Blue Plate Special (40 page)

Shocked with a strange relief I didn’t understand, I burst into tears.

“No!” I said. “I know, I’ve been so distant and strange. I’m so sorry. I’m not having an affair, that’s the last thing I need. But I needed you to ask me that.”

Then we had sex. It turned out to be the last time. Although things between us were warmer and calmer for the next two weeks, and it felt almost as if we had returned to each other, the marriage was over. Gradually, I became manic and panic-stricken again.

The night before he flew back down to Guadalajara to take down his show, as we sat in our living room at opposite ends of the long red couch, Jon looked at me with clear comprehension.

“You’re out of here, aren’t you,” he said.

I felt the same odd shock of relief I’d felt when he had confronted me in our hotel room.

“Yes,” I said, a little dazed. “I guess I am.”

Jon and I were together for a total of fourteen years; much of my grief at leaving him was that I was losing the person I trusted absolutely, whom I had so much deep history with. We were young when we got together, and now we were middle-aged. Our marriage had been good in so many ways. We were family; we supported each other, had each other’s back. We went through deaths and September 11 together. He helped my mother and me plan an intervention, over the course of two or three years, which ultimately failed, to try to get Emily and her family out of the Twelve Tribes. And, thanks to Jon, I had found my older half sisters, Caddie and Thea.

We were comrades in work. He believed in me unswervingly. Likewise, I had supported and encouraged him through the ups and downs in his own work—painting, music, photography.

We traveled together to Australia, Oaxaca, Israel, Mexico City, the Yucatán and Chiapas, Costa Rica, Panama, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Paris, Guadalajara. We endured and shared a daily life, two hardheaded, hotheaded, stiff-necked, hardworking firstborns, bustling and blustering through our days in Brooklyn, fighting all the time but always, in the end, managing to make a kind of peace.

Although I am technically the asshole who behaved badly and left, I know that it was no one’s fault. I feel that we were
tuned to radically different frequencies. We were temperamentally incompatible. It was as if we were two entirely different species trying to coexist in one cave. It was like a hypothetical
Star Trek
episode in which a Romulan falls in love with a Klingon and they genuinely try to adapt to each other’s ways and characters and then, in sorrow and heartbreak, fail.

And I could not stop yearning for some other, lighter, easier kind of connection. I craved true love with a soul mate so intensely, it felt sometimes to me as if I would die without it.

D
uring the time it took for our marriage to officially end, which is to say, during the time I was simultaneously trying to leave and trying to stay and consequently going slowly out of my mind and breaking both our hearts, Jon and I cried a lot in restaurants. Crying in restaurants had become something of a joke between us during the years when everyone was dying—we could never eat out without one or both of us shedding at least some tears and not infrequently weeping openly. But during our breakup, our restaurant crying surpassed anything we’d done before.

We did most of it at a local place called Sweetwater, where our favorite waitress—a beautiful, elfin, madcap girl—knew our favorite drinks and brought them to us without asking and stayed by our table to banter and kibitz. We tipped her very well, of course—we always tipped all waiters and waitresses very well but her most of all. She also somehow knew to stay away from our table if one of our heads was down, especially after four or five rounds of drinks—Herradura on the rocks for him and Sancerre for me.

I was the worst offender. Sometimes I had to duck my head for fifteen minutes at a time while unstoppable tears poured down my face onto my lap. But sometimes it was Jon. He was angry at me, and I was angry at him, because we had a heavy
weight of accumulated, unsolvable things between us, but most of all we were unbearably, bitterly, mutually sad.

Two years of marital therapy and determination hadn’t worked. I had given this marriage my all, and I was still frustrated and lonely. In October 2008, I finally left for good after too many episodes of self-medicating alcohol abuse, severe panic attacks, manic spells, depressive spells, out-of-control behavior, and overwhelming, debilitating sickness of soul. I left because I had to, but I ran away from my good, solid, kind husband in a state of terrible panic and grief. It was the hardest decision I’d ever made.

After we separated, we agreed to share custody of Dingo as long as we could, because he was both of ours, and we both loved him. And we kept eating together: food had been our greatest bond, and we weren’t ready to lose that, too. We continued to cry in restaurants, and we continued to joke about it—but now, instead of going home together to sleep in separate lonely tandem, we’d go home to our now-separate places to sleep alone.

Not once did I regret leaving—I was devastated and sad, yes, but I also felt suddenly miraculously better, as if I had been let out of a cage or freed from a spell. My psyche and soul, which I’d bent for so long to the task of staying in my marriage, sprang upright, relieved all at once of my impossible demands on them. I felt intact, autonomous, and whole—able to shape my behavior and thoughts according to my true desires and untrammeled will. I could breathe.

And I was far less lonely now that we were separated. Or rather, my loneliness took on a new quality—when I was living with Jon, it had been unacknowledged, diffuse, scattershot, and therefore dangerous to me and possibly others. Now that I was alone, I could discover safely, gingerly, and by degrees that I was sane.

For the first five months, I sublet my friend Jami’s loft a mile down the waterfront while she did a stint on the West Coast. When she returned, I moved back to Greenpoint, to a big, airy railroad apartment on Monitor and Norman, exactly one block away from the old apartment I’d lived in before I married Jon. I felt like I had come full circle, except that now my rent was $1,800 a month, and that was considered a bargain.

There’s a certain time of day, after sunset, when people naturally seem to feel the urge to gather together by a fire or a stove or a hibachi or another common source of heat and food and hunker down together to eat and drink. I started thinking of the blue hour as a hump I had to get over, a period of restless bleakness during which I yearned for company. I wanted to go out and eat in a restaurant just to be around other people. Suddenly I missed Jon, missed being married. On some especially blue evenings, I almost, but never actually, wished I had a roommate. And I regretted the solitary nature of the writer’s life—other people, normal working people, spent their days with coworkers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself. Of course, I had Dingo, but a dog just doesn’t cut it in the blue hour.

Although it was preferable to eat with other people, cooking for one, that one being my own damn self, was the most
effective way I had of shaking that sense of desolation. As soon as the sun went down, I went into the kitchen and started chopping things. I made just enough dinner for me, a simple and comforting and filling meal—one broiled chicken thigh, or even two, with a baked sweet potato and a side of garlicky red chard, for example; or cauliflower curry over basmati rice served with cashews, sriracha hot sauce, and cilantro; or a puttanesca with gluten-free pasta and anchovies, capers, olives, and hot red pepper flakes. I always made sure I had plenty of food in the refrigerator and cupboard; keeping the kitchen well stocked was another comforting bulwark against loneliness. And I became much neater as well. The Calyer Street house was generally messy and cluttered, dishes in the sink, laundry not put away, stuff covering the dining room table, and I didn’t care and neither did Jon. In my own place, I kept everything neat and shipshape.

When the meal was ready, I heaped up a plate, sat at a table set for one, and feasted. I looked out the window at headlights and taillights streaming beneath the spangled struts of whatever bridge I was looking at; Jami’s loft in South Williamsburg had a view of the Williamsburg Bridge, and my apartment on Monitor Street in Greenpoint had a view of the Kosciuszko Bridge. I found that I looked out the window a lot more often now than I had when there was someone else in the house with me, as if a view of the outside world were some instinctive way of feeling connected to other people. Sometimes I put music on. Sometimes I lit a candle. Sometimes I wolfed down the food so I could get back to my e-mail. I always drank wine.

These meals for one had a counterintuitive, resonant coziness. Eating by myself in my own apartment, single and alone again for the first time in many years, I should have felt, but did not feel, sad. Because I had taken the trouble to make myself a real dinner, I felt nurtured and cared for, if only by myself. Eating alone was freeing, too; I didn’t have to make conversation,
I got to focus on my food without thinking about anyone else’s needs at all, and that made it taste even better. I didn’t have to share my dinner or worry about taking too much food: it was all mine. I could sing along to the music and wear pajamas and eat with my hands and drink the whole bottle of wine and lick my plate clean. Who would know or care?

Dingo lay at my feet, and little by little, as the evening went on, his company became, once again, sufficient. When I was done with my food, if there was anything left and he was allowed to have it, I gave him a scrap or two. Then he and I went out into the now-dark evening and made our rounds together, ambling along the sidewalk. I waited while he sniffed intently at tree trunks, lampposts, and bushes and deposited a squirt of pee on everything, lifting his leg as high as he could get it and often missing the thing entirely, sending his little stream out into space to land on the sidewalk or street. He squatted; I hovered behind him with a bag at the ready, scanning for the nearest trash can.

Then we went home again and spent the rest of the evening together. I read a book or wrote e-mails; he lay nearby and watched me. He always turned in before I did.

Sleeping alone was another luxurious pleasure that should have been depressing but wasn’t. I got to hog the covers, sprawl across the whole mattress, use all the pillows, and move around as much as I wanted without worrying about disturbing anyone else. No one snored in my ear or talked in his sleep. No one woke me up. No one stole the covers or accidentally nudged me with his leg or got up and creaked the floorboards on the way to the bathroom. After my satisfying solitary dinner, I was the captain of my bed, the master of my sleep. But even so, I longed for a bedmate—the urge became stronger and stronger as the months went on. I became tired of the blue hour, cooking for one, eating everything all by myself, watching the cars streaming over the bridge, and daydreaming about falling in love.