Unwifeable(44)

When I am assigned the piece, I assume it will be the usual “shtick lit” where you stunt it up and write the reactions. Instead, I find myself unnerved. Emotions are bubbling up.

Earlier that day, I bought a fancy $350 red coat from Ann Taylor to wear because the photos are to be in color, and one of the photo editors told me I need something to make me “pop” in pictures instead of my black overcoat. After I file my piece, I am exhausted, and Katherine joins me to return the coat to the store right before closing. We are walking in the rain, when I realize I left the receipt at my desk. But all the tags are on, and I bought it that day. I explain all this to the clerk at the counter, but she cops an attitude like a Soviet bureaucrat.

“No receipt, no return,” she says.

“I really don’t appreciate your shitty attitude,” I tell the clerk, and now I am both livid and ashamed of my behavior. I hate myself. I hate everything.

“Are you okay?” Katherine asks, and I am embarrassed and confused. I can’t see straight, I am so angry over nothing.

“Are you a manager?” I ask the clerk. I am now just gone completely, riding a wave of fury.

“No,” she says.

“That’s what I thought!” I snap, and I leave the store with Katherine.

“You’re not crazy; she was a total bitch,” Katherine consoles me, and I start crying at the stupidity of it all. I give her a hug good night, and walk away.

I trudge back to the office, now soaked in rain, seething with irrational rage and even more anger directed at the anger itself. It’s like a cycle of shit.

I haven’t let myself feel this way in a while. Only when I am drunk does it come out.

I sit at my desk. I text Katherine and tell her I feel sick, “like congealed lamb fat left over from lunch now in the fridge.”

I keep texting. I say I miss being her friend now that she has been promoted.

I am . . . radically honest.

She is kind. Katherine is always so kind.

And I keep sitting there, unable to move. The clock says 7:55 p.m. It is me and my best friend, Angie, the cleaning lady, once again. I look in an email folder I haven’t checked in ages. “Old Mail.” Therein lie emotional land mines. The soul equivalent of photographs taken right before an assassination—or, in this case, a marriage’s end.

In one email to my ex-husband, James, I tell him how some of my new friends, like Michael Malice, a very funny provocateur and author, remind me of him a little bit.

“They don’t remind you of me,” James wrote back. “They remind you of aspects of me. No one reminds me of you.”

I keep wanting to scratch the pain.

Angie, the cleaning lady, maneuvers politely around me to remove my trash as I sit there, weeping openly. We talk all the time, but right now she knows to just let me be. I am having what Blanton calls “an orgasm of grief.” I have several.

I pick up my cell phone, and I have no desire to talk to Blaine. I know he doesn’t want to see or know about any of this weirdness. I know it is “a little strange.”

Impulsively, I call James, and I tell him about what an asshole I’ve been tonight. I tell him about finding these old emails, about being reminded of our old life in our ridiculous run-down house in Chicago with the stripped old cars in the yard and the concord grape mini-vineyard that we lay under looking at the stars and how it felt like the Grand Canyon. I tell him how badly he hurt me and how I want to forgive him but that everything is so contaminated by anger.

He tells me how I hurt him.

“I know you didn’t think you did, but when you said I was like an ‘alien,’ that hurt me,” he says. “It made me feel terrible.”

“I am sorry,” I say, bawling. “I am so sorry.”

He tells me about his girlfriend. I tell him about Blaine.

“You only call me when you want to talk about things that make you feel bad,” he says.

“Do you . . .” I choke out. “Do you want to hear about things that make me happy?”

“Yes,” he says, and I can feel that gentle connection filling up the space around me.

I tell him about the nice emails I get about my column from women who tell me it helps. I tell him about Comedy Central asking me to pitch a show. I tell him I am traveling to Brazil in two weeks with Blaine and some friends from the Post.

“There’s nothing worse than feeling like you should feel happy about something and feeling totally unable,” I say.

This is how Brazil has been feeling lately. Like a beautiful shiny golden thing completely covered in the rust of my mind, which says, I can ruin this, oh, just you watch me.

“I want to move on,” I say to him.

“We were so young,” James says. “We just saw in each other a sense of possibility.”

As we speak, I see some of that rust disappear. I see some of the beauty of the luster return. There is always a sense of possibility.



* * *




TWO SHORT WEEKS later, Blaine and I—and Mackenzie and several other Post friends—arrive in what is truly a Brazilian sun-soaked paradise. It is like we are walking around in a postcard.

We are staying in Arraial d’Ajuda, a picturesque district in Porto Seguro, Bahia, in a little resort three minutes from the beach by the name of Casar?o Alto Mucugê. (You should actually check this place out if you’re ever considering a South American trip. And tell Eloisa, who runs the joint, I said, “Opa!”)