The Office of Historical Corrections(27)
The apologies sounded like him and they did not sound like him. They used correct and known-only-privately pet names. They contained details the wronged parties had carried quietly for years. They used phrases he would use. But they were unlike him in that they were, in fact, actual apologies, and in that way bore no resemblance to his previous efforts at making amends, which had all gone more or less like this:
To the Long-Suffering Ex-wife, a three-page typewriter-typed letter that used the words “I’m sorry” exactly once, in its conclusion, in the context “I’ve done the best I can here and I’m sorry if even after my attempt to apologize, you are unable to forgive me, although I have, clearly, forgiven you for giving up on me in the first place.”
To the Former Personal Assistant, two apologies, first, in the middle of everything, a terse email that she knew even then to keep in her in-box forever: “It was a mistake to have sex with you again and I’m sorry you got hurt,” and then, years later, well after she was no longer anyone’s personal assistant, and shortly after she’d turned down working an event because he’d be one of the presenters, a second apology, via the Soon-to-Be Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife, who cornered her at a gala and said, “He says to tell you he’s sorry about whatever’s going on in your life, but you need to stop making shit up about him when he barely remembers you and never touched you.”
To the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife, just before the divorce, in a chain of text messages:
The Artist: I do concede that I owe you an apology for the way that I phrased things. There was probably a kinder way to express my frustration with your unreasonable expectations than to say that you just didn’t understand why so many women I had history with were still in my life because you’d never known what it was like to be as successful as I am, and, as a woman, in order to understand it, you’d have to imagine what things would be like for you if you were beautiful. But it’s unfair of you to accuse me of being cruel to you in public when we were not in public. We were, for the record, in a crowded bar.
TSSEW: WTF? A crowded bar is literally the definition of public. How can that not be public? If you were making a book about places to have fights, a crowded bar would be the textbook definition of “in public.”
The Artist: Well, I was hoping to leave things amicably, but if you’re going to be childish and condescending like this, then we clearly can’t have a reasonable conversation.
To the Daughter, a note slipped under the door she’d locked herself behind while visiting him for the summer. It read “I understand it was upsetting for you to find out this way, but ‘SAT tutor’ is not a proprietary relationship; she is not your SAT tutor in the sense of belonging to you, and there’s no reason for you to be so upset about our relationship, or to compare it at all to Shannon, who I’m sorry is no longer your friend, but, I remind you, was redshirted in kindergarten because her parents didn’t want her to mature late, and is a year older than you, and was eighteen when I asked her out, which I’m sorry made her uncomfortable, but reasonably assumed was what she wanted at the time.” It was signed “Love, Dad,” with a hand-drawn smiley face.
Now he was sorry without caveat or redirection. He was sorry without taking the opportunity to tell a long story about the things that had brought him to this point, a story causing the person whom he was supposed to be comforting to comfort him instead. He was sorry in specific and concrete ways. He was sorry about the time he cost the Former Personal Assistant a job by off-the-record calling her a crazy bitch, and sorry for lying to her face about it. He was sorry for telling the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife that things were over with the Long-Suffering Ex-wife when in fact he was still fucking her most nights and fighting with her most mornings. He was sorry he’d said that thing about the Model/Actress’s mother, and also sorry he’d said that thing about the left side of the Model/Actress’s face, which was really exactly like the right side and perfectly lovely. He was sorry for telling the Long-Suffering Ex-wife that she was lucky she’d met him when she had because she had never been good enough for him, and if they’d met a year later he would have already known that. He was sorry for bringing the Daughter along and seating her beside him on multiple occasions when he was afraid a woman would otherwise yell at him, sorry for teaching her that however much he loved her, she was still a tool for him to use. He was sorry about the time he’d playfully squeezed a hand around the High School Sweetheart’s throat and kept it there well past the point where her eyes showed a flicker of real fear, because he could, and then removed it and laughed and said, “What, you don’t trust me?” He was sorry for the time he argued with the On-Again Off-Again Ex of His Wayward Youth and gripped her arm so hard he left a bruise, and sorrier still for insisting, when she pointed to it the next day, that the bruise wasn’t there and she was seeing things. He was so sorry for everything.
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The Long-Suffering Ex-wife thought that perhaps the apologies were his latest art project. It made her nervous and upset to think of him watching for a reaction. She hired a private detective to see if he had cameras on her somehow, but nothing turned up.
The High School Sweetheart went home from the store and hugged her children and kissed the mouth of her husband who had forgotten all the important groceries, and tried to remember what being dramatically wounded by the artist had felt like, but found that she could not, that when she tried to find the words to explain to her husband the things the artist had said and done to her and now finally apologized for, she was describing some other person’s ugly life, a life that did not belong in her kitchen. She left the groceries sitting on the counter and went to have a glass of wine in the living room. When she came back, her husband had put the groceries away, and had lasagna in the oven, and their teenager was at the table doing homework and humming along with her headphones, and she almost cried at how stupid she’d been all that time ago, feeling bereft when the artist went off into the world without her.