"I want a divorce."
Faith and I had been married for twenty-five years, and I had been
waiting, terrified at first and later indifferently, even impatiently,
for these words, this conversation, for the last fifteen. We were
driving around in the Hockley Valley, looking at the fall colours. They
were magnificent. I was pulling over on the gravel shoulder every
kilometre so that Faith could take pictures. As usual, she took the
panorama shots, and I borrowed the camera for quirky close-ups, maple
leaves in the water, that sort of thing.
"What would that accomplish, other than making life more expensive for both of us?"
"I don't care. I've had it. I'm bored, and I need a real relationship."
"It seems to me, judging from the 'late nights' at work, you're not waiting for formalities for that."
I just couldn't resist. Faith's mystery evenings out, over the last two
years, which she explained in last-minute phone messages simply as
"dinner with someone from work" and then more recently with just "Out
for dinner, I'll be home late" had been the latest in her not-so-subtle
ways of telling me that something was very wrong with us, that she
wasn't happy. There were all the other usual tell-tale signs as well --
more attention to her appearance at work, purchases of expensive
lingerie, the rush upstairs to change when she first got home, you know
the drill. As with her earlier messages, I pretended to ignore them,
said nothing.
"Well what do you expect me to do? There's more to life for some of us
than just sitting in front of a fucking computer all the time."
She was right. But I was content, she wasn't. Faith had always lived in
the moment. I just dreamed of possibilities. I began imagining us ten
years from now, living our separate lives, her with a series of
passionate flings, but determined not to make the mistake of marrying
again, living alone in a comfortable house with a big garden, but never
really alone; me living in my dream house -- energy and space efficient
in the middle of wilderness, living communally with a bunch of people
who engaged me intellectually, but left me emotionally untouched,
alone.
I realized it was my turn to say something, but I didn't know what to say.
"So what does this mean? You want to move out, you want me to move out, what?"
"How can either of us afford to move out? All our money is tied up in
the fucking house. I feel like a prisoner. You wonder why I stay out,
I'm suffocating."
I was watching where I was driving, taking the curves in the valley
road, but I could tell from Faith's voice that she was losing it. She
wasn't a talker, about important things, anyway. Her emotions were a
private thing, to be demonstrated but not articulated. As usual she had
answered my question with another question, which I took not as
deference but rather a ruse to avoid committing herself, to avoid
saying what she really wanted. I really had no idea what happened
during her late nights 'at work'. I didn't blame her for them, but I
didn't want to think about them either. She made it clear they were my
fault. She was right. I sighed.
"We can sell the house, I guess. It's worth a lot, we could each buy a
decent place and still be mortgage free. It would be a shame, though.
It's such a great setting, and the neighbours are so great. I could
never live in the city again."
She said nothing. Faith had extracted a concession, a commitment from
me. As far as she was concerned, I figured, the conversation was over.
This always infuriated me. It was like a game, a contest. She knew I
wouldn't let it go at that, and she was right.
"So is that what you want to do?" I said.
I knew I would not get an answer to this, but I couldn't help myself.
From now on I might as well be talking to a wall, and Faith was a great
wall -- silence was her survival mechanism, her strength. So I stopped
myself from pursuing the discussion further. I realized at once that
everything I had said was wrong. The correct reply to her initial four
word statement would have been an impassioned denial, an emotional
recapitulation of everything that had been wonderful in our marriage,
and could be again, an acceptance of responsibility for everything that
had gone wrong, and a fervent promise to be better, to try harder, to
be what I was supposed to be and do what I, the husband in her second,
long-faltering marriage, was supposed to do. To Faith, anything less
was an admission of failure, and Faith did not accept failure lightly.
But I was not up to this speech, I no longer believed it, and Faith
knew that. That was why the four-word statement had been so long in
coming.
I stopped the car beside a spectacular White Oak tree, grabbed the
camera from the car seat, and hopped out. I lay on my back under the
tree, looking up at the profusion of colours, the rays of late
afternoon sun diffusing through. I took a series of shots, the camera
pointed straight up, and then put the camera down and just lay there.
In his novel Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins keeps asking the question: Why is it so hard to make love last?
I was beginning to think his question was too pat, that the real
question was why we try so hard to make it last. I knew I still loved
Faith. She was an amazing woman, driven and uncompromising and
indefatigable. She had picked me up from a wicked, deep depression, and
given me a reason to live. I respected her enormously, she made the
most of everything she had, and never gave up. We shared the same
tastes in most things, and we almost never fought. And I had no doubt
she still loved me, in her own way. I had been good for her, too, given
her something to focus her energies on, given her courage and
self-confidence and a belief, for the first time, that life was not
always unfair. All of this was enough to make me satisfied with the
relationship even as its spark dimmed, as our love became, bit by bit,
little more than two sympathetic people living together in peace and
contentment. Except Faith was not content. She knew what had been
slowly lost more acutely than I did. What was for me mellow and
comfortable, was for her a hell on Earth.
I knew this intellectually, but I didn't understand it. To Faith, the
way the game worked was simple: The man makes all the moves, and the
woman pulls all the strings. The man appears to be in control (even to
the woman), while the woman really is
in control. Every birdwatcher understands this -- it's a universal. But
now in our marriage, the strings had become tangled, and I wasn't
making any moves at all. And Faith had lost control. She kept waiting
for the news that there was another woman pulling the strings now,
because no other explanation made sense to her. She accused me often,
in the years when our marriage began to fall apart, of unfaithfulness,
because that's what she expected. She wanted to know who the other
woman was, and when I told her there wasn't one, she accused me of
lying. At first this caused fights, but I soon just ignored the
accusations, as there was no possibility of convincing her, and finally
the accusations stopped, at about the time her late night dinners
began. At first I was bitter and angry about these, but finally I just
accepted them. We all do what we have to do, and when it is no longer
important enough, we stop.
Now I wondered what it was we were trying so hard to hold on to.
Faith had got out of the car and was walking towards the river. I
called out "Where're you going?" but I knew she wouldn't reply, and I
also knew from past experience that if I lost sight of her she'd keep
walking until she got home, or someone else offered her a ride. It
always annoyed me when she pulled this stunt, and I'd learned to go
after her, keep her in my sights. This was hard, because she was tall
and fit and moved fast. But looking ridiculous chasing after her was
one of my roles, so I did it. I didn't even try to cajole her to get
back in the car, and didn't bite when she told me to leave her alone. I
wasn't that dumb.
We walked for miles. No words had been spoken. It was starting to get
dark, and I was worried because I couldn't remember if I'd locked the
car before I took off after Faith. And the two dogs at home would be
waiting for supper, and we'd left no lights on for them. Faith's
refusal to go back to the car was a broadcast message, meant more for
herself than for me: I don't need you.
I needed no convincing of this fact, but sometimes I knew she needed to
persuade herself. We were still a long way from home, too far to walk,
and hitch-hiking at dusk would be precarious, especially with so little
traffic left on the road. She circled back on a road we'd never been
on, and I said I thought we were lost, but she found the way, and by
the time we arrived back at the car it was pitch black and I was
exhausted. We drove home in silence.
(Photo: Tom Hsiang, U. of Guelph Dept. of Environmental Biology)
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