B. – on marriage and divorce.

Brooklyn, New York
January 1, 2001

Dear L.,

I keep thinking of you recently. You’re the only one I know roughly my age who got married and divorced all within a pretty short period of time. I never thought I’d be thinking so much about divorce only a few months after I got married, but I am. At least I am from time to time, and when those times come around they come around big time.

I remember thinking, before G. and I got married, that if everything else leaked out of our relationship like so much air out of an air mattress at least what we’d have left is that we could talk. G. and I always talked and talked – I remember marveling at how good a communicator he was. I fell in love with him during our lengthy morning conversations, when we’d sit around the living room of my apartment by the floor-to-ceiling windows and long white muslin drapes drinking scalding mugs of black coffee and talk and talk and talk – about what? Everything, it felt like – until we were both miserably late to work and embarrassed by how late we were but thrilled, completely thrilled, to have found the one person to whom each of us could talk and talk and talk that way and never get bored.

What I never considered was, what if he stopped being interested in what I had to say? I was so busy reveling in how it felt to have someone so gripped by my stray insights that I never stopped to imagine that such intense concentration might waver – and certainly not after only a few months of marriage. Just the same way that it never occurred to me that G. himself would ever stop sharing his thoughts and ideas with me, which he has.

So, though you and I have talked a lot about your divorce and why you felt like you had to leave, I’m wondering if it boiled down to the fact that you and E. just stopped talking the way you once did. And if you just couldn’t stand how sad and invisible that made you feel. And if you made the decision to leave him, say, one night after eating dinner at a restaurant.

I wonder if when you were driving home you passed along a street you don’t travel on much and it reminded you of an experience that still resonated for you. And I wonder if you started to tell him about that experience, if you started to set up the story and tell him why you had been on that street, and just at the point where you were about to get to the beautiful, poignant point of the story, E. cut you off, irritated that you were driving too slow or that the windshield washer light was on and you hadn’t noticed it, and you realized at that moment, not only has he not heard a word I just said but he hasn’t heard a word I’ve said in months. And I wonder if at that moment you just stopped talking, if you just closed your lips and turned on the radio and said to yourself, enough of this, I think I’ve had enough.

Is that how it happened? I really need to know.

xxox, B.