“I’ll be right back,” I said. I got the bags and The Bell Jar (a little on the nose but whatever) from the bedroom and went back to the living room. I did the two bags off the coffee table in front of him because what the fuck was the difference?
He kept talking in that nice way of his about how he had tried and how it was nobody’s fault. He sighed and said, “We can stop pretending.” What the hell did that mean? He had been pretending? He had tears in his eyes. He was serious.
“What do you mean, pretending?”
“Didn’t it feel like we were going through the motions?”
“No, I love you, and you’re leaving me for no reason.”
He stared directly at me with tears running down his face, and said, “Fuck you. This is what you wanted.”
What the fuck was he talking about? I wondered, after I slowly came to from binge watching Don’t Trust the B- - in Apartment 23 and doing all the dope I had. I had completely lost my tolerance and kept nodding out. I would jerk awake and find myself bent over, my head almost touching the floor. It sounded like Peter was dragging shit across the bedroom floor.
This is what you wanted. Oh. What I said to Amy on the phone. “I wish Peter would just leave already. I treat him like shit.” He must have overheard me when I was smoking outside. My stupid mouth saying stupid things. Had I meant it? Was this exactly what I wanted? I snorted another bag. No more being scared that the biggest thrills left for me were buying things at Crate & Barrel. I was free. Anything and nothing could happen.
In the future everyone will ask me, “Why did your marriage end? What did you do?”
Peter and I walked over to Elizabeth’s. She sold me five bars of Xanax and gave me a hug. She was strung out. Her apartment told the story. All the lights were off, and there was a candle, and her laptop was playing a show with no laugh track. I wanted to stay, but Peter was outside waiting.
I’d never learned how to get dumped. I didn’t know how to not take it personally.
“Peter, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean any of it. I’m not pretending. I love you.”
“No, Maya, you did mean it. All you do is push yourself away from me. I can feel it.”
“It’s scary to emotionally depend on someone.”
“It’s supposed to be hard. That’s why it means something, and that’s why it never meant anything to you,” he said.
“You don’t want to be alone, Peter, c’mon.”
“Maya, I started looking as soon as we got back, and I’ve already put the deposit down.”
“Where is it?”
“Bushwick.”
“That’s what fucking happens. You fall in love, and in one way or another, you end up in metaphorical or literal Bushwick. This place of just total shit.”
“I’d rather live in Bushwick than here,” he said.
This human being would rather get drunk in a shitty apartment in fucking Bushwick and risk dying alone than be with me.
One day I’ll be strong enough, I thought. One day I’ll just go and jump off a bridge.
The following weeks were the opposite of a blur. Raw and sharp. I cried so much I didn’t even know what I was crying about. I forgot to eat. Dread was the first thing I felt when I opened my eyes. Peter gave me money all the time, and I took Xanax and heroin all the time. We both knew it was the only way he would get any sleep.
I told him I would kill myself, because no one was allowed to just leave someone like that. He didn’t respond. Was I actually going to have to kill myself to prove a point?
I looked out the window at a child wearing an oversized book bag in the courtyard, waiting for the bus. There was a world where kids went to schools and the postal service mailed letters so people could communicate, and there were train conductors conducting trains and buses picking people up so they could get from one place to another, and there were nurses using wet Q-tips to moisten the lips of people in comas and people who volunteered to cradle babies who didn’t have parents. And there were wars, and people died. And I was always in a room, crying.
I lost my job at the bookstore. This douchebag had shown up, who was supposed to be the one to supervise textbooks but was put in charge of the whole staff instead. This made Michelle quit. And then, one by one, he fired everyone. We had all been friends, and now we were like a slowly dying family. We talked a lot of smack, but no one actually wrote nasty letters to the owners. No one quit. We each waited our turn. We looked at the douchebag’s blog and laughed at him for being a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast and groaned at what an awful human being he was. In one post he wrote, “Had to fire a girl today. But she couldn’t get with the program.” He said things like, “Get with the program.” People who worked there for years were booted and replaced by eighteen-year-old girls the douchebag called “sweetheart.”
I don’t know why it is that when some men call you “sweetheart” or “honey,” it makes you blush, yet when other men do it, you want to hurl.
There was no order or reason to it. He fired everyone, the hard working along with the lazy. After the firings got underway, every time a customer asked about a book, I would go on Amazon and show them how much cheaper they could buy it from there.
I stole everything I could get my hands on.
I watched everyone get replaced before the e-mail arrived at two in the morning informing me I didn’t need to bother coming in the next day.
I looked on craigslist for jobs.
I finally landed a temp job at a labor union in the East Twenties. The middle-aged man who interviewed me leered. He asked me personal questions (“Do you live alone, or?”), made stunted small talk (“I used to live in the city. .”), and periodically checked to see if my breasts were still where they were the last time. He was cross-eyed, so he could check on both. He was one of those old, gross men who went through life trying to muster the courage to commit to sexually harassing someone instead of just being a slimy perv.
I took the place of a woman who had kept a calendar with cats that had very unoriginal things to say about Mondays.
Boys wearing headphones inhabited the beige cubicles dividing the office floor. Nobody talked. I wanted work to be around people. But I was always alone there.
I told Peter to pack while I was at work, but he didn’t. He did it right in front of me instead. He stood in front of the bookshelf with his eyes squinted, looking for his books. When we got married, we threw out duplicate copies of the books we owned.
“Just give me the shittier pots and pans, but don’t take them all,” I begged him. He told me I should have felt lucky he was taking as little as he was. He didn’t have to be nice anymore. It really didn’t fucking matter what we said or did to each other now.
All the best memories suddenly rematerialized the moment he told me he was leaving. Those fuzzy memories of the beginning. Going to the beach, laughing in bed, making love while Steve Earle blared on the stereo. The way he always held the umbrella to completely cover me. The human mind plays the worst tricks.