My divorce was finalized just a couple weeks ago--a divorce I absolutely did not want. God help me, I still love my now ex-wife dearly. I'm really at sixes and sevens. I've been medicated now for several weeks (Clonazepam [sp?], Lexapro, and, a recent addition to the "cocktail," Wellbutrin) after a divorce-related suicide attempt won me a "voluntary" commitment to a psychiatric ward, and yet the medication just does not do enough. Every night I wake at four or five AM from a dream I have about her, unless I supplement my meds with liberal amounts of alcohol, allowing me to fall into a black, dreamless slumber. The nights I remain sober, which have grown fewer and farther between as the months wear on, are hellish and completely draining.
Before my trip to the booby hatch, I was averaging about three or four hours of sleep a night, and I would go days without eating. My inanition and dehydration were so severe that, immediately after my admission to the hospital, I was put on an IV. I had to go through detox (thoroughly unpleasant) but have been drinking steadily since my discharge in mid-February. Lest you think me an emotionally incontinent little wuss, let me say that my suicide attempt was a reaction to the fact that my life was unraveling. The constant exhaustion I felt from the insomnia I had since my wife left, the inability to eat, and the constant drinking brought me to a state of utter collapse. I felt as if all I could look forward to each day was the same thing: missing my wife, and the despair that this brought me. My work and studies were suffering. I could read nothing. I could write nothing. My mind would inevitably drift back to my utterly baffling, yet no less immanent, divorce. The reasons which my wife gave me for her leaving--I "loved her too much," "put her on a pedestal," "came to rely on her emotionally too much"--didn't seem to me insurmountable problems. I've always been a man of my word to her (Well, I did start smoking again behind her back after having quit for a year-and-a-half), and thus I pledged that I would work on those things about me that bothered her. She agreed to go to marriage counseling, though she stated repeatedy that she didn't see much hope in that. She wasn't in love with me, and didn't believe she ever could be again.
After she told me she "didn't want to be married anymore," totally blindsiding me, as we were to leave the next day to spend Thanksgiving with my brother and his wife in Kansas City, she ended up living with me for almost another month (I went to KC alone), during which time I was banished to the couch. That month was utter agony. She made no firm plans to move out, and I carried on in a husbandly capacity, though she would not let me sleep with her, or even touch her. My exasperation reached such a critical point that I flew to Madison, WI to spend Xmas break with my father and stepmother. It was during this second absence that my wife found a place of her own and packed whatever it was she decided was hers. No negotiation, no apprisals of what she planned to take. I was in Madison for nearly two weeks, and came home to an apartment full of boxes. And yet she lived with me for another week-and-a-half, claiming some delay with the preparation of her new pad!
Our separation was informal. She led me to believe that she was just having a mid-twenties crisis (I had had such a crisis myself), and needed some time apart--a marriage sabbatical, if you like. Thus appealing to my sympathies and my nobility of intention towards her, she persuaded me, the complete fool that I am, to not only sign my car--our ONLY car--over to her, but also to allow her to empty a special bank account we'd started the previous summer to save toward a trip to London--an account that I had sold many cherished books and CDs over the internet in order to fill. She said she needed the money in order to buy a new laptop computer. It was either concede that money in the account to her, or sell the computer we shared and give her half the money. Goodbye vacation fund!
After she'd been gone a couple of weeks, I was driving my "Divorce-Mobile," a Nissan Ultima with 170K miles on it that my brother was getting ready to junk, to a farmer's market here in Tucson, when I came across my wife's car--MY car--outside an apartment complex in which I was reasonably certain none of her friends lived. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, and thus surrendered to the impulse to stop. I went to the apartment that I believed her to be in, and rang the doorbell. No one answered, but a dog inside was barking with great gusti. I then began to march around the complex, yelling my wife's name, and eventually my wife came outside, looking as if she'd just rolled out of bed (the time was 4 PM on a Friday afternoon). The was some guy I'd never seen in the doorway. Needless to say, I went insane, because I must have asked my wife thirty times during our protracted separation if she was involved with someone else, to which she invariably replied, "No." She told me to leave or she would call the police, but I lingered, begging her to explain why she had lied to me, why she had betrayed me. During that encounter, I came to the realization that I was the victim of an elaborate swindle: my wife, knowing that she'd not the resources to retain a lawyer, while I did, courtesy of my well-heeled father, tricked me into an uncontested divorce, and was thus able to get more from me than she'd otherwise get, given the fact that it was her who left and her who was being unfaithful. There I was in my absolute defeat and humiliation, hoisted on my own petard of selflessness and large-mindedness, qualities in me my wife knew she could exploit to her advantage.
She'd surprised me with divorce papers in our bank's parking lot earlier in the week. We went from an informal separation to a quickie divorce in a veritable blink of an eye. And yet, even on that day, just a few before I discovered her at that dude's apartment, she maintained that she wasn't interested in anyone else. There I was, however, outside "anyone else's" apartment. I confronted him, challenging him to a fight, but he cowered inside his apartment and said he was going to call the police. I soon left, but not before I groveled before my wife, whose look of absolute contempt is forever seared in my memory, begging for an explanation I knew I wasn't going to get.
That was the last time I've seen her in person.
I eventually left, but not before I kicked a sizeable dent in my old car's driver-side door.
The cops showed up at my apartment while I was calling my in-laws to inform them of my wife's swindling, whoring ways. They (the cops) browbeat me for a while, but I think that my wife was reluctant to press charges out of what I like to think is shame in having been caught in a lie. She did call me the following Sunday to tell me she was getting a restraining order against me, because she "needed to feel safe from me." From me! A man who couldn't love his wife more, who waited on her hand and foot the whole time we were together, who was virtually the sole source of income while she pursued a Bachelor's degree, who told her every day how much he loved her and how she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen! God, I adored my wife, and was constantly grateful that I found a woman who seemed to me the perfect combination of beauty, grace and intellect. She did the one thing I swore to her I'd never do: throw her over for someone else. This other guy must really be something, if my wife was so willing to speed along our divorce.
Everyone on her side of the family and mine were totally nonplussed. They told her what a good husband I was. I was committed (in the oher sense) bright, funny, articulate, and firmly on my way to a comfortable career in academia. Yet she threw it all away for this choad who probably knows far more about me than I'll ever know about him.
The Sunday on which she told me that she was getting a restraining order against me was the day I tried to hang myself, but was thwarted in the attempt. And here I speak to you across the wires, alive but not living. I'd take her back, even now, even after all this. Such was the love we shared, or, at least that I thought we shared. On the day she left, she lingered by the front door and said, "I'm scared." I asked her why. "Because I'm afraid I'm going to live to regret my decision."
I haven't heard from her in a month.
"But what a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and runnning water." --Catullus
* * *
What I'm most frustrated about is that I imagine my ex-wife is much happier than me, which seems a gross miscarriage of karmic or providential justice. She committed a crime--a whole string of crimes, actually--and I am suffering the punishment. I go to bed alone each night; she apparently doesn't. I'm on a whole smorgasbord of meds that make me feel lethargic and apathetic, when not in the throes of an abiding, seething resentment; she is apparently content and fulfilled, having freed herself from me.
We were so close. We shared so many common interests. We enjoyed the same sorts of films, the same sorts of activities, the same political views, the same aspirations, and, perhaps most importantly, the same worldview. I really and truly believed that we had the foundation for a lifelong love. I wanted to grow old with her. Her face was what I wanted to gaze into as I died. When we were good, we were great. I wrote her a love poem every Christmas, and in every card she gave me was an econmium to my husbandly virtues. She took all of these cards, which I'd saved over the years, with her when she left, except one that had fallen behind a nightstand. I found it just a few weeks ago as I was refurnishing my bedroom. In it she wrote, "I love you more than you will ever know." She also took every photograph, including our wedding pictures (and their negatives), from our nearly seven years together. She took journals that we kept together, and all of my favorite novels. She has all the mementos, or should I say, relics, of a dead marriage. I imagine they're probably in a box buried under her bed, as I am now buried in her heart. She has erased me.
All of these billet doux from her now smack of insincerity or dissimulation. How could she go from those sentiments to the ones she now has, which have allowed her to treat me with such self-interest and cruel indifference, to pursue a secret agenda with such Machiavellian machinations? These questions plague me. I know I will never have the answers, and thus I fear this plague will become a terminal condition.
I love her as much now as I did when we got engaged. We married out of love, with much deliberation and forethought. We were under no duress: she wasn't pregnant, nor was I ready to ship off somewhere. And to my dying day I will believe that our marriage could have survived, had my ex-wife made slightly different choices. Now all I do is scratch my head and get drunk to dull the heartache that never subsides. I try to hate her. I catalogue in my mind all of her transgressions, but then immediately forgive her. I just want to know that she feels remorse, that she feels the injustice of how she repaid all of my kindnesses.
I would have loved her forever, because my notion of love is precisely that of Shakespeare, who said,
"Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove: / O no! it is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."
That is what I feel; that is what I believe. I therefore pray daily for a reconciliation. I keep lit a candle in the window of my heart, my wife's true home--if she could just see it as such.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment