By HMS
Date: 6 May 2000

Beyond reason

Now that the necessity of it has become unavoidable, divorce makes me recall Hawthorne, so hard to teach in these permissive days.  Divorce will brand me with a scarlet D: denigrated, discarded, defective, divorcee (probably my least favorite word in the language).  I recoil from the humiliation.  Up until this marriage to a man I loved beyond reason, I had secretly pitied divorced people.  How could anyone be so stupid?  Or so weak?  I used to figure it was one or the other:  either you married the wrong person (stupid) or couldn't manage to overcome whatever problems cropped up (weak).  If, say, the man couldn't handle the problems, that's not exactly the woman's fault, but it brings you back to reason 1, stupid--she clearly picked the wrong guy.

Which brings us to G.  The man I loved beyond reason.  Reason is very helpful.  Reason mentions little items like, G. doesn't appreciate your talent for acting; he winces when you sing; he never says he's sorry after a fight--never even tries to make up; and he had to be cajoled into an engagement with threats and promises.  Reason didn't even have to mention that he never once said "I love you"--G. pointed that one out himself, at the time of our engagement.

"I know!  You're not the gushy romantic type," I can recall saying happily.  "It's one of the things I love about you."  

So that old "love is blind" stuff is not just a cliche.  Love is also deaf, dumb, and extremely stubborn.  Or is that just me?  And like so many other things I have purchased dearly in my life, when I got this one thing, my heart's desire, I discovered it was all wrong and I should never have spent so much on it.

So this story begins with an ending.  And we have a choice.  We can have the feel-good romance summer-movie ending, where the heroine endures terrible loneliness and pain, but regains her sense of self, her confidence, and finally, her ability to love again, and--oh yes, what a coincidence!--Hollywood's Man-of-the-Moment appears to sweep her off her feet.  Or, feel-good romance summer-movie II scenario, the heroine endures terrible loneliness and pain, but regains her sense of self, her confidence, and finally, that jerk she married realizes what a fool he's been, and how she is really his true love after all, and won't she please come back and everything will be different now?  Depending on what the pre-screening audiences say, she could marry him all over again; or dump him and go off with Hollywood's Man-of-the-Moment; or dump him and go off with Thelma.

But these endings all imply new beginnings.  And what I feel right now is only profound grief.  Ending a marriage is like committing a murder, very publicly.  And the worst part is, things were not really that bad.  We got along well, really well.  We laughed like crazy a lot of the time, real laughter, the best.  Probably at least once a week I would laugh until the tears were rolling down my cheeks, my stomach ached, and I was gasping "Stop!  Don't!  I mean it!"  What we laughed about was so bizarre it doesn't seem possible that anyone else could cook up that kind of bubbling chemical reaction in me.  He would call the cat "the world's smallest carnivore" and tell me in detail about the tiny live animals she had happily devoured.  He would imitate a peacock and strut around the room, turning suddenly to look at me (as a peacock we saw once did to his wife) and saying with a lascivious chuckle, "Who are YOU?  Ho-ho-o...  Oh, it's my wife.  Sorry.  Sorry!"  When Car Talk came on the radio, that crazy banjo music, we would jump up and dance around the house, waving imaginary tails in the air.  The divorce papers do not merely end our marriage. They have destroyed some of my happiest memories; damaged as if in a fire, not so much by flame as by smoke and soot and water.
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