A Separation(6)

I’ll wait, I told her. You won’t come back until you find him, she said. You must find him. I will, I said. But I’m not sure I am the person who should be looking for him.

If she had listened, if she had stopped to ask what I meant, I would have told her, standing in this hotel room, the secret of our separation no longer felt valid—but she did not pause or even appear to hear me. You won’t come back until you find him, she repeated, you must bring him back. She sounded unhinged, it was essentially a terrible relationship. It was no wonder Christopher had been running away from her the whole of his life, or since he had become an adult man—he was always running away before he was running toward anything.

I lowered the phone. I told Kostas that they could pack the rest of Christopher’s things into his cases and when he returned he could tell them what to do himself. Kostas nodded and then I turned and left the room. I was free to go.





2.





But I did not leave. I told Kostas that I would stay another day or two, it was very pleasant at the hotel. To sit and do nothing in the perfect weather. I had my lunch outside and then I swam in the swimming pool, which was as warm as Kostas had promised, more like an enormous bath than a swimming pool. Isabella had been correctly informed, it was a very nice pool. I read a little, I had some work to do but nothing very taxing, nothing that was urgent.

And I did not mind this delay, this waiting, which on the face of it did not look like hesitation. But until a decision is acted upon, it is only hypothetical, a kind of thought experiment: I had decided to ask Christopher for a divorce but I had not yet committed the act, I had not looked at him and spoken the words. It was important, this act of enunciation, these words, or rather this one word—divorce—which thus far had been notably absent from our conversation, and which, once spoken, would change the course of our separation inalterably.

Of course it had been in the air—as the endgame, the worst-case scenario, an inevitability or relief. The word was weighted, ?a me pèse, a condition of adulthood. In childhood, words are weightless—I shout I hate you and it means nothing, the same can be said for I love you—but as an adult, those very words are used with greater care, they no longer slip out of the mouth with the same ease. I do is another example, a phrase that in childhood is only the stuff of playacting, a game between children, but then grows freighted with meaning.

How many times had I myself spoken these words? Only once since becoming an adult. Christopher and I were married in a courtroom and arrived only minutes before the brief ceremony, there was no rehearsal, the judge assured us that we need only repeat after him, even an idiot couldn’t get it wrong. And so when I said I do before the assembled group of our family and friends, it was for the first time, or at least the first time since childhood.

I remembered being surprised by the power of the ritual, the ceremonial act of speaking these words, which took on a deep and almost maniac significance. It suddenly made sense that these words—I do—would be paired with the archaic and unreasonable phrase until death do us part, which was morbid and apparently out of place in what was meant to be a joyful occasion, but which nonetheless served a clear purpose: to remind the participants of the crazed wager they were making in this act, this act being marriage.

I tried to remember what else I had felt during the ceremony, not so many years ago but long enough for my memory to be uncertain. I thought there had been a brief moment of terror but mostly I had been happy, I had been very happy, for a long time it was a good and optimistic marriage. For all these reasons, it was difficult to contemplate the pronouncement of the word that would destroy all that optimism, however outdated—and so although I remained at the hotel in order to ask Christopher for a divorce, I found that I was in no hurry to confront him, I had made a decision that I believed to be absolute, and yet I could have sat in the sun for days, for weeks, without moving, without doing anything, without speaking a word.

Later that afternoon, a couple arrived who could only have been the pair that was to occupy Christopher’s room. They stumbled through the lobby already drunk, they must have begun in the car, the same driver who had delivered me to the hotel followed them into the lobby dragging three large cases behind him. Briefly, his eyes met mine, but apart from a small nod he did not acknowledge me, he had his hands full with the couple.

They looked Scandinavian, both pale and blue-eyed and essentially incongruous in this landscape, for which they had not been designed. The woman’s hair was bleached blond and the man was somehow already sunburnt, his skin a hectic and uncomfortable red. They were evidently very fond of each other. They kissed constantly, even from across the lobby I could see how they were flexing their tongues in an impressively muscular fashion, they could not give Kostas—he was on duty behind the desk, his face stoic—more than a single piece of information—their name, their country of origin, their date of departure—before they were at it again.

Kostas stared at the wall behind the embracing couple as he told them that breakfast was served on the terrace, asked which newspaper they wanted in the morning, whether they would be needing a wake-up call, although it was obvious they would not. The pair seemed undeterred by the utter quiet of the hotel. When they spoke they were overloud and giddy, they allowed their voices to carry, it was as if they believed themselves to be checking into a hotel in Las Vegas or Monaco.