Yet Eric and I continued to drift apart. I can’t say exactly where we went off the rails, but I know it didn’t help that both of us kept paying too much attention to our jobs and social lives and not enough to each other or to making a family. It wasn’t that things ever got actively bad: even when we were snappish we mostly managed to enjoy each other. That allowed us, or at least allowed me, to mistake having a good time for being happy. But it turned out that we were all along letting a collection of slights and disappointments accrete like barnacles on the hull of our romance, slowing the momentum until we could no longer move forward together.
In the end it was Eric who figured it out first and triggered our demise. It was 2007, I was forty-two, and we’d finally gotten serious about having children. Unable to conceive on our own, we’d started down the road to IVF by picking a fertility center and taking a few preliminary steps, like providing a sperm sample and making sure my fallopian tubes were unblocked. Eric had just been offered a new job overseeing the sustainable development arm of a global mining financier based in Vancouver, a job that promised a saner work life and that I thought could give us a chance to right our ship. I was in the kitchen getting ready to make a celebratory meal that involved center-cut pork chops and a bottle of our favorite champagne when he came home.
I opened the champagne and poured us both glasses. We had a toast, and then I pulled the chops from the refrigerator. “We need to talk,” he said behind me, tightly. I turned to face him. “I don’t want to try to have a kid right now. I think we need to work on our relationship.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling confused, but not much more. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“I’m not happy,” he said. “Are you happy with the way things are?”
“Well, not entirely, but I thought we would be able to make things better once you changed jobs.”
“I know, but I feel like we’re in crisis.”
“I don’t know that we’re in crisis. Things maybe aren’t great, but I feel like we can fix them.”
“I think we should go to counseling. And I just don’t want to try to have a kid until we get things sorted.”
I stood there with my champagne, feeling stupid, with a furious bile starting to bubble up from my gut and burn the back of my throat. While I’d been happily shopping and planning a nice evening to usher us toward the next phase of our shared enterprise, he’d been going over in his head how he was going to tell me we were on the brink of falling apart. How could I not see this coming? I wanted to hurl the flute across the room, make the shattering crystal a sonic expression of my shattering heart. Instead I drained the glass and poured another one. “I don’t think I can cook now,” I said, putting the chops away. “We’ll just have to go out.”
We finished the champagne and then kept drinking at a little Italian place a few blocks away. I told him that I’d go to couples counseling, even though I had the suspicion that it would simply make an inevitable breakup a little kinder.
“I mean, what do you want?” I asked at some point, my head hot and buzzing with anger, hurt, and alcohol. “Do you want a divorce?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked at him, the broad planes of his face illuminated by a flickering votive candle between us, his eyes in shadow, darkened pits sunk into his skull and unreadable to me. Suddenly the entire room seemed to recede behind him—the exposed brick walls, long wood bar, and small tables brimming with other Brooklyn couples folding in on themselves. I knew I needed out, needed to be anywhere but here, going through the motions of a normal dinner with this man on whom I’d staked my future but who now didn’t know if he wanted to be with me. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I said, standing up, choking back tears. “I just can’t be around you right now.” I turned and walked unsteadily to the street, wondering where exactly I was going, crying into the night. I’d just walked out on my husband, leaving him stunned and uncomfortable in a restaurant where we were regulars—and I certainly couldn’t handle going home.
So I walked: up and down the commercial strip, through a few of the tree-lined blocks I’d always thought were pretty, over to the Gowanus Canal and across a cobblestone bridge to the edge of Park Slope on the other side. No longer crying, I stared at the water, at the bundle of wood pilings jutting up at its edge, and at the snaking path of the current in the moonlight as it fed south along the industrial waterfront toward the harbor. How many years I’d invested in this neighborhood, I thought, chasing after an imaginary life, and for what? To end up rejected and alone, rattling around the house, where the beams of sunlight refracted through leaves outside the six-foot parlor windows onto every beautiful detail—the vintage floorboards, the plaster moldings—would be like arrows pointing toward all I had reached for and lost. If we split up, there would be no babies, no dogs, no fantastic backyard dinner parties of prime local meats and homegrown produce with our oh-so-entertaining and like-minded friends and their kids. And then who will I be?
I’d been with Eric for so long that I couldn’t see what life would be without him, couldn’t fathom having to try to date. I’d never been very good at it when I was young, and now I felt headed out to pasture: too old for most men near my age, and possibly unable to bear a child. He’d have no trouble at all finding someone else, I thought bitterly. He’s a guy, after all—successful, attractive, younger, and still fertile. The trees rustled overhead. It was as if they were laughing at me.
It should have been obvious that night that it was over, but it took me months to accept it. Eric moved to Vancouver for the job but came back every few weeks for our couples counseling as we debated whether I should join him there. On a gray morning in November, during one of his increasingly rare returns to Brooklyn, we stood together in the kitchen, gazing out over the back deck at the one tree we had preserved in the garden: a dogwood that bloomed a dark and extraordinary green-veined pink, fading to white over a few spring weeks. The garden was misty and quiet except for the familiar and hopeful chirping of birds. Standing next to Eric, I turned and leaned in to kiss him, and he presented me his cheek.
We separated for good soon after that, committed to treating each other as well as we could in ending what had once felt like a tremendous shared love. Distraught and embarrassed, I could barely reach out to my friends. It wasn’t just the dissolution of the marriage and the prospect of disappointing my father that shamed me—“Diane, you’ve made me very proud,” he had said at the wedding, the only time he ever did so—but my own inability to see it coming. I had always thought of myself as emotionally clear-eyed and resilient, someone valued by relatives and friends for my independence and stability, rather than as one of those women who loses her way in an unhappy relationship. But that’s exactly what I was, and I couldn’t get over how unclearly I had seen myself, like the anorectic girl who registers only flab in her reflection. I spent many nights seeking solace in the company of good wine alongside a bamboo steamer of dumplings or a bowl of meatballs at the bar of one hipster boîte or another, always making sure I had a book to read, trying to project a vaguely Parisian image. It was just a cover, a thin veil barely masking the fact that I was a sad and lonely woman with no one to go home to, feeling too unloved and pathetic to try to start up with anyone new. I’d wake up and cry each morning, with the sensation that my body was too heavy to drag out of bed, every muscle trying to curl itself back into the mattress. How could I let this happen? I’d think. Why didn’t we try to fix it earlier? And, When will I stop feeling like such a loser?