He is famously kind, my husband. Always sending money to those afflicted with obscure diseases or shoveling the walk of the crazy neighbor or helloing the fat girl at Rite Aid... How then is he married to me? I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves “comfortable” when what they mean is decadently rich. You’re so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it.
I have a chunk of vomit in my hair, I realize right before class. Chunk is maybe overstating it, but yes, something. I wash my hair in the sink. I am teaching a class called “Magic and Dread.”
There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.
What Keats said: No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.
What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.
The Yoga People always travel in pairs, their mats under their arms, their hair severely shorn in that new mother way. But what if someone sucker punched them and took their mats away? How long until they’d knuckle under?
There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.
What Ovid said: If you are ever caught, no matter how well you’ve concealed it / Though it is as clear as the day, swear up and down it is a lie / Don’t be too abject, and don’t be too unduly attentive / That would establish your guilt far above anything else / Wear yourself out if you must and prove in her bed, that you could / Not / Possibly be that good, coming from some other girl.
Taller? Thinner? Quieter? Easier, he says.
The wife goes to yoga now. Just to shut everyone up.
She remembers the first night she knew she loved him, the way the fear came rushing in. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it. Why would you ruin my best thing?
Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.
Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.
What Kant said: What causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing.
Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.
Some nights in bed the wife can feel herself floating up towards the ceiling. Help me, she thinks, help me, but he sleeps and sleeps.
The wife reads about something called “the wayward fog” on the Internet. The one who has the affair becomes enveloped in it. His old life and wife become unbearably irritating. His possible new life seems a shimmering dream. All of this has to do with chemicals in the brain, allegedly. An amphetamine-like mix, far more compelling than the soothing attachment one. Or so the evolutionary biologists say. It is during this period that people burn their houses down. At first the flames are beautiful to see. Then when the fog wears off, they come back to find only ashes. “What are you reading about?” the husband asks her from across the room. “Weather,” she tells him.
How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.
If only they were French, the wife thinks. This would all feel different. But no, feel isn’t the word exactly. What is it that the grad students say? Signify.
The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)
She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn’t dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts.
The thing is this: Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him. “It was a fucking miracle that I found him,” she tells the philosopher.
The wife has a little room now, one that looks out over the garden. She makes a note to herself about the book she is writing. Too many crying scenes.
What Rilke said: Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.
I’m hungry. I want to eat something delicious, have a beer and a cigarette. I’ve come back to Earth full of desires. The air tastes good. This is what the Japanese reporter said when he came back from the space station. In the morning, the wife lets the dog out: Hey a squirrel! Hey a tree! Hey a piece of shit! Hey! Hey! Hey!
The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention. The visitor was displeased. “Is that all?” So Ikkyu obliged him. Two words now. Attention. Attention. Sometimes the wife still watches him sleep. Sometimes she still strokes his hair in the middle of the night and half asleep he turns to her.
What the rabbi said: Three things have a flavor of the world to come: the Sabbath, the sun, and married love.
~ all from Dept. of Speculation, which I bought and kept reading after 1% obviously, having the uncanny experience not for the first time that the book I was reading was also the one I had been writing. The wife, who is sometimes "I", stays with her husband and he stays with her despite the mistress having had better hair. (Note, however: there is no mother-in-law in the story.)
