The Night I Left My Husband
The promise of a dry month began in our living room in Brooklyn and ended six days later in a karaoke bar on 53rd Street. Some work colleagues and I were celebrating a milestone and I invited Charlie to join us as a way to keep him occupied on a Friday night, and give us a chance to rebuild some trust. He said that other people drinking wouldn’t be a problem.
I could tell right away when he started drinking. Not in front of me, of course, but at another part of the bar outside the room we rented to belt out pop hits and ’80s power ballads. When I asked him about it, he got annoyed, which only confirmed my suspicions. I let it go until we left, so as not to make a scene in front of my coworkers. He said some ladies from Long Island at the bar had been offering to buy him drinks, and what was he supposed to do?
“Say no,” I answered. “We talked about this.”
“You’re jealous. Someone showed me attention who wasn’t you and you’re jealous.”
“I’m actually not, “ I said, taking a deep breath. “I don’t feel threatened by some randoms from Strong Island. You said you weren’t going to drink, and then you did, and I’m angry about that.”
“Why are you so emotionally stunted?”
“I’m emotionally stunted? You’re the one with a drinking problem.”
“That’s exactly what your mother would say,” he sneered. “I wouldn’t expect anything less from her daughter.”
It escalated from there. By this time we were on a subway heading back to Brooklyn.
“Sis, he is disrespecting you,” said the woman sitting next to me, with red streaks twisted into her hair. I said nothing and stared at the floor of the train. He kept ranting about my emotional stunting, repeating the phrase over and over with more power each time, and then progressed to how I wasn’t supportive of him. I said nothing.
“Oh, so you’re not talking to me now? Real mature. That’s very adult of you.”
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”
“Like what?”
“Drunk.”
“I’m not drunk!” The words roared through the train car. “I had one drink! You keep using that as an excuse, and — “
“No, I’m not,” I said, shaking with rage. “I don’t believe you’ve only had one drink.”
“So now I’m a liar?”
“You’re a drunk.”
“I’m off at the next stop,” said the woman next to me. “You can come with me if you want.”
I heaved a sigh.
“What is that sigh for?” snapped Charlie.
“Nothing. I’m breathing.”
“Breathing? Breathing. Just like your mother.”
We sat in silence for a precious few minutes. I thought about the evening and how good it had been to scream into a microphone, releasing all the stress of the last two weeks at work, which had not been eased by coming home to Charlie. At this time he was possessed by the Alien, and bore no resemblance to the caring, funny, generous man with whom I fell in love, and had built a life and home over more than a decade. When the Alien was in control, Charlie was all temper and rage, wild accusations that poked at my worst vulnerabilities and humiliated me in front of anyone who could hear us. He said things he would later claim he didn’t mean, but which were awfully hard to take back. I had waited for years for the Alien to let go of Charlie, and was losing hope.
I remembered how we both sang “Kiss Off” by the Violent Femmes at the karaoke bar, me screaming it into his face as I counted down all the ways I hated him for what he’d done to us for the last two years. The fact that this scene from our marriage played out in a room full of people I work with was of no concern. I knew they knew he had a drinking problem. That ship of personal privacy had sailed long ago, at another work event where he arrived drunk.
“I’m off here,” said the woman. “Are you coming?”
I got up and walked off the train with her onto the platform, without turning around to see that Charlie was right behind us.
“He’s right there,” she said. “Just keep moving until we get to the street. I’ve done this before.”
I could hear him talking behind us as we climbed the stairs to the street level, but my brain tuned out the words. By now all I could hear was fear, unsteadiness. When we reached the street, the woman abruptly turned to face him.
“What is your name?”
“My name?”
“Yes. Your name.”
“Charlie,” he answered. His voice shook.
“Charlie. Okay. Here’s what’s happening. She is coming with me. If you follow us, I am calling the cops.”
“But we have a dog at home,” he said, beginning to cry. “I need her to come home and help me take care of the dog.”
“The dog is an animal. It will be fine. But she is done with your shit and she’s coming with me tonight. Do you understand?”
He said nothing. By the streetlight I noticed she was shorter than me, probably younger, with a large freckle next to her button nose. She carried a large plastic shopping bag from Instacart.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Okay. Good. Have a good night, Charlie.”
We turned and walked. I resisted the deep urge to turn around and badly wished I still smoked.
“Can I hold your hand?” I asked. She answered with a grip.
“I’ve been where you are,” she said. “They don’t change.”
“Who was it for you?”
“My boyfriend. His was drinking and drugs.”
“His is just drinking. Bourbon,” I added.
“How long have you been together?”
“We’ve been married for eleven years.”
“Eleven years? Damn. He been like this the whole time?”
“No. Just the last two.” We walked in silence for a bit.
“Are you scared of the projects?” she asked.
“No,” I lied. “I’m fine.”
“Good. We’re going to go pick up my son and then we’ll go to my place.”
We kept walking for a couple of blocks before turning onto a pathway in the middle of the Walt Whitman Houses, heading up a ramp past some kids smoking. I imagined what they thought of a white woman holding hands with a black woman they probably knew, and wondered if she would catch shit from them for it later.
She knocked on a door on the first floor and a tall man appeared with a baby in a stroller, who smiled and clapped his hands at the sight of my new friend.
“Hi baby!” she said. Then, to the man: “Why didn’t you tell me about the Pampers?”
“I did tell you,” he said, looking sideways at me. “Don’t you get my texts?”
“I didn’t get texts from you. Don’t you lie.”
“What’s for tomorrow?”
“I gotta be at work at noon,” she sighed. “You good?”
“Yeah, okay.” He closed the door. She called the elevator and pushed a wheel on the stroller back into place.
“What do you do?” I asked as we waited.
“I work part-time in a hospital cafeteria in the city.”
“Which hospital?” I asked. The baby laughed as the stroller rocked into the elevator. The three of us barely fit.
“Mount Sinai, on the Upper East Side,” she answered. “It’s cool. It’s a new job.”
I didn’t mention that my sister’s best friend was a doctor there, or that my niece had been delivered there. It seemed unlikely there would be a connection.
We got off at the twelfth floor, and her apartment was directly across the hall. She undid one lock, then a second, and as she turned on the lights I saw a large velour couch and a couple of plastic play sets. The dark green walls still had painter’s tape around the edges. She undid the clasps on the stroller and the baby jumped out to grab a red ball from the corner.
“He is so happy!” I said, as he sent the ball my direction. “What’s his name?”
“His name is Prince. And he is happy. Aren’t you, Prince?”
“How old is he?” I rolled the ball back to him.
“Two.”
“Aw. I have a nephew who’s two. Joey.”
“Oh no, we don’t put bags on the floor! Here, let me take your purse.” I thanked her and she hung my brown leather bag on a high hook affixed to a closet door.
“So your name is Prince,” I said to the baby. “Would you like to know my name so we’re not strangers?”
“I know I would,” said the woman.
“My name is Meg,” I said. “And you?”
“Chloe.” A beat, then: “Where are you from?”
“Midwest. My family bounced around a bit. You?”
“Bronx, but most of my family is in South Carolina now.”
“Oh wow. Are they okay?” Hurricanes had been pounding the region.
“Shoot. I should call.” I went back to playing with Prince and now had finger puppets on my hands.
“Are you hungry?” Chloe asked me. “I could make us a burger and fries. Or I could run out and get us some wine. Or do you want some juice?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
“You know you’re welcome to stay here if you want.”
“I don’t know, I don’t want to get in the way.”
“Prince doesn’t go to sleep until 2 A.M. anyway. And you know, you should stay away from your husband for a bit. I’m not saying you should leave-leave, but you at least need some time, like a weekend apart. Do you have kids?”
“No kids.”
“Is that because of the drinking?”
“No.” This was absolutely true. “We’ve just never wanted them. I love being an aunt and I love having animals.”
“Do you have other siblings?”
“I have a sister in Brooklyn who has two kids, and another sister in Oregon who just had her third. Plus my husband’s sister has two daughters.”
“Do they know what’s going on?”
“My sisters do. I don’t know how much Charlie’s sister knows.”
We talked some more, about how Chloe had been adopted in the Bronx and then her parents split up and her mother moved away. I played some more with Prince and helped feed him a Dole fruit cup while Chloe made up the couch for me to sleep. Eventually, she put Prince in the stroller and wheeled him to her bedroom in the back. I could hear the Paw Patrol theme song start, and began to drift off to sleep. Chloe came back out to the living room and I could hear her on the phone with her mother, talking about hurricane damage in South Carolina while she smoked weed.
I expect it was about an hour later that the front door opened and a man came in. My eyes fluttered open a bit and he walked past the living room to the bedroom where Paw Patrol had stopped. Prince started crying and Chloe urged him to be quiet. The man asked who was in the living room and I heard Chloe answer, “She’s in trouble and needed help.”
Chloe and her friend smoked pot for hours, and I could hear them FaceTiming with someone else though I couldn’t really make out what they were saying and didn’t want to. I considered calling my sister, but it was late and I was embarrassed. Logging into my online bank account, I could see Charlie had made a trip to the liquor store after we parted on the subway. It occurred to me that I should be worried about Chloe and/or her friend trying to steal from me while I slept, but for some reason I wasn’t. It also occurred to me that I didn’t have my phone charger. I powered off and slept.
I woke up to two women in the hallway outside the apartment, arguing about a man. Daylight had just begun to break past the sheets that hung as curtains, and when I turned my phone on I saw that it was 5:45 in the morning. The rest of the apartment was quiet.
I didn’t know what the right thing was to do, but I knew I wanted to leave. I thought about leaving money for my imposition, but determined that would be rude. I wanted to buy breakfast for Chloe and Prince, but didn’t have a way to get back into the apartment. Part of me wondered if Chloe would be offended by my buying breakfast, like it was some white woman’s charity. I also wondered if that’s exactly what it would have been: an exorcism of my own guilt for being white, for being married to a heavy drinker, for having been born into a different life yet somehow sharing the circumstances of loving an addict.
I found an envelope on a table by the TV and fished a pen out of my purse. On the back I wrote:
“Dear Chloe,
You and Prince are magic. Thank you for everything.
XOXO
Meg”
I flipped the lock, called the elevator and walked out in the morning light towards the subway.
