I Started Sleeping Diagonal at Forty-Two and Finally Saw My Marriage

Nobody tells you about the bed part of crossing forty. The perimenopause, sure. The way your knees start weather-reporting every storm system that moves through the Midwest. But mostly it’s the bed getting wider. Not physically. The mattress is the same California King we bought in 2017 from some boutique in Cincinnati that smelled like eucalyptus and old money. The space between our bodies has become this enormous country, and I keep forgetting which side of it I was supposed to be guarding.

Lately I’ve been sleeping diagonal.

Sometime in February, one of those bleary weeks where Tuesday and Thursday blur into the same wet brown afternoon, I ended up sitting across from three different women, separately, who each said things about their husbands I haven’t been able to stop chewing on. I keep waiting for the lesson at the end of it. The thing I’m supposed to take home and stick to the fridge. But the older I get the more the lessons turn out to be just other women’s coping mechanisms I haven’t figured out how to steal.

The first woman I thought about was a friend from college who now lives outside Columbus. We’ll call her Jeanne, because that’s not her name and she would kill me if it were. Jeanne told me, while stirring cream into her cold brew, that she hadn’t been intimate with her husband in almost two years. Not because of anything dramatic. Her husband had started sleeping in the guest room because he snored, and one night he just didn’t come back. They still hold hands at church, which is somehow worse, the public theater of a marriage that’s become a quiet arrangement. There was a sugar packet on the table and Jeanne kept folding the wrapper into smaller and smaller squares while she talked.

Jeanne said she felt “fine.” Then she paused and said it again, “Fine. I’m fine.” I watched her say it the way you watch someone step onto a frozen pond, one foot out, one foot still on the bank. There was a smudge of lipstick on the rim of her cup she’d been worrying at with her thumb. By the way she said his name — Tom — like she was setting down a glass object on a hard floor.

I thought about the question she asked me on the drive home: “Do you think a woman is allowed to stop wanting him, even if he never technically did the unforgivable thing?”

I still don’t know.

And then there was Maya. Maya is forty-seven and she says things in restaurants that make the couple at the next table put down their forks. She told me, three espressos deep, that she and her husband still “go at it” several times a week, looking me dead in the eye across a marble table in some West Village cafe. She met him at nineteen, in Madrid. She literally tackled him onto her dorm bed the first night. She said it with such open delight that I forgot for a second that we were two grown women sitting in daylight discussing the sexual frequency of our marriages. The espresso machine behind the counter was making that high-pitched steam sound and I was watching my own hands in my lap and thinking about how I’d forgotten to take my coat off and was sitting there in my winter boots with the salt stains.

Maya’s husband didn’t leave. By her own account he was “boringly good.” What does a woman do with her own wreckage when she sees a marriage that simply didn’t burn down? Do you stand there in the house that didn’t burn feeling relieved and livid at the same time.

I sat there thinking: is that what I did wrong? Was I simply too much, too angry, too willing to fight? Did my wanting someone so badly set fire to the whole project?

Probably. Probably not. Nobody sends you the paperwork. You just walk around inside whatever’s left.

And then there was Lin. Lin paints. That’s her verb now, the way other women use yoga or a glass of wine. She paints tiny watercolors of birds that nobody buys, alone in a room she calls her studio, although the room is also where the cat sleeps on a cushion that used to belong to her son who is now twenty-six and living in Portland. There’s a radiator that clicks every forty seconds or so, and in winter you can hear the upstairs neighbor’s dog bark at nothing. Lin’s marriage isn’t over. It’s the kind that happens to you while you’re not looking, like a slow leak in a tire you keep forgetting to check. Lin has gone into the bird paintings the way you crawl into the bushes when something’s hunting you, and she swears the bushes are enough. Lin’s whole thing is this vast, unfussy non-answer that drives me half-crazy and half-admiring.

“My paintings are my lovers. They never sleep on the wet spot. They never leave the cap off the toothpaste. They never make me cry in the bathroom at two in the morning.”

I went home that night and stood in my own kitchen eating shredded cheese out of the bag because I couldn’t decide what to make for dinner, and I kept thinking about the color of one of her birds, a wren with this terrible hopeful pink at its throat.

So now it’s me, lying diagonal across a California King at forty-two, with three women’s voices piled up in my head, all talking at once.

I’m not Jeanne. My husband didn’t do the unforgivable thing. He did the much worse thing, the thousand small unloving things that compound over a decade into a shape you can’t recognize anymore. The forgetting to ask about your day. The reading his phone at dinner. The way he kissed me on the top of the head like I was his mother greeting him at the airport, and I never forgave him for that one and I never told him.

Maya I’m not either. I haven’t tackled anyone onto anything since I was twenty-three. I cried the last time I tried to initiate something. The hallway light was on, I remember that. The bedroom door was open a crack. I made a small sound in the back of my throat and turned my face into the pillow so he wouldn’t see, and he pretended not to hear, which is the worst possible kindness a man can do. We never spoke about it.

And Lin. I’m not her. I haven’t found my bird paintings. I have my laptop and this sentence and a warm bagel at seven a.m. and a podcast I pretend to like. I have a woman I see every other Wednesday in a beige office downtown who keeps handing me laminated worksheets about identifying my core wounds, and I take them home and use them as coasters, which I think is a kind of progress.

I don’t actually know what I want.

I don’t know if I want my husband to touch me again. The body remembers. The body has its own vote. And my body has been voting no for so long that the muscle memory of saying yes has atrophied into this vague muscular confusion, like trying to recall a language you once spoke fluently and finding only vocabulary left. Kitchen. Milk. Blue. The way his neck smelled in 2014. But no verbs. No conjugations.

Is it possible the unforgivable thing was never him? Is it possible it was just the deal, the whole business of asking one person to be your lover and your co-parent and your witness and your roommate, and calling it the death of desire when really the deal was always going to break?

I don’t know.

I keep my wedding ring on. It fits the same.

I keep my husband’s coffee mug washed and by the machine every morning. It is the only ritual I have left that resembles romance, and I do it without thinking, which is probably what romance always was — something you did without thinking, until one day you thought about it, and thinking about it was the first draft of leaving.

Okay. Pretend it isn’t cold in the middle of the bed. I keep doing this. Pretending. Pretend the birds aren’t enough — they are. Pretend you’re still the kind of woman who would tackle him onto the dorm-room mattress of your twenties. Pretend it’s 2014 and his neck still smells like something. I went and checked if the kids left the porch light on. They had. I turned it off. I came back to bed. He was on his side. I was on mine. There was a lot of California King between us and the radiator was clicking and I thought about Lin’s terrible pink wren and I didn’t sleep for a long time.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.