Unwifeable(6)

My ID is still swinging around my neck—I can’t bring myself to take it off just yet. I walk up the stairs to the million-dollar brownstone, another small victory thanks yet again to a cold-call-emailing session.

Sex, job, and shelter. What couldn’t a confidently worded query to a stranger do?

Write it—and they will come. Or maybe you will.

Juanita, a fellow Northwestern grad, had received my forwarded email plea a few months back when Steve sent my official offer. Turned out she and her girlfriend, Lola, had a spare room, which they were looking to rent for $895 a month. She sent me pictures of their mind-boggling Park Slope paradise: teak bathroom decor, movie-studio-quality views, and a state-of-the-art stainless steel kitchen that looked straight out of a TV commercial for high-end cookware. Was I interested? Yes. Yes, I was.

“You’re back!” Juanita cheers when I walk through the door, and I see that a dinner party is in full swing with their friends—most of them coupled up—huddling around the kitchen to roll homemade sushi.

“Drink?” one of their friends asks, handing me some sake, and I accept the expensive miniature wooden cup so as to not seem weird. Every day I write in my “morning pages” long screeds about how I thought maybe life would be better without alcohol, but when push came to shove (it seemed impossible that you could actually choose not to drink), I didn’t want to be the weirdo who didn’t know how to have a good time.

“Not enough sex scenes!” one girl complains as someone pulls up an on-demand episode of The L Word in the background, and I introduce myself around the party. One girl wearing Ray-Bans and skinny jeans scopes me out and says she’d like to get to know me better, touching my arm, leaning in close. I have never been straight-up hit on by a woman before, and it is exhilarating and alienating all at once.

I concentrate most of my energy on just sipping my sake rather than downing it, like I want to so badly. The partygoers scream with laughter, repeating inside jokes and whooping at inappropriate revelations. I don’t feel like I click with anyone the way I did with Katherine at work. Juanita and Lola are a power couple, whose careers are taking off. It’s hard for me to distinguish between the Showtime series playing in the background and the who’s-broken-up-with-who small talk being made over yellowfin tuna and rice rolls around me.

“I think I’m just going to go back to my room.” I check out early with a smile and collapse onto the inflatable air mattress that is to be my bed for months to come—until Juanita spies a Craigslist freebie posting about an IKEA wooden-slat queen left on the street a few blocks over.

I shuffle my body around awkwardly, trying to get comfortable on the balloon-like structure that is my bed, finally give up, and pick up my computer. I need something familiar. Determined to make the kind of connection I didn’t at the party, I email a friend from Chicago a rant to try to soothe the emptiness that lingers in my gut.

“So these girls are ridiculously rich,” I write, feeling guilty as I covet everything around me, and wishing my hosts’ opulent lifestyle extended to their guest bedroom as well.

“I mean, whatever . . . I get along with them fine, and this’ll be fine and it’s cool. It’s just like this entire ‘Don’t forget to squeegee the teak in the bathroom!’ lifestyle is pretty bizarre. We all just drank some hot sake. ‘Should we do the sake hot or cold?’ the girls debated as if their lives depended on it. The loneliness, oh the loneliness.”

I hit “send.”

But the grossness in my gut is still there.

I text Scott with the Yacht that I am getting acclimated, and he writes, “Miss you here in Chicago.”

But I still can’t bring myself to text or call my ex-husband, James, the one person who knows me better than anyone, while also never knowing me at all. How could he? I didn’t even know myself.

He certainly knew who he was, though. His idea of a hot date was to bring me to an International Socialist conference. The day of our divorce, when the Post job became official, James whispered to me at the courthouse, “Now when anyone asks why we broke up we can just say it’s because you took a job with Rupert Murdoch.”

James was so angry and so liberal.

I used to love that about him.



* * *




ON THE COMMUTE from Brooklyn to Rockefeller Center the next day, I whip out a notebook and attempt to do what I started doing two years before: writing my stupid morning pages.

Not stupid, obviously, as it resulted in all of the stream-of-consciousness insights that led to me figuring out that an emotionally abusive marriage wasn’t for me, but it felt so indulgent.

I have countless notebook pages that just begin, “What do I want to say?” The hardest initial part is getting past the self-hatred that leads your body to nearly seize up in disgust that you do not have a perfect narrative outlined to a T. That you are raw, earnest, scattered, and scared. As I ride on the train, surrounded by sunglasses-wearing strangers, I peruse old pages. The journal now reads like some kind of Mad Libs tale of separation, reconciliation, divorce, and hopefully—potentially—rebirth.

March 5, 2005

1. My marriage is ending.

2. This is a good thing.

3. My husband is masturbating in the next room.

May 28, 2005

Today, I almost died, crashed my car. But then I didn’t. And it was good. I asked James, “Do you want to be my husband?”