Bluestone
Years after the divorce, we meet on a bluestone patio to divide up the summer.
Welcome to The Slush Pile—a new series of old, rejected stories that have been collecting dust in my Google Drive for years. This is a draft of a chapter that became the inspiration for Fawn.
The house is looking good, says Paul. It’s been four weeks since we moved upstate from Brooklyn and we’re sitting at the picnic table on my bluestone patio. Bluestone patio. This is the kind of thing that sells a house up here. I never even knew what bluestone was until I moved.
It’s a mess inside.
All of our exchanges are steeped in subtext. He means: Look at you. You got everything you wanted. My response: You wrecked me, Paul. I’m still a shell. Still in hell.
He’s brought his own coffee. I’m drinking tea, mint and dandelions from my property, stuffed into a jar, then steeped in boiling water. Paul does not offer to get me coffee before he comes, just as I don’t offer to make him tea. I’ve learned, in the five years since we’ve split, that this is the secret to peaceful co-parenting: give nothing, take nothing. When we first split up, I’d still make him breakfast every morning. He’d come to the apartment to get the kids for school and I’d have a plate of bacon waiting for him. He’d put my heart through a blender, but I was still so in it that I couldn’t stand the thought of him going hungry.
Nine years ago, I found out Paul had been with another woman. Is this what you wanted? I said. It was June 2014. He walked in from a work trip and found me at the kitchen table, the iPad open to a picture of his boner, a text thread with some sex worker.
But he never took the bacon. He never even noticed the bacon was there.
What week do you want in August? he asks, squinting against the sun.
The last one. What about you?
That’s fine with me. I’ll take the second-to-last week. My family will be in Philly then.
Nine years ago, I found out Paul had been with another woman. Is this what you wanted? I said. It was June 2014. He walked in from a work trip and found me at the kitchen table, the iPad open to a picture of his boner, a text thread with some sex worker.
I’ll destroy you. I was talking into my hands. You’ll have nothing. You’ll be nothing. A zero. A middle-aged editor at Diablo magazine, living in some shithole studio, fucking Craigslist prostitutes. You’re a disgrace to your daughter.
Daughter. We only had one then. Our second was conceived that night.
And horseback riding camp? Paul takes a long gulp of his coffee, looking out at the yard, then the graveyard behind it, then the mountains looming verdant in the distance. A fawn, delicate and dotted, trots over on tiny legs, munching clover.
First week in August. Three hundred and twenty-five each.
We take out our phones and start punching numbers and dates into Google Cal.
But I didn’t destroy him. I stayed with him for three more years, trying to repair the relationship, put it back together. I made us go to couples therapy. I doubled up on my own therapy. I marked up spreadsheets. Wrote lists of all the ways in which I’d put myself in this position: my low self-esteem, my neediness, my unrealistic expectations around money and men.
When it all finally blew up, I was so angry that I prayed for Paul to die. I prayed he’d end in some Port Authority housing project with a needle in his arm. I wanted some neighbor to find half his face eaten off by rats, his pathetic pot-bellied corpse weakened from surviving on government cheese. I wanted proof I’d been the medicine all along, that he couldn’t survive one day, one second, without me by his side.
But Paul did not die. The summer we split up, Paul moved into a free designer motorhome down the street, part of some marketing stunt he worked out through the website he was running at the time. He live-vlogged daily, his eccentric bachelor existence: cooking on a hot plate, doing kettlebell workouts beside the cot bed. He became a fixture of the neighborhood, sitting in front of the motorhome talking to passersby about his cool house on wheels, the metal walls decorated with our daughters’ drawings.
How’s your mom?
Better. The electroshock worked.
Ketamine helped with Kate’s depression. She did it last year.
I want to ask more but I don’t. Kate is Paul’s girlfriend of three years. Kate loves Paul. Kate loves my daughters. Kate refuses to accept my Instagram request. Kate is brunette with a gymnast’s body, compact and tensile, the kind of woman who looks like she could do a back handspring at any moment. Kate runs a wilderness guiding company out west, taking burned-out tech founders on silent trekking expeditions through the desert. Kate doesn’t know Paul has been active on the dating apps the entire time they’ve been together, that just last week a mom at the coffee shop told me they hooked up on Hinge.
The fawn meanders back toward its mother. When we first moved here, these deer seemed magical. Now they just seem gross. They are everywhere, carrying bacteria and black-legged ticks, the equivalent of Brooklyn rats. Up close you see their cracked hooves, their limbs bent from car accidents, fur patchy from forest disease.
Are the kids spraying their clothes? Paul asks. Lyme is really bad this year.
Yep.
I’m lying. I haven’t sprayed the kids’ clothes. The heavy-duty repellent everyone uses around here scares me. Last week I stood in the Home Depot aisle in front of five different kinds of insecticide, head spinning, Googling how to make homemade tick repellent with peppermint essential oil. I don’t tell Paul I left Home Depot without buying anything, that sometimes having to take care of small things alone, apply insecticide, sunscreen, install smoke detectors, makes me realize how much I miss him, how much I need him, that without him I’m dangerously close to becoming my own mother: terrified, lost, sobbing in the passenger seat of the minivan while my father rages at her, how do you not understand basic navigation, the map of Michigan crumpled in her lap.
Paul, in the sun, looks better than he did when we met thirteen years ago. Back then he had a nine-to-five office job and his look was normcore: clean-shaven, white shirt, khakis. Young. Adorable. I thought that’s who I was marrying, a man in khakis. But within a few years, when he started wearing all black again, I realized that’s who he’d always been: a band guy in black. The khakis were a costume, a sabbatical from his true self. We were both in costume then, prowling around for someone to fill the void. Now age is another costume that works in his favor. He wears it like a big sweater you want to smell, just the right amount of weight and scratchiness.
He’s always been handsome, but the last few years have put pain in his eyes. It makes him sexier. He looks like a man looking to get laid.
The last time we tried to have sex I asked if he’d be more attracted to me if I got breast implants.
“Maybe,” he said. We lay naked on our backs staring at the ceiling.
For the first few years we were married, I thought he only liked Gala apples. I could swear he told me that once. Every Saturday I bought a bag of Gala apples at the farmers market. I don’t like Gala apples. I like my apples green, taut and sour, but what I liked didn’t matter anymore. I thought that was what love was: putting your needs aside for your partner. The bad feeling you got when you did what you didn’t want to do seemed like a good thing. Proof the love was working. One day I said, I’m sorry, the farmers market was out of Gala apples. I could only get Pink Ladies. Is that okay? He was watching The Wire, eyes glued to the screen.
What’s a Gala apple? he said, reaching deep into the bag. Any apple is fine.He bit down into the flesh and chewed loudly.
The fawn and the mother spot the rest of their family in my neighbor’s yard, baby siblings and a father with grand antlers grazing. They bound toward them.
The night before mediation, I cried so hard I burst a blood vessel in my eye. You can take it back, I said. We can start over. Lisa came out of her room yawning in a big Madonna T-shirt. Why is Daddy here? Why isn’t Daddy in the house on wheels? Is Daddy moving back in now?
Stop crying, Paul snapped later after putting her back to bed. You’re going to be fine. You’ve always been fine.
When the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke a few months later, I kept coming back to that moment. Paul said I’d always been fine. Had I always been fine? My dad was deep in chemo by then. We’d sit together in the hospital waiting room watching the bag of frozen plasma thaw, pictures of Harvey Weinstein flashing across CNN. We never talked about #MeToo. To ask my dad what he thought would mean asking what he thought about all of it, and our container had become too fragile. I was scared he’d say it was a witch hunt, that those actresses shouldn’t have put themselves in that position, that that’s the price you pay for craving fame.
Does infidelity count as #MeToo? I texted my friend with one hand, the other resting on my father’s back as the platelets drained into his arm. Eight years of lies. Unprotected sex with all those women. Does any of that count?
No, she texted back. That’s not sexual assault.
What is it?
That’s marriage. For better, for worse.
Paul stands up to leave and my stomach drops. This is the worst part. Spending time with him, even talking logistics, loosens the stitches. Opens the wound. I’m scared he can smell my desperation. Don’t try to get the hook in, I tell myself. Don’t ask about the book he wants to write. Don’t ask about the cars. Don’t be needy. Fill your own well. Rejection is God’s protection. Shut your fucking mouth and find your backbone.
How’s your mom?
She’s good. She just got back from a two-week sailing trip.
My mother-in-law and I aren’t in touch. She sends me a check on my birthday. If I were a better person, I’d send her flowers on Mother’s Day. I’m mad at her. I know it’s not rational, but I don’t care. I blame her for raising a middle-aged infant, a sex addict, a man incapable of responsibility. I’m sure she’s mad at me too. For kicking her son out. For taking child support. For refusing to back down. At my dad’s funeral she told me that the night Paul left, he drove straight through to Philly, six hours, and when he got to her house he stood in her kitchen sobbing: I don’t want to lose my babies.
But I never saw him cry. He just walked out the door.
Send her my love, I say.