Really Good, Actually(27)

“He took the cat,” I said.

Merris patted my back, an uncharacteristically maternal gesture. “Well,” she said, “at least you won’t be coming to work with vomit on your shirt anymore. Not cat vomit, at any rate.” She chuckled, and it really felt like I was going to laugh too—the sound started the right way. Instead, I let out a loud and unexpected wail and felt myself crumple in half. My head dropped first, then the rest of my body, a little pile of woman where a competent human had been. Merris seemed to be expecting this, pulling my head to her shoulder with one hand and closing my office door with the other.

I had cried a lot since Jon moved out, but this was different, intense and animal. It was all spilling out, at work, to my boss: Jon’s refusal to return my calls, my relief that he was leaving and immediate regret when he did, the Cointreau and burgers and reckless credit card activity, the hours on Instagram and the impossible rent and the rapidly dwindling bank account. The fact that my parents were hours away, that I knew my friends were already finding me a bit much, that my lawyer seemed unconcerned about the biggest decision in my young life, that I was writing poems again. And, worst of all, the knowledge that none of these were real problems, that spending every moment dwelling on them probably made me a very bad or at least preposterously boring person who would never accomplish anything or help anyone, who would die of climate-related flooding or cancer or famine, alone and hated.

I wiped my nose, and the silence of a crossed boundary settled.

“Well,” said Merris, before I could finish the apology my mouth was forming. “I hope you can take some comfort in the idea that I think you did the right thing. You’re not supposed to say that, in case a couple gets back together, but that doesn’t seem much of a risk here.”

I told her I was continually surprised by how horrible I felt. When my first boyfriend and I broke up, at eighteen, it cured my fear of death—eternal nothingness seemed preferable to the cavity wound in my chest that Jason had left when he chose a different university (despite an express agreement to move to Toronto together!). I’d assumed, a full decade later, that heartbreak would feel different, that I would have acquired some skills to manage it with grace and dignity. But no. In a post-breakup email, I’d told Jason it felt like he’d ripped open my rib cage and shit inside me. This felt almost exactly the same—worse, if anything, because of its familiarity—and here I was, crying at my desk in the middle of the day, being given pity eggs by younger colleagues.

Merris tutted. “They’re fine eggs.”

I told her I’d liked the idea that marriage was hard to get out of at the time—had even found it romantic. It seemed like it should be hard to leave, because it would probably be hard to stay at points. An aunt had jokingly said, “The best marriage advice I can give you: make sure you each want the divorce at different times.” I had assumed that challenge would come later.

“Seems like a tremendous idea in the moment, doesn’t it?” Merris said. “And look, it probably was. I’m sure you loved each other then, and it’s not a crime to change your mind. I won’t patronize you by suggesting you learned everything you needed from each other. Sometimes a relationship just loses its way.”

I told Merris she was right. I did feel lost. And stupid. The whole thing was embarrassing. And demoralizing, and hopeless, and, and, and. I said I felt too old to move on and too young to be divorced, like I’d stranded myself in the gap between experience and maturity.

Merris sat us both up straight. “One day,” she said, “and it will surprise you how soon this day will come, but one day you will wake up and feel good. It won’t last long, but then you’ll have another day where you barely remember this abjection, and another, and another, until that’s just your life. But for now, it will be hard. This is the part that’s hard.”

I smiled weakly: “God, you’re wise.”

“I’m old,” she said. “And a divorcée and a widow . . . you certainly came to the right place. Now go home, you’re not fit. Get some sleep, down some triple sec or what have you, and come back tomorrow, better. And maybe leave the man alone.”

I squeezed Merris’s arm and looked away, wanting to spare her any further emotional displays. Though we were relatively friendly colleagues, this afternoon had demanded more intimacy from her than the entirety of our relationship to this point. She stood and smoothed the linen of her shift dress.

“I’m going to forward you an article,” she said. “It’s a compilation of autocorrect mishaps. People texting ‘nipple’ for ‘dimple,’ that sort of thing. Bit of light humor might take your mind off it all.”

After Merris left, I gathered my things and stepped into the oppressive haze of another too-warm September. I walked along College Street, serene enough to get through five minutes of a fifteen-minute “mindful walking” meditation. Listening to it was awful, but clicking on it felt transformative, the first step on the path toward meaningful growth. I turned it off when the too-soothing voice asked me to notice the way my toes felt in my shoes.

Merris’s advice had been thoughtful and mature. How lucky, I thought, to have access to such a generous model on which to base my way of thinking. How sad, that her words meant nothing to me, that I was filled instead with a white-hot rage that would not be sated until I had won this divorce and reduced the man who hurt me to rubble, razed his cities to the ground and salted the earth so nothing would ever grow there. Merris had been correct in every way, but that was not the way we would proceed.