I was going to spend my children's naptime today editing this last bit of the novel so it would read better and I'd feel less like an ass about posting it. But I just walked by my master bedroom and it's all nice and cold and dark in there and suddenly sitting on the computer sounds like a terrible idea when I could be unconscious instead. So here it is. Unedited. I don't even know what the hell I said, just that it got me to 50,000 words. There are also three or four other scenes that I added in other sections of the novel. None of them is great; one of them was pure, unadulterated erotica. I will spare your eyes.
This whole NaNo business is nearly over (thank God) but before I sign off from it completely, I plan on writing one more post which will talk about what it was like to post a novel to a blog. I'll also answer some of the questions you guys have emailed me (feel free to send more if you have them). And then if I'm feeling truly inspired (I probably won't be) I may set up a link to the novel in its entirety so anyone who is interested can read back through in a linear format.
And then it'll be done. I hope you'll all join me in martinis. Thank you again for reading and for your feedback.
Tom walks out the door again without so much as a nod in my direction. He slides easily into the car, unencumbered. I watch as he turns the key in the ignition and drums his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for me. I almost hate him when I see him look in the rearview mirror to fix his sunglasses. I am left fumbling with my bag, the poorly-wrapped gift, and some hastily constructed directions for the babysitter. This will be fun, I think sarcastically. There is nothing more entertaining than taking your grouchy husband to a social event where you are likely to meet your boyfriend’s baby for the first time. I am a Lifetime movie.
Boyfriend? Is Darwin my boyfriend? Can married women have boyfriends? I have to admit that I rather like the term. I like the word “boy.” It reminds me of the catcalls of my youth. I decide that from this moment on, I shall think of Darwin as my boyfriend. It is rather nice to apply a label to the person itself instead of the relationship. I just made the jump from affair to boyfriend in my mind. Just the idea of my having a boyfriend gives me the energy to say goodbye to the babysitter and head out the door.
This drive will be awkward, I know with certainty as soon as I get into the car. Tom is obviously angry about something, and if he behaves as he typically does, he will prefer sulking about it quietly all day, rather than fighting about it and getting past the matter. Tom and I are different like that. If I am going to make the effort to show people how I am feeling, I am also going to grant them the opportunity to change whatever it is that they are doing to piss me off. Not so with Tom. Tom does not believe he has the right to influence other people’s actions. He is all about accepting people for who and what they are. That makes him sound fairly honorable and decent, but the reality is that with all of this supposed acceptance, Tom has lost his voice. He doesn’t feel he should influence people or outcomes or social situations. So if he is unhappy with a thing, he feels he has no option other than to accept his unhappiness. It is disempowering; it is emasculating. It’s a bit ridiculous, and if other people are like me, they fail to respect him for it. They wonder instead why he does it. They wonder where he lost his voice. I am sure they blame me for it, even as I am just as irritated with the character flaw. Women, wives, always are blamed when their husbands act like little bitches.
Nobody ever talks about how sometimes being nice is one of the most dangerous things you can be. All we’re ever told is to be nicer, share more, give more, be more present. Somewhere along the line we all forgot that sometimes you just have to be an asshole to get the job done. I am certain that the skill of being an asshole is something that is never purposely taught. Nice families certainly don’t teach it to their own children, whereas the kids of crazies learn it by default. Tom has a nice family. And once again, I don’t regret my upbringing.
We drive on in silence and I find myself with the feeling that I am just about completely over the problem of Tom. He is certainly not giving me anything to work with. He is refusing my attempts at communication, and he is hiding in his shell. I have had better fights with the twins. I feel more lost from him today than ever before in our lives together, and I wonder why I spent any time beating myself up about this at all. I am starting to see Darwin as a symptom, not the problem itself. Tom’s complacency and then acceptance of defeat makes him suddenly completely unattractive in my eyes. I wanted, I realize then, him to fight for me. That he is not rising to the challenge means that I am fighting by myself. It means I can safely give up the fight altogether, I suppose.
When I make an impulsive decision to act in a big way, I experience a physical sensation not unlike that of falling. I feel the world rushing past me. I am deaf to any noise. I find it difficult to see. I taste adrenaline. I feel absolutely out of control with the fact that I am completely in control. The confusion of the paradox provides whatever fuel I need to do what I am about to do. I feel powerless over the innate power inside of me.
I will never forget the first time I felt like this. I was a child, at the dinner table with my family. My mother was medicated, my father was around, Julia had not yet left us. Things were actually going rather well in the house, but there was a noticeable anger growing inside of me. I was consciously resisting, sometimes on an hourly basis, the urge to scream. It was barely contained, though my parents were unaware of the tempest brewing inside of me. And then that night, my father asked me why my math teacher had called him at work to talk about my poor test scores. There were a thousand different ways to handle the situation. He could have followed the fine examples set in the after school specials I watched. He could have looked at me with concern and asked whether anything was bothering me. He could have admitted to having raised me in a veritable shit storm that should have produced behaviors far worse than a lousy grade in math. Instead, he said, with his mouth full of chewed up food, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” And that’s when I first felt it—the overwhelming feeling of internal chaos that I have come to associate with the experience of my body doing something that my mind has not yet worked through. Without my permission, my mouth opened and I responded, “Shut the fuck up.” It, in hindsight, is exactly what I should have said. He deserved at least that. But fathers, no matter how they choose to raise their daughters, are apparently deserving of better language than my less than carefully chosen words. Apparently, no matter what the circumstances are, little girls are never to tell their fathers to shut the fuck up. It makes me want to tattoo the words across my skin.
I told the story once before. I told it to Tom. When I told it to him, I closed it by saying, “And then he slapped me.” Because slap is a nicer word than punch. Slaps sting whereas punches deaden. Slaps do not tend to draw blood. Slaps rarely even bruise. So I said “slap” because I learned my lesson that night about choosing my language carefully.
This feeling, this precursor to telling my father to fuck off, is akin to what I feel one half-second before my mouth opens and I hear myself telling Tom, “We need to think about getting a divorce.” I say it as if I am discussing the option of canceling our daily subscription to the newspaper. I say it without regard for the three children tucked in our nest. I say it without having thought about how I will pay my bills. I say it loudly, finally, because I have been whispering it now for months and it somehow has not been heard. I say it, mostly, because Tom has failed to.
I hadn’t thought about the prospect of divorcing Tom before I said the words. Not really. Not in a practical way. But once the words are out, I realize that probably that is exactly what needs to happen. For some reason, the idea of change no longer frightens me. I don’t much think about it, to be honest. I think that the period of time which elapsed in between my first thinking about leaving Tom and this moment right here was the only thing I really needed in order to be okay with the change. I did not, in the end, need to sort out any complicated feelings. I didn’t need to think about income, housing arrangements, what his parents would think. I just needed time to have lived with the thought in my head. I needed time to incorporate that thought into my daily routine. And now, I realize after the fact, it is in there. And now there is no getting it out. There is no going backwards. Of this I am sure.
I can live without Tom. Part of me will be sad as hell to think of him, this person with whom I have so much shared history, wandering apart from me. It feels like a broken union, which of course is what it is. It feels like the other half of me will be gutted from me. That feeling, that truth, about having to leave one entire half of who I am is the very reason I realize it must be done. I need to be whole without him. I need to feel complete on my own. I need to grow back into a whole, all by myself. This feeling of anxiety that I get when I contemplate leaving a man I obviously no longer want to be with is the only proof I need. One shouldn’t feel anxious about getting what she wants.
The therapist would be proud.
I don’t know what a life without Tom will look like, but I am certain of its possibility. I did it once before and I can do it again. I’m not thinking of Darwin, I realize. He is not a consideration. For as much as his entering my life appears to have culminated in my leaving Tom, he is not a factor at all. I think that the therapist would likely congratulate me for not thinking about him. I am intentionally not replacing one man with another. I think I may be doing away with them altogether. I have spent my entire adulthood, I realize, growing in context of someone else. I have no idea who I might be on my own. And while this may be okay, preferable even, for some people, I cannot face it anymore. I know that I will die alone, ultimately. I was born alone and I will die alone. Why on earth should I try to comfort myself with the presence of someone else in the interim. Why would I not figure this thing out on my own.
Suddenly, the entire institution of marriage seems a crutch, a construct manufactured to stave off the effects of the natural aging process. The only reason for being with one person for so long, I think, is to have someone around to provide validation. Validation may well be the greatest stumbling block in between a person in need of change and the change itself. Maybe if we didn’t intentionally seek out these little cheerleaders, we would be more apt to grow and adapt. Maybe we would confront middle age and then our final years on earth with a bit more grace and acceptance. Maybe if we were always alone, we would feel less alone when it really counts. I think these thoughts as I’m clutching the white pasta bowl, holding it safely on my lap. Tom is driving, staring straight ahead, probably imagining himself to be wounding me with his silence. He doesn’t know that inside of my head there is a maelstrom. He doesn’t realize that I have already left him. He thinks he is on the winning side with his silence and his anger. He doesn’t know that I already have the one thing more powerful than all of that anger—indifference. He can’t shock me if I don’t care. I can no longer force myself to care.
These decisions I’m making lately, I know a lot of people would consider them failures. I wonder why it is that they don’t feel as such. I wonder what I am doing different, wrong. I wonder, not for the first time today, why I don’t really care too much.
Tom is quiet. I can tell from the subtle change in his facial structure that he is clenching his jaw. When you have been with someone for this long, you notice these things immediately. To me, the change is as striking as if he removed his shirt. I even know what it means. A clenched jaw means that Tom is angry and is taking some time to calm himself down before he speaks. I wish he would just fucking say whatever it is that is on his mind. I hate these waiting periods. I don’t mind the waiting. I mind getting the watered-down version of his emotions.
While I wait for him to talk, I imagine the scenario where Tom just blurts out whatever is in his mind. I imagine him screaming in rage, driving too fast. I imagine him pulling the car over so that he has a free hand to slap me. And then, though it is a significantly less rewarding enterprise, I imagine him sobbing. Again, the car is pulled over and his head is cradled in his arms. He is weeping. I am not sure how I would react to the sobbing, but I know for a fact that if he were to react to me in a rage, I would likely fall back in love with him. It is an explosion of passion that I am lacking. It is the sign of giving a shit that I am seeking. It is this ennui that I am consciously fighting. I don’t know why he struggles to see this. It’s not difficult. Women are drawn to outbursts. We are encouraged by passion. We are, at the end of the day, complicated beings who are motivated by simple emotions. I want him to scream at me, I realize. I may very well have spent the past few months in bed with Darwin, hoping that Tom would scream at me.
And at the exact same time, I know that he will not. It is not in his character makeup to do so. He has too much of whatever it is that stands in between a person’s will to air their ugly truths and their actual ability to do so. He is too goddamn nice.
At this minute, I cannot think of a single description that is more cruel than “nice.”
I watch him clenching and relaxing his jaw and I wait for it. I wait for his measured response. I know that I am in control because I have visual evidence of Tom trying like hell to maintain his own control. It is this that I have had too much of. Too much control. I don’t want to feel like I am in charge of this relationship. I am already a mother to three. I want a partner. I want to feel either the sensation of equal commitment or else the hopelessly, carelessly lost feeling I am getting from whatever it is that I am doing with Darwin. I want to be out of control.
Tom’s voice is even. “It sounds as if you have given this a lot of thought. And I hope like hell that you have.” This is his response. No passion; no flare ups. He hopes I have given thought to the matter. I have not, but I do not bother telling him that, since it likely will have no effect on the outcome of our situation. I nod. I finger the wrapping on the pasta dish. He hopes I have thought about the matter. This implies that he feels I will be a little lost without him. I likely will be; he may not be wrong about that. I just don’t care anymore, and it is this aspect which he is underestimating. Lost sounds pretty fucking good right about now. I, after all, have years of experience in taking care of myself. I know I can do it. I’m not interested in having someone do it for me now. Likewise, I’m not interested in taking care of anyone else. It’s a struggle. It requires of me more than I ever had to give. This is why I can’t parent. This is why I can’t be a proper wife.
I get the sense, suddenly, that this situation is not nearly as inflammatory as it likely needs to be. I am on the verge of cashing in ten years of marriage, and I get the sense that unless I do something drastic here, the entire thing will end with merely a whimper. I could handle it. I could handle the anticlimax, but if it’s in my power to do something to force out a bang, I ought to. The dissolution of our marriage, I know, will be easier and tidier to replay and understand if there is some kind of action associated with it. If it is nothing but words, it will linger forever in my mind. I know this. I know from experience that the more vague a memory is, the longer it sits around to haunt you. If you don’t understand this, you need to spend more time around people who have been damaged. You need to ask someone who has lived through both a single paralyzing gunshot and the experience of having been locked in the trunk of a car and you’ll find out that they’re still trying to get out of the trunk long after the stitches have been removed from their gunshot wound. The human brain appreciates a concrete start and finish to the tragedies it is expected to make sense of.
I’d rather be shot than suffocated.
I tell Tom to pull over. He does. Still clenching his jaw. I begin to feel sorry for him because I know he is bracing himself against my perceived assault, and I hate that I have this control over him. I think of the caged tigers at the zoo. Pacing, pacing, pacing. Products of their environment. Stripped of their power. Impotent. This is Tom. Tom is the caged tiger, which puts me in the role of zoo keeper. I never asked to be zoo keeper. It’s not exactly the job I signed up for when I got married. I have unwittingly emasculated my husband. You can see why this entire affair needs to end, sooner rather than later. I refuse, though, to take the blame for his emasculation. If I was too overbearing, if I was too confident, if I was too anything, he had a responsibility to tell me. I never asked to be in charge. Honestly, I think I went into it expecting to be the tiger.
It is not my goal to hurt him, but at the same time I have to admit that I want to inspire some emotion in him. Part of me wants to tip him over the edge so that he can leave this mess behind him neatly. If he hates me, he will move on and be okay. Anger is a gift, I remind myself. Right now it is likely the only kindness I can give him.
“I have been fucking Darwin for the past three months.” This is what I tell him. This is the ammunition I choose to use. It is not premeditated. Nothing I have said or done today has been rehearsed. I am simply speaking. It is true that I enjoy the sound of the words “fucking Darwin” probably much more than I should, but this is not why I say it. I honestly say it so that Tom will be angry with me.
I wait for his face to change. It does not. I am staring at his chin, at his eyebrows, at the corners of his mouth. I am waiting for evidence of surprise, shock, anger. I get nothing. And then I realize that he already knows. He has known before this conversation, before this car ride. Perhaps he has always known about my fucking Darwin.
“Yeah,” he says, “About that. I wanted to ask you how that’s been working out for you.”
Chapter Seven
I am unsure what to say, so I concentrate on the scenery going by. We drive over a bridge and I am surprised to see a blonde girl holding a fishing pole. She’s nineteen, maybe twenty years old, fishing. I was under the impression that fishing was an activity for older males and for children. I wasn’t aware of the twenty year old woman demographic. Because my mind is eager for any activity but the one at hand, I contemplate on designing an advertising campaign for the twenty year old female fisher. I spend a few minutes wondering what that would look like.
Half of me is concentrating on the female fisherman (??? Fisherwoman? Fisherperson? —seriously, why do I choose to write about shit like this? Who does that?) and the other half of me is reeling from Tom’s reveal. I could not be more surprised if I tried. I am not even conscious of the shifting power dynamic because I am so caught in the surprise of his knowledge. He knows and has said nothing. All this time, I thought I was the one with the secret. Tom has surprised me.
“You’re a fucking embarrassment.” This is what he says to me next. My head physically draws back in surprise. I feel my eyes widen. It is as if I have been struck.
He says it in a voice devoid of anger, seemingly absent of emotion altogether. It is not like Tom to use this kind of language and this is the only clue to whatever emotions might be percolating underneath that veneer he paints on so well.
Something about that statement. . .there’s something about it. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something not altogether unpleasant about it. After I take a second to work through the initial implied barb, I think there is something deeper to the comment. I think that there is an implied ownership in the remark. As if I am a cross he must bear. I am his dirty little secret. He has endured me because he felt he had to. Or he wanted to. He was aware of my being a mess and he tolerated me. It may be a stretch, but that is how I choose to understand the remark. As such, I raise my eyebrow. I appreciate this from Tom. I appreciate that he has feelings about what I have done. I appreciate that he feels embarrassed by me. It shows he is human and in a way it rather elevates the situation. I have not, in the end, been fighting all by myself. There was another real human involved.
Was.
I wonder why he is still driving to the party. I wonder why, if he knew about me and Darwin all along, why he agreed to attend the party at all. Why is he sleeping in our bed? Why has he not mentioned Darwin? How have I been led to believe he knew nothing? I wonder what Tom was getting out of it all. It is a basic assumption of human behavior—we do not tend to act in ways that do not directly benefit us. Not for the long haul, anyway. Tom was getting something out of my affair with Darwin or else he would have ended it. To ask what that something might be, though, would imply that I cared enough to work on it. I do not. I know our situation is over. Our marriage is over and I am not interested in sorting out the details. Darwin is a symptom. And I’m not interested in trying to solve the underlying problem. That doesn’t make me weak, I remind myself. It makes me real. I am not interested in trying to solve the problem of my marriage. I am only interested in getting out.
The car is silent. It’s the type of silence that is so quiet I can hear the blood rushing through my body. For a minute, it seems as though the entire world is frozen in time. I know that in a moment, the light will turn green and we will go. If I give this one more minute, Tom will turn to me and ask me why I did it. He will either be angry or sad or stoic. I will be forced to say things I haven’t even thought. If I give it another minute, I will have to ask him when he found out. I will admit to things he may not even know for certain. I will have to either feign a renewed sense of commitment to our marriage or else hurt him with the truth of my indifference. One more minute and the walls will come crashing down.
As such, I balance the pasta bowl on my knees and carefully unlock my seat belt. I hand Tom the pasta bowl with one hand, with the other I collect my purse off the floor. Tom, sensing my impending departure, says to me then, “I will fight you for full custody of the girls. I don’t want them in the same house as a guy who leaves his pregnant wife for a married woman. I will win.” I turn to face him then. His is not the look of a man who is making empty threats or ultimatums. He is just merely stating what is most likely the truth. It is another thing I hadn’t considered, but I immediately realize that even this threat is not enough to keep me rooted in place.
I open the door and step out.
