Really Good, Actually(8)
“Perfect!” she said. “You can walk me to work.”
She grabbed her bag and we headed to the hallway, where I tried to make myself presentable with a stray mascara I’d left on the shelf near my keys. I poked at the bags under my eyes and sighed loudly.
“Shame this had to happen right as I lost my last shred of youthful beauty,” I said.
“Don’t talk that way,” said Amirah, pulling on a pair of decorated plastic clogs. “Ugh, I could kill Jon. I’m so mad at him.”
“It’s not his fault,” I said, shoving my keys into a purse and opening the door. “Really. It’s my fault, if anything.”
Amirah made a face. “How is it your fault?”
I didn’t really know, that was just how it felt.
The next day I was supposed to go to work but could not bring myself to do it. For one thing, Toronto’s humidity levels had switched from June’s traditional “Coca-Cola misting zone” to a “world’s armpit” scenario we usually didn’t struggle through until August, and for another, I looked like shit and was sad all the time.
Although I didn’t teach in the summer, I normally worked a few days a month at my cramped desk in the English department as a research assistant for Merris, the elderly and understanding early modernist who had supervised my master’s thesis and occupied a place in my imagination somewhere between feared-yet-beloved aunt and powerful elder witch. I had not come in for the last two Wednesdays, texting her vague and unconvincing excuses each time. This Wednesday, she called.
“Merris, hi—sorry, I—”
“What is it today, grandmother’s emergency dentist appointment?”
I liked working for Merris. She was the most knowledgeable person I had ever met, and she never made other people feel stupid, though sometimes, as now, she could not resist toying with them a little bit. I could see her sitting at her desk, smiling wryly, long fingers wrapping the cord of her office phone around her knobbly left thumb. She was probably wearing a pair of reading glasses with another perched on top of her head. Sometimes there was a third pair on a stylish chain around her neck.
“I think I’m getting a divorce,” I told her. “I mean, I am getting one, but I don’t know when or how, exactly.”
“Ah.”
I hadn’t loved telling anyone about this development, but breaking the news to Merris felt spectacularly silly. I was a twentysomething going through a breakup, so what? Merris had been married twice, divorced once, and was now widowed and living what she called her “best life,” sharing a large duplex in the east end with two other professors in a kind of highbrow Golden Girls situation.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Work from home for now and come in again when you’re ready.”
I told her that might be never. Merris laughed and tried to pass it off as a hiccup. “Take as long as you need,” she said, “as long as you only need until September.”
Merris had not cared for Jon, based largely on her feeling that he’d lectured her about French Canadian cinema for “several hours” at a department function a few years ago. When I asked Jon about this, he told me they’d spoken for under fifteen minutes, during which he’d said almost nothing about film, except to mention he’d recently been to a showing of Xavier Dolan’s Mommy. I suspect they were both being low-level insufferable and disliked seeing their own pretension mirrored in the other. At our wedding, he had tried to ingratiate himself to her by quoting Sonnet 18, and she’d said, “Shakespeare, for weddings? You might be onto something.” Like everyone I’ve ever loved, both of them were capable of being a Bit Much.
After Merris and I hung up, I returned to my usual activities: working, eating, and thinking up reasons to avoid taking a shower. Most days, after a few hours of carefully scrutinizing plays from the 1500s that were unpopular even then, I’d reward and/or punish myself by looking at Jon’s various social media profiles. He had recently scaled back our already minimal communication, something I was trying to take with a casual grace while freaking out about it internally. In an effort to seem breezy, I’d also suggested we block each other on social media, to “facilitate our transition out of each other’s lives.” He had done so unnervingly quickly, though neither of us had blocked the joint Instagram account we’d created for our cat.
If I logged out of my own account and in to @perfectjanetgoodgirl, there was Jon: not posting much on main, but certainly playing the piano and singing (!) in his Stories, broadcast from some darkened basement. I’d poke around in his tagged photos and watch his friends’ Stories, looking for something painful—audio of him laughing at a party, a video of a concert where he was standing close to a woman I didn’t know—evidence of joy or satisfaction in his new life as Not My Husband. It was objectively unhinged behavior, this cyberstalking via pet account, but I was comforted that Janet occasionally watched my Stories too, meaning Jon was doing the same thing to me.
We had not yet decided who would get the cat, easily our most precious shared possession. She was technically his, but we (Janet and I) had lived together for as long as we (Jon and I) had, and I loved her fiercely, even if her main hobbies were screaming and vomiting on my clothing and furniture. She was tough and enormous, a big streetwise tabby with scraggly gray-brown fur and intelligent green eyes. When I read student papers in bed she would sneak into the room, attracted by the sound of rustling paper. By the time I realized she was headed for me, it was too late: she’d already be midflight, soaring up from the floor to land directly on top of the essay in my hands. I had apologetically returned more than one crumpled, punctured term paper to a confused student, but I would have let that cat destroy everything I owned—which she did occasionally seem on a mission to do. The house was so quiet without her. It was weird not to have to check on top of the fridge when I entered the kitchen (she had a small pouncing-on-people’s-heads problem); every unopened packet of foul-smelling treats in the cupboard broke my heart. Jon and I had agreed to take some time to think about what would be best for her, with an eye to a potential shared custody situation. Like many things about my old life, I missed her often.