“You can’t remember your marriage?”
I told her I had flashes, sometimes: the two of us laughing over coffee, singing along to the radio in a rental car, frantically gripping each other’s hand under the table at a dinner party where someone was saying something idiotic; an afternoon doing the crossword in bed; a running joke that he might one day piss on me in the shower; the feeling of walking home from work, knowing he and the cat would be there. But these flashes didn’t feel like memories, really. They felt like a movie, or—god forbid—an Instagram Story. They felt like something that had happened to someone else.
“You know,” I said, “I don’t know if it’s super useful to even talk about it.”
Helen cocked her head. “Why is that?” She was good, which was annoying. To buy some time, I made a big show of not having anywhere to put my tea bag.
I’d had enough of discussing my marriage, at least without Jon there, so I distracted her by listing my life’s Top Shames. These included:
thinking Ezra Pound, Evelyn Waugh, and e. e. cummings were women until well into my undergraduate degree;
peeing my pants, fully, after being scared by a loud noise, age nine;
getting caught by a family friend completely giving myself over to song while pretending to be a mermaid, perched on a rock, aged slightly too old to be doing so;
my preferred way to eat macaroni （the entire package, oversalted and cold, in a large congealed lump that had been left out overnight in the pot）;
allowing my classmates to bully a close friend in elementary school, out of fear that without this distraction, they would turn on me instead;
the time I tried to give Jon a lap dance, got upset about whether I was doing it right, cried, and briefly attempted to keep going through the tears;
the fact that I’ve never been moved by a painting.
“I’ve liked a lot of paintings,” I said, “and found them beautiful and sometimes even arresting, but I’ve never seen a painting and felt any emotion other than ‘interested or not interested in the painting in front of me,’ which feels wrong and embarrassing and like I am not fully participating in being human. Oh, and the other big one is whatever’s going on with the shape of my pinkie toes.”
Helen responded gamely to all of these, making a probing remark here and there, noting things down on a yellow legal pad like the ones in Lori’s office. She did not try to move the subject back to Jon or our marriage or divorce. In fact, she let me speak mostly unbroken for almost half an hour.
At 5:45, she leaned forward and suggested we might want to try “sitting with the possibility” that Jon would not arrive. “I’m sure this is a disappointing turn of events, but we can rebook for next week,” she said gently. “Maybe you could leave me some of the other dates the two of you discussed, and I can get in touch with Jon myself.”
I admitted that there hadn’t been a lot of back and forth about the appointment. “Basically, I had to book it without him,” I told her, “because he hasn’t been responding to my emails, but I know he’s been opening them because there’s a Gmail setting that notifies you when your emails get read, so he’s definitely seen the message about today, and I thought he’d want to clear the air, you know? I mean, he still might. We haven’t fully ruled out an accident or something. Or he could be using a twenty-four-hour clock and have confused two p.m. with, like, fourteen, four p.m.—you know what, let’s call him, just to make sure.”
I took out my phone and discovered it was dead. “Do you mind if we use your landline?” I asked Helen. “We probably won’t get anywhere. It’s worth a try, though.”
I did not mention that I’d tried to call him, twice, from my cell phone in the waiting room. Helen plonked her big gray landline on the coffee table between us, an expression on her face I couldn’t quite read. I dialed Jon and, after some direction from Helen, was able to put the phone on speaker. I knew his number from memory. I also knew he never answered. I told Helen it would probably go to voicemail. She did her quietly understanding nod, and Jon answered on the first ring.
“Hello?”
“Oh, hello, Jon, this is Helen Yim, I’m a relational counselor, and—”
“Ah, yes. Hi. Is Maggie with you?”
I leaned forward and said I was there. I was there, and I was sorry, and I was feeling, like, maybe medically distraught, and it was so clear, now, hearing his voice, that I had made a mistake. I didn’t want to do more yoga or watch any more dismal old movies, didn’t want to be tactful and mature. It had been hard to be married, yes, but it was so much harder to be divorced. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wanted him to take me back. Helen’s breath caught in her throat. On the other end of the line, Jon was quiet.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Jon. “Fuck.”
“I mean . . . what do you think?” I asked.
Jon laughed dryly, incredulous. “Come on, Mags . . .”
I hadn’t heard him say my name in half a year. The tears felt very reasonable.
“Think about it,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I am a big enough person to admit that I still love you, that there’s still love in there, for me.”
“I know, you said that in your email.”
“Right, okay, so, what about you?”
“What about me?”
“You know,” I said. “Do you . . . ?”
“I really did love you, Maggie, b—”
“Well, then isn’t it kind of crazy to throw it all away because—what? It seemed bad for a minute? Because we had a few doubts? I feel like I’m definitely having an equal number of doubts about this whole divorce thing, so maybe that’s life, you know, maybe you never feel good about any of your choices and that’s normal, in which case we really shouldn’t get divorced because actually everything’s fine.”
Helen passed me a tissue, and I dabbed at my nose. When I pulled my hand away, a string of milky-green snot came with it. I balled up the tissue and stuck it up my nose. This was not how I’d imagined this conversation going. I realized with horror that what I’d sold—to Helen, to my friends, to myself—as a kind of exit interview had existed in my mind as a do-over. A chance to ask again, “Is this working?” and have him fight me, say yes.
“I’m not the bigger person,” I said, my voice taking on a bad-part-of-the-psychosexual-thriller quality. “I’ve done everything you’re supposed to do and it’s not working. I’m not going to find myself. I don’t even want to. I live in a basement. I’m having nightmares, and I keep spooning people I don’t know that well because I’m not used to sleeping with someone casually. I’m used to sleeping with you.”
“One of your voicemails said you had a boyfriend.”
“Oh, yeah, well,” I said, “I did for a second, but I don’t anymore.”
“From your messages it sounds like you’ve been dating a lot. I’m sure you’ll find someone else.”
“I don’t want to,” I cried, feeling oddly empowered by the depths to which I was sinking. That I could be this pathetic and still breathing was an achievement, in its way. “We made this big, huge decision, and now we have to go out there and choose something else, knowing we did it wrong the first time? Absolutely not, I’m sorry. No.”