Liars, page 17
When I read those three months of his text messages, I saw that he’d always sent Victoria links to the funny online things I sent him. I wondered if there was a point at which he thought, I’ll stay married for a while longer, since my wife gives me links to funny online things that my girlfriend likes.
Felix said that John’s friends had thought I was too good for him, and that John had always explained that I was profoundly unstable, deeply crazy, and had even been hospitalized.
Imagine having to explain to your friends that your wife is with you only because there’s something wrong with her.
After John left, I swept out the garage and discovered that he could, in fact, receive my calls and texts in his garage studio. He’d always claimed there was no reception.
A few months before he left, he’d called me out to the garage and asked me for a critique of a new painting. I’d sandwiched the critique in praise. Well, that’s just wrong, he’d quickly said to the criticism.
The only lie I’d ever told my husband was that a piece of glass left over from a DIY project had cracked on its own, and not because I’d dropped it. It had felt like a neutralizing decision. It had felt like getting even with the harm he’d done me. It had felt like a drop in the bucket of that harm.
Which is, of course, exactly how he’d felt about his lying and cheating.
How large was his bucket? What else was in it, besides Victoria?
I wrote down the story again:
As soon as we got settled and I found an adjunct-teaching job, John would lose his job and we’d move again. The more untethered and dependent and overwhelmed I grew, the surer he felt that he should be the one making decisions about where to live, since he was, by that point, bringing in most of the money. I believed him, especially when he added that I was crazy, since, after all, I’d been hospitalized that one time.
Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.
But wait—was I crazy?
When John had wanted to hang a pull-up bar in a doorway of our first California house, I’d refused to let him because I feared I’d be tempted to hang myself from it.
When our son had disappeared at the beach and we’d had the lifeguards scouring the sand, I’d stood and said, Oh my god oh my god loudly enough that people were staring, and I hadn’t cared. I took a break from my keening to inform my stonily silent husband that if the child were dead, I would kill myself.
But the child was found, and I didn’t kill myself.
That’s the problem with women like us, Marni said. We don’t die. When I tell people I look forward to dying, they don’t get it. I’m just fucking tired. I’m not going to kill myself, but I’m ready to rest. When I went on vacation I went snorkeling and couldn’t move. The current was too strong. But it was just beautiful underwater. I thought, Well, if this is it, it’s not bad. Then the stupid boat guide saved me and gave me a hundred bucks.
I closed my eyes and gathered the entire marriage into a pile. It looked like a scene from a building demolition, rebar and jagged wood, half a lifetime’s worth of stuff. Then I compacted it and the pile contracted, crushed by heavy machines. When I was done, it was black as coal and had the density of a collapsed star. I opened my eyes.
A year after he left, I felt a stirring of awareness: Maybe he’d known he’d needed to let me go so I could be free to do my work and live my life, and maybe on some deep, secret level, it was an act of duty and kindness.
But that’s just me projecting a pretty moral onto a story of deliberate harm. When I was a wife, that was my main job.
When I arrived at John’s house, the child was eating cereal out of a beautiful blue bowl. I recognized the brand and looked it up on the internet. The bowl had cost forty-four dollars.
He’d left me the blue bowls I’d bought at Target, years before we met. I couldn’t have spent more than ten bucks for the set.
John’s new house was full of new expensive things. Those bowls, the leather sofa, the custom-framed pictures—he’d bought all of it quickly, before we’d split what was left of our savings.
In the beginning, every time John and I had heard about an affair, we used to say that it sounded exhausting to carry on like that, to tell so many lies, take care of two relationships, make time for phone calls and trysts. I really had felt that way, and since John was so lazy in the rest of his life, I’d assumed he’d felt that way, too.
A month before he left, Victoria had written to him: Imagine these words coming straight out of my mouth and into yours. And then my mouth going somewhere else…How much longer before we can celebrate?
I hadn’t had any trouble masturbating after John left. But after more than a year, while rubbing myself in bed, I saw him suddenly hanging there, looking down at me with that calm green gaze. I was surprised; it was the first time that had happened. The rage had left my body, and the rest of the feelings were finding their way back in.
The smell of a woman’s cunt on her own fingers, I wrote in my notebook that night. It felt important.
Everything I’d written during the marriage belonged to John and me equally, since California was a community property state. But everything afterward was mine.
The intellectual property I’d created during the life of the marriage was considered shared property in the eyes of the law, so even though John earned hundreds of thousands of dollars more than I did, every year for the rest of the settlement I’d have to pay him half of what I earned from four of my books. He could have let me keep the money, but he didn’t. I tried to forget about it. I couldn’t change the law if I wanted to, and it might work the other way, if some cheater wrote a hit movie while he was married. In their divorce, his chump wife would benefit. I tried to feel that scenario balancing mine.
During a five-minute break in my online lecture I checked my email and found a message from the mediator with the subject heading Final Judgment. Adrenaline surged into my throat. I couldn’t open it; I had two more hours to teach onscreen.
I wondered if John felt the same strange dread at suddenly being divorced, but of course he didn’t; he was already several years into his next relationship.
Days later, I felt my mind start to allocate space to things other than the divorce. Those other things, as they made their way into my awareness—music, a squirrel in a tree, the sun and sky—felt new and unspoiled, as if I’d never thought about them before.
For a long time I’d thought of marriage as something I was good at, and that each wedding anniversary was an achievement. I was good at absorbing abuse. I’d been good at playing the piano, too, but after I’d quit I felt the same relief.
John and I opened new bank accounts and traded account numbers. John didn’t know how to read the account number on the bottom of his new checks and sent me a photo of a check so I could read it for him, but I didn’t do it to help him. I did it so that I didn’t have to deal with it later on, after some financial transaction failed.
The tide was high and the sand was hell to walk through, wet and loosely packed, but I dragged myself a mile down the beach so the child could watch the surf beat the rocks. On the way back a dog chased him and he cried. My back and neck seized up. But then there were dolphins.
There were so many perspectives on those fourteen years, and each one was newly, separately instructive. Once I could stand looking at it from one direction, I discovered another and had to figure everything out all over again.
Early on, maybe five years in, John had said, Are you only with me because I’m dark and handsome? and I’d said, I’ve left darker and handsomer, which had been true. But I saw now that it had also been a dodge. Even then, I’d known I was drawn mainly to his body.
Maybe a man’s relationship to another person is only ever adversarial.
Almost two years had passed, and whatever it was that I hadn’t gotten over, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get over it if the prize was having to take on a husband again.
John had taught me a lesson that felt indelible: that there are no assurances. That anyone might do anything to anyone.
Maybe I should have followed my instinct, years back, when I’d yearned to move to a little house upstate, all alone.
While we waited for the child to put his shoes on, John stood in my living room, preeningly explaining something, polishing his sunglasses on the bottom of his shirt, exposing a good six inches of belly, which was noticeably doughier than it had been a year ago. Its hairs were long and straggly. I tried not to look at it.
John had always rubbed his eyes when he was excited about explaining something, about showing his authority. The gesture never varied. When he started rubbing his eyes I immediately got bored.
When you’re a liar, you always know something that other people don’t know. Maybe lying to me made John feel extra smart.
Everything he did to me, all the lying—he’d thought he was avenging a wound I’d inflicted on purpose. He must have felt like a guttering candle, on the verge of being extinguished.
Victoria’s attention affirmed to him that he existed, that he was important, that he was worth everything, even her family. Even his family. Imagine how good that must have felt.
Next to Victoria, John didn’t look like a failed artist or a faithless husband. He looked like a guy who was valuable enough to make someone throw away a twenty-five-year marriage.
Someday John’s contempt would find its way into that romance, too, but it was no concern of mine.
Now I stand in the shade of a tree.
Someone has left three perfect walnut halves on the lowest branch. Perhaps a lucky squirrel will find them. The child steps over them and keeps going up. The light in the sky is fading.
I’m not thinking about John. He isn’t part of this.
I am in a park, which is a wordless place.
I’m looking at a tree with a child in it, my child, who has come out of my body and gone calmly and happily up a tree. I’m looking up at him, watching over him from underneath.
My marriage is done. The last artifact of it is in the tree now. I feel like myself.
The child sits up high and considers the park from the highest comfortable seat.
It’s as if I’ve deployed him.
The boy in the tree looks down at the world.
He’s the engine by which I learn what is left of my life.
I remember how desperately I had to cling to the story of my happy marriage. It took effort. It felt so good to stop lying.
At karate this afternoon I sit with an unfamiliar woman who usually brings her daughter to practice on a different day. We talk about how good it was for our kids to have the dojo, even online, during the long quarantine. I hear myself say, My husband and I divorced this past year, and the consistency and community were just so good for our child.
No alarm bells ring; no flames flicker. A moment later, she and I are talking about something else.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Parisa Ebrahimi and PJ Mark above all others, and to acknowledge the generous support of Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Jim Behrle, Sam Chapman, Jean Connolly, J. D. Daniels, Elizabeth Doan, Amy Fusselman, Garry Gekht, Makenna Goodman, Andrew Sean Greer, Daniel Handler, Sheila Heti, James Kent, Jennifer L. Knox, Diane Kramer, Catherine Lacey, Erinn Lalezari, Tanya Larkin, Irene Lusztig, Frank Manguso, Judith Manguso, Jenny Moore, Mary Mount, Ted Mulkerin, Leigh Newman, Julie Orringer, Ed Park, Christa Parravani, Bobbie Poledouris, Alexa de los Reyes, Karen Gaul Schulman, Leanne Shapton, Eleanor Skimin, Susan Steinberg, Amanda Stern, Caeli Wulfson Widger, Antoine Wilson, the teams at Hogarth and Janklow & Nesbit—and especially Tracy Schorn and the life-saving community of Chump Nation.
Parts of this book were included, in slightly different forms, in “Love,” included in Pets: An Anthology (Tyrant Books, 2020), edited by Jordan Castro.
About the Author
Sarah Manguso is the author of eight previous books, including the novel Very Cold People and several works of nonfiction and poetry. Her work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.
sarahmanguso.com
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Sarah Manguso, Liars
