Really Good, Actually(63)

“Fuck,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Jon. “Fuck.”

“I mean . . . what do you think?” I asked.

Jon laughed dryly, incredulous. “Come on, Mags . . .”

I hadn’t heard him say my name in half a year. The tears felt very reasonable.

“Think about it,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I am a big enough person to admit that I still love you, that there’s still love in there, for me.”

“I know, you said that in your email.”

“Right, okay, so, what about you?”

“What about me?”

“You know,” I said. “Do you . . . ?”

“I really did love you, Maggie, b—”

“Well, then isn’t it kind of crazy to throw it all away because—what? It seemed bad for a minute? Because we had a few doubts? I feel like I’m definitely having an equal number of doubts about this whole divorce thing, so maybe that’s life, you know, maybe you never feel good about any of your choices and that’s normal, in which case we really shouldn’t get divorced because actually everything’s fine.”

Helen passed me a tissue, and I dabbed at my nose. When I pulled my hand away, a string of milky-green snot came with it. I balled up the tissue and stuck it up my nose. This was not how I’d imagined this conversation going. I realized with horror that what I’d sold—to Helen, to my friends, to myself—as a kind of exit interview had existed in my mind as a do-over. A chance to ask again, “Is this working?” and have him fight me, say yes.

“I’m not the bigger person,” I said, my voice taking on a bad-part-of-the-psychosexual-thriller quality. “I’ve done everything you’re supposed to do and it’s not working. I’m not going to find myself. I don’t even want to. I live in a basement. I’m having nightmares, and I keep spooning people I don’t know that well because I’m not used to sleeping with someone casually. I’m used to sleeping with you.”

“One of your voicemails said you had a boyfriend.”

“Oh, yeah, well,” I said, “I did for a second, but I don’t anymore.”

“From your messages it sounds like you’ve been dating a lot. I’m sure you’ll find someone else.”

“I don’t want to,” I cried, feeling oddly empowered by the depths to which I was sinking. That I could be this pathetic and still breathing was an achievement, in its way. “We made this big, huge decision, and now we have to go out there and choose something else, knowing we did it wrong the first time? Absolutely not, I’m sorry. No.”

Helen’s tight-lipped expression was transforming from strained concentration into something more overtly perturbed. “If I may,” she said. “Sorry, Helen here. Can I ask, how frequent are these voicemails?”

I sat back as Jon told her the truth. That I’d texted or emailed most days, sometimes several times per day, since we had separated. That he had stopped answering my calls seven months ago, but that had not stopped the messages, which only became longer and, in his words, “significantly more batshit.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” I said.

“On Valentine’s Day you left a three-part voicemail where you sang that Bernadette Peters song in full.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Jon sang a few bars of “No One Is Alone,” from Stephen Sondheim’s 1987 musical Into the Woods.

“Oh,” I said. “Well. That’s not actually a Bernadette Peters song, she only covers it on Sondheim, Etc., because it’s one of her favorites. And I didn’t do the whole thing, I just wanted to show you the chorus and one particularly resonant verse about how everybody makes mistakes, because they do, and maybe that’s not so—”

“I don’t care, Maggie.”

“I think it’s important to be accurate—”

“I don’t care about any of it,” he said. “I don’t want to hear from you.”

“Why didn’t you say that?” I asked. “How could you just disappear?”

Jon let out a frustrated breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I was mad. I don’t know why you thought you could suggest we get divorced and then have me hold your hand through it too.”

“Because you promised!” I wailed. “You said you would.”

“Did you have sex with Calvin?”

Helen’s lips were so pursed I was genuinely worried about her air supply.

Jon tried again: “I don’t even think you mean it, about getting back together. I think you’re stressed out about having to make decisions for yourself. Honestly, you might just be bored.”

I told him I was bored, that being sad all the time was fucking boring, actually. He was unmoved. I tried to rally, invoked the promises we’d made, the day at the beach with the sunset that made him feel safe, the jokes about baby names, the life we’d agreed to make happen. Didn’t people have rough patches? Didn’t they have rough years? Was trying to be happy again worth being this miserable? The words were tumbling out of my mouth, melodramatic and fast. I wasn’t sure I meant them either. I didn’t want to think any longer about what I wanted, or how to be, or who to try to be with. I wanted to go back to how it was.