A wife falls apart, a marriage is broken, and a husband tries to pick up the pieces.
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Shattered, shattered
Love and hope and sex and dreams
Are still surviving on the street
Look at me, I’m in tatters!
– Shattered, The Rolling Stones
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There was no money for a spree at IKEA … There was no IKEA—at least not in the states yet.
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When Lana and I moved to our first house, we tried to assemble a life. It wasn’t easy. It took some doing. There was no money for a spree at IKEA, like the one I indulged with my second wife. There was no IKEA—at least not in the states yet. We had lived for a long time in a small, elegant one-bedroom apartment, elegant in its bones but not in the way we’d fleshed them out, and aside from my giant partners desk topped with plexiglas and used by Lana as a work surface for making jewelry, the two tall wardrobes bought with my mother’s wedding gift that wouldn’t fit in the elevator and were sent back to be shortened—one now gold-leafed by Lana and angled stylishly in a corner—and a cheap tryptic of unfinished pine bookshelves we’d bought to contain our ever-growing collection (remember, I worked at a publishing house), we didn’t have much furniture. There was a black, cloth-covered reclining chair with matching ottoman, both showing signs of wear. And a tall, teak stand-alone shelf with a pull-down desk area for me, cluttered with bills and papers. Our bed was a fold-up futon that stayed folded down most of the time to forestall serious back injury. All told, there was enough to fill maybe a room and a half of the house we were buying.
When God curses or, more accurately, refuses to bless something, nothing ever goes smoothly.
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But we did have her grandmother’s things, left to us when she’d died a year earlier, waiting in storage, a thousand miles away. There we had the black and gold upholstered couch with the fleur-de-lis pattern and its two matching wing chairs, faded but well-cared for, the fine mahogany dining table chipped in places but still serviceable, the small half-moon end table with the built-in magazine rack, the porcelain lamps absent their shades, the old bed frame and headboard, and the carefully wrapped, hideously ugly Staffordshire figurines. And still more in my mother’s basement—the odds and ends from Lana’s coach house, where she’d lived when we first dated: an assortment of enormous art books and discontinued design magazines, an old inlaid wood dresser from her art school days, her mothballed wedding dress, and many boxes of McCoy.
All this we drove that winter from Chicago to New York in an old rented U-Haul. Actually three old rented U-Hauls, because the first two broke down. Truck number one stopped accelerating no more than ten minutes into our trip, causing us to lose a day of travel while awaiting its replacement. Truck number two made it to Pennsylvania but stalled just as we slid onto an exit ramp and coasted down to the light, and then refused to start again. Not once but twice did all the heirlooms, large and small, have to be yanked out of one one truck and crammed into another by less-than-thrilled U-Haul staff who couldn’t have cared less about their provenance. During the second transfer, accomplished at a dingy gas station to which the second truck had been towed, one of the couch pillows sustained a minor tear, impaled by the spike of a carelessly angled table lamp, precipitating a letter-bomb from me to U-Haul that got all our charges waived. This was the ex post facto high point of the journey.
Minutes later, a lone red full-length LaFrance came trolling down our quaint street, lights out, with only its bell ringing.
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When we arrived at the house in the middle of the night, after closing on it in absentia due to the travel delays, the keys were supposed to be in our mailbox. But they weren’t, and we had to call the local fire department to take the lock apart and let us in. I asked specifically for no sirens, as we didn’t want our grand entrance to involve awakened neighbors and emergency vehicles. Minutes later, a lone red full-length LaFrance came trolling down our quaint street, lights out, with only its bell ringing. When God curses or, more accurately, refuses to bless something, nothing ever goes smoothly, because the bright shiny apple is full of rot within. But we’re often blind to it, attributing our misfortune to coincidence, a lack of fairness, or just plain bad luck. How else can I explain fifteen years with Lana?
♦◊♦
In our picture-perfect coastal village, on our Hollywood-set street, we actually had a real living room. There was even a fireplace.
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After the old furniture finally made it to our new 1850’s home, a big gray Italianate box with a wraparound porch and added-on bay window and gabled roof to transform it into a true Victorian, in our picture-perfect coastal village, on our Hollywood-set street, we actually had a real living room. A couch and two chairs. End tables, albeit mismatched. Lamps, though still with bare bulbs. A coffee table, on which we placed the enormous art books and discontinued design magazines, slanted for sophistication, along with a book about our very own colonial village, with pictures of our street (but not our home) purchased through the local historical society. There was even a fireplace. To make the room even homier, Lana hit the church thrift shop for a host of accent pieces, all of which were real finds—little dishes, ashtrays (at the time she smoked), vases, and other knick-knacks, all color-coordinated to complement the mostly dark brown furnishings. She found beiges and browns, creams and caramels, colors of flan and coffee ice cream. There was one yellow jug, I recall, a mellow yellow for a touch of brightness, and for Valentine’s Day I added—from the fancier consignment shop in town—a three-legged rococo chair with Chippendale-style claws for feet and a throw pillow fashioned to resemble a bunch of red roses. Magnifique! The chair was too fragile for even Lana’s petite frame, but it “looked well” by the fireplace, as she was fond of saying. We chose paint colors—she chose, I agreed—and had the rooms painted, highlighting the moldings and trim. And after we’d cleaned up for our first dinner party, the house looked so nice—despite the torn curtain in the hallway, the rotting porch steps, and the unfinished areas of the now uncarpeted dining room floor—I was compelled to invite more guests to join us the following day to sit with us in our lovely living room, feeling somehow, with a faint hint of foreboding, that our home would never shine this way again.
Divorce interrupts the flow of memory, because after the break, memory is no longer shored up through sharing. It splits into versions, often at odds, sometimes in conflict, never in harmony or aligned.
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Despite the picture I’ve just created for you, I’m shocked at how little I remember of that life. Which way did the bed face? Where was the TV? More disturbingly, what did Lana and I talk about when we lived there? What did she make—or what did we order—for dinner when I got home from work? How frequently did we make love? Divorce interrupts the flow of memory, because after the break, memory is no longer shored up through sharing. It splits into versions, often at odds, sometimes in conflict, never in harmony or aligned. I do, however, have two distinct memories of sitting on the couch in that living room, with the torn pillow turned to conceal the damage. The first is of Lana confessing. To what I cannot say. I can only say I forgave her, offered my handkerchief and dried her tears, held her in my arms, and told her that it would be OK, that we would be OK. And for a while, we were.
♦◊♦
A coffee-colored candy dish hit the wall above the fireplace, right between the two brass sconces, and bits scattered in all directions, some settling in my hair.
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The second memory is, oddly, more painful than the first, which may explain why I’ve blocked out the starting point. It begins, for me, with the living room Lana had lovingly put together being violently disassembled. In his instructional memoir On Writing, Stephen King, like Strunk and White, his oft-cited exemplars, preaches avoidance of the passive voice. He cites rare exceptions, and would that this were one of them. I am tempted to recede, to withdraw into the woodwork, to disappear in the gathering shadows, to slink away and cower, saying only that dishes flew, lamps toppled, glass shattered, and things that could not be replaced were suddenly broken beyond repair. But I was an actor in the drama, and my cue was not to exit but to stand, mute and still at first, rendered motionless by the shock of it, caught in the spotlight center stage as the machinery of destruction first rumbled, then roared, then screeched, inexorable and inhuman, the way humans sound when we wail. A coffee-colored candy dish hit the wall above the fireplace, right between the two brass sconces, and bits scattered in all directions, some settling in my hair. The little yellow jug was next, splitting neatly into two useless halves as it slammed to the floor. Did Lana throw the dish and slam the jug? Yes, she did. She threw, she slammed, she flung and smashed, careless and deliberate, ruthless and disconsolate, agitated and depressed. Dissatisfied with the pace at which porcelain was perishing, she upended the coffee table with her bare foot, sending art books, design magazines, and a Baccarat crystal bowl to the floor. The bowl, a wedding gift, landed on its bottom, wobbled for a second or two, then fell on its side, cracking from base to rim.
“Lana. Stop.”
But she did not stop.
She swept the candlesticks from the mantel, making dents in the soft wood planks below.
Love may be strong—an unbreakable diamond—but the marriage bond, when twisted, will break before it bends.
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She kicked one lamp and punched the other, and since neither had shades I watched the bulbs burst into invisible slivers as they crashed onto the floor. I had crushed a lightbulb myself once before, on our wedding day, in the Jewish tradition of the groom breaking a glass with his foot at the end of the ceremony. To prevent injury, a lightbulb is frequently substituted for the harder-to-shatter glass. The glass-breaking symbolizes the fragility of marriage, which survives only when partners devote wholly to each other and individually to the whole. Love may be strong—an unbreakable diamond—but the marriage bond, when twisted, will break before it bends.
I forgot to mention the cat and the dog, our two black animals, waiting it out under the bed. I wanted to retreat under there with them, warm and safe, sheltered from the bombing, but lacking their instinct for self-preservation, I indulged the delusion that I could enter the fray, retake the battleground, and save even a few of the soldiers from their fate.
“Lana.”
“Lana … ”
How could someone so precise be so indifferent? How could someone so tiny unleash damage on this scale?
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Then the leather wedding album thudded as the end table toppled and the cream-colored ashtray crashed, its ash scattering over a pile of brown-tipped cigarette butts spread out across the floor. The floor that was now buried beneath a blanket of shards and fragments, mixed with blood from my wife’s uncovered soles. She cut such a small figure at barely over five feet, well-proportioned, with longer legs, shorter arms, and fine, delicate fingers, the perfect size for rendering intricate designs in paint on paper and carving wax with dental tools to sculpt the molds for her jewelry. How could someone so precise be so indifferent? How could someone so tiny unleash damage on this scale? She stood now, amidst it, unaware her feet were bleeding, surrounded by the remains of the room, head down, shoulders slumped, eyes averted.
She had stopped because there was nothing left. Nothing whole. Not one unbroken thing.
And all I could do was walk quietly to the basement door, turn the handle and open it, grab the broom from the side of the steps, pick up the dustpan, and start sweeping, stooped in the posture of despair, while Lana sat balled up on the couch, like a little girl whose childhood had been ripped from her, a lost girl, a shattered soul forever seeking and never finding peace. I couldn’t leave her to clean up the mess, to restore the room, now stripped of its intimacy and bereft of its charm, absent its ardor, to an order both spiritless and bare. I had to do it myself. Because I was the only one of the two of us who could still, despite the nightmares, dream.
Photo—Sam Galison/Flickr