The Perfect Order of Things (19 page)

I woke up night after night at four in the morning. With only the ghostly whisper of air conditioning in my ears, as though I were in an airplane flying through the night, the rest of the passengers asleep, I felt that I had committed a terrible act for which I was about to be punished. But I couldn’t put my finger on what I’d done. I had that teetering, out-of-time feeling you have in those first waking seconds the morning after a cherished lover leaves you. You know something is wrong, but it takes a few seconds to remember what it is.

But what had I
done
? My children were asleep, safe and healthy in their beds. I had a job, a few friends, my ex-wives loved me, I didn’t have leukemia. I hadn’t written bad cheques or, like the young Rostov in
War and Peace
, lost a sickening amount of money at cards.

What
is
this horror? I asked myself.

Was it death? Was it Molly?

I wandered naked through the dark house. I looked in on my children: Franny, her bony arm thrown over her forehead as if protesting; her brother, chin pointed slightly upwards; he had kicked off his sheets and lay sprawled in his blue boxers. I covered him up. Kissed them both on the forehead, first one, then the other; and the sense that I was there to watch over them, that they slept such untroubled, exposed sleep because they knew they were safe, made the horror momentarily recede.

I slipped open the glass doors at the back of the house; you could hear the ocean from here;
boom
, a pause; then
boom
. I was going to go for a walk in the cold sand, but just out beyond the jacaranda bush I felt the presence of something that unsettled me.

What
is
this horror?

A horror of losing a life that I cherish? That someone will take it away? That circumstances will take it away? That I will do something to destroy it? (It takes years to build a good life, a long weekend to wreck it.) Or is this an
inherited
horror? A scared-of-the-dark horror: a million years of things trying to eat you, a sensation that is not easily dispelled by turning on the light?

The Russians (naturally!) have a name for this bout of middle-of-the-night terror. They call it Sparrow Nights. But what could it have been? In the years that have ensued, whenever these Sparrow Nights might occur, I have wondered again and again if I am (forgive the California tone of this) receiving a coded warning from the future, that a black train is coming up behind me; that it will catch me looking down the tracks in the
other
direction, wondering, Hmmm, what
is
that racket?

Or was it something less operatic, less
Russian
? Is it simply how your body feels when you’re over thirty and can no longer sleep like the child in the next room; when, as Leonard Cohen puts it, you “ache in the places you used to play”?

I stood for I don’t know how long in the open doors of our rented house; it was getting light over the ocean, a dazzling orange sky melting into pink melting into blue. How verblessly beautiful the world can be sometimes, I thought. Almost enough to make you believe in God.

To no one’s surprise, except mine, Molly left me several months later.

It happened on a Sunday. Dreadful things always happen on Sunday. Molly and I were in the living room of our small apartment and I was talking when her beautiful eyes filled with tears. “I can’t live here anymore,” she said. I put a consoling arm around her. “Then you mustn’t.” I was bluffing, for sure. I had rehearsed this very speech, it was part of my straighten-up-and-fly-right approach, a no-nonsense “buck up” to a young woman from an older man. One bad decision followed on the heels of another. Which is to say that I then went to a movie, leaving her alone in the apartment.

A gloomy winter darkness was settling over the city when I made my way back home across the park a few hours later. I saw Christmas lights blinking cheerfully in our apartment. She’s changed her mind, I thought, changed her mind and decided to stop whining, to “buck up.” I hurried up the stairs in a state of palpable relief, put my key in the lock and yanked open the door. Soft music played on the radio; the kitchen was immaculate, plates stacked in the holder, counters scrubbed. I went into the bedroom. Her cupboard was empty, the hangers still clinking. She must have put on the Christmas lights to lessen the impact of her departure.

At four o’clock the next morning, I rose from my bed like a madman, looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, looked at her empty cupboard again (no, I had not been dreaming) and lay back down in a fever. A sinister daybreak stole over the neighbourhood. Everything looked different: the mailman more coarsely featured; vicious children on their way to school. A pair of black dogs copulated on the front lawn.

Near noon, I called Molly’s father, a sweet-natured man, at his dental practice. Yes, he knew where she was and gave me the name. A girlfriend’s house. More dialing. Yes, she was there. (Everyone so kind this morning; was that, I wondered, because they wished me well or felt sorry for me and wanted to cushion the blow?) Molly came to the phone. Trying to find the right tone of jollity, I said, “Boy, I bet
you
had a pretty nutty sleep last night.”

Except she had no idea what I was talking about. Molly came over that evening; she looked ravishing, newly minted in a way that terrified me. I could feel my confidence ebbing away. I suggested it would be “all right” if she wanted to come back. No? I proposed marriage; I offered to give up drinking; I did everything but hang upside down from the shower rack by my feet. To all of which she said, sweetly, no, thank you.

Gradually, over the next few days, it occurred to me that this was a nightmare from which I was unlikely to awaken any time soon. I could feel it in my stomach, even before she could manage to say the actual words: I’d lost her. (Was
this
the black train from my Sparrow Night?)

Crazed with insomnia and not eating, I went to a psychiatrist M. recommended. (Perfect, your ex-wife looks after you when your lover bolts!) He was a vaguely Asian-looking man with a gentle manner and a handy prescription pad. “What does your gut tell you?” he said.

“That she’s not coming back.”

“Then you’re probably right,” he said, and scribbled a scrip for some little green pills that gave me about fifteen minutes’ relief before they wore off. I burnt through a month’s supply in a matter of days.

Not long after (by my standards, anyway) Molly took up with another man, a tall, failed musician (I add forgivingly) who worked at the same television network I did and had a desk not twenty feet from mine. Which meant that I saw him daily. Every time I turned the corner and headed through the newsroom to the elevators, I passed his desk. He worked in a position considerably beneath mine, but somehow, from the second I learned he was fucking my precious Molly, that seemed like a card in his favour: the signature of a rebel, of a man who wasn’t afraid of non-achievement. Whereas for me, my stature seemed like an indictment, a proof of my conformity, as if I had made a team that wasn’t worth making; had joined a golf club that seemed prestigious but once you made it inside revealed its mediocre trappings.

When I glimpsed the musician in the morning, my chest seizing like a car engine, I thought to myself, He has just left her bed; and a whole series of not very original but excruciating images would start up in my imagination. I saw her doing this, doing that. Sometimes, as I passed close by him in the cafeteria or in the queue at the elevator, I thought I could smell her on his skin.

It seemed to me that there couldn’t be a God, that no one could be so spiteful as to have my Molly leave me for—of all the humans on earth—a man who sat a few desks away. I know what you’re thinking, reader. You’re thinking, That’s the point, dummy. That’s
why
she did it. But I don’t think so. I think Molly chose him because she liked him; I don’t think, to be fair, she gave a second’s thought to where he sat or even worked in the early days of their love affair; and that when she did, she probably would’ve preferred for things to not have played out quite that way. I think Molly was glad to be rid of me, like an oppressive darkness standing over her, but I don’t think she wanted me to suffer. She simply wanted
away
.

But my God, coincidence can be cruel. One day, it was a late November afternoon, darkness growing over the city, grains of snow pelting soundlessly against the windows, I was drifting around the building up on the eighth floor; I was safe up there.
He
never went there. But as I was walking down a line of desks, producers busy, getting ready for the evening news, running footage in editing suites, scrolling down computer screens, I passed the desk of a young woman, Evelyn Dunne. I’d forgotten she worked up there. She had cream-white skin that erupted occasionally and a large, attractive bosom which was hard to take your eyes off, even when you were hearing about an earthquake in Mexico City, 25,000 people dead. (“Shall we wait till it gets to 50,000 and
then
lead with it?”) She was effervescent and friendly and always wore black.

I knew—because I’d seen them together early one morning in the flea market—that Evelyn had “dated” the musician. In fact, I’d met them together once. Molly, who had known him as a child, introduced us, a foursome on the summer sidewalk, no one suspecting how extraordinarily full of surprises life was and that these surprises awaited all four of us just down the road.

I passed by her desk, my head down. I wanted to avoid a conversation, with its inevitable adrenalin-prompting questions. “No, I don’t know what Molly’s up to these days.” Or, “Yes, I have lost a little weight.” I needn’t have worried. Evelyn was talking on the phone and had other concerns. I heard her say in a plaintive voice, a voice that vibrated with upset but tried to pass itself off as high-spirited, “But you never
call
me!”

In an instant, like being mugged from behind, I realized she was talking to the musician; that she’d been dumped; that he’d stopped coming around, stopped phoning because he had a new girlfriend. And that new girlfriend was Molly. My Molly.

It didn’t seem to matter where I went in the city; I couldn’t escape from the horror that she was gone (how I missed her body, her skin) and that she was fucking another man in all the ways that she’d fucked me. People repeat themselves, especially if it works.

I thought sometimes, imagining them together at night, that I was going to pass out from the pain. And that this pain might be doing actual physical damage to my brain.

Some afternoons, I’d look over; he had his long feet up on the desk, he was chatting breezily on the phone (while I looked on like Count Dracula), and I knew he was talking to
her
, that they were, as a couple does, exchanging the high points of their day, making a plan for the evening; joking perhaps about a little bit of naughtiness the night before. I was afraid, too, they were talking about me, a whispered, “Oh yes, he’s right over there. Looking pretty wrung out if you ask me.”

I expect my suffering, for she knew me well, knew I was suffering, gave Molly no pleasure. But I felt it gave
him
pleasure, the sight of me worn thin with jealousy and sleeplessness. I thought this because I’d thought that way about other men when I “took” their girlfriends away. (As if you can take away a happy woman!) But how ungenerous I’d been, how smug, how quietly convinced that superiority (mine) had taken the day. And now I was paying for it. Bent over, a sharp stick up my bum, I’d been forced to my knees, the object of public (I felt) ridicule (everyone knows!).

I entertained thoughts of death. I wished him dead. No, to be honest, I wished
her
dead. Not O.J. Simpson– style, but a car accident, a brain tumour, something where I might turn up at her funeral with a long face (I saw myself in an Edwardian jacket) and commiserate with her parents in a clear, sincere voice. A voice that sought to pass off relief—he’s not fucking her anymore—as sincerity.

I often thought, getting up in the night to change my sweat-soaked T-shirt for the third time, I thought: I’d be better off dead than feeling like this. I looked at my gaunt face in the bathroom mirror, the light too bright, and daydreamed of catching a terminal disease. Not to punish her. But as a release for me. An honourable release. You can despise a man for committing suicide but not for dying of a disease, I “reasoned.”

That February, I woke up too early every morning; it was just getting light. It was always getting light. How will I get through the whole day? This endless, interminable day, a series of grinding, meaningless, rewardless exertions. I wandered naked around the apartment. I imagined her in her bed with the musician, I saw the light come through their curtained windows, I saw them stir slowly from sleep, I saw them . . . why go on? There were mornings when I hurried over to Catherine’s house (my second ex-wife now for six years), when I banged on the door at six-thirty in the morning, when I stood in the darkness of her bedroom saying over and over, “I can’t stand
another
day of this . . .”

“Get in bed,” she’d say. “Get in bed and go to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep. I cannot endure the horrors of what I see when I close my eyes.”

“Then let me sleep,” she said softly. “I have to sleep.”

How could an ex-wife be so kind, so gentle? How lucky I was.

I waited three months for Molly to come back. I sat on the end of my bed looking over the park that lay just beneath my window; there were children who came there to skate every morning; in the afternoon, teenagers played ball hockey; at night, when the lights overhead came on and washed the ice in a surreal brightness, couples, sometimes with a small child in a snowsuit between them, skated around and around and around; at midnight, the lights went off,
poof
, the ice fell into darkness; and then little by little, a dreamy oval came back into focus under the moonlight.

I lost twenty pounds. I considered a conversion to Christianity—anything to make her come back. I burst into tears in restaurants, went home with a transvestite by mistake. Why did I never, not once, call her up and say simply, Please come back to me? It wouldn’t have done the cause any good, I know that, but it would have done
me
good, just to say it, just to have the courage to put out my hand, knowing it was going to get slapped and returned empty. But I was afraid to hear the actual words, their finality. When a woman leaves you, I’ve learned, she tends to have done her homework before she hits the door. The sound you hear is the click of a vault closing and you’re on the wrong side of it.