Really Good, Actually(2)

It had always been slightly surreal to me that we were legally wed. When I said “my husband” to people, their eyebrows would raise and I would think, totally, yes, how bizarre. Jon did not find it strange at all. It was not that he was a romantic per se, but his were the last set of mutually enamored parents on earth, so he had above-average faith in the institution. To him, marriage was a natural response to being in love for an extended period. When we checked into the honeymoon suite at our budget Italian hotel, the chatty American concierge had shrieked, “Oh my god, you’re like a child bride!” and Jon had laughed, but I felt weirdly bashful. There was something naive about it. Hadn’t I crunched the numbers? Did I really think our marriage would last, when so many didn’t? Maybe I felt embarrassed because yes, I really did. I wanted to tap that version of myself on the shoulder: honey, if you’re embarrassed now . . .

The first morning without him, I swear to god I woke up crying. My pillow was wet, at any rate, and instead of flipping it over or changing the pillowcase, I rolled out of bed and let myself land heavily on the floor. Even if we handle it as well as possible, I thought, it’s still going to be terrible. Even though we were going to be well-behaved exes, the type who didn’t gossip about each other, or have sex with that one coworker the other’s always been jealous of, or post vindictive thirst traps on social media, or tweet excessively about our exciting new lives as single people, it was still going to feel awful for years, possibly forever. It certainly felt that way now.

It was important to me that we have a Good Divorce. As we’d packed his clothes away, we’d agreed that handling whatever came next with kindness would be a nice way to honor what we meant to each other (or had meant). We’d composed a little speech to say to friends—“we just grew in different directions”—that was true, but also meaningless, and promised to stay in touch—for the first while, anyway. He’d been gone twenty-four hours, and we’d both checked in a few times already via text, variations on how are you and i’m sorry it’s like this and have you told your parents. In time, I could see us being the type of exes who went to each other’s birthday parties, stayed for a tasteful number of drinks, hugged the new partner, and left before things got messy. But for now I couldn’t see anything, except how badly we’d fucked it up, how quiet the apartment was without him, and how few plans I had for the weekend.

I stayed on the floor until mid-afternoon. It didn’t feel great, but it was the kind of thing you were supposed to do when your marriage fell apart. In the movies, when you get divorced you lie down on the floor, and then you get drunk, and then you pick yourself up by the sweater shawl and learn to love yourself again at a beach house rented from a charming and handsome older man whose first wife died, and although he clearly still loves her in a respectful way, he feels like he might be ready to move on, like the two of you might help each other heal. In the movies, when you get divorced you have a big fight with lawyers, and it’s very painful because the children resent you and you can’t decide who gets the house—the big, beautiful house you spent years decorating together, into which you have poured your life’s savings and where you raised several children or at least one sizable dog. In the movies, you are Diane Lane, or Keaton, or possibly Kruger, a beautiful middle-aged Diane who is her own boss and knows about the good kind of white wine. Usually, you do not continue living with your ex for weeks because you can’t make the rent on your dusty one-bedroom apartment alone. Generally, you are not a glorified research assistant and an advertising copywriter, respectively, whose most important shared financial asset is your one friend who always gets free phones from work. Certainly, you are not supposed to be twenty-eight years old and actively planning a birthday party with the dress code “Jimmy Buffett sluts.”

But there I was, semi-prone, texting the group chat about how much a banner reading Parrothead Pussy would cost, and whether a margarita-flavored cake was within the scope of Clive’s baking abilities. It was widely agreed that he could handle it, and not only that but it was surely something his enemy, a handsome television chef who had recently taught viewers how to “make” corn on the cob, could not achieve. Further, Amirah had found a party bus that had wipe-clean seating inside: it seems like it’s probably used for some kind of bang-bus scenario rather than birthday parties normally, but it’s cheaper than the other one by almost $100 . . . Lauren, whose birthday it was, wrote back: maybe we don’t think about it too much and spend the extra cash on booze? The rest of us agreed.

The group chat comprised my four closest friends from university: Amirah, a lightly frazzled, emotionally turbulent nurse I had met in residence halls; Clive, a large and elegant gay man who was always describing himself as “chaotic” for doing normal things like paying for cabs in cash; and two Laurens—one who cried at everything and another who maintained she had cried only once in her entire life, when McDonald’s stopped doing pizza. For simplicity’s sake, we called the former “Emotional Lauren.”

I had not confessed to the group chat that Jon had left. They knew we were considering separation—that things had not been great lately—but I couldn’t bring myself to type the words he’s gone. I think part of me assumed we would get back together, even after we agreed he’d go, even after everything. I couldn’t envision it lasting, this time apart. Who would I complain to about the speed of the wifi? What would he do when he needed to remember his mom’s birthday? By whom would I run every single decision I made every day of my life? What about Sundays, what would we do? I assumed he would eventually come back and we’d both say, that was exhausting, ha, ha, and then we’d get stoned and watch The Great British Bake Off, an activity that constitutes, as far as I can tell, a full 60 percent of all marriages.