My opening night was so close I could taste it, and let me tell you; it didn't taste well. It tasted like nervousness, nausea and possibilities of failure. But I had to keep going, I had to see this through, even if it didn't turn out to be the success I wanted it to be.
Regarding the email I sent her, she never replied. No surprise there. I close all my social media accounts and changed my phone number to make sure I wouldn't be distracted by thoughts of her. I could not allow myself to think of anything other than my opening night. At least that was the plan. The universe makes it a habit out of laughing at whatever it is you want.
It was probably the end of August. Less than a month away from my opening. Time had been moving fast, yet slow at the same time. Like an airplane moving in the distance. It had been slow because every day I woke up with this intense, debilitating sense of worthlessness and pain in my chest that made of life a chore, and fast because I kept thinking 'what the hell have I done with my time? Why haven't I finished the paintings already?'. Fast, because even though I was going through the toughest moment in my life, I was also going through the second greatest.
Scott took one hundred and thirty-seven pictures of me, added some photoshop here and there, chose the best ten ones and began the marketing. There were so many pictures of me in Caroline's gallery that I was beginning to get bored of my face. I also went to at least ten reunion, five gatherings, many other events by many other artists and talked to so many people I would otherwise despise that I was feeling ready to become antisocial.
Except for Scott and Dumont. Ellen kept taking me in this very extravagant parties. We would arrive at midnight, drink with a bunch of strangers whose name didn't matter because I'd never see them again, I would kiss some random woman because Ellen liked me when even others found me attractive, she was the one I was leaving one. We did more drugs than I care to admit and I lost my mind in more than one way.
It was fun, and tiresome. And honestly, after a few months of it, it was beginning to lose its edge. And when I needed something more grounded, I went out with Scott.
That day we were hanging at his apartment, at Harlem. He was making us tea while I stared in awe at the amazing black and white pictures he had hanging on his walls.
"This one is beautiful," I said looking at the photograph of a woman nursing a baby in the middle of what probably was some sort of main square.
He came out of the kitchen holding two cups of green tea. "I took it in a small-town Chile. Beautiful place. Amazing food."
"When did you go to Chile?"
"A few years back. Back when you wouldn't talk to me."
"So, after the divorce."
"Yeah."
Hearing that word again made this sensation come back. The sensation of 'I'm getting divorced again. Yay.'
I knew I had to tell him, assuming she hadn't told him already. "Hey Scott?" I asked
He handed me the cup of tea and asked, "Yeah?"
"I need to talk to you about something, and I need you to be supportive, and loving and compassionate." He frowned but didn't add anything else. "I asked Riley for the divorce."
It hit him. You could tell. Scott had a bigger response than probably she herself had, which meant she hadn't told him. He looked out the window with his mouth slightly opened, like he was trying to process what to say, what to think or how to act. When he realized looking out the window wasn't it, he walked towards the couch and sat down.
He rubbed his face with his right hand and then had a sip of his tea. "Whe-when was this?"
"On my birthday. That day, when she didn't call or write, I just knew I was done waiting for her."
"Did she say something?"
"Did even acknowledge the message."
"Then she must've not have read it."
"Scott."
"She would've said something, Faye. She wouldn't just let you do this."
"You seem to be forgetting it was her choice to leave me."
"But no divorce! She left, yes, and she hasn't talked to you since, but she'd never said 'Hey, Faye. I'm done. We're over. Get a lawyer'. I'm letting you this is not... she hasn't read it."
"It doesn't matter. I'm sure this is what I want." I wasn't.
No one in history will ever tell you that they are one hundred percent sure of getting that divorce. It's different when you're just a couple. You can finish things up, pick up your stuff and move on. Being married makes everything so much more complicated. The house, the cars, the bookstore, the bonds we bought, the join bank accounts, the changing of the name, the telling friends and family. There's this part of you that always asks 'are you sure there's no other way'. But I wasn't about to let that part of me talk. Not after everything that had happened. Or well, after nothing had happened in over six months of her been gone. I hadn't spoken to her in over six months and the one time I sent an email, she didn't even reply.
No, things were done.
"Really?" Scott asked. He wasn't accusatory, he seemed to understand why this was the decision I had landed on.
You wanna hear something weird? The one statistic we know about divorce is that half the marriages end up divorcing. The stat we don't know, is that out of the people who get the divorce, over 60% think it wasn't the right call for their relationship when asked three years after the breakup.
Funny how we look at things as time goes by.
"There's nothing left to do. I don't think there's anything left to safe and things have been working out with Ellen. I wanna see where things are headed."
Scott licked his lips and said, "Look, I get it. Ellen is distracting, you've made that pretty clear, but eventually you're gonna need someone who's not distracting. Someone who's reliable, and stable, and dependable. Are you sure you're willing to take that risk?"
"There's no risk. Riley left me. I didn't leave her. I can't go back to something that isn't there. And even if I could, I'm pretty sure I don't want to anymore. I want to be with other people. I want something knew, something different. I want to move on with my life."
"Okay, then do it. And I'll support you and love you and all that crap. I just..." he took my hands and looked deep into my eyes. "I just want to believe that everything you're saying is the truth, and not what you wish were true."
I sighed and nodded. How could I know? When you feel so many things at the same time, how can you figure out what is noise and what is really happening to your heart?
I couldn't, not while I kept evading it, so the next day, I decided for the first time since it happened... I wanted to talk about it.
* * * *
"You're not hungry?" Ellen asked when I didn't eat my garlic shrimp.
"I am, it's just... can we go somewhere? I mean, I know you haven't finished your lunch but I really want to talk to you about something important."
Ellen placed the fork down and looked at my face trying to figure out how import this was. Then she nodded and asked for the check. We walked to Central Park and sat on the grass next to the... the... body of water, under a nice shadow from a big tree.
"So? What's going on? You seem... worried."
"You're always asking me about my wife, and I always refuse to talk about it. I want to talk about it now and I want to say all of this to you."
Ellen straightened herself, like she was trying to show me that I had her undivided attention. "Okay. I'm listening."
"I was born in Denver. When I was ten, my dad, who was an architect, got this very lucrative job restoring a really old municipal building in this small town called Lenberg, Oregon. So, we moved. It was difficult at the beginning, but then my mom became friends with this woman who had a kid my age."
"Your wife," she resorted.
"Riley. Her name is Riley Burton-Brenan. Well, it was just Riley Brenan back then. We grew up together, we were the best of friends, except I had this huge crush on her. And when I say huge, I do mean HUGE. I don't understand how she didn't notice. Every time she talked to me I'd get fluster, whenever she walked away I couldn't stop myself from looking at her like an idiot. Everything she said was always so funny, or smart, or interesting. Like I had it really bad."
Ellen laughed and I kept going. "Okay, I got it."
"We got together when we were sixteen or seventeen, and I couldn't be happier. It was the happiest time of my life. Even happier than after we got married. I guess things were just so much simpler back then. We graduated at seventeen and agreed we'd go to college together. I majored in Art Practice and minored in Women's studies. She majored in Architecture and minored in Computer Science. Once we had our college degrees, we went back home and... it was supposed to be the beginning, you know? The beginning of making our dreams come true and all that crap that teenagers believe in when in reality, life makes its own plans and nothing will ever be the way you imagine it. No dream will ever come true exactly how you envisioned it. You know?"
I turned to her noticing I had been talking to myself and not to her for a moment. She smiled and said, "Go on."
"We started talking about marriage, we were gonna buy this really small, really nice and cheap apartment a few blocks away from my parents. She was contracting with my dad and I was painting and running a website online and selling some paintings here and there. Like we didn't have much money but that was fine. We had each other. We were okay."
"I feel a 'something really bad happened' coming sometime soon."
"Yeah, well... like I said, life laughs at your plans. The thing was, her dad was always just a bit too strict, just a bit too controlling, and talked just a bit too loud. It was stressful. But with the boy, he was borderline abusive. Connor Brenan is the sweetest boy you'll ever meet. He's my brother. But her dad was so obsessed with this ridiculous idea that he had to join the military, and he'd raised Connor to be terrified of him. I think to some degree they all were afraid something bad would happen if they didn't do what he wanted. He had definitely showed them he wasn't afraid to do something about it.
"Connor didn't want to be a soldier. No one did. He wanted to be a pilot, which also never happened, and lately, for some reason, he said he's happier this way. We always think that the only way we'll ever be happy is if life ends up being exactly what we want it to be, but that's never true. What we want is rarely ever what truly ends up making up happy. That's beside the point. Point was..."
"Your wife joined instead of her bother."
"Yes. One day, out of the complete blue, without even a shred of a heads up she said, 'I joined the army, I'm leaving in a month, and I won't be back for at least a year'. Just like that. Our plans were completely ruined. Everything was destroyed that day. I hated her for it. I hated her because she made such a big decision without even thinking about asking me. She was abandoning me and I didn't even get to say something about it. I felt betrayed, neglected, hurt... but at the same time I thought I couldn't be so selfish. I had to understand, so I forced myself to support her, even when I thought I would die the day she left. I don't know where she was shipped to but... years went by."
"Years? Didn't she say she'd come back?"
I smiled. "You're beginning to get it. She didn't. I promised I would wait for her, that we would still be together, that nothing would come between us..." I snorted at how ridiculous that sounds now. "Less than a year later she dumped me... through an email."
"Ouch, that really fucking hurts."
"Yeah. Anyway, a few months later my dad died from heart complications."
"I'm sorry about that."
"Yeah, me, too. He was the best man in the whole damn world. Anyway, I'm not talking about my dad. That is a whole nother can of beans. After Riley dumped me, Scott started making moves on me."
"Wait... Scotty?"
"Yep. We were married for two and a half long and agonizing years. Scott was going through his own shit and he wanted me to be one of those shits. He did a really bad thing."
"What?"
I thought it over and decided I should tell her. "After my dad died, we couldn't pay for this huge mortgage he'd gotten on the house, so we lost it. Scott bought it back from the bank with the implication of me being with him."
"And you did it?"
"I wasn't making good money and my mom wasn't working at the time my dad died. We would've been on the street. But it was so much more than that. That house... it wasn't a house. The reason the mortgage was there in the first place was because my dad had added a third floor because he wanted to leave it to me and Riley and our kids. He put his heart and soul into it. He built it with his own hands. That house was the only thing I had that was... his, letting it go was like letting go of him. So yeah, I wasn't going to lose it and honestly Scott wasn't that bad back then. He was somewhat caring, somewhat present and the sex was adequate...
"And then Riley came back and when I saw her, I felt like time hadn't passed. Like it had stopped for me. I hadn't thought about her in weeks but as soon as I saw her, I knew. It was like something inside of me recognized her. Like I had just kept those feelings inside a locked chest in my heart and now that she was back, those feelings were demanding attention. But I was married, and she was... she came back different. She was all kinds of fucked up. She had always been aggressive and angry and sometimes that made her dangerous. But when she came back, all of that was gone. It was replaced by this crippling, eviscerating, omnipresent sense of sadness! She was always sad. Even when she laughed, even when she smiled, even when she was distracting herself with work or meaningless chores, or family issues. There was this sadness looming on her back. Like she was carrying some unbearable weight on her shoulders."
"Wow. I can only imagine how horrible that must have been."
"Yeah, so I thought it doesn't matter. What I'm feeling, what I'm going through, it doesn't matter. The anger, the resentment, the sadness, all the things I felt regarding her abandoning me... the love I still felt, I pushed them aside. It didn't matter. She mattered. So, I swallowed my feelings and I decided to be there for her because more important than being a couple, we were best friends and I couldn't leave her alone. Until I couldn't push it aside anymore. We started sleeping together and the more I went out with Riley, the worse my relationship got with Scott, up until the point of becoming abusive which for a relationship that started as blackmail, says a lot. Eventually it imploded, we got a divorce and literally three days after my divorce with Scott was finally, I was married again. Riley's been getting help for her depression and her PTSD for years now. She's stable... mostly. She still has good days and bad days, but the bad days got further between. However, reality is she will always have bad days. It's something we learnt to live with.
"Apart from that, we were happy. I was happy. I thought she was happy too. Maybe she was. Maybe we just didn't know how to cope with so much pain."
"Pain?"
"Something happened, something that I would rather not discuss now but... it broke us as a couple. This time I couldn't push my feelings aside and focus on her. I was too broken. She was too broken. We just didn't know how to deal with it, how to be there for each other. How to not fall apart. So, the more we suffered, the more we started shoving space between us. It happened slowly at first. Like not watching TV together, or not walking the dog together, or no longer cooking together on the weekend. When we finally paid attention to it, we hadn't been intimate in months and we hadn't kissed in weeks. We slept together but apart from that we rarely ever spoke. Maybe I noticed it too late, or maybe there was never anything I could've done. Anyway, one night I sat her down and told her I wasn't happy with the way things were going and that I needed us to talk and get ourselves out of this. She rolled her eyes at me, stood up and left. She'd never ever acted like that. So distant, so uncaring. It was the first time I felt she didn't love me anymore. A few weeks later she did it. The first link in a chain of fucked up links that destroyed us. She did the one thing that took me years to forget. The one thing that traumatized me... she re-enlisted."
"What? Why? How?"
"I guess, she needed something to give her purpose. Something to help her cope. At the moment there was this huge fight. She was leaving, again; she had done it without my consent, again... she was abandoning me again. She assured me it wasn't like that. She just needed something... else. The way she put it to calm me down... Jesus, I'm such an idiot. She said she had to go through training again and that chances were she wouldn't pass because she's injured, and even if she did, there was no way, no way in hell she would ever get deployed somewhere far away. She would probably get a desk job or something like that. She made it sound so secure and safe that in the end, after having her relive something that shook our relationship to our core... I left her do it."
"You did what?"
"I thought this was what she needed and if she needed it, I didn't want to stand in her way. I thought maybe it would even make things better."
"I'm guessing it didn't"
"It didn't because she lied. I mean yeah, she did have to go through training again, and she was right. Initially she was going to serve in Alaska or something like that. You have no idea how many elbows she rubbed, how many favors she called to get herself to Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan or some freaking country really far away, where she could stand in combat again! And guess what, she fucking got it! Because what she really wanted, was to kill herself, but she promised she'd never do it, so she had enlisted to have someone else do it for her."
"I'm sorry."
"By the time she showed up with the news... she was no longer pretending we were still together. She made sure I knew it was over. I begged her not to leave. You have no idea how much I begged. Nothing, she didn't even seem moved by me. Like I was just an annoying fly that kept circling her while she kept trying to explain how it was done, and this was what she wanted."
"Syria, or Iraq... wow. Why on earth would she do something like that?"
"Well, in her words, she couldn't stand to see me or be near me anymore."
"Oh, come on, you can't think that way. It's very unfair."
"Oh, those are not my thoughts, those are her words. She literally said, 'I can't stand being in this house, I can't stand being near you, I can't stand looking at you!'. After she said that... it was like I accepted it. I knew there was nothing I could say or do to stop her. So, I sat down on the sofa crying while she picked up her stuff. She left and I haven't spoken to her since. I know she's not dead because no one has told me so, but nothing more than that."
Ellen stayed quiet for a moment, then held my hand and asked, "Why did you tell me?"
I took a deep breath and answered. "Because I asked for the divorce, and I thought it was time I began talking about it. And I do feel a lot better."
She smiled at me. "Thank you for trusting me with that."
I kissed her and replied, "Thanks for listening."