Watching me, this home-making must have seemed eccentric: an animal building by instinct, from sticks, debris, its own fur and bodily fluids. No one knows why.
No one asked me to do it, did they?
Perhaps.
Postcard #–11—Away
(This postcard is divided into six squares, five of which show ancient monuments, the sixth, the hotel.)
Rewind. I am at home. My soon-to-be-ex husband is away. Like two wooden people on a cuckoo clock, one is in when the other is out. The whole day has been calm. I had forgotten how calm home could be. The more I wriggle toward divorce the more painful I know it will be, the closer I get to the terrible blank pain I felt yesterday when I realized I had persuaded you to leave, calm panic with no prospect of an end. But the more I work my way toward it determinedly, the more triumphant I feel. I do not understand, nor can I predict, what I want. I can trust only the leaving. It must happen. It is happening already.
Did I spend all my time waiting for the moment you’d be gone? And, now you have, will I wait hopelessly for your return? Wanting you gone is such a delicate mechanism. How much of you, even absent, there is from which to defend myself. I’d looked forward for weeks to your departure. No more holding my breath in the evenings, hearing you breathing in the other room. Perhaps I will even use the other room to read my books.
Now that I no longer have you, I no longer have the kind of loneliness in which to wait for you. I no longer have to wait, but I have not yet developed the leisure to read a book. It is a different kind of loneliness. Perhaps, at first, it is worse.
I will shepherd my melancholy, turn it into something else. I’ll have to. Learn this other kind of loneliness: you won’t be seeing him again.
Postcard #–10—Pockets
(This postcard shows a model on a generic beach, her back turned to us, the hotel’s name below her deck chair. The hotel is a chain hotel. This branch does not have a beach.)
Rewind. One of marriage’s hidden violences of thought. When you were away I liked to look through your pockets. Perhaps I would find some kind of evidence of something, I don’t know what. It’s a husband who has pockets and who has things to put into them. My pockets are small, sometimes stitched (a reminder that anything I put in would spoil the line). I seldom put things in my pockets but you overstuffed yours: receipts, notes, parking fines of many months’ passing. You wore through the bottom of your pockets until things fell into the linings of your clothes.
Whatever I found there, it never told me anything about you.
Postcard #–9—Drunk time
(This postcard shows a hotel bathroom. It is empty.)
Rewind: At home, I’d lurch toward drunk twice a week, sometimes more. Always I did it while waiting. And, when I did, I could smell the moldiness, that particular floral eau de javel, whatever, that is more rotten than rotten. It’s either decay, or its opposite. But I don’t need to drink as much now you are not here. I don’t fret in the evenings that you are doing something alone when you could be doing something companionable, though I am reading here alone, as usual, and in bed. I am allowed to. I disapproved of what you did with your evenings. Each harmless thing you did seemed an affront.
I had forgotten that I am allowed to be divorced. Here in the provinces, I know no divorced people. A friend in London emailed, wrote, Oh, all my friends are doing it. And I felt normal again.
Postcard #–8—Evening
(This postcard shows half a gilt-framed mirror. The rest of the postcard has the hotel’s address. I have not seen a mirror like this in the hotel.)
Rewind: Tears left me with a headache — or is it the cold? I sought the illusion of companionship and thought it would be okay, you and me at home working side by side at work that was not home work. Instead I found that you made noises and I made noises, and they were wrong noises. Perhaps it’s okay not to know each other, to preserve unknowing. Perhaps that’s what marriage is. We stopped working. I read. You watched TV.
I used to be unable to sleep in the same bed as you. Then I was unable to eat at the same table. There was always somewhere I was not doing something with you.
Not a good night, then, nor the couple of nights before. And the bad nights still outnumber the good nights. And keeping notebooks means discontent, and discontent means writing.
Postcard #–7—Married time II
(This postcard is a view across a hotel room from the made bed to the window. The window has net curtains. The photographer could be sitting on the bed.)
Rewind: Tonight you went for a drink after work. I had already been looking after our children and their friends for a long while. I had noticed the clock five minutes, two minutes, before, then two minutes, five minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour after. When you got in touch I acquiesced, politely, and asked if you would like to stay out later. That’s marriage, I guess. We have to make room for each other. I am in a room, at home, and you are not. Tonight I am having a married experience and you are not, as you would also go out for a drink with colleagues if you were not married, but I would not be here in this room if I were not. Marriage is our constraints in relation to each other. Married time is time with the corners trimmed off.
You told me:
You have it better than other women.
Or was it:
Other women have it worse than you?
You never asked if I had it better or worse than other men.
Or whether I have it better or worse than you.
Postcard #–6—Angry time
(This postcard shows the hotel’s rooftop pooclass="underline" it is empty.)
You tell me you want to be with me.
You only tell me that when you are not here.
When you are not here, you do not tell me where you are or when you will be coming back.
That would be okay, if we weren’t “together.”
We are “together” but we are seldom together.
You say we spend all our time together.
We are frequently at home together, but seldom in the same room.
Home contains not being together; it is essential to it.
Here I am at home where you are not. I stink of home — is that why you won’t come near me? I hate what home has made of me. I hate the home that we have made.
You have left me with home to care for. It is your home as well as mine. I have not made this home alone. I don’t mind home work. I mind that you don’t see it. I don’t ask that you help me, I only ask that you see me doing it. I gave up asking for help a long time ago. Now, I ask for nothing, and you are able to give me less than nothing.
Give her a home. Who is it gives the home to the other?
Because home is measured in time, not space, you will give it to me again.
You might give it to me every day.
It is rational that this should obsess me. Given my position, I am allowed to be obsessed by this.
A reasonable wife would leave you alone.
A reasonable wife would be at home with your not being at home. When she is at home, she is married. When she is absent from home, she is not married. When she is at home, not being married is absent from her: she is absent from part of herself. She is absent from it all the time she is there.