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.My guts were playing Twister.She leaned over and kissed me.“You just need a little more work,” she said.“A little more time with me, and you’ll be a damn good man.”22I saw Marlene one time after she left.Her eminently fair division of the household left nothing to contest.We simply had to show up a single time in court to affirm that our wish was to not be married anymore—and in the absence of so many other wishes I’d have preferred, I didn’t see how I could deny Marlene that.She showed up early.I showed up early, too, because I knew she would, and I didn’t want to disappoint her again.We had a few minutes alone, together, in the anteroom.She clutched a small blue purse on her lap.I fiddled with my tie.I hate ties.She looked beautiful—just a little eyeliner and blush, something she rarely put on for me, enough to notice without being stopped in your tracks.I liked it.“You look nice,” I said.She choked more life out of that purse.“Thank you.”I didn’t say anything else.When it was time to enter the courtroom, we went in silence until compelled to speak.We said yes—or, rather, we said no to each other—and we signed our names and we left.She took the elevator.I took the stairs.She went out the north doors and to her car, I presume.I went out the west doors, crossed two streets, and poured myself into a seat at a bar.Frank and Hugo came around to check on me, and to buy me a few.Good friends, those guys.There’s the occasional night—it’s almost always a night—when I’ve had too much beer and not enough recent companionship, and I pull out the tattered memories of life with Marlene and rearrange them and almost convince myself that we had a chance.We didn’t, of course.The fights between us, from the start, exceeded all reasonable concept of proportion.They never turned physical.It might have been a relief if they had.Instead, we bypassed the usual ramping up—minor disagreement yields to raised voices yields to bitter recrimination—and proceeded directly to the ugliest, most damaging things we could say to each other.At times, it felt like a crazy-making game to me.Could I take away her will to battle me, then save everything by reversing course and telling her I loved her? Could I say I was sorry and make it stick? Whose feelings would be trampled first? Who would come home in the nastier mood and inflict it on the other? It was such an ugly brand of brinkmanship we played that each of us, on the eve of the wedding we had planned just so we could double down on our dysfunction, faced the concern of our respective best friends—but we insisted that yes, we wanted this marriage.We would be better.We would do better.That was the lie we told ourselves, and the lie we believed for a long time.That lie carried us, man.It carried us through my early years at the Herald-Gleaner, when we’d bridge the last week of a month with ramen noodles and found pennies, even as we took up battlements in our ceaseless fights about how thin our margins were.It carried us through the belief that a child would somehow bond us in all the ways we couldn’t manage on our own.When the child came and our division only grew, we lied to ourselves and said we just had to figure out how to make it work now that everything had changed.And we believed it anew.We couldn’t be saved.That’s the truth I came back to every time I thought about those years, which was far too often.I could rearrange the order of things, fixate on small moments of kindness and laughter and read something bigger into them, but the pathway just wasn’t there.I tried to tell myself that it was no one’s fault, that no one had to take the blame for it, but that was another lie.Von changed our marriage.That seems a self-evident point.Two plus one equals three, and the mathematics alone shift the variables.What I mean is that Von made it better, at least for Marlene.He made it tolerable for her, because he was the realization of the only dream she ever asserted for herself in our marriage
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