Really Good, Actually(3)

I had also not told them because it felt unbelievably stupid. It is hard to explain exactly how mortifying it is to have had a wedding when your marriage ends almost instantly thereafter. The relationship had been longer than the marriage—much longer—but so what? To have that all-eyes-on-you, congratulations-on-your-big-moment, till-death-do-you-part day, with its attendant preparation and fights with family and guest list issues and thousands of dollars turn out to simply have been a very expensive Tinder photoshoot for your friends is . . . well, it’s not ideal. And you don’t even get to use the photos for Tinder yourself, first, because you do not know how Tinder works, and second, because you are wearing a wedding dress in all of them.

Instead of confessing, I entertained: telling stories about funny dogs I’d seen, or a recent medical appointment where I’d taunted my doctor with tales of my healthy, active lifestyle as she blinked confusedly and tapped the orange-to-red section of the BMI chart on her clipboard. don’t get Maggie started on BMI, wrote Lauren. we’ll be here all night. Clive told us he’d recently decided that it really stood for “Beautiful Man Index,” which made sense, because his was so high. Emotional Lauren said she’d heard a podcast recently that would change our lives. Amirah sent a link to a video of a seagull shoplifting, and then we were off, riffing about marine animal gangs, gossiping about acquaintances, and complaining with equal vigor about real injustices in the world and the corniness of a Toronto micro-celebrity’s social media presence.

Eventually, I knew, I would have to tell them, but I was waiting until I found the right opening. I couldn’t face their questions before I had the answers myself. Was I ready to be single again? Where would I live? What was I going to do about money? I had some money, sure, but Jon had lots of it—from his job, his family, his savvy financial habits. He knew how to save and how to invest and how not to spend a long-awaited freelance check on risky crop tops or a new kind of fancy cat food. He had subsidized my rent and paid for our groceries, and when we went on holidays, he’d pay for everything except my flight, which I was “allowed” to pay for the way children who clear their plates at Thanksgiving “help” with the dishes. A few weeks before our wedding, I’d joked that I was running out of time to get him to sign that prenup; what if we split and he took me for everything I was worth? He told me I could keep my eighty dollars. (That used to be a funny story.)



Days passed, and I haunted the house like a reverse-Havisham, wandering aimlessly from room to room. As I looked around our silent, empty home—half empty, anyway—I realized my husband (“ex-husband”) had paid for the TV and the art on the walls and the kitchen chairs and the thing we put our feet up on when we sat on our appalling couch. Most of the stuff in our apartment was by definition his. Though I’d encouraged him to take everything he’d purchased, he’d left some of it behind, so the place was technically functional but felt wrong: a too-spacious bedroom closet with no shoe storage, a cutlery drawer without any big knives, a kitchen table you could not sit at. I dropped onto the terrible hardness of our couch, set my drink on the floor where our bar cart had been, and sobbed my little eyes out.

I didn’t know where to look, what to think about, or how to spend my time. Every item in the house was dripping with significance. The toaster was a wedding present, so I ate bread at room temperature. The fridge door ephemera—receipts, grocery lists, notes about bananas and eggs and plans to buy a bike lock—was too painful to look at, so I took my coffee without milk. I taped a piece of paper over a framed photo in the bathroom, not quite ready to take it down but not ready to face it yet either. A banner left over from our engagement party glittered on a wall above the space where some of Jon’s art had hung. c o n g r a t u l a t i o n shone in gold calligraphy. The S had fallen off at some point but we’d kept it up, liked it better that way, thought it was kind of fun. Looking at it now was unbelievably depressing.

There were positive discoveries too: without any pressure to blend our two styles, I realized I had disliked almost every decorative item my husband had brought into our home. Anything I’d ever looked at and thought, we’ll have to replace that eventually, had been his—or something we had settled on, defining compromise as “an object we both hate equally.” Now most of these objects were gone. The sparseness of my possessions gave the house a slightly threadbare quality, and I hadn’t kept any of the big towels, but there were no band posters on the walls, no novelty shot glasses in the kitchen, no lightly moldering wooden bath mat he’d gotten high and ordered on eBay. Now there was space to display my little knickknacks, to light the candle Jon thought “smelled weird,” to play the nineties pop music he found boring and generic. Of course, it did not feel better to burn a tobacco and juniper candle and listen to the Backstreet Boys than it had felt to be loved.

Every article and forum I’d found through grim googling (tips for divorce; marriage breakdown young; first time alone how) had told me to prepare for sleeplessness, but I had not realized how long the nights would feel. Another surprise was that I could still stomach food. I’d been led to believe that heartbreak spoiled the appetite. As a teenager I had heavily anticipated the breakup—inevitable, teen soaps about handsome vampires and their underage lovers had taught me—that would leave me unable to eat, wasting beautifully away, so thin and wronged and absolutely thrilled to hell about it. To have had a boyfriend, then lose that boyfriend and several dress sizes, perhaps enough to fit into one of the cursed polo shirts Abercrombie sold in its dank, perfumed mall caves? I could not imagine anything better.