Page 15 of Fox
“We’re getting divorced, Fox. You don’t get to call me that any longer.” I don’t know how I’m able to speak in full sentences when I’m breaking into a million pieces inside.
I’m losing my man—the love of my life.
I turn from the sink. He steps away from me.
I walk past him and go to our bedroom.
I close the door and lock it for the first time since I moved in. I sit on the edge of the bed, and I let myself do the thing I have not been doing since eleven-thirty this morning, since the conference room.
I cry for the baby girl I lost—the one with the name I don’t say out loud—and I cry for the marriage I thought I had. I cry because the lamb ragu was genuinely excellent, and I ate almost none of it. I cry because I am going to have to tell my mother, who never fully trusted Fox but was trying, and my father, who told me at the wedding that Fox seemed like a good man, and Milo, who said nothing but shook Fox’s hand and looked at him the way Milo looks at cars he’s not sure about.
I cry until there’s nothing left, and then I wash my face, and I look at myself in the mirror for a long time.
Okay, Lucy, now what?
5
WHY DOES IT HURT?
FOX
She’s packing.
I can hear drawers opening and closing, the soft drag of a bag across the bedroom floor, the silence between sounds.
She’s not frantic or even angry.
She’s doing it all quietly, patiently, and deliberately, which is worse.
Frantic and angry, I could work with. Deliberate means she has decided.
I stand by the dining table with my second glass of wine that I have only half-drunk, looking at the table we ate at, at the two place settings she put out—cloth napkins, the good wine, the lamb that took three hours—and I try to locate myself inside what is happening.
I cannot.
This is new.
I am a man who always knows where he is.
Geographically, professionally, emotionally. I maintain orientation the way I maintain most things, through control anddistance, through the administration of proximity to anything that could move me off my axis.
It is, I’m aware, not an attractive quality.
Percy has told me so in various forms over the years, most recently and most directly, approximately two months ago, when I told him I thought Lucy and I were heading for divorce, and he looked at me like I’d said something in a language he didn’t understand.
But I knew where I was then. I knew where I stood and what I felt and what I intended, and I could describe it all in complete sentences, which is the only test I’ve ever applied to my own certainty.
Right now, I cannot find a complete sentence anywhere.
Ishouldfeel relieved.
This is what I want, what I have been moving toward for months, what the honest version of me has been trying to find the words for when I looked across the breakfast table at my wife and understood that I was doing her a profound disservice and have been for a long time.
I do not feel relieved.
I feel like a piece of shit.
I top off the wine.
