“Why? Are you jealous?”
“Am I right?”
“Well, you’re not wrong. Jack is my ex-husband.”
Him
Tuesday 09:30
My ex-wife knows more about this than she is letting on.
I don’t understand how, but then I lived with the woman for fifteen years, was married to her for ten of them, and still always struggled to tell the difference between her truth and her lies. Some people build invisible walls around themselves in the name of self-preservation. Hers were always tall, solid, and impenetrable. I knew we were in trouble long before I did anything about it. Truth in my work is everything, but truth in my personal life can feel like a bright light I need to turn away from.
Nobody here knows that I was married to Anna Andrews. Just as I expect nobody she works with knows about me. Anna has always been intensely private, a condition she inherited from her mother. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Don’t ask, don’t tell works for me too when it comes to my life away from the job.
Like a lot of people who have been in a relationship for a long time, we would regularly say “I love you.” I don’t remember exactly why or when it started to lose its meaning, but those three little words turned into three little lies. They became more of a substitute for “good-bye”—if one of us was leaving the house—or “goodnight”—when we were going to sleep. We dropped the “I” after a while; “Love you” seemed sufficient, and why waste three words when you could express the same empty sentiment with two? But it wasn’t the same. It was as though we forgot what the words were supposed to mean. My stomach rumbles loudly and I remember how hungry I am.
* * *
When I was a child my mother didn’t let us eat between meals, and sweets were banned from the house. She worked as a receptionist at the local dentist and took tooth decay very seriously. The other kids would all take snacks to school—chips, candy bars, biscuits—I got an apple, or, on special occasions, a little red box of Sun-Maid raisins. I remember the rush of anger I felt whenever I found them in my packed lunch—the box said the raisins came all the way from California, and I realized that even dried fruit had a more interesting existence than eight-year-old me. The most I could hope for was a Golden Delicious, which was a misleading description because in my opinion those apples were neither.
The only time I ever tasted chocolate as a child was when my grandmother came to visit. It was our little secret, and it tasted like a promise. Nothing else I remember from my childhood gave me more unadulterated pleasure than those little brown squares of Cadbury Dairy Milk melting on my tongue.
I eat a chocolate bar every day now. Sometimes two if things are bad at work. No matter which one I buy, or how much it costs, it never tastes as good as the cheap chocolate bars my grandmother used to bring. Even they don’t taste the same. I think when we finally get what we think we want, it loses its value. It’s the secret nobody ever shares, because if they did, we would all stop trying.
Anna and I got what we thought we wanted.
It wasn’t a never-ending supply of chocolate bars, or a private island in the sun. First it was an apartment, then a car, then a job, then a house, then a wedding, then a baby. We followed the same safe paths that older generations had carved out for us, trampled into permanence by so many previous footsteps that it was only too easy to follow. We were so certain we were headed in the right direction, we left tracks of our own, to help future couples find their way. But we didn’t discover a pot of golden happiness at the end of the rite-of-passage rainbow. When we finally got where we thought we wanted to be, we realized that there was nothing there.
I think it’s the same for everyone, but as a species we are preprogrammed to pretend to be happy when we think we should be. It is expected of us.
You buy the car you always wanted, but in a couple of years you want a new one. You buy the house of your dreams, but then decide that your dreams weren’t big enough. You marry the woman you love, but then you forget why. You have a baby because that’s next on your list of things to do. It’s what everybody else does, so maybe it will fix the thing that you’ve been pretending wasn’t broken. Maybe a child will make you happy.
And she did for a while, our daughter.
We were a family and it felt different. Loving her seemed to remind us how to love each other. We had somehow made the most beautiful living thing that my eyes had ever seen, and I would often stare in wonder at our baby, amazed that two imperfect people could somehow produce such a perfect child. Our little girl saved us from ourselves for a short while, but then she was gone.