squeezing the steering wheel in silent rage. He acted as if it were my fault. And it was my fault. I was the one desperate to prove that we too could have exciting outdoor sex. “One day we will laugh about this,” I said when he pulled up our driveway.

That day never came.

But sitting there on the bus with the issue of the Résistance in my lap, I went ahead and added +50 points to the entry for sex. As the kids’ PE teacher always said: “It’s not the result that counts, it’s the effort!”

By the time the bus made it to the last stop, I had enough positive points to stay married to Len.

Note to an inquisitive reader. I wonder how many other people are doing that, putting so much effort into faking the math so that their marriages appear tolerable at best. I’d love to see some statistics on that.