A Fiction Preview: “The Divorce”

Here’s a preview of a work of fiction I’m currently writing. I do not yet know if it’s a short story or something longer, but I feel quite good about it. Let me know what you think and if you’d like more in the comments.

THE DIVORCE

How did we get here, seated across from one another at a large metallic table, our lives together contracted to signatures on a piece of paper? I did not feel relief, as I thought I might, when the final stroke of my pen inked my last name. I felt something like nostalgia and remorse smashed together, a peculiar Venn diagram of emotions that, when combined, were entirely unfamiliar to me. When I looked at her sign her name I did not see the woman I once loved, but I also did not see a stranger — that would have made it easier, the idea that we’d simply fallen out of love after years of commitment had made us more friends than lovers. No, worse than that.

She was like a familiar work of art I’d enjoyed visiting at The Met for years, often enough that I started to think of it as my work, that it existed as a marker of my connection to the painter, whoever it was, and that The Met itself had mysteriously engineered every scene featuring me and this work — it was about us. But then, after twenty-three years of sitting on a stone bench staring into the daring strokes of black and yellow and white, I’d found myself wondering why I’d allowed myself to focus so thoroughly on this one piece. It no longer represented my love and devotion. It came to embody my neglect for everything else the museum had to offer, and so a strain of revulsion slid in, an unavoidable anger that this piece had somehow distracted me from not a better story but, perhaps, a more nourishing one.

What does one say after the ink has dried on a divorce?

Nothing apparently. I’d hoped to see the glimmer of a tear in the corner of her eye, but instead I saw something like confidence. She was ready for this — she had plans, like always, a focus that led directly out the pair of glass doors behind her, beyond the hallways and the elevators and the vestibule to the air and the breeze and the streaks of white clouds in a promising sky. She said she didn’t have a man or a woman, but she didn’t know I knew better. I’d followed her one night last year. It was Spring and the clocks had just turned so it was still light at seven, her favorite time of year, and she walked to Washington Square Park where she embraced a man right under the arch and they kissed and I wondered first how they could be so brazen and wondered next why she’d become a tad cliché in her forties.

My lawyer, Barry, extended his hand. It was a meaty, sweaty paw with the sort of thick lines a palm reader would salivate over. I slid my hand into his and felt my small fingers crack. She always said she didn’t mind that I had small hands. And I believed her. She never really lied — except for her Washington Square Park friend — and I admired that about her. There was so much to admire in her. I would tell my mother, when she was still alive, “She’s the kindest woman I’ve ever known,” and that was true. I’d known many women before I met Kristen. One session when I was complaining about my relationships (or lack thereof) with women in my twenties, my therapist told me to write all of their names down on a piece of paper and list all of their qualities, good and bad, and see if a pattern emerged. A very clear pattern revealed itself and I was ruined for a few months — I fell for women who were completely unavailable, starting when I was seven and fell in love with my second grade teacher Miss Went. English teachers were my poison in middle school and high school and girls with boyfriends or drug problems in college. For reasons I never quite articulated with that therapist, I was drawn to women who seemed to appreciate my presence the way someone admires a particularly well-made vase. It’s there and it’s nice and you don’t want to break it but you also don’t want to play with it and you’re not interested in its history. Girls and women who liked me — forget about it. Not pretty enough. Not thin enough. Not smart enough. Not Natalie Portman enough.

Kristen cut through all of that when I met her. I was twenty-five and she was twenty and we were at a mutual friend’s Halloween party in Amityville. I so wish I’d seen her through the crowd as it parted, holding a red solo cup as the band plucked notes that perfectly embodied my swelling heart. But that’s not how it happened.

“You’re Christopher,” I heard an enthusiastic voice. I spun around and saw a short, young woman dressed as a sexy-Pocahontas — it was 2002 and the world was less awake. There were two more sexy-Pocahonti behind her laughing and drinking.

“Yes, do I know you?”

“I’m Kristen,” she said, holding out her hand, “Dan’s friend.”

Dan was smoking pot by the garden — we were in the backyard of someone I didn’t know and the band played in garbled lyrics and unrefined guitar licks on the deck. There was a pool covered by a tarp with collections of damp, brown leaves strewn across it. There were already discarded cups in the grass.

“Oh hi, Kristen,” I said, shaking her hand. No idea who she was, Dan had never mentioned her to me. “How do you know Dan?”

“His sister and I go to Post.”

“How do you already know me?” I smiled and she smiled. I thought she was attractive, but I didn’t feel that undeniable spark I often felt with less available women. She was cute with short brown hair and big brown eyes — her cheeks dotted with cartoonish blush.

“I saw your film.”

She was suddenly interesting. I took a big sip of skunky beer.

“Oh no. Which one,” I asked.

“The one about the coffee shop. I really liked it.”

“Oh thank you,” I said. “What did you like about it?”

Her face contracted into thought as she seriously considered my question.

“I liked how you didn’t romanticize the couple. It just felt real. Like I’ve had that experience before.”

“You’ve had someone confess their unrequited love for you?”

“Yes.”

“What was that like.”

“It was awful,” her grin then had a mischievous quality, and I realized that she was flirting with me. I never was a good flirt — it required so much effort. It was agreeing to play a character, some charming version of yourself that did not reflect the daily anxieties and anguish that goes along with really living. It was a pact to play along, to inhabit another’s skin for a few minutes and sustain a fantasy that you’re both like witty characters in a movie.

“I like your costume,” she said. I was Frodo Baggins, the one ring dangling from a golden chain around my neck. I wore shoes that looked like big, hairy Hobbit feet, the benefit of knowing a prop maker.

“Thank you, I like yours too. Why are there so many of you?”

“We thought it would be funny.”

“It is. So what are you studying at Post?”

“Poli-sci.”

“I had a great poli-sci class once in my undergrad.”

“You go to NYU, right?”

“Guilty. I’m getting my PHD in film.”

I suddenly became very aware of the sound of my own voice and I hated it. In moments like that I wonder if I’m picking up on the way the person I’m talking to has received my voice — I’m like an anxious psychic perceiving the way others perceive me. What a self-important dick I was to mention my PHD.

“That’s so cool. So what are your top five favorite movies?”

You know how the rest of this goes. We talked, we drank, I got her number, and we agreed to meet again. A few days later I called and we went on our first date — a walk through Bryant Park and a few slices of pizza — we kissed just outside the Long Island Railroad entrance to Penn Station. It was nice. It was easy. In my romantic life pre-Kristen I had come to regard women as peculiar locks requiring individual picks and retinal scans and fingerprint IDs in order to open up. Kristen was not a puzzle to solve. She was simply a girl who liked me, who wanted me, and I was unaccustomed to that process. I liked that she wasn’t an artist, but seemed to value art. She had good taste in movies, and a deep appreciation for American history. While I didn’t understand this at the time, we had become fast friends. This was a slow-burn kind of attraction that I had never experienced before — in fact, it was so unusual to me that I questioned the veracity of it. I was not swinging wildly in my moods when it came to her. I was steady, intrigued, and something resembling happy. I thought about her often, but it did not come with a pang of frustration or confusion. I didn’t have to worry about her with other men — we were quick to agree to monogamy.

“You’re my main squeeze, kid,” I said to her, trying to be cool, after only a couple weeks of dating.

“I better be your only squeeze, guy!” she pinched my bare nipple and I screamed. I tickled her stomach and she squirmed, and then we kissed and had sex. She was the third woman I’d ever been with. The first was in high school, the second in college, and then Kristen. I measured out my life in these academic phases. I’d wanted to be with more women, of course, but a blend of my own misguided romantic philosophy and my forgettable face didn’t seem to make that possible. Kristen was the first woman to see me as I wanted to be seen — intelligent, interesting, funny, and worthy of commitment.

***

I felt a very specific, fleeting pain in my chest when I saw her — like someone had pushed a long needle through my breast bone and pierced my heart. Sweat bubbled up to the surface of my pores, coating my face in a sheen of anxiety. She was even prettier than I remembered her but, then again, I was always attracted to older women. Time had been more than kind to her. Her hair was short and dark and her dress was long and black. She sat down in the second row with a copy of my book in her lap. I watched her through a crack in the door, immediately wondering how I might greet her. This wasn’t the first time someone from my past had appeared at one of my readings, but she was the first to make me nervous.

Joan.

The second woman I’d ever been with. My first official girlfriend. I’d be lying if I told you I hadn’t fantasized about bumping into her again. Only I imagined it would be somewhere in the city with her two daughters — yes, I’ve periodically checked in on Joan via Google and smiled at her Instagram posts about her vegan meals and parenting hacks. She seemed happy in her videos, as though she’d cracked life’s code and matured into a self-assured adult…