After I moved out of Zeke’s house, divorce papers filed and storage locker crammed full of the leavings of what had been my life, I flew elsewhere for three weeks, to a moist green place that was not the desert. A friend met me at the airport. We drove to her cabin in the woods. We had been corresponding for some time. Our intent was to see whether our epistolary friendship might blossom into something more. It didn’t. In the short-to-medium term this proved to be good news; most of what makes me happy in my life today would never have come about had she and I started a life together. We saw each other in early summer, and by October we hadn’t spoken for months, which was primarily by my choosing.
Those few weeks were painful. Some of it was certainly displaced grief over the marriage, and over Zeke. How much more comfortable to mourn the failure of a fling, my subconscious seemed to say, than a marriage of two decades’ standing. Seen from outside, the affair was tawdry and predictable, a middle-aged newly separated man seeking emotional affirmation from a woman 15 years his junior, the fling’s epistolary portion starting before I’d moved out of my ex-wife’s house, a timing of events that caused all three of us unnecessary pain. This is all clear in retrospect, of course. It should have been clear at the time as well. The further removed I become from the two years that followed Zeke’s death, the more obvious it becomes to me that I spent those years in a state that could be reasonably described as insane. We make light this week of people sabotaging their futures because of some illusory pending Rapture, but I can tell you that when Zeke died I had about 12 thousand dollars in the bank, and I figured I would stick around only until that ran out. My entire purpose had been fulfilled. With Zeke gone, and no one to carry up the hill from the park each morning, I was an empty husk. The universe was an empty husk. A few months of distraction and a few loose ends tied up over the subsequent months, I thought, and then I could just conveniently fade away when the money ran out.
My friend Tim offered me a job two months in, which completely ruined my plans.
I was despondent nonetheless. It was terrifying, the sadness. I distracted myself from it by whatever means I could find. I engaged on the internet with people who were devoid of the ability to argue in good faith. I spent money planting herbs in a garden atop Zeke that I knew would not last the summer. I left the house to go hiking, got halfway there, and turned around to come back, unwilling to leave the hole in the ground in my backyard lest it need me for something. I saw no end to my sadness save the irrevocable one.
It was in this context that I met her. She seemed brilliant and passionate, empathetic, interested in my well-being. I grabbed at her attention, a drowning man grasping a slim bankside reed. This process quite often fails to save the drowning man. It is rarely beneficial to the reed.
By the third or fourth day of my visit it had become clear that we did not communicate well. Our passion was blunted, awkward. I had put my back out badly on the flight in, which didn’t help. (It hurt horribly for a month, seized up to the point where I could not turn or lift my left arm. In July she called me in the desert and — inevitably — broke things off. My back was fine the next day.) The litany of reportage on things I did not do correctly — in bed and elsewhere — was as crippling as the pulled muscles. I hiked wrong, I patted her dog wrong, I asked the wrong questions and gave the wrong answers. I touched her wrong. She described one short bit of lovemaking as “flawless,” her tone suggesting she meant exactly that: she’d been on the lookout for flaws and I had failed to provide her with any to catalog. Her judgment was important to me. I had flown there to be evaluated, our life together on the line, and I was failing.
At around half past midnight one night we lay in her bed, and I was chatting desultorily about something I no longer remember. She responded to one statement with a long, seemingly pointed silence. I forged on, saying the next inconsequential thing that came to mind. She groaned.
“I’m trying to get some sleep,” she said.
What could I say? It had been one more Failure To Perceive on my part. “Oh! I’m sorry. Silly of me. Sleep well.”
“It’s okay, I’m just tired. Are you hungry? Do you need anything? You know we have that good bread we picked up at the co-op.” There was something odd in her voice, a new impatience. Faint, but palpable.
Best for us both to just get to tomorrow, I thought. “Yeah, I know. I’ll make myself a peanut butter sandwich if I get hungry. But I’ll probably just nod off. Good night!” I turned over on my non-spasming side, felt the sweat dripping down my back against the humid air, listened to rain on her roof and the distant thunder.
I had something to prove, she’d been saying that week. It was too important to me what she thought of me. It got in the way. I’d puzzled over how I could show her I had nothing to prove. I had walked for months on eggshells. Her intensity could switch directions in a flutter of long lash. In one arduous conversation some months before she’d made it very clear we had no future together. A week later I was looking at real estate land listings in central Arizona, thinking I might buy a few acres of desert with the money I’d be getting for my half of the house, and she was livid. I was giving up on us, she fumed. I had to care less about what she thought of me, but not caring what she thought could prove disastrous.
Perhaps some sleep, I thought. Maybe the rain will ebb, and the humidity will lessen, and my back will repair itself. Maybe everything will sort itself out in the light of day. Maybe tomorrow we will be the people we’d promised each other we were. I started to doze.
“Are you going to go get something to eat?” Her voice was dead flat.
“No,” I said, sleepily. “Not really hungry. Just going to go to sleep.”
She sprang from the bed, the comforter nearly hitting the far wall. She was livid. “I am trying to get to sleep,” she said. “I am tired. I am in pain. And all you can think to do is sulk at me because I won’t make you a peanut butter sandwich.”
It took me a moment to comprehend what she was saying. “I don’t want you to make me a sandwich. I can make one myself if I want one. What’s this about?”
“I do not have the energy for this. You’re constantly trying to find ways for me to take care of you. You need constant affirmation. I always have to praise your writing, coddle your ego, just like everyone else in the constellation of women admirers you draw to yourself and keep in orbit around your blog. And now you’re sulking about a peanut butter sandwich? This is narcissism, rampant narcissism. And it’s really disappointing.”
I was startled. It wasn’t that the criticism was new. These assessments weren’t anything I hadn’t heard from her before, or from myself for that matter. They were artful, really. Criticize me for something I know not to be true, and it’s relatively easy for me to shrug it off. She was accusing me of the flaws I feared most in myself, and her words found purchase. But why had this rage in her erupted now?
“What’s going on here? I don’t understand why you’re angry. I promise you, I don’t want you to make me a peanut butter sandwich. Really, I don’t. I promise.”
“You just manipulate, and manipulate,” she continued. “You just want me to set aside what I need. It’s always been the case. I have suffered in this relationship. I have lost sleep to stay up and chat with you. I can not do that anymore. It’s not sustainable, and even though we’ve talked about it, and you say you understand it has to change, here we are arguing over me making you a stupid peanut butter sandwich.”
“Seriously. I never expected you to make me a sandwich. I don’t even want a sandwich, and if I did, why would I sulk about it? I know how to make a damn sandwich.”
She was on to other failings without missing a beat. She’d known brilliant writers her whole life, the acclaimed and the unknown who passed through the writers’ retreat her family ran, and on their worst most uninspired days those writers were far more talented than I was at my best. I didn’t work hard enough for it. I was lazy. I expected everything to be handed to me. Throughout my whole life I had been praised for every tiniest thing I’d ever done. My silver platter life had sapped my initiative and corroded my character. Also, I kept interrupting her, which was annoying. She was going to go outside and smoke a cigarette now, which she hadn’t done for months, and by the way her smoking was my fault.
She left. After a time I remembered to pull my lower jaw back up into place. I felt something very much like vertigo, as if I had been yanked out of my world and tossed somewhere else.
It’s not my intention to diagnose either of us. Frameworks can both illuminate and obscure. One person’s splitting and hypervigilance is another person’s world-weary guardedness. She told me herself she was skinless, and I wrote poetry to her about my splintering eggshells beneath my feet: right there is data sufficient to any armchair speculation. Such speculation helps no one. But that night as I heard her front door slam, I wondered if I had finally, irrevocably lost it. Her anger had always been so perceptive and incisive. That night she had started off as usual, but gone on to diatribe against a me I did not recognize. The charges stung less as a result, but they were far more disorienting. She knew as well as anyone my history of neglect, of family showing me time and again that I was of no consequence at best, and more usually a disappointment. So where did that comment about growing up with constant praise come from? For that matter, what the hell was with suggesting I’d provoke an argument to get her to make me a sandwich? She knew my siblings and I had to fend for ourselves to feed ourselves throughout our teens; if we’d waited for someone to make us a sandwich, or even to buy the goddamn peanut butter, we’d have starved.
In months to follow I told myself I’d at least get a piece of fiction out of the argument. A stage play, maybe, or a short unpleasant idyll like I’d written about our other disagreements. But fiction should be believable. Each character’s statements should be compelled by motivations that are, at least in theory, knowable. Her intent was opaque to me that night. It still is, in the main. But when I think about it, who am I but another person beset by overwhelming unhappiness, sublime joy, and frequent confusing combinations of the two? Who am I but an aging man reeling from injuries dealt out to a child? I learned early in life that my needs would not be met, at least not reliably so, and that wound festers though the weapon that inflicted it is crumbled to dust. I am loved, I am fed, I am granted some measure of value by those important to me, and yet that visceral hunger remains. She called me out, though she got the details wrong. If only a sandwich would slake this void! I have filled it with food, with alcohol, with anger, with passion, I have filled it with mistrust and overweening pride, I have filled it with lust and with song and with the cadged praise of others, and it roars back each time as voracious and empty and negative as if I had never tried to fill it.
Nothing that will fill that void. I realize these days that I have healed as much as I ever will. I will never be whole. The demons will always ride my back. It angers me, and there are days I feel that lifetime of need settling in my chest, making my heart race. Knowing that nothing will sate it does not sate it. I only find peace in becoming the void, seeing my life from the void’s point of view. All the rest becomes detail: the small litany of accomplishments, the praise, the triumphs. The sandwiches.
I don’t think it’s ever any other way, for anyone. It’s never enough—never enough validation, never enough security, never enough praise. In some ways, the more you get the crazier you get, the longer you can tell yourself that getting enough is just around the corner. Just one more effort, just one more lover, just one more prize—
Nothing has been more of a waste of time in my own life, than identifying this as some defect in my character, and trying to fix it: that’s just been another variation on the never-enough theme. What if it’s not my fault, if it has nothing to do with me? What if it’s just one of the givens? What then?
Well, that doesn’t fix it either, but it stops some time-wasting and some useless recrimination. And it moves the question away from “how can I make myself a different person?” to the completely different question of “how do I live with this disability?”
I guess I’m still a Buddhist, or some kind of religious person; I guess I still think that the real answer has something to do with the way leaves move in the wind and sometimes the stars are so beautiful that for half a fucking second it actually doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of me. But maybe that’s just one of the steps in the dance. I don’t know.
Dammit Dale, what part of “special snowflake” do you not understand?
=v= I’ve grappled with conversations like this, so I do find it believable. Very well-written, too, but don’t take that as some kind of superfluous praise.
If I manage to exhale, I might cry.
One of my regrets: I am kinder to strangers than to the person I love most.
The challenge: to stay true, but still be kind, to that person
I will never be whole
If you weren’t such a hopeless bastard, how could you ever have appealed to all the other hopeless bastards out there? You had me at Sciurus Niger. Just don’t stop.