New Essay: The Broken-In World

How could I have known that my most satisfying life was a broken life?

This is the kind of thing I’ll be writing for paid subscribers. (Not usually quite this long.)

I wrote this essay back in 2016, but very few have read it. Over the years I came back to it a few times and fussed around a bit, but I never tried to publish it. Maybe that’s a testament to everything that was going on in the news at the time (need I remind you?) or maybe it was my state of mind, but I couldn’t imagine putting it out into the world. So it’s lived in my computer until now.

In the years that have passed since I wrote it, my Saint Bernard has died, as have a number of people in my building in New York City. A few were found by concerned neighbors after they’d been dead in their apartments for a couple of days. I have many times imagined myself dying in that same way. I still love that building.

About a year ago, I found myself in the surprisingly unsurprising situation of filing for divorce. To be accurate, I was the respondent in this filing, a decision based solely upon the fact that my husband was remaining in our home state of California while I was taking one of our two giant dogs and driving to New York City in order to “restart my life.” (A somewhat ironic notion, since many years earlier I’d attempted to restart my life by making the same move in the opposite direction. But what is the human condition if not a perpetually indecisive toggle switch?)

Even though it made more sense for my husband to file for divorce against me rather than the other way around, there was no wronged party here. There was no measurable infidelity or betrayal, just your standard irreconcilable differences, a phrase I’ve come to believe is legal jargon for “can no longer ride in the car together due to frequency of arguments about the driver’s braking skills, texting proclivities, and degree of willingness to make left turns into busy intersections.” If I was really forced to get specific about our particular brand of irreconcilable differences, I’d have to say they were both as petty as my refusing to sing along with when my husband played Neil Young songs on the guitar and as monumental as my facing up to the fact that I’m infinitely happier and less insane when I live alone (or possibly with a roommate who travels frequently) than am I when I live even with the person I love and care about most. 

And so there you have it. Divorced. Or at least well on the way to it. As any divorced person knows, which is I guess is to say, “as about half of all adults know or will eventually know,” much of the battle is going public with it. Sure, your close friends won’t be surprised. They’ve been hearing you whine for years now. It’s the people in the outer rings who will be shocked; the workplace colleagues and the casual acquaintances and the housekeeper. (Though who are we kidding? The housekeeper knew before anyone.) Those who belong to the divorce club will respond appropriately. Their sympathy will be imbued with solidarity. Their condolences will carry a strong whiff of congratulations.

Others will cover their mouths and gasp with a jolt, as though they just happened to glance out their window and witness a plane crash. They’ll cluck their tongues and cock their heads. They’ll reach out to you as if consoling a crying child. And though they will have only the best of intentions, these gestures will just make you feel worse. They will make you feel sadder than you already were in that moment. They will make you say to yourself, here I was, having a perfectly normal conversation and not feeling devastated about my divorce and this person just reminded me to be devastated all over again. 

But after awhile of this, these gestures will begin to make you smile ever so slightly. You will see that gestures will be in vain, they are the domain of the well-meaning but uninitiated. That is because a person getting a divorce is the opposite of a crying child. A person getting a divorce is an adult who has decided to set a quit date for the misery and crying. It is a person who has chosen pain over ambivalence and learned one of the great lessons of life, which is that ambivalence is the worst pain there is.

Yet people fear divorce the way they fear illness. They look away when they see it in others. They search for evidence of weakness, of moral deficiency, of crimes they can’t imagine committing themselves. They tell themselves that given enough healthy life choices it’s possible to lower their odds into, if not negligibility, at least something that will, if it should ever come to that, feel more like a force majeure than the real statistical possibility everyone knows it is.

I can’t say I got married thinking I’d eventually get divorced (though I know a few who have) but if you had told me that almost exactly seven years to the day that I stood in a white lace dress and almost floor-length veil (that veil was and remains the most exhilarating garment I’ve ever attached to my body) I’d be receiving a “dissolution notice” from the state of California I wouldn’t exactly have fallen out of my chair. Marriage had never been an abiding goal of mine. Practice serial monogamy well into your thirties and you’ve got enough pretend little simulated-marriages under your belt that the real thing loses some of its mystique. 

Still, I went through my 20s and most of my 30s wrestling with the internalized and not-always-entirely-conscious pressure that all but the most wild-spirited young people operate under: the assumption that my social life was essentially a vehicle for finding one singularly qualified person with whom I could enact some version of settling down. I made quite a big deal of saying I was on no such search. I liked to think of myself as, if not exactly wild-spirited, than wild-spirit adjacent in some manner. But the truth is that I bought into the idea of legally sanctioned, lifelong monogamy as earnestly as anyone else. And as much as I could see that it was a big gamble no matter how you played it, I thought that waiting as long as possible to marry constituted a sort of inoculation against divorce. Not in the “couples who delay marriage have higher success rates” sense (in fact, those success rates begin to reverse once you reach your mid-thirties) but in the sense that I thought that waiting until we were older meant we’d have less time to grow tired of one another. A lot of the people I saw divorcing had been in the saddle together for decades. They had kids leaving home, mortgages paid off, last gasps of sexual vitality begging not to be squandered. By the time my husband and I reached the 20-year mark, we’d be too old to bother splitting up. We’d be 60, which seemed to me at 40 less like actual life but a grayed-out silhouette of life. 

It’s only taken me until 46 to see the folly in that, to understand that the seeds of 60, planted at birth, are saplings at 20 and by the mid-forties have grown into giant, flapping fronds of inchoate physicality. Desiccated on the edges but coursing with some mysterious something in the veins (blood? water? the collective tears of a lifetime?) middle-aged carnal desire is a sweet, capricious beast. It’s a desire that sometimes feels less rooted in abject carnality than in plain interest.

To witness two people of a certain age getting to know one another in way that might lead to physical intimacy is to see anthropology in action. There is social theory happening here, urban planning, case studies in family law. There is history meeting history. There is baggage being lifted off a carousel and introduced like dogs sniffing each other on the sidewalk. There is no pretense of freshness, of blamelessness, of idealizing or being idealized. Coyness, too, seems in the wrong key. First dates cut right to the chase. The real stuff gets trotted out right away: the custody arrangements, the miscarriages, the mortgage payments, the therapy sessions. Instead of talking the best concert you ever saw you talk about the day you realized your previous life was going to be just that, a previous life from which only a few residual threads now hang from your shirtsleeves. This is now the story you trot out when you want to signal that you might be willing to let yourself be known.

This is the story of how you broke yourself, of how your world sprung a crack right underneath where you were standing. And as your story joins the chorus of stories being told and listened to in as many versions as there are broken people to tell and hear them, you slide into a new kind of world. It’s a world in which the stiff hide of convention and expectation has softened into supple leather. It’s a world that can no longer support pretense, a world where those Facebook posts advertising marital bliss are confirmed as the bullshit we always deep down knew them to be. It’s a world built on scar tissue, which turns out to be a surprisingly solid foundation. And at some point, without quite realizing it, your life goes from broken to broken in. 

It turns out this is something of a magical place. Like a Narnia for disaffected adults, the broken-in world comes with its share of strange, terrifying creatures but ultimately procures a kind of divine comfort. During the first few months that I permanently separated from my husband, I found myself on the receiving end of dozens of domestic war stories. Friends I hadn’t seen for a decade or more, whose apparently untarnished lives I’d followed on Facebook with a mixture of envy and genuine happiness for their good fortune, were suddenly wanting to get together and tell me how it really was. Having heard about my “situation,” they were compelled to tell me about the affairs and financial transgressions and mental health issues and slightly fucked up, less-than-totally-existentially-fulfilling children that now filled the void of their still-discontented lives.

There were more than a few instances of cell phones landing in the hands of the technologically savvier spouse—in some cases because the less savvy partner needed the phone  “fixed”—only to reveal a stream of incriminating text messages. People I’d long considered pillars of decency and in some cases major geeks turned out to have been shouting at each other in their kitchens in front of their kids, in their driveways in front of their neighbors, in the offices of therapists and lawyers. They were sleeping with old flames at college reunions, keeping secret Tinder accounts, keeping secret bank accounts, developing gambling addictions, drinking too much, hating their jobs, hating their lives, hating themselves. It was horrifying. 

It was fantastic. I couldn’t get enough. I sat with them for hours, nodding in sympathy, shaking my head in empathy. It wasn’t that I took pleasure in their suffering. If I’d had the power, I would have whisked any of them back into their fantasyland of their Facebook personae—for their kids’ sake if not their own. (Though that’s a reflexive bit of sentimentality; anyone who ever thought they were preserving their children’s innocence by enlisting them in the project of impersonating a happy family is engaged in a level of denial that borders on cruelty.) The truth was that I loved this world that we’d entered. I loved the broken-in world. I loved it because it felt like honest living, the sort of emotional equivalent to working with your hands. Everyone should do such work at least once in their lives. How could I have known I would take so well to the emotional equivalent of manual labor? How could I have known that my most satisfying life was a broken life?

When I got to New York, I moved first to Brooklyn. That is what you do now when you move to New York. I can’t remember hating a place more. I lived in fancy Brooklyn, which is to say a part of Brooklyn that had seemed intractably crime ridden when I’d last lived in New York 20 years earlier but was now a glorified suburb; Connecticut for people who would never move to Connecticut. High grade strollers choked the narrow sidewalks, having long displaced the residents of the old neighborhood. Moms strode about in yoga pants, dads did self-congratulating drop-offs at the “good public school” before boarding the F-train to their midtown offices. 

I couldn’t figure out why I was so miserable here, why I felt like a member of another species. Was it nothing more than the ache of divorce? The alternating shock and relief of aloneness? Or was it that my neighbors, with their young marriages and younger children and determination to keep the whole enviable shebang intact were not yet broken? They were leather as stiff as a shiny purse. Their baggage was still being assembled and packed. It wasn’t scuffed and distressed and strewn all around them like mine was. It would be someday, but it wasn’t yet.

Eventually I gave up and moved with my Saint Bernard to Manhattan, into a clanking old building on the northern banks of the Hudson River where the wind howled mercilessly through the airshaft and the elevator broke constantly. It was a building where so many people lived alone that it was not infrequent that someone would drop dead in his or her apartment, only to be found days later after the neighbors noticed a smell. Whenever this happened, a little memorial with a photo and flowers was placed in the lobby. Evidently, a woman who lived in my apartment years earlier had fallen to the ground, died suddenly of a heart attack, and gone unnoticed for so long that the bedroom floor was so damaged that it had to be replaced.

“But don’t worry,” said Lois, my kind, 70-year-old next-door neighbor said to me. “That won’t happen to you. If you dropped dead your dog would bark.”

Another neighbor, Marlene, is 75 and we frequently meet for coffee in the café around the corner. Marlene is divorced, never had children, and recently moved with her dog from Los Angeles to New York, where she shares a large apartment in our building with her harpsichord teacher. One afternoon I found Marlene sitting in the lobby with her dog, flipping through The New York Times but looking visibly shaken. She told me was waiting for her ex-husband, whom she hadn’t seen in two years but was finally making good on their divorce agreement allowing him to visit the dog. He had flown all the way to New York in order walk the dog around the block and then bring it back. “I told him it was supposed to rain,” she said. “But he’s determined to come anyway. He may do it again tomorrow before he goes back.”

The next day, while walking my dog by the river, I saw Marlene’s dog with a man I assumed to be the ex-husband. He was tall yet stooped, greying but also grey in posture and in bearing. He wore a fishing hat and a too-thin jacket, as Californians do. I watched him gazing out at the water as the dog sniffed the banks. He had flown 3,000 miles to spend half an hour staring across the water at New Jersey, probably wondering if his dog even remembered him. The river that day was brackish yet choppy. It struck me a vast sea of sadness, a tattered artery breaking the land in two emphatically distinct pieces. It was devastating. It was beautiful. I couldn’t get enough. It was broken. It was home. 

Fall 2016, New York City