He went on for some time while I sat listening in silence because I knew he was right, and like two people who have loved each other however imperfectly, who have tried to make a life together, however imperfectly, who have lived side by side and watched the wrinkles slowly form at the corner of the other’s eyes, and watched a little drop of gray, as if poured from a jug, drop into the other’s skin and spread itself evenly, listening to the other’s coughs and sneezes and little collected mumblings, like two people who’d had one idea together and slowly allowed that idea to be replaced with two separate, less hopeful, less ambitious ideas, we spoke deep into the night, and the next day, and the next night. For forty days and forty nights, I want to say, but the fact of the matter is it only took three. One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.
And as we spoke a picture of myself emerged and developed, reacting to S’s hurt like a Polaroid reacting to heat, a picture of myself to hang on the wall next to the one I’d already been living with for months—the one of someone who made use of the pain of others for her own ends, who, while others suffered, starved, and were tormented, hid herself safely away and prided herself on her special perceptiveness and sensitivity to the symmetry buried below things, someone who needed little help to convince herself that her self-important project was serving the greater good, but who in fact was utterly beside the point, totally irrelevant, and worse, a fraud who hid a poverty of spirit behind a mountain of words. Yes, next to that pretty picture I now hung another: a picture of someone so selfish and self-absorbed that she had been unconcerned enough about her husband’s feelings to give him not even a fraction of the care and attention she gave to imagining the emotional lives of the people she sketched out on paper, to furnishing their inner lives, taking pains to adjust the light on their faces, brushing a stray hair from their eyes. Busy with all of this, not wishing to be disturbed, I’d hardly stopped to think of how S might have felt, for example, when he walked through the door of our home and found his wife silent, with back turned and shoulders hunched so as to defend her little kingdom, how he felt as he removed his shoes, checked the mail, dropped the foreign coins into their little canisters, wondering just how cold my mood would be when at last he tried to approach me across the rickety bridge. I had barely paused to consider him fully at all.
After three nights of talking as we had not in many years, we arrived at the inevitable end. Slowly, like a great hot-air balloon drifting down and landing with a bump in the grass, our marriage of a decade expired. But it took us time to split apart. The apartment had to be sold, the books divided up, but really, Your Honor, there is no need to go on about this, it would take too long, and I feel I haven’t got a lot of time with you, so I won’t go into the pain of two people prying apart their lives inch by inch, the sudden vulnerability of the human situation, the sorrow, regret, anger, guilt, and disgust with oneself, the fear and suffocating loneliness, but also the relief, so incomparable, and I will only say that when it was all finished I found myself alone again in a new apartment, surrounded by my belongings and what was left of Daniel Varsky’s furniture, which followed me like a pack of mangy dogs.
I suppose you can imagine the rest, Your Honor. In your line of work you must see it all the time, the way people continue to repeat the same story of themselves over and over, complete with the old mistakes. One would think that someone like me, with enough psychological acumen to supposedly uncover the little delicate skeleton that organizes the behavior of others, would be able to learn from the painful lessons