7 You Struck First

7

you struck first

Alexander

When I started my own practice fifteen years ago, I was committed to making it successful. I had the full support of my wife, her encouragement to stay late and put the time in, which I did. But the funny thing is, back then, when my business needed my attention in order to grow, all I wanted to do was get back home to Dani. Our nightly dinners, our alone time, playing house, falling deeper and deeper in love. Now I do everything I can to avoid our house, stay late at work, create new projects that have nothing to do with my practice.

When you build a life with someone, there are reminders everywhere. Even at work: vacation photos, picture mugs, homemade elementary school paperweights, the couch in the corner where Dani and I would sit, eat lunch…make out like teenagers. She hadn’t come to my work during a lunch break in years. She’d pop into the office now and then to drop something off, but our relationship had long since been reduced to an arrangement .

The office was empty and dark. The other physical therapist, supervisor, and front office staff had all gone home for the day. I sat at my desk trying to dream up some reason to avoid going home even though I was exhausted. It had already been a long and grueling day after the mediation debacle, holding up the line at the boys’ school, and listening to Dani sob in her closet.

Glancing at the clock, I made a deal with myself to suck it up and head home in ten minutes. That would put me at the house around 8 p.m. Hopefully, everyone would be settling in and I wouldn’t have to face Dani or the boys.

From my office window, I looked out at the glowing red lights spreading out on the 5 freeway. The traffic was letting up, finally. My office was a mere three miles from our home in Los Feliz, but if traffic was bad enough, it could take me forty-five minutes to get across the 5 freeway from Glendale. Dani was well aware of the Los Angeles traffic norms, which meant she knew that unless there was an accident, getting home at eight meant I had been in the office for at least two hours after the clinic had closed.

I don’t think she ever suspected an affair, and she would be right not to, but there was no doubt that Dani knew I avoided her.

When my email dinged, I smiled, excited at the prospect of possibly having work to do, a client to respond to, or a colleague checking in that would force me to stay in the office longer. But that wasn’t the case. As soon as I saw Dani’s name on the email, my stomach dropped. What now?

Alex,

The vitriol, anger, and constant arguing is spilling over into every aspect of our lives. We always talked about avoiding divorce to protect the children, now it’s about completing the divorce to protect the children. I never thought this would be us, Alex! But it is, despite the dreams we both had about family and growing old together. They were idealistic dreams, but we were both in it, weren’t we? Maybe that relationship hubris came back to bite us in the ass. We thought we were so much better than everyone else and now we’re a cliché.

It was supposed to be you and me, my friend, growing old and gray, and older, and older until the end.

Instead you behave as though you wish I were dead. Maybe so you can start a new life. Do you? Wish I were dead?

I know you’re sitting in your office, probably staring out the window, wishing you didn’t have to come home.

Soon, Alex, soon!

I’m writing to you to tell you that I’m putting a deadline on this nonsense. No more marriage counseling, there’s no point. We can still use Kevin to work out the financial logistics and co-parenting, but there is no “us” to talk about. We’re getting a divorce.

I don’t want to move the boys back and forth between two broken homes. I think we should get a bird-nesting apartment.

That is my request. In two weeks, by the end of the month, we have an apartment we share to use on our days without the boys. Hopefully we can both be grown-ups about sharing a space. I sent Kevin a schedule and looked at your request to be with the boys Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays. I wanted to argue about how convenient that would be for you to have your freedom on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, but I don’t care anymore. Freedom isn’t being away from the kids. I hope that’s not how you’re looking at it.

I won’t be available to you as a babysitter or bus driver on your days at the house with the boys, so you’ll have to figure that out. I don’t want to know about it, or be a part of it, unless it’s an emergency.

That’s it. That’s all I have. We have two weeks to get a place. It’s time.

-Dani

I sat still, quiet, my mind swirling, contemplating how to respond to her. I typed…

Dani,

You know what? Go fuck yourself.

I was hovering the little arrow over the Send button when I heard a knock on the door.

“Knock, knock,” Mark said as he pushed the door open to my office. I startled and then settled back into my chair. I moved my hand away from the computer mouse, leaving Dani’s message unanswered.

“Hey man, come in,” I said.

“The front door was unlocked. I just pushed it open.”

Mark and Alicia were our best friends. Alicia was Dani’s childhood friend. They had always been inseparable, even moving to LA from Seattle together during college. I met Dani and Alicia before Mark was in the picture. I knew it would take a rare breed to be married to bullheaded, tough as nails Alicia, and Mark is just that…rare. He and I fell into an easy friendship from the start. He’s a calm and cool person, which makes him a brilliant lawyer as well as a perfect match for Alicia’s intensity. She comes from a long family line of judges and lawyers who make an Olympic sport out of suing people. What is undeniable about Alicia, though, is that she is loyal and genuine to the core. She represents good people who are suing bad people, and she always wins. Mark and Alicia are partners in life and at the firm, but they don’t have any children, so our boys are as close as they’ll come to parenting.

Mark and Alicia are major factors in why Dani and I have struggled to commit to divorce, but they know everything that’s going on. It’s ironic that now the commitment is in the divorce and not the marriage.

“Yeah, I was just about to leave, but come in, sit down,” I told him.

He smiled, glanced down at my empty desk and back up again. “I was picking up take-out and had to park three blocks away. Walking by, I saw your light on.” He held up a bag of Chinese food. “Hungry?”

“Starving.” I lied.

Mark pulled a chair out and sat down, leaving the takeout in a bag on the floor. “Well?” he said.

“Well what?” I chuckled. He wasn’t just in the neighborhood. “Was Alicia talking about us or something?”

“Honestly, Alex, Alicia doesn’t stop talking about you guys.” He smirked. I always thought of Mark as a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. He didn’t have sneaky ulterior motives when he decided to stop in my office late on a Wednesday, but he also wasn’t walking by. He was checking in on me.

“What did she say?”

“Just the usual. If Dani and Alex can’t make it work, how can anyone else?”

I laughed, flippantly. “That ship has sailed. Alicia’s probably just scared. She’s been watching the death of a marriage for years now.”

“She’s also worried about what it means for us, Alex. ”

“You guys are solid.”

“No,” he said. “Not our marriage. Our couples marriage to you guys.” He laughed.

“Everything will be fine with us,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced myself.

“The last thing Alicia wants is for us to have to choose sides.”

“No one is asking you to, Mark,” I said with a hint of irritation in my tone.

“It’s been years with threats flying between you and Dani. You’ve both asked us for names of lawyers, mediators, financial advisors. Alicia and I made a pact that we wouldn’t get in the middle of things, but it’s hard to see you like this, and it’s hard to see it affecting Alicia too.”

“Well, I’m sorry it’s affecting Alicia, but jeez, it’s like the last thing we have on our minds, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’m trying to be honest with you. It’s for everyone’s sake, not just Alicia’s. The weeble-wobbling, the emotional motion sickness, the back and forth, the ups and downs—”

“I get the point. No more weeble-wobbling,” I said and then laughed a little to try to lighten the mood.

“It’s for your kids too, man. You guys got lucky with a couple of rad kids, but aren’t you worried this will eventually take a toll?”

“Of course. We worry about that every day.” I felt like he was crossing a line even though I couldn’t deny what he was saying was true. “It’s hard to know what’s better for everyone. The amount of thought we’ve put into divorce is exponentially greater than the amount of thought we put into getting married in the first place.”

“That’s how it always is, because divorce is final and everyone knows marriage is not,” he said.

The statement struck me. It was true. Something no one likes to admit. We claim it’s forever as we stand up and take our vows, but in our subconscious we’re saying forever…unless x, y, or z happens. Some might say divorce doesn’t have to be final either, but there is no divorced unless x, y, z happens. We’re getting a divorce, not making a promise to each other. It’s final. It’s the end of a promise, a union. It’s a death.

I was trying to shuffle the seriousness of the conversation to the bottom of the deck, but Mark wasn’t letting me. “We’re trying to do the right thing for the kids,” I said finally.

“But in the process, you’re all putting everyone in limbo, including yourselves. Shit or get off the pot, you know?”

I laughed lightly. “God, I hate that saying. Can’t we just talk about golf or something?” I really wanted to change the subject but knew I wouldn’t get off that easy.

“Alicia wants her friend back. We miss you guys, the vacations…everything. What’s going on right now? Are you working on things? Now that Danielle’s mom is gone, is it better? Or are you ready to file the papers and sign that shit and be done with it?”

“We’re getting a divorce, Mark. There’s not going to be couples vacations and hanging out.”

“There hasn’t been in a long time. At least everyone will understand the boundaries though. You and I will always be friends. Alicia is not going to make you a pariah, okay? She knows Dani too well. She knows it was a culmination of things. No one blames either one of you—or your mother-in-law, for that matter.”

It felt easy for me to blame Danielle’s mom for the demise of our marriage. Dani and I had barely addressed the fact that, four years ago, the day we moved my mother-in-law into our house to take care of her, basically marked what I viewed as the beginning of the end for us. But Irene has been gone for a year now and things haven’t gotten better .

“It wasn’t just Irene, though I don’t think you could possibly understand what it was like to live with her. Her toxicity,” I scoffed.

“She had Alzheimer’s, man,” he said.

But he wasn’t there to see her nastiness, her disdain for me. I don’t think it was all the disease talking.

I also took Irene’s criticism while Dani looked the other way and it was just too much. After having Irene in our house for six months, I was a shell emotionally. I couldn’t take it. Dani was swept up in work…swept up in Lars. She would start fights with me every night over how heartless she thought I was. She actually called me heartless while I was at home caring for her mother and reading on celebrity websites about how Dani was screwing her boss.

They’re not even celebrities.

Dani can deny it, but she was always going into the office when she didn’t have to, and she defended Lars. I know something was going on. Constant late-night calls. The giddiness in her voice when she would talk to him. I couldn’t trust her, and so I stopped needing to trust her. That’s when, mentally, I left the marriage.

Mark was staring at me waiting for me to respond. He had the same look of disappointment Dani would get when she thought I was being insensitive. “I know she was sick,” I said finally. “It was sad and brutal to watch, but it’s the reason all our problems came to the surface. If we were meant to be, wouldn’t we have survived that?”

Mark shrugged, then picked up the food and started taking it out of the bag. “I think you guys should have worked through your mother-in-law issues with a good therapist. Taking care of an ailing parent is hard on any relationship. It’s been, what, a year since Irene passed?” I nodded. “And you guys are still constantly spiking serves at each other? You do know that kind of petty back-and-forth means you still love each other? You’re still fighting like kids on a playground.”

I paused, contemplating his statement. “Of course I love Dani. You can love someone and not want to be married to them anymore. We’re done. It’s over.” I glanced down at the email I had almost sent. “I promise we won’t drag you guys into it. I’m getting an apartment this week. Dani and I are gonna try the bird-nesting thing and I’m going to sign the papers.”

He looked up, surprised. “You think you guys can handle that…sharing an apartment?”

“Well, we live in the same house. And we won’t ever be at the apartment at the same time.”

“You’ve been in the same house but separate bedrooms, right? For how long?”

I glanced out the window, remembering the day I came home to Dani filling the guest room closet with my clothes. That was three years ago.

“Yeah, it’ll be different though. It’s the next step. The pettiness is prolonging the inevitable. I’m signing the docs tomorrow. The paperwork is done. We’ll get the apartment and stick a fork in it, okay? It’s what she wants too.”

“I’m not trying to push you in that direction—”

“No, but you’re right. You can tell Alicia everything. I’m going to email Dani in a minute.”

Mark stood up and pushed a carton of food toward me. “You know this is gonna look like I prodded you.”

“No, it really won’t. It’s been a long time coming.”

“Okay, man.” Mark turned around in the doorway. “I’m here for you.”

“Thanks. Hey Mark, can we grab a drink this weekend?”

“Yeah. Don’t the boys have baseball?” he said. He knew we always went to dinner with other baseball families on Saturday nights. I guess that was going to change too.

“I’ll be free after five.”

“Okay. Call me.”

As soon as I heard the door to the clinic close, I looked at the email to Dani and deleted what I had written earlier. I kept the new message short and to the point.

Dani,

All of that is fine and I agree. I’ll look for an apartment and send you the options so we can make a decision.

-Alex

I’m not a crier. I’m sure Dani could count on one hand the number of times I have almost cried, but never did. Of course, when her brother died, I didn’t even know him, but seeing her pain and her parents’ pain made me emotional. Still, I never shed an actual tear over it. There was the death of our beloved first dog, Sparty, who took his last breath in my arms as Dani wailed next to me in the vet’s office fifteen years ago. I felt sad but didn’t cry; he died of old age, and honestly it was a relief. There were Dani’s two miscarriages, when I almost cried, but not from the loss as much as from seeing Dani’s pain, physical and emotional. And then the birth of our two boys, where again, watching Dani labor, unmedicated, through excruciating pain, the relief and joy I could see on her face when they plopped our screaming babies on her chest—that’s what actually moved me the most, but not to tears. Never to tears.

Sometimes, I wondered what was wrong with me. Why I didn’t often get emotional. Dani sure as hell made a point of bringing to my attention that I was likely made of stone. I didn’t take it seriously, though, because it was coming from her, a person who cried when someone sang the freakin’ “Star-Spangled Banner.” I always found that one particularly confounding because Dani wasn’t patriotic at all. She said she was moved by togetherness. A group of people sharing a moment. An evocative song. Someone or an animal in pain. A dog with a limp could literally make Dani spiral into a deep sorrow. To say I didn’t get it would be an understatement. I didn’t actually believe it was real. I thought she was an Academy Award–winning actress in life.

In the twenty-two years we had been together, I had never cried. Not in front of Dani and not alone. But that night, a minute after I sent Dani the email, and thirty seconds after I sent the lawyer an email to complete the divorce paperwork, I closed my computer down, looked out the window, across the freeway to where we lived for so many years, and the tears finally came. I sobbed. And I understood it…finally. It was the finality of it. The death in it. The mourning of something I actually loved.