Chapter 4: D Is For Divorce

Welcome back to Fawn — installment four of an alphabetically serialized novel for those oscillating between competence and collapse.

If you are new to this series, start with Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.

I met Sean in 2009, when magazines were still glossy and full of white people. Miramax, Talk, Tina Brown. No one had heard of DEI. Men’s magazines were refrigerators for white boys obsessed with Kurt Cobain and nipples, occasionally broken up by an essay about fishermen dying at sea.

I was twenty-nine. Twenty-nine felt terminal. I wasn’t good at anything, but I was good at wanting. I wanted a family. I knew I’d be a bad wife and assumed I’d be a good mother. I wanted a child the way some people want a drug—not to heal anything. Just to have it.

I crouched on a crooked sidewalk on the Lower East Side, holding a broken heel. The night was humid, thick and wet. I’d snapped the heel on a curb outside a bar I didn’t even like, during a party I’d mentally left an hour earlier. The party had all the usual markers: speakeasy vibe, models, a tiny trembling monkey in a suit perched on a piano, a branded candle tucked into a gift bag. MFA people with a dark cocktail twist. Evan Dando talking about his book of acronyms. Justin Fetherstone was there too, which meant it was the best party in the city—maybe even the best party in the world. Guests craned their necks, rehearsing lives they weren’t quite living yet. The whole scene was performative—clinking glasses, pursed lips, scanning the room for someone better to talk to. That was the currency then: adjacency, not intimacy. Everyone angling for a seat closer to the flame, mistaking reflection for warmth.

I was there with Barb—though she’d say she was there with Crystal, and Crystal would say he was there with the Creative Director of French Vogue. Barb ignored me, mostly, as she always did when Crystal was around. But I didn’t really care that night. I was distracted. My cat was sick, and I needed to go home to give him a shot.

I’d gotten the cat years earlier, as a kitten—thirty-nine dollars, cash, off the street—back when I was the Beauty Editor at Peaches magazine and engaged to my college boyfriend, Cornelius, a graphic artist. Cornelius once left me alone in a dilapidated hostel in Serbia with a UTI so he could fly back to America for a Razorfish interview. Peaches was a terrible and terrific job. Every hour we’d all stand outside on West Broadway, smoking rudely and making fun of people like David Spade as they walked by. But sometimes interesting things happened too—like when the power went out in the entire city, or when a man with stretched earlobes pranced past with a kitten sticking out of his backpack. The kitten was the tiniest, fluffiest, most beautiful ball of fur I’d ever seen.

“How much?” I asked, feeling—at the time—like a French model in a movie.

“Thirty-nine dollars,” the man said. “This kitten is the son of the most famous circus Maine Coon in America.”

“I’ve always wanted a Maine Coon,” I said, handing him two crumpled twenties. He gave me back a dollar.

But the kitten turned out to be sick—sneezing blood and mucus on the walls. Cornelius was also ill. The night we got engaged he became so scary I called 911.

After the breakup, the magazine folded, and I was left with a diabetic cat and babysitting jobs, living in a studio filled with cat litter and free pots of Crème de la Mer, caring for a giant wheezing animal who needed daily shots of insulin.

I stepped outside for air and limped a few steps—one shoe off—until the laughter and rooftop music receded into a blur. The streets were sticky with summer beer and sirens. The city smelled hot and sour. Gutters reeked of old beer and taxi exhaust. I was tired. I crouched near a tree pit, wiping grime off my foot with a cocktail napkin, when I saw him.

He wore a white button-down, khakis, a backpack. His face was lit from the side by the pink neon glow of a bodega sign. There was something boyish about him. He held a steaming bodega coffee and wore boots—old, scuffed, resoled. Dad boots, I thought. The thought calmed me. My father had a pair just like them—wore them while raking leaves. Sturdy. Reliable.

Photo by Ellena McGuinness on Unsplash

“Lose something?” he asked, glancing at my bare foot.

I held up the broken heel. “My dignity?”

He laughed and stepped closer. “Any idea where it is?”

“Somewhere in the mid-nineties?”

He laughed again—open-mouthed. It occurred to me I hadn’t made a man laugh in a long time. Earlier that afternoon my dad had called from chemo, yelling about all the money I was pouring into my sick cat.

“You’re dragging your axle,” he said, nodding at my foot. “That’s how cars crash.”

“I crashed a long time ago,” I said. “You should’ve seen the junkyard of a party I was just at.”

“Oh—you were there?” He nodded toward the bar. A freckled model teetered past in red Louboutins, holding Josh Hartnett’s arm.

“No,” I lied. Suddenly, I never wanted to be at a party like that again.

We stood under a flickering streetlamp. Two blocks away the party was still happening—Evan Dando talking about poetry, a BFA photographer posturing, a novelist named Jonathan fawning over another novelist named Jonathan. It all felt foolish now. Far away.

“I don’t like my friend Barb,” I said suddenly. “She’s my best friend. Right now she’s trying to get Justin Fetherstone’s attention.”

“Who?”

“Justin Fetherstone. The photographer.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

He might as well have said he didn’t know who Barack Obama was. I had never met anyone in Manhattan who didn’t worship Justin Fetherstone. The idea that a man could build an entire career putting his boner on beautiful girls’ faces against a white seamless—and get gobs of money doing it—was, to them, genius. Cornelius used to freeze whenever we passed Justin on the street. But not this man in the dad boots. He had no idea.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Brooklyn.”

That explained it. To Manhattan people, Brooklyn was a war-torn farming town. Saying you lived there was like admitting you were poor. Unpedigreed.

“I don’t like those people,” I said, surprising myself. “I hate them. I hate my best friend Barb. She’s not even nice to me.”

“Why wouldn’t Barb be nice to you?”

“Once I took an orange from Justin Fetherstone’s kitchen,” I said. “And Barb shamed me for it.”

“Your friend shamed you—for taking an orange?”

“Yes.”

“If you came to my house,” he said, his voice dropping slightly, “I’d give you all the oranges you wanted.”

That’s when I realized we were flirting. His eyes were hazel, flecked with gold. I felt them in my stomach—that’s the only way to explain it.

He took my heel and tossed it into the gutter. Kerplunk. A clean, hollow sound that shot straight through my heart.

“How am I supposed to get home?” I asked.

“You’re not,” he said.

I was going to say something about the cat, but I stopped myself. Suddenly I never wanted to think about the cat again. Or Barb. Or Justin Fetherstone. Or those parties.

He drove me to Brooklyn in a blue BMW with thirty-two miles on it. We didn’t talk much. I remember thinking how easy it would be to stay quiet forever if someone else kept driving. We slept all afternoon in yellow sheets, our arms and legs tangling automatically. We didn’t kiss. At some point I thought about the cat. I pictured the bowl, the way he waited by the door. I closed my eyes. Being held by the man felt medicinal. The cat was dead by the time I got home. We were married within a year.

Sean smelled like detergent and toothpaste. He knew how to use an Oxford comma. His public life streamlined into masculine aspiration: steaks, hotel bedding folded into impossible corners, leather and light. Private jets on quiet tarmacs. Champagne sweating onto marble tables. Flight paths glowing like constellations.

He founded a prestige press called Diablo—high-impact reading for people who flew private. Literature for people who never touched their own luggage. His Instagram reflected it exactly: watches catching light at thirty thousand feet, leather seats, silence. Food photographed mid-arrival—lobster, torn bread, melting butter—always suggesting appetite and movement.

I didn’t mind. I liked that he was a man. I wanted a man. My single life had gone on too long, a Julia Stiles movie set in a bar: cropped tops, long-haired boys, crying, white wine puke. I was tired. Sean felt clean. I did not feel clean.

I hadn’t traveled or accrued stories. I was a Gen-X nepo baby at my father’s Ivy League college, then a cocaine-snorting dropout of my own fortune. I moved to New York to secretly become a model. Failed quietly. Cycled through magazine jobs, quitting once they became tolerable. My hobbies were therapy and blowouts.

Sean spent his twenties zig-zagging the globe with Diablo, collecting stories ike merit badges. I spent mine getting clean and perfecting a handstand beside Smith from Sex and the City.

I don’t blame him for what he did. I wouldn’t have wanted to be married to me either. I was always on my phone. Always at a party. Making Pinterest boards instead of dinner. Leaving discharge underwear on the floor. I never swallowed. Sometimes I wiped with a sock. Sometimes I ate oatmeal with my hands. I thought Eric Garner was an American Idol contestant. The woman Sean fell in love was clever and libidinous and full of collagen and hope, but eventually, I was nothing he could use. I wasn’t anything I could use either. He cheated with bodies. I cheated with the phone. Instagram. He fucked women; I fucked my own essence into oblivion.

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