Really Good, Actually(22)

really do hope you’re well.





Chapter 7




Amirah set me up for a commiseration evening with a colleague of hers who had recently been involved in what she called a “category five divorce.” People in general were very keen to suggest I hang out with other people they knew who’d divorced before they’d gotten gray hair. Sometimes it felt like a gesture of support, and sometimes it felt like loading all the corpses on the same cart so the rest of the village didn’t get the plague.

My summer had been peppered with these arranged evenings, which always involved alcohol and usually involved crying, and each was odd in a different way. Being united only by one grim fact of your life left a lot of other points upon which two people could be incompatible. It was like constantly going for drinks with someone who had also lost an uncle, or whose roommate moved out unexpectedly, or who’d recently ripped a cherished pair of jeans. This woman’s name was Amy.

Amy had been with her husband for four years. They were married for three. I did not tell her that I thought it was objectively stupid to marry someone you’d known for one year, age twenty-seven, even though that is how I felt. Amy was beautiful and small and very, very mad. Her fury radiated off her in nearly visible lines, like bad smells in cartoons.

“It’s fucking ridiculous,” she said. “He’s such a fucking loser.”

Amy’s husband had left her for a younger woman, which was the kind of thing she thought didn’t happen until you were, like, actually old. His new girlfriend was twenty-one, and taught Pilates with one of those machines that look like they’re for sex but are really for thin women to pulse on. Amy had considered taking one of her classes but assumed her ex’s new girlfriend knew what she looked like, because of social media and because of Toronto. Instead she had started going to a different Pilates studio, waking up at five to take the six and seven a.m. classes back-to-back.

“You sort of need to do two hours to feel any impact,” she said, which I suspected would not be true in my case. Amy felt washed up now, at thirty.

I envied the clarity of Amy’s anger. Deciding your ex was a villain seemed like an easier way to go through a breakup. I flip-flopped hourly between hating Jon and wanting to go easy on him. After all, he had not done anything terrifically wrong; his major crime was not fighting me when I suggested the marriage was not working, and I couldn’t blame him for that ( . . . could I?).

“I think he freaked out because we got married and he realized that was it, no new puss till he died,” Amy said. “He got weird as soon as we got back from our honeymoon. I don’t get it. Being married didn’t feel any different to me.”

The night before our wedding, Jon had wondered aloud whether something would change, if we would feel different as man and wife. After the ceremony, I asked him if he did.

“Not really,” he said. “Still love you a lot like normal.”

Then he said, “my waiiiife,” in the Borat voice and ran off after a server holding a tray of chicken sliders. I felt different, though: calmer, safer. Buckled in.

Amy said she would not go back to her husband in “more than a billion years.” She said my ex was a definite idiot with a probable small penis. She suggested I put on a sexy dress, go somewhere I knew he would be, and “show him what he’s missing.”

Jon and I had been together almost ten years, I told her. He could draw what he was missing from memory. Plus, he didn’t seem to be missing it that much. I confessed that he hadn’t responded to my text messages in nearly a month.

“That’s actually so toxic. It’s harassment,” said Amy, pouring us another glass each of natural wine.

I felt like a persistent lack of contact was, if anything, the opposite of harassment, but stayed quiet and sipped my drink, the sourness of it stinging my throat. When the server first dropped off the wine list, Amy had asked him to “challenge her.” I told her that Jon had once told me he considered all wine bourgeois. Amy’s mouth dropped open: “So he’s a fucking asshole.” She loved it.

Amy was fun. She swore a lot and went to the corner store to buy cigarettes after we finished our first bottle of challenging wine. Amy talked such merciless shit on her ex-husband I felt free to think about how annoying Jon was during election seasons, how he acted like it was reasonable to spend nine hours on the toilet (an approximate figure, but still), how he sometimes acted like working in advertising was a noble higher calling. Hadn’t I chosen to cut him loose? I felt again the euphoric freedom that washed over me when Calvin had laughed and said, “That guy is never coming back.” Maybe this was not a life-defining tragedy. Maybe I was a smart woman who knew her worth, or at least knew she deserved more than being shredded to death by a junior executive’s gnarled toenails every night. Amy said she’d never felt better, on days when she didn’t feel the worst she ever had.

Still, she couldn’t get over the fact that one day her ex-husband would die, and she would have no idea. “I was supposed to be at that funeral,” she said with a hiccup. “Or I guess also dead, but like, nearby.”

I thought about Jon dying one day, an old man with millions of newly accumulated experiences, none of which would have anything to do with me, darkly sweet death prank long forgotten. In the scope of his life, the near decade we’d spent together wasn’t much. I’d occupy a space in his mind similar to elementary school: a thing that happened, from which few memories remained. What would stay? Would he remember our first apartment, the shower you couldn’t stand up in, the vintage posters we were weirdly proud of, the time we got locked out in the dead of winter, the look on the landlord’s son’s face when he came to rescue us at two a.m.? Would he remember that we’d loved each other, changed each other; how we’d compromised on bedroom decor and gone halfsies on a mattress that was cooling for his night sweats and rock hard for my back problems? He’d learned to handle a kitchen knife at a cooking class I’d bought him for our anniversary. Would he think of me when he chopped garlic, at least?