Divorce Is in the Air (27 page)

Once we were watching a nature program, and I waited for her to get bored with hunting and fishing and fall asleep before I started fondling her; this time, I was interested only in the asexual function of her breasts. But Helen wasn't showing any gestational signs, and I dismissed the idea of a phantom pregnancy. I didn't have the skill I do now when it comes to the Internet, and I had to make do with the
Larousse Medical Dictionary
. I remember molar inspections, and that one night I delicately separated her toes to rule out the possibility that she was growing fins. It may seem excessive, but it was very important to me to be sure that the emotional darkness squeezing Helen's spirits was temporary, that it wouldn't be impossible for me to pull her out of that state. The wretched reason couldn't be rooted that deep in the past. I needed to convince myself that we weren't going to live like a couple of stinking rags from then on just because Rupert had imagined his old age would be spent with a little Mike, John, or Brad beside him (didn't matter, just someone who could pee standing up), watching baseball on TV, hunting butterflies, or whatever it is that macho Montana men do.

When she started to go really downhill, I bought a couple of serious books on depression, and it felt as if I were rolling up my sleeves to take on a physical task: force open a door, carry furniture up the stairs, push a car until the motor starts. I faced Helen's sadness the same way I had overcome my juvenile problems: by injecting the heart with a shock of adrenaline. Of course, Daddy Rupert wasn't a window or a motor, nor could I grab him by the wrist or wring his neck. He was little more than a slippery impression, and we were defenseless before him.

Enlisting the same passion with which I'd turned to the classic repertoire of the jealous and paranoid husband, I launched her into rounds of appointments with psychiatrists I paid to find a physical cause for that rampant anxiety. I know no one who passed her on the street and saw the rack on her would believe me, but the truth is that during that time the only part of Helen that interested me was her brain: the very marrow of our problems.

Last Thursday at Pedro's apartment I found a BBC documentary about some neurologists who injected a chemical dye into a brain and could trace the movement of a thought. When the cycle of reason is short and obsessive, it's spectacular—you know, those people so terrified by germs they need to wash their hands every three minutes. You can see the electrical tracks of the ideas biting their own tail; it reminded me of a carousel. Back then, though, they just stuck Helen into a sarcophagus and irradiated her head until they had a blueprint of her brain. Dr. Fronkonstine showed us some small dark spots: weak material, areas that didn't get enough minerals, something like that. It was amazing to think that all our malaise could depend on those shady areas moving across the dunes of cerebral material like clouds' shadows. But I wasn't about to buy any lithium or mercury tablets. I'd already seen what they could do when we set them loose in Mother's brain.

“Other than that, there is no lesion. You can always go to a psychologist; they're the best-equipped healers of the soul—we've got them more controlled than any other kind of shaman.”

Healthy atoms, clean molecules, robust fibers. In the taxi I realized that a smile was showing through Helen's usual sad rictus, as if in the end she were happy not to have to dilute Daddy's black influence within a broader scheme of neural deterioration. She seemed pleased to keep the face-off going.

Rupert was hoping for a son and he got a daughter, a girl he had not wished for with all his heart—that was it? Are we really so simple, so predictable? None of the people who had known me six years earlier (living it up on the southern coast, celebrating the degree that qualified me to direct the businesses Dad started and that, as I boasted to my friends back then, pretty much ran themselves) would have believed that some girl born five thousand miles away was going to stick me with her family mess and impose a lifestyle on me that consisted of growing old next to a head case. Of course, Helen denied that her torment would last long: it would be over once Daddy was “no longer alive.” The sinister echoes of that decree held me obliquely responsible that Rupert hadn't kicked the bucket yet. What did my sweet love expect me to do? Buy a plane ticket and drive along back roads to Fuokville, where I'd stab my father-in-law with a marble-handled letter opener? If a continent of salt water wasn't enough to cauterize her wounds, I didn't believe putting the planet of the dead between the two of them would work either. That imbroglio was the most interesting part of her past, it was stuck to her, so hot you couldn't separate it without pulling off her whole skin. Freud rules because he lets you interpret your pathetic sex life as if it were some extraordinary entanglement, so complicated and steamy. Really though, it should be against the law to dump all that shit on yourself.

Our life started to burn out before our eyes. She lost interest in making love, and tried to keep me satisfied with an early-morning oral offensive. And I won't deny it, that dawn exercise was a powerful reason to stick around. I must be true to my priorities, they're certainly more loyal than people, they won't just up and leave you overnight. It filled me with tender pride that my physical self, my precious soma, still responded to the initial attack and to the delicate (and mortifying) slow motion that followed, and which, after an early period when I employed any trick I could to keep her there another half-minute, Helen had come to dominate with icy mastery. But even when blurred by waves of oxytocin, my mind would have been grateful for any hesitation, an impulse to kiss, an attack of modesty, an embrace. Blow jobs are overrated: if they're dragged out for too long there's something decidedly gay in the passivity you're reduced to. Helen served me too many portions of the same dish: a juvenile recipe, glazed in a sickly sweet sauce. She no longer had the will to stew us with an adult palate in mind. I guess some emotion was a lot to ask for; she was already making such an effort. Plus, the pills (which she started taking on the sly) were like a shovel that can't distinguish the quality of the earth it digs up: as they heaved the pain from her mind, they also yanked the roots of desire from her body. To go to bed seriously with a man, a woman has to feel complete. She can't have parts of her brain asleep.

Helen was a woman who had to make an effort to read headlines to the end, but one day she asked me to go with her to the bookstore, where she stocked up on esoteric tomes, trying out self-help, willpower-building, family horoscopes. She got interested in a certain therapist named Jovanotti, who advised using one's bodily fluids to draw pictures of all one's relatives in order to overcome the coercive behaviors that we carry (according to him) fossilized in our chests. (And how was I to help her—me, who wanted only for my father to return, so I could ask his advice again, feel the touch of his hand?) She experimented with a spiritualist diet, and I was forced to eat out because that slop was so vile. Helen switched from one approach to the next without seeing any one method through to its end. Nor did it seem that delving deeper into “say yes” or chromotherapy was really going to improve our situation.

Helen barely mentioned what she hoped to find in those books that she left open like bored crows, their spines creased end to end with a thick wrinkle. But then I'd see her tuck her hair behind her ears (have I mentioned that she was—she is—left-handed?) and I'd watch, motionless and spellbound, as the locks fell loose again one by one to form a new fringe. When I looked at all that beauty polluted by the pills, I knew that Helen was searching for a bit of hope. I don't know how things work for horses or beavers but when it comes to humans, as long as you still have words there's always some hope left. The tongue passes over the lips and the words leave behind a residue of energy. That's the vital compensation for using them, that's the trick—keep ideas active, shake up your thoughts. Helen would have gotten some comfort just reading aloud the label on the pasta sauce.

Do you have any idea how many women carry magic stones around, spread potions over their bodies to prevent aging, monitor the movements of the stars to fit the small events of their lives into some kind of cosmic causality? How many believe that they are watched over by a friendly, superhuman presence? That the universe, the interminable mass that spreads out and folds in on itself, peppered with incandescent bodies, insensate material, and stardust, is conspiring in their favor? There are no reliable statistics, but let's say one in every three women in the comfortable, urban West is going to turn to pills (as if there were a world free of suffering folded inside them). Look, I don't think all of you are bonkers. I tend to think that something isn't right in women's brains, that there's a piece that breaks off from the inner workings of sanity ahead of time, like a built-in obsolescence. One night you lay your head on the pillow, and something cracks inside it and breaks. You get up, frightened, and wait for it to pass, but the day spreads through the streets and afternoon arrives and your fear surges because those gears are still busted. And don't think I'm just ranting, there's a physiological basis to this, actually. The hormones you all have floating around in your bodies like invisible medusas don't sweat out enough of the substance of happiness. Helen's must have been practically all dried up.

She didn't like the beach anymore, and walks in the mountains were too much for her. Her dejection on opening her eyes ruled out any plan I might propose. I missed the way alcohol used to have more exhilarating effects on her than a stupor; I missed feeling the contractions of her body when I grabbed her neck with the firm sweetness of my desire. I was bored, I was imprisoned in a life that wasn't for me. Our fights stopped seeming like two splendid currents of energy that tripled their force on meeting. Helen's dazed voice conveyed only serial complaints:

“I want to leave Barcelona.”

“This apartment is a rip-off.”

“I want to leave, we have to get out.”

“Barcelona, it's the city's fault.”

By now “Helen's situation” was swallowing up our days. I could still corner her verbally, but that's like using physical strength against a virus, against falling rain. You can't imagine the patient fortitude weak people have until you're shackled to one. You can't understand how they just absorb all warmth, all happiness, all the moments that beg to be enjoyed with all your heart. The only part of the day I could enjoy was its first minutes, when Helen amassed heat under the sheets, a little animal dirty with sleep, and I took the chance to wrap her in embraces salvaged from our best times together. What can you do when someone sinks so deeply into despondence? Even if you stick your arm into the slippery hollow after them, there's no guarantee you'll get it out whole again, the way it was before. How do they remember their former lives in that doleful state? I like to think they still keep some sense of their old relationships, even if the view is as poor as when we look out at the spinning galaxy from Earth: a swarm of points blazing in space.

I'd get up and make myself a coffee. The water for the shower would heat up and I could hear the apartment's circulation stirring, its metallic veins, pipes, and conduits. I'd shower fearfully, brush my teeth naked and terrified, waiting for Helen's consciousness to turn on and for the black juices to reconfigure the awareness of her weaknesses: how far she still had to go to get better, the man she lived with, and how little she could expect from him. In the mirror I saw that the discreet veins that irrigated my cheeks had spilled into rosacea. I swear I could hear the sheets squealing when Helen moved. My hands trembled, I couldn't take three steps without feeling that bitter mass of anxiety climbing up my esophagus.

“John.”

And it could be anything.

I didn't even seriously think about taking a lover. Outside in the street the salacious parade of pleasing shapes continued, and what happened happened, but I won't even go so far as to call it an incident. Let's just say that she had three kids and ten years on me, and an opening so wet I could barely feel anything. Really, the thing was an arrangement between her and her fluids. I chose her because it had been years since I'd kissed a woman that dark. She didn't take off her bra, and her face barely registered any pleasure. These things happen, but I didn't feel I had the strength to initiate a real entanglement: the pretending, the duplicity, the phone calls and agreements, the emotional roller coasters, my husband, your wife, the ebb and flow of everyday life, the ebb and flow of feelings about the poor cuckolds, united without knowing each other by an intangible lubricious thread….To promise loyalty to a person with whom you bake yourself in pleasure with a sauce of betrayal, to feel second fiddle and to feel special, indispensable and a nuisance, to go over your e-mail, erase the text messages, jump every time the doorbell rings, provide explanations and hold back information in both directions, evaluate the long-term value of the new interest, rate the worth of what remains of a life together, reach stupid compromises with yourself, with two sets of emotions, survive that instant when you'd get rid of both of them, let the apex of sentimentality pass when you convince yourself that there really is a magical combination of words that would allow both love stories to flourish and be celebrated and welcomed under the blue and indifferent skies, that the two poor women could meet and learn to respect each other. I don't have the makings of a double agent: my fibs only grow in soils of spontaneity. There must have been a mistake about my date of birth because if anyone is not a Gemini, it's me. I'm not made for a double life.

And don't think my heart's wearing some kind of hair shirt (it's just a weak lump, a mass in need of coddling). I admire down to my bones the thousands who, though they can't say “hi” on a stage without their voices strangling into a falsetto, still manage to weave complex webs of deceit around themselves. They dupe the women and men who know them best in the world, and they happily stroll through their half-paid-off houses clutching a time bomb. What men! What women! It's not a moral question, I follow my desire wherever it leads—frustration isn't my style. It's just that we inveterate monogamists don't find it appealing to screw around with substitutes. The girls we choose are the ones we desire most.