F*ck Marriage(3)

That’s the way it goes during the death of a marriage: the denial, the anger, the grieving, and then the inevitable purging of soul.





Chapter Three





New York bulges in front of me, splitting her city seams across the horizon. Excitement crackles in my belly as I watch her come into view. I’ve been ridiculed for my love of this city back home, but I don’t care. She’s testy, ambitious; everything about her pulses lightning fast. She’s easy on the eyes and hard on the nose. Warm wind blows through the open window and I crinkle my nose at the smell of exhaust fumes and piss. Weak, Billie. You leave for two years and now you’re wrinkling your nose like a tourist. I smile, leaning my head against the back of the seat. It feels so good to be back.



I always feel most at home here because New York is me: my soul city. Neither of us knows how to sleep, for instance. And there is the fact that we make people from small towns feel uncomfortable.

I peer out the window as the cab veers left then right, swerving at the last minute to take the exit. It’s the type of erratic cab driving that tourists bemoan for years after visiting. Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe how they drive in the city…

In my expert opinion, you haven’t truly experienced New York until you’ve thought you were going to die during a cab ride. My hair, a tangled mess after the red-eye I took, hits me in the face as the wind from the open window zigzags through the car. My cabbie is a nice man named Frank who has three snake tattoos. He stops in front of a building on Fifth Avenue and hooks his arm across the back of the seat to look at me.

“You gonna be okay? You’re the color of my Aunt Bee’s pea soup.”

“Word,” I say. “You should see what my insides look like.”

“That bad, huh?”

I eye the cigarette propped behind his ear.

“Can I smell your cigarette?”

He plucks it from its resting spot and hands it to me without comment. Lifting it to my nose, I sniff.

“Okay,” I say, handing it back. “Better.”

When I step out, my entire body is tingling in anticipation. I flex my fingers and stare up at the building, while Frank retrieves my bag from the trunk. All of a sudden, I feel foolish for ever leaving New York. This is the place I love. Jules, my friend since college, has taken a job in Brazil for a year. She’s letting me stay in her apartment until I get back on my feet. That means I have exactly a year to figure things out; if I can’t reverse what I’ve done in a year, I’ll gladly skulk back to Washington. The apartment is on the third floor, and after I pay my fare, I haul my meager suitcase up the stairs. The keyring Jules mailed me bites into my sweating palm. I know this city, I love this city, and yet my hands are trembling as I turn the key and push open the door. Relief kicks in as soon as I step inside. It’s not the spacious one and a half bedrooms, or the hardwood floors, or even the impressive collection of thrifted furniture that I’m happy to see. It’s the fact that I made it back, that I came back after what happened. I didn’t let the hurt swallow me whole. Just thinking about the hurt makes me hurt, so I busy myself with looking around.

Jules had a cleaning company come in; I smell wood polish and bleach. I walk around the apartment touching the spines of her books, the carved wooden wings that sit on the coffee table, like an invisible angel ready to take off. I can’t believe I’m here.



I spend my first morning back unpacking the few things I brought, examining the excellent light that trickles through the blinds making everything glow honey warm, and examining the contents of Jules’ pantry—which is mostly empty except for a few cans of creamed corn and green beans. I find the coffee—a bag of somethin’ somethin’ from a shop uptown, the name of the beans handwritten in marker on the indigo blue bag. Jules has a very fancy coffee machine. She’s taped instructions on how to use it on the counter. I stare at her instructions for a few minutes, my palms sweating at the responsibility. Espresso machines are for grown-ups, not girls like me who have never even owned a Keurig. In Port Townsend, I did the smart thing and walked to a coffee shop for my morning joe.

To my extreme delight, there are several coffee shops in the neighborhood. I try the closest one first, a place called Crunchy that has a cat sitting in the window. I smile wanly at the barista when he hands me my recycled cup, my new name scratched on the side in hot-pink Sharpie. Yes! Yes! Yes! That’s me, Wendy from New York! I’m uptown, and I wear a size four, and no man would dare cheat on a woman with such magnificent mermaid hair.

I spend the afternoon shopping for supplies. Instead of a chain grocery store, I peruse a little sidewalk farmers market, plucking vegetables from baskets. In the evening, so as not to break the schedule I’ve been keeping, I pull on my Nikes and go for a run. And then, when the day is over, in the crisp sheets of someone else’s bed, I curl up and cry. It’s a very Billie thing to do, but oh well, no one can see me anyway. Tomorrow it’s back to being Wendy.



The next morning I check my emails on my beat-up old laptop. It won’t even turn on unless it’s plugged in, and I tap my fingers on the counter while I wait for the screen to load. I’d given Woods a little consideration and sent him an email before I left Washington, informing him that I was moving back to the city. He’d responded right away, it was nice. He welcomed me back and asked if I’d be staying in our old loft. I never answered him. I’d put up an ad on Craigslist about the loft and had twenty messages within the first day. I’d chosen a guy in his thirties who was serious about his career and worked in finance. I figured he was less likely to have wild parties in the event that he would be working all the time. All that’s left to do is pick up a box of things the cleaning company set aside and hand him his keys. In my rattiest jeans and an old Pearl Jam shirt, I set out for my favorite street in SoHo. It’s nearly impossible to avoid painful memories in a city you spent ten years living in, but I try anyway, taking the long way around the places where my ex-husband and I spent a lot of our time. The gym, for example—I can’t say I loved going, but Woods and I would trek there three times a week, holding hands, gym bags slung over our shoulders. It was part of our daily lives, a monotony that I appreciated at the time. I’ve found that the small moments hurt more than the big ones. The juice bar on Spring Street where we’d stop for breakfast on the way to the office, trying each other’s drinks and laughing when we always liked the other person's better. The movie theater we went to on 181st, because it had the best popcorn and fizziest Diet Coke. All places that Woods and I shared the most intimate moments, moments that solidified my love for him and our life together. Seeing them ignites a hurt that I wrestle down to a smoldering level. Barely.