“I know that people in the office probably told you about the miscarriage,” she said. “I stupidly talked about it with a few people. Telling Abby anything is a mistake.” He laughed, because, yeah, Abby was a gossip.
“When you get a divorce,” she said after a moment, “everyone expects you to provide a story to justify it. Every woman I’ve ever met who has had a divorce has a story to explain herself. But in real life the story and actual reasons for the divorce diverge. In reality, everything is more ambivalent. My own reasons are closer to a tone than a series of causes and effects. But when I talk about it, I know people want a cause and effect, a clear why.”
“All right,” Ames said. “So what’s the tone of your divorce?”
“I like to call it the Ennui of Heterosexuality.”
“I see. Do you still suffer from the ennui of heterosexuality?” Ames asked, gesturing grandly at their postcoital bedroom tableau.
“I suffered from a miscarriage,” she replied defiantly, puncturing his irony.
Ames quickly apologized.
Katrina shifted a pillow, and when she turned back to Ames, her face was…amused? “See, you proved my point. When I said ‘ennui of heterosexuality,’ you challenged me, but when I said ‘miscarriage,’ you immediately apologized. That’s why the miscarriage is the official story of my divorce. No one ever challenges it. Miscarriages are private, and so my miscarriage is a clean get-out-free card. It makes for a divorce in which Danny was blameless—grief where you lose something you can’t quite name. People assume that mourning drove a sad wedge between a couple—no one’s fault. Everything is assumed. No one ever asks how I actually felt about the miscarriage.”
“How did you feel about the miscarriage?” Ames asked.
“I felt relief.”
“Relief?”
“Yes. I was relieved. Which made me feel like a psychopath. I read all these articles in women’s magazines about miscarriages, and they all said that I would feel grief and guilt. They assured me that it wasn’t my fault: that it wasn’t because of that glass of wine I had once, or that Italian sub full of processed meat. But I never thought it was my fault. My own guilt came from not having guilt. After a while of feeling that way, I began to ask why. Why should I feel relieved? It caused me to look harder at my marriage. I was relieved because of something I didn’t want to admit: I didn’t want to be with Danny anymore and if we had a kid together I would have to be. Danny was a good boyfriend to have when I was younger, when we were in college. Like, in the same way that a Saint Bernard would be a good dog to have if you were lost in the mountains. A big amiable body that a girl could shelter behind. Danny was an idea I inherited, maybe from growing up in Vermont, of what a man was supposed to be. We looked good together; like, early on I knew any photo for our wedding announcement was going to look like it came from a magazine. So when he proposed, I accepted, even though we had been dating two years, and I don’t think that sex ever lasted longer than fifteen minutes, including foreplay, and despite the fact that by the three-month point in our relationship, I had somehow already ended up doing his laundry.
“One time, I made this joke that my marriage was like a push-up bra: It looked pretty good underneath a shirt, but you know it’s all just padding and by the end of the day you can’t wait to take the damn thing off. My friends laughed, but I felt icy, because I realized I had inadvertently told the truth and it was awful.”
Ames listened. She had once told him that she liked how he didn’t seem to feel a need to speak or give advice when she was working through a thought out loud.
Katrina removed her earrings and set them on the nightstand. “Danny and I went to Dartmouth with this couple—Pete and Lia. When they moved to New York from Seattle, they did this thing where they invited other married couples over to watch Cheers and eat pie. The couples were the kind of people who liked rock climbing and called themselves foodies. Everyone but me was very, very white. Watching Cheers was part of their weird hipster irony. We all snorted at the eighties-era sexual politics like we were better than that, like we’d really come so far since then. Pussy-hound Sam Malone and shrill, wannabe-feminist-but-secretly-dick-crazed what’s her name? Oh! I can’t remember what her name was.”
“Diane,” said Ames.
“Yeah, Diane. I just remember this one night, after I lost the baby, all the men, once the show started, sort of unfurled themselves around their wives, and each wife settled into her respective husband’s arms contentedly. These bonded animal pairs. And suddenly they all looked like apes grooming each other. I was revolted. And Danny, you could see that he was leaning back on the sectional, opening his long arms so that I would place myself in them like all the other good wives. But I wouldn’t do it. I sat stiffly next to him on the couch with a foot of space between us. Our hosts put on Cheers, and we watched men and women say horrible things to each other and we laughed like that wasn’t what we also did. Or do.”
“Yeah,” Ames said, nodding.
“All through it,” Katrina went on, “Danny kept sneaking me this hurt expression. I’m sure he didn’t know what was worse: what I thought or what all our friends thought. But I didn’t care. There was nothing that could ever have induced me to care about his hurt feelings just then. At that moment I blamed him for ruining me. For making me a psychopath. My thoughts were focused on him like I was psychically stabbing him with them. Over and over I thought the words, If you didn’t annoy me, I wouldn’t be glad to have lost the baby.
“I don’t think it was fair or even logical, but I understood that I had felt that way for a long time. I had never even dared to think it in words. Just something about the smugness of that situation released it, of having to be his pet lap ape, while pretending we were evolved.”
Katrina cut off her own story with a mirthless laugh. “Also, I think it was around then that I found his secret Asian porn collection.”
“He had a secret Asian porn collection?”
“A bunch on his computer and some DVDs titled Anal Asians or something.”
“I dunno,” Ames said. “If I were an Asian woman, and my husband had a collection of Asian porn, maybe I’d be flattered. At least it means he’s attracted to me.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t get it. It means you begin to entertain creeping suspicions that after all you’ve been through together, years of learning to be adults together, the man who you married might only be with you because he fetishizes Asians—even though I have felt not quite Asian enough my whole life. He couldn’t even fetishize me accurately.”
“What’s that kind of chaser called?” Ames asked.
“That kind of what?”