What We Lose(31)

He spends the night in my room, and it’s not until he’s left the next morning, and I’m alone, that I’m paralyzed by the thought that what I’ve done can’t possibly stay in this room. This will follow me wherever I go.



An object at rest remains at rest, or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force.





By the time I ask Peter to move out for a while, we have not gone a single week without fighting since Mahpee’s birth. I wait for one of our two-day armistices when I approach him with the proposition. He is sitting in his white armchair in the living room, reading a magazine, when I sit on the armrest and put my computer on his lap. The ad for the temporary rental is on the screen, a one-bedroom apartment in the next neighborhood.

He bristles at first. I can see the fight welling up inside him, but then he sighs, a weary look spreading over his face. “All right,” he says.

We make it through the next week without any major fights. On a Monday morning before leaving for work, in addition to preparing his briefcase and coffee, Peter packs one suitcase and leaves it by the door. He calls me into the living room.

I always loved how he traveled light, how he needed nothing more than two outfits, a toothbrush, and a razor to live in the world. Before he leaves, he squeezes M for a long time. He weeps openly, clutching our son’s chubby head to his face.

“Okay,” he says as he hands the baby to me. He looks like he’s on the high dive, staring into icy water fifty feet below. He gives me one last kiss on the forehead, one last hug, and I fight every instinct telling me to apologize, to get him to stay, just this one last time. But I know what I have to do. He straightens his plaid shirt, blotting the wet spot on his shoulder, and walks out the door.

That evening, after I come home from work and pick M up from the sitter, my mind turns from tonight to two weeks from now, to next month, to years from now. I envision, with resignation, my life as a single parent. I cry without pause, even while recognizing that I have done the right thing. The first three days, I barely sleep between anxiety and M, and I nap sitting up, eyes closed, at my desk, until the minute the clock strikes five and I rush out the door.

My favorite television show involves people implausibly redecorating their friends’ houses while they’re out for dinner. It’s the ridiculous premise that roped me in. The results are often slipshod, the contestants’ reactions strained. If one of my friends ever did this to me, I would be furious. It’s probably the artificiality of the show that I find so amusing, and of course Peter never appreciated kitsch. Peter never took to irony, detesting hipsters. It was one of the reasons I was attracted to him and, predictably, it is one of the things that now irritates me most about him.

“Why can’t you just laugh?” I’ve told him more times than I can count.

By Thursday, I can scarcely imagine another week like the one that’s just passed. I’ve stopped all pretenses of normality. I put M’s crib in the living room. I order Chinese food and eat it straight from the container. I have a glass of wine and turn the TV up so that it tunes out M’s gurgling and occasional crying. M sits next to me on the couch, and crawls dangerously close to the edge. I push him back over with my ankle. I watch all three reruns of my show until Mahpee starts to wail, then I feed him and wash his little body in the sink. We both fall asleep in the living room that night, and when I wake up, it’s 6:00 a.m. and the TV is still on, blaring an infomercial for a mop that looks like every other mop in stores. It’s the first time I’ve slept through the night in as long as I can remember.

—

Before long, it’s Sunday and time for Peter to take Mahpee. I am more than ready to be relieved of my duties. We decide that we will alternate weeks with him while we are living apart.

After M is gone, along with his mini suitcase full of tiny clothes and bath products and half of his toys, the house is quiet. Snow is melting off tree branches outside and falls to earth with an occasional plop! This is a sound I’ve come to associate with late winter and the beginning of spring, of emerging from a long, dark, and cold period.

I call a therapist and arrange an appointment. When I walk into the waiting room at her office, I suddenly feel very aware of how disheveled I look. I am wearing Peter’s old flannel shirt. Its front pocket has ripped off, and I’ve been using the sleeve as a handkerchief for the past few days.

The therapist starts with the usual background-gathering, thumbing through the paperwork I filled out in the lobby just minutes before. “No addictions, no psychiatric history. Africa, that’s interesting.”

“South Africa,” I correct her. She looks up from the papers briefly, frowns slightly at me, and lowers her eyes again.

“And you’re going through a divorce,” she says. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well.”

“It’s quite a common thing for people who have recently experienced loss to rush into relationships,” she says robotically. She looks up at me again, reading my expression.

“Oh,” I say. “It’s that simple.”

The therapist smirks, raises her pen in the air, and turns the page. “Well, I can’t say that.”

“Of course you can’t,” I mutter.

It takes the rest of the session for her to review the paperwork. At the end of the session, she shakes my hand and says “I look forward to working with you” in a very businesslike manner before ushering me out the front door.