Ours had contracted into a grocery-list relationship—finances, children, housekeeping. We concentrated on logistics, cautiously withholding, careful of what we said to one another in case it was used against us later. We were competitive with one another about the difficulties each of us faced in our everyday lives, as if to announce our individual happiness to one another was the final infidelity. And instead of disclosing our souls, we recounted complaints and kept score of the ways in which we had irritated one another or let each other down. After that we had nothing left to say.
I asked Charlie if he could imagine me dead, really wanting to know. He said, “What kind of question is that?”
“It doesn’t have to be a tragic death,” I pointed out. “I could be painlessly evaporated. Gently vaporized by a bunch of angels. Raptured into heaven.”
Charlie was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “Yes, sometimes I do.”
“Me too,” I said.
Death is the great silencer into which people can pour their interpretations of love and loss and longing. But divorce is a choice, and it’s hard to listen to the inevitable rancorous fallout and shaky insecurity it engenders. The social disease of a breakup threatens and destabilizes, and all but the closest of friends—and sometimes even they—recede from the threat it poses. Marriage, with all its fairy-tale promise, its allure of security, and its impression of superior morality, is something we hold up as a badge of honor. Politicians and sports stars rise on the borrowed capital of long and steady marriages; they fall on their discreditable failures.
We had made every effort. There had been the trial separations, the cultish weekend marriage seminars encouraging conjugal spirituality, a couple of disastrous vacations without the children when I missed them so much it only served to highlight that we were better parents than we were romantic partners. There had been dozens of couples’ counseling sessions with the accompanying rules about holding a relationship together by using safe words, or by setting up date nights. But the suggestions filled me with dread. I couldn’t grasp the concept of safe words—“There are no bad words,” I’ve always taught my children. “Only bad ways to use good words.” And our attempts at date nights had increasingly ended in silent standoffs or out-and-out fights.
I had begun to understand that neither of us was wrong, and neither was either of us right. But we saw the world so differently that it seemed to me as if Charlie was living in a different space and time than I was. He saw the world in concrete terms, rationally, and as if the place were solid and the systems set in place were dependable. Charlie never questioned his own sanity, although he sometimes questioned mine. I saw the world as something fluid; I expected irrationality and surprises. I could not tell the difference between inspiration and mild madness, and most of the time I did not think the gap between the two was important.
A month earlier I had gone to our local public library and walked down the aisle of relationship-related books, piling volume after volume into my arms. I made it as far as the help desk with the books before I pictured myself running into an acquaintance in the checkout line or in the parking lot. How would I explain these titles? The Emergency Divorce Handbook for Women; Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way; Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay: A Step-by-Step Guide to Help You Decide Whether to Stay In or Get Out of Your Relationship; Coming Apart: Why Relationships End and How to Live Through the End of Yours. My panic escalated. Even if I managed to negotiate my way out of our small-town public library parking lot without bumping into half a dozen people I knew, how would I get the books into the house unobserved? What if Charlie saw them? Worse, what if the children saw them?
I dumped the books on the shelving cart by the door and hurried out of the library into the high-altitude sunshine, inexplicit in its cheerful clarity. What I wanted more than anything was a sign that told me unequivocally whether or not to divorce Charlie—a thunderclap from the heavens, maybe, words written in clouds, something as unambiguous as the sensation in my whole shocked body the first time I met him and knew without any doubt he was the love of my life.
I drove home, and found myself walking into the house as if it might hold the answer to that question. We’d built the house together more than ten years earlier but even so it had never really felt mine. Although I can’t say it felt as if it belonged to Charlie either. Domestically our two cultures had come into opposition like participants in a nominally friendly sports competition and clashed more aggressively than was necessary. It turned out Charlie prefers clean, modern lines. My taste leans toward the sort of thing that would not be out of place in a brimming African farmhouse. Now Charlie’s low-slung, shiny leather sofa faced my canvas-covered, dog-stained, allergy-hot-zone sofa over the coffee table on which there was a buffer zone of shared interests: a book of Lee Miller’s war photography; a biography of Paul Bowles; orange candles on Japanese-print-inspired holders; Charlie’s weekly newspaper; a world atlas; bills; the children’s homework.
The kids weren’t home from school yet, Charlie was still at work. I went online and ordered a variety of books, from those that promised to rescue a rocky marriage to the sorts of fresh-from-the-fray divorcée memoirs I would ordinarily have avoided. I got used paperbacks because I knew I wouldn’t want them on my shelves after I’d read them. If the marriage survived, they would be a threat—always suggestively winking up from my shelves on the days our union reverted rocky. If the marriage didn’t survive, I knew I wouldn’t want to be reminded of this day forever afterward by their presence.
When they arrived, I stashed the books in their anonymous brown packages behind my collection of obscure Africana, where I knew they were unlikely to be discovered. Every time I went on assignment or to a speaking engagement I stuffed a few volumes into my carry-on. I was distressed to find that many came in the telltale, rippled condition of women on the brink; read in the bath, wept upon, or both. I imagined their previous owners propped on the edge of the steaming tub, taps running, tears streaming. I read them hurriedly, in increasing dismay, and left them in the backs of airplane seats, in airports, in hotel rooms—a guilty trail of contagion. The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A Twenty-Five-Year Landmark Study disturbed me so much I tore it into parts and discarded the fragments in separate gas station garbage bins across South Dakota and Nebraska.
Like alcoholic memoirs and their twelve steps to freedom and recovery, divorcée memoirs seem to follow a familiar path: the grim realization that the marriage is truly over; the reluctant acceptance that the unhappy liaison has an ungodly power over the couple; the terror and dislocation that preceded and followed the actual awful act of divorce; the new man and renewed belief in the old lies about love. I had begun to give up on these books at the first mention of a woman collapsing with grief on the kitchen or the bathroom floor. Why always these two rooms? Couldn’t anyone fall over anywhere more comfortable? The sitting room perhaps, the bedroom even? It was only later I discovered that women dissolve in these two places for good reason: the kitchen because it is the place from which we have nurtured our soon-to-be devastated families, and the bathroom because it is private.
“I think it’s over,” I said, stopping Charlie at the front door one morning in mid-August. Even as I spoke, I could hear the mix of anxiety and finality in my voice, as if for several months we had both been watching over a dying relative whose time had finally come. It sounded to me as if I were warning Charlie: if he walked out the door now, he would miss what we had all been waiting for, the moment of death.
“What’s over?” Charlie asked.
“This,” I said, and I gestured us, and the house, and by implication everything we had collected and made together. Our family, the shelves of books, the rows of pills on the bathroom shelf, the boxes of old tax returns in the garage, the photo albums showing us on vacation in Central and South America, the Shona sculpture of a mother with child, the eccentrically beautiful pink-and-cream
rug made from homegrown Zambian wool woven for us by Vanessa as a wedding present. “It’s the beach,” she had explained unhelpfully when I stared at the wavy design in puzzlement. “With rocks.”
“Not now,” Charlie said. “If you want to discuss this some other time, we can schedule a meeting.”
“Schedule a meeting?” I said. “I’m not your business partner.”
“Don’t yell.”
“I’m not yelling,” I said.
“You are.”
Then I was.
Cecily came down from the kitchen and stood between us, tiny and fragile-looking in her ready-for-preschool braids, her backpack seeming to double her size. For too long our children had done this, inserting themselves between us and the words that might finally blow us apart. “So right now?” Charlie asked. “You really want to do this right now?”
I didn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. Cecily was a burgeoning part of my hysteria. I wanted her world to be predictable, safe, and, above all, normal. I wanted all my children to be able to say of their childhoods that they were if not idyllic, then at least uneventful. I didn’t want our children losing their house, or their sense of family. I wanted them swaddled in continuity and predictability. In other words, I wanted for my children what I’d never had and what I seemed unable and unwilling and far too unbelieving to create for myself: a solid, obvious, and unassailable sense of self attached to an immovable home, the same address for decades, routines and traditions. “Yes,” I said. Then, “No. No, of course not.”
I had broken the sacred six-word vow of silence: Not in front of the children. But I was keeping the sacred six-word vow of parenthood: For the sake of the children. For the sake of the children we wouldn’t talk about this now, or maybe ever. For the sake of the children, there would be days made normal by after-school sports and by PTO meetings and by cupcakes on their birthdays. For the sake of the children we would pretend everything was okay until our marriage went from cold war to nuclear winter, and maybe even then.
Charlie scooped up Cecily. “I’m leaving,” he said. “E-mail me with some times we can meet. When you’re calmer.”
They left, Cecily yelling, “Hearts and kisses! Hearts and kisses!” and waving as she always did until the corner in the driveway rendered her invisible to me. I went up to my office, a small room—more of a landing than anything else, a stage stop from which I could easily monitor the comings and goings of the home. It would have been, if the house had had a heart, exactly there, suspended over the belly of the kitchen, and the incubating warmth of the children’s bedroom. I turned on my computer and started the day’s writing. There had been a time, ten or fifteen years ago, that I had believed I could write my way out of anything. For years I had even kept a sticky note on my computer that said exactly that: “You can write your way out of this.”
But I had written and written and here we still were. For the first time, I admitted this might be something I would not be able to write my way out of. I couldn’t make words take the shape of an escape for either of us. This couldn’t go on. On the other hand, what options did we have? Charlie and I were in this together, house lifting off its foundation or not, sweat equity and tears, thick and thin. We had children together, we had history together, we had dwindling bank accounts and accumulated debt together.
I looked around at the couples we knew and none of them seemed to be tripping the light fantastic either. Most people I knew complained more or less tirelessly about their spouses: they disagreed about how to spend their money, how to raise their children, and how often or seldom they should have sex. They complained of being bored, of their lives being habitual and careful, of feeling spied upon, of carrying with them a perpetual hangover of guilt. It seemed that no one felt good enough at being married. Maybe marriage wasn’t supposed to be unfettered joy. Maybe this was it, coupledom as a slog with the reward being the comfort of believing you were doing your best, not for yourself, but for those to whom you had pledged your allegiance. Maybe marriage was a long exercise in compromise, and self-denial, and an increasingly furtive internal life. To aim for anything else seemed a fatal swim too far from shore in unknown waters.
There seemed nothing for it but to double down. Dig deeper. Work more and harder and longer. The Zulu signal flag is four triangles—black, yellow, blue, and red—making up a four-colored square. Ordinarily, it means, “I need a tug.” But in 1905, when the Zulu flag was hoisted by Admiral Togo at the Battle of Tsushima, it meant, “The empire’s fate depends on the result of this battle, let every man do his utmost duty.”
THE MIDDAY SUN
Then in a kind of fin-de-siècle madness, we both planned working trips to Africa. Charlie said he would guide potential investors around Zambian safari camps. I said I’d go home and collect photographs for my new book. We planned our travel so as not to be in Zambia longer than a couple of nights together. I said I didn’t want to leave the children home alone; Charlie said he would need to focus on the logistics of his clients’ itineraries and wouldn’t be able to deal with distractions. What neither of us said was that we couldn’t bear to be together, that we couldn’t breathe around each other any-more.
In their 1977 piece “Breathing In/Breathing Out (Death Itself),” the performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay kneel face-to-face, pressing their mouths together. Their noses are blocked with cigarette filters. The image is that of a passionate kiss, but it is in fact an intense, exhausting physical struggle. For the duration of the piece—nearly twenty minutes—the couple have no external access to air. Shortly after the performance starts, Marina’s face grows shiny with exertion; she is audibly suffering. Soon, Ulay is gasping too. At last, they let go of one another’s mouths—propelled backward by their need for oxygen and space.
Breath, pneuma, has also been understood since ancient times as soul, as the connection between the outer world and our inner beings, as our integrity. When we breathe deeply, we connect head and heart, and we are connected to the atmosphere. When we hold our breath, when our breath is forbidden, then we are isolated from all creation. Even if we can still function, we are not integral, we cannot be trusted, we are not whole, we have no hope of being authentic. We are dependent and immobile and fixed. In that way, the lack of breath between two people is an isolating, suffocating, limited contract. The couple, gasping, will eventually have to fall apart from one another.
In early September, I wrote letters to our three children, hid them under the cleaning products in the back of the bathroom cabinet where I was sure they would not be found until sufficiently long after my death, and flew to Zambia. By now, the hilarity of my father’s seventieth birthday party had long worn off. A banana-leaf-ruining frost in July had left him with recurrent bouts of bronchitis. Then the rains returned and he came down with a particularly stubborn dose of malaria. Suspicious of medicine in general and of Western medicine in particular, Dad submitted himself to the care of a Chinese doctor, new to Lusaka.
Dr. Quek diagnosed him with polluted blood—“We could have told you that for free,” the rest of us shrieked—and she prescribed inpatient injections of antimalarial medicine, intravenous infusions of antibiotics, and capsules of vitamins. Dad had to eat an egg a day, two servings of red meat, and a variety of green vegetables. He was to avoid drinking beer and water, he was prohibited the enervating effects of ice, but he was allowed as much red wine and tea as he liked. “You see?” Dad said. “Very sensible.” I had my doubts but nonetheless offered to accompany him to town for his appointments.
Accordingly, we left the farm at dawn, hitting the edge of Lusaka just after rush hour. The city was barely recognizable from the one Charlie and I had left in the early nineties. The official end of the Cold War in 1992 meant the communist bloc no longer subsidized Zambia’s social-humanist ideology. Decades of complacent economic stagnation had given way to a sudden proliferation of petty capitalism. Traffic lights and interse
ctions were clogged with vendors hawking counterfeit perfume, pirated music, and plastic toys from China. Then the Chinese themselves arrived and instituted seriously consequential capitalism.
First they built roads. Then they took over mines and opened industrial plants. After that, they went onto the farms. Now they were in the shops, schools, and clinics. There were scores of Chinese restaurants, oddly empty and often bafflingly free of either menus or chefs. By 2006, there were more Chinese in Zambia than there had ever been British. Advertisements at the airport welcomed visitors in English and Chinese. Trucks and cars with Chinese characters on their doors teemed up and down Cha Cha Cha Road and disappeared into the compounds and suburbs loaded with gravel, bricks, cement. Hospitals, schools, and compounds with swooping double-eaved roofs sprung up all over Lusaka.
Suddenly time, which had never mattered before, had meaning. Nearly everyone seemed to have a cell phone, people could text, SMS, update their Facebook statuses. In kiosks and intersections across the country it was impossible to avoid vendors selling talk time. Until now, time was an abstract idea, possessing the languid pointlessness of all socialist-era states; striving was fruitless. Government clocks in post offices, hospitals, and police stations had rusted to a stop with dust and neglect. Waiting had been a national pastime. Now there were cell phones and time came in sheets of little scratch-off tickets, and people could make appointments. Unseemly speed was the new order of the delineated twenty-four-hour day.
“We’re orphans of the empire,” Mum lamented. “Our hour is over.”
But Dad admired the Chinese workers he saw on the road over the Muchinga Escarpment on the way to and from the farm. They worked quickly and single-mindedly with the focus of a hungry people who have a historic understanding that things always could get worse. “Look at that,” Dad said, indicating the men in their conical hats and their blue pajama uniforms toiling over steaming layers of freshly laid asphalt. “You wouldn’t find a Brit or a Yank slogging so hard in this heat, would you?” He leaned out the window and waved his pipe at the surprised laborers. “Well done, chaps, well done! Good effort. Keep it up.”