The Bad Guy, Part Two
On my phone somewhere, still undeleted, is his voice…
At odd moments, as I wait a few extra seconds for the elevator, or as I pause to cross at an intersection, I’m struck again by the “how” of it. How do you do that? How do you even begin? I try to see myself in his place, a gun beside me on the bed.
I’m the last person who should have been surprised when he killed himself, but somehow I was. And each time I imagine it, I feel the same horror. Each time, before the final moment, I pull back. I just can’t get to the place where that happens. I can’t understand the act, even broken down to its simplest form. I look at my hand now and I try to imagine my fingers around the grip of a gun. Lifting it. But, each time, my hand wants to toss it away.
Is it possible he practiced? He must have. More than once, holding the barrel to his head. Until it became an unsurprising thing to do. Until his finger knew where to rest on the cold trigger.
All the years we were married, I hated to be near his guns. I didn’t like that he kept one under the bed. We fought about it more than once. He thought I was stupid about guns. It’s not like I thought it would do anything on its own, not simply lying there under the bed. But a gun can always be picked up, and pointed, and fired. I could always feel it, down on the floor. Its potential for death.
It was there, his gun, even in the first scenes of our relationship. In early 2010, at his cabin in Utah, he told me the story of how he had meticulously planned his suicide a few years earlier. He’d done it in that same bedroom, where we were lying on the bed. He had carried out the steps of a clean suicide—the pills, the plastic bag over his head. But he’d fouled it in the end. His body, in desperation, wanted air. As he lost consciousness, he had pulled off the bag. He called someone, a friend, who called the cops. Pills are a doubtful way to do it, he told me. The trouble is your body. It doesn’t want to die. If you give it any chance, it will decide to save itself.
He told me the stories of all his friends and lovers who’d killed themselves. The first, the original was a girlfriend in the mid-80s. She shot herself in the head. It ruined him for years. It was still ruining him, decades later.
Had he ever thought about shooting himself? Knowing there was a gun with us at that moment, under the bed, it seemed right to ask.
No. The gun he kept around was for safety. It was for shooting pack rats as they scurried across the cabin floor at night. It was for nothing. He just liked having it around.
He would never shoot himself. He would never, ever, do that. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t. Not a gun. He knew what that did to the people you left behind.
He ended our first fight like this:
“You’d never stay with me if I were nice to you all the time.”
He smiled then, and I knew the fight had ended.
The yelling was over. I had already apologized and agreed with him, and he’d grown calm. He sat beside me until I stopped crying.
Now he made a pantomime face of niceness at me. “Oh NO,” he said in a silly voice. “I just want to do what YOU want to do.” He laughed. “You would hate that, wouldn’t you?”
I laughed with him, a little shakily.
“I’m an asshole,” he said. “But you don’t want to be with some boring, nice guy. You’d be gone in a week.”
He left to get a drink from the fridge, and I stayed behind on the bed, considering the idea. It seemed plausible. I had been in relationships before, and I had left them. I wouldn’t say those guys were all too nice, but none of them had sent my head spinning the way he did. There was something different about being with him, the way he continually cut out the ground from under me, so that I never knew where I was standing.
I was 21, and at that age, I liked to hear big, bold statements about myself. I still believed that I was special. Not like everyone else. Not one of those girls who chased stability and strollers and two-car garages. My life was going to be bigger than theirs. My love life would be more complicated, richer, less obvious. I could tell, even a month into this relationship, that I was walking into an enormous mess, but, at 21, that mess made a kind of sense to me. Normal girls liked nice, safe guys. I didn’t. Maybe I liked assholes? It seemed possible.
Another fight, a week later—I don’t know what word to use except “fight,” even though that doesn’t capture the strange dynamics of our fights, wherein he was furious and I was perpetually confused, a step behind, always trying to fix whatever had happened. This time, I had left a dirty footprint in the shower. He came out of the bathroom yelling. It seemed like the whole universe, the sound of his voice reverberating against the walls around me, was loud and angry and unhearing.
And then, without warning, it was silent.
I followed him as he walked into the kitchen. He took a pill bottle out of a cabinet. I stood behind him as he poured a shot of vodka and took one Ambien. He poured another shot and took another. He drank four more quick shots and walked past me to the bedroom. He left the vodka bottle on the counter.
All day, I sat in a chair in his living room. For the first hour, I thought, this is when I’m supposed to leave. If this were a movie, my character would pack her bag and leave while he was sleeping it off. But how? I tried to picture the steps of leaving and couldn’t. My bag was in the bedroom. I didn’t have a car to get to the airport. I would have to wait for him to wake up and then ask him for a ride to Salt Lake City, four hours away. I would have to be firm with him somehow—had I ever been firm with anyone in my life? I would need to decide, before he woke up, that the relationship was over. But I didn’t feel firm. After a few hours of waiting, it seemed to be too late for me to react to what had happened. What would I be reacting to? I watched Netflix on my laptop and fed the cats and cleaned the bathroom. Some part of me already agreed with him: I had signed up for this.
The next morning, he woke up. He saw the clean tub and he hugged me. And the relief I felt when I realized he still wanted me there, the released breath after a full day and night of waiting, was so intense, it was like being high. It was something similar to being in love. I said it to myself, this is what love feels like.
The next time he said, “I love you,” to me, I said it back.
And then, in the very next breath, I felt the pang of having lied.
I think it’s normal, at the beginning of a divorce, to wonder if you ever loved the other person. To re-cast the preceding years. When you have the attorney, and you’ve filed the papers, you naturally look back on your life with someone else’s eyes. In this new moment, once you’ve detached from all the habits of thinking, the weaknesses and blind spots and continuous little surrenders that kept your unhappy marriage going for so long, you do not feel love. So looking back with a divorcee’s eyes, all the loving behavior of those years seems like playacting. Whether it was or not. I think those thoughts are a normal part of the divorce process.
But my thoughts weren’t normal. I had those distant, assessing, doubtful thoughts, all the way back to the beginning. Each time I reached for him, I did it through a kind of calculation. The desire for closeness, for the relief from pain, but not for love. I knew, even in the earliest months, that I was happier whenever he was out of town. I carried a divorced mind with me through the engagement, the honeymoon, a decade. Somehow, I guess because I didn’t know better, I thought that was just how it was.
He could write you a beautiful story of our marriage, and it would sound much more compelling than mine. It always did. I was so moved by it, when he would tell me how our love was extraordinary and rare. He believed that we loved each other beyond what most couples can experience. We were a couple of elites, bound together by our innate difference from everyone else. Bound together by our distance from the rest of the world. And, because I didn’t know better, and because I knew his version sounded better, I let his story be the only story. I felt ashamed, knowing the problem wasn’t him. He kept saying how happy he was.
I consoled myself with theories. Of course I was in love, I told myself. This is what love is. It’s about your actions. All the other bullshit is for the movies. The realest, the most pure form of love is the act of taking care of someone. And didn’t I do that? His thoughts were my thoughts. His laundry was my laundry. His meals, his bills, his appointments… everything, every day, for over a decade. Every moment of my life was about him. Wasn’t that love? I let myself believe it.
On darker days, I told myself that the whole big heartbreaking idea of “love” was a kind of self-medication. It was candy floss, dissolving under the slightest scrutiny. A placebo to dull the emptiness at the heart of everything. No one even cared about romantic love until the Middle Ages. I had read that somewhere. Love was a fairy tale people told themselves in order to sleep at night. And, in that case, why beat myself up? So I wasn’t very good at believing in fairy tales. So what?
But then sometimes, especially if I was alone, late at night in a quiet house, I let myself wonder if love might be real. I wondered if it might be exactly as great as it was supposed to be. Just like in the movies. Just like in all the novels I’d always read.
If that was the case, then the problem wasn’t love. It was me. There was something wrong with me. I just couldn’t feel it. I spent a decade trying to hide my failure from him. Trying to behave as though I weren’t fundamentally broken, incapable of the kind of love he believed I was feeling.
When I walked into my old house in March, just a few days after he died, I was confronted with my own face. I looked back at myself from photos on the shelves. On the side tables. He had framed maybe a dozen different photographs of me, a few of the two of us together, and put them around the room. They were the first things I saw when I walked in.
I stared at them for a long moment and, with a shudder, realized they had been the first things he saw, too, every time he walked in his front door. For how long? I had been gone for two years. Why would he do this to himself for so long? Was it a reminder? A way to prove something? All I could think was that he was trying to prove that the ten years we were married had been real. That I had really been there.
He said in his emails that I was behaving like none of it had ever happened. Our marriage. All those years together. I tried to gently contradict him. The past was real. The past would always be there. I wasn’t going to deny any of it had happened. All I needed was for it to be over.
Next to the couch was another photo. I was standing alone in a big field east of town. Why would he want that next to him every single time he sat down?
The living room looked like the aftermath of a Catholic wake. My wake, somehow. And the woman in those photos didn’t even look like me—that dyed blonde hair he’d chosen, the tight tucked-away expression on my face. I had hoped I would never see that woman again. The first thing I did was throw them all away. I went through the living room with a big black garbage bag, throwing out all the framed photos, and the bag went out to the bin at the curb. If I ever needed to see them again, I still had the original files saved somewhere.
It was strange how my body remembered the house in Kansas, even after two years. I knew where to pull on the outer door so that the latch clicked. I knew exactly where the light switches were, and how to walk across the floorboards to avoid rattling the furniture. My fingers knew just where to touch the wall of the stairwell, walking down the steps from our old bedroom.
Strange how I knew the place, but not him. I had looked at him for twelve years, but now, as I threw another photo of us into the garbage bag, I realized that his face didn’t seem familiar to me. It wasn’t that he was a total stranger. I could call up a scene with this man in it, but he was two-dimensional, like the photo in my hands. His face behind sunglasses. I could see how he would walk up to me from a distance. I could even hear him speaking. But I could no longer remember how it felt to be hugged by him, or what he smelled like.
No, that isn’t true. Now, as I write that, I do remember the smell of his lotion. At night, after he’d taken a shower and then come up to bed. The smell of almonds and cherries on his bathrobe. As soon as I left him, I switched to a different kind of lotion, just to avoid calling up that particular smell. But it’s still there, somehow. I remember it.
On the flight out of Wichita, when I was first leaving him, I began to make a list of things to remember. Knowing how weak I had been in the past, I didn’t want to be weak again. I didn’t want to go back. So I began a list of all the things I shouldn’t forget. Every hurtful thing I could remember, from the past few days and from the past ten years. Every nasty fight. Every good reason I had to leave him. I wrote down pages and pages of my worst memories with him. Some were physical—his fingers pinching at my skin to see if I’d gained any weight. The slack expression that came over his face as the pills kicked in. Some were just sensations—the disappointment of being misunderstood, the continual, ragged fatigue. Mostly, I wrote down things he’d said. Everything I could think of. I didn’t write down any good memories. Somehow I didn’t think I needed to. Maybe I thought I’d have time to write them later.
I know there must have been good memories. But where are they? Why can’t I remember? I do remember feeling happiness. I remember sunlight, leaning back in the passenger seat to close my eyes with the sun on my face.
I remember looking out from the cheap little parcel of land we bought in New Mexico, shading my eyes and looking south to the Capitan Mountains and then out over the deep bowl of the White Sands Missile Range. I remember a spark of hope. I imagined building a little writing retreat on that land. I imagined renting a hole-in-the-wall storefront in Carrizozo and opening a used bookstore. I imagined becoming an eccentric, wind-beaten old woman out there in the middle of no place, an empty brown spot on the map. And the thought excited me. It was a fantasy of growing older that didn’t include him.
When I try to place him with me in a happy memory, the image turns dark. That’s when I remember the fight immediately before or after. Or I remember something else I wish I could forget. But somewhere, I know I must have good memories of him. Somewhere.
It’s only right that I should tell you: I don’t think you should believe me. I’m doing my best to tell you the truth, but I keep stuttering over the question of what that is. I don’t consider myself a reliable voice on the past. I can only write down on paper what I remember: one cloudy perspective, filtered through grief and time. And I barely have the words for that.
There are more than two sides to a marriage. There may be a thousand, depending on the day, depending on the story you’re telling. I can tell you what I know right now: things I remember him saying and doing, things I remember myself saying and doing. I can point to the obvious: for years, for his whole life, he was angry and in pain. He liked pills. He liked alcohol.
Of course, if he were alive, he would stop me there. He’d say that, no, actually, he didn’t like alcohol. He never liked how it tasted. What he liked about alcohol was how it worked. He liked how it made the medicine go down. A few shots of vodka, in the beginning, to speed along the Ambien. A few shots of whiskey, maybe a glass or two of whiskey by the end, and a handful of pills, because it was the only thing that could truly knock him out.
After I left him, he pushed away many of his remaining friends. He isolated himself in a dark, silent house. And then, a couple months before he died, his supply of pills dried up. I know this from his friends and from his emails. He couldn’t get a new prescription. Many of his last conversations before he died were requests for someone to find him pills. He went back to friends he’d cut off months or years earlier, hoping they might be able to get him some. Ideally Xanax and Ambien, his preferred combination, but he’d take what he could get. As far as I know, he didn’t get any. And, as bad as life had been before, I imagine it was a lot worse without the pills. Then, finally, last March, he held a gun to his head and he killed himself.
That’s one story. It’s one I know how to tell. It’s unsatisfying, held together with loose threads. I can’t tell you how he felt, or what he withheld, or what he hoped for. I can’t tell you his story. Or even our story, together. The story of my marriage to him changes, day by day, even for me.
I can tell you he was waiting for me. I know it because he wrote to me. He wrote to me continually over the two years between our divorce and his death. He wrote to me long after I stopped responding. And each time he wrote, mixed through the incoherent, contradictory sentences, between the parts where he told me how my writing was pathetic without him, between the insults thrown toward my mother and friends, and even as he told me how I was sick and shallow, how I was heartless and broken, and how in the end I would have nothing, he always fell back into the same heartbreaking refrain. He would forgive me. He still loved me. He would take me back. If only I would come back. He was waiting.
In return, I left him in silence. Even knowing what his silence was like, I left him in it.
On my phone somewhere, still undeleted, is his voice. A voicemail he left me during those excruciating last few days with him in Kansas. I haven’t listened to it since then.
I didn’t want to take his voice with me when I left him. I had heard him say enough things. I didn’t need to hear any more. And it seemed like whenever he spoke, whole parts of my mind went dark. I lost track of my own thoughts. I couldn’t remember what I was saying before he started talking. So I decided not to hear his voice again.
For a few months after I left, I kept in touch with him via email and text messages. We had to get through the paperwork for the divorce and our last joint taxes. I gave him advice on taking care of the cats. I told him what his passwords were. But then, once all that was done, I began to listen to my therapist’s advice:
“Each time he writes to you, Tonya, you end up taking care of him again.”
I can still hear her sighing over the Zoom screen. “Every bit of progress disappears when you’re caught up in these back and forth emails with him. You still think he decides things for you. He doesn’t decide anything. Whose life are you living now? When will you leave him in the past?”
“What would happen, Tonya, if you stopped responding to him? What terrible thing are you afraid will happen?”
This.
I remembered my therapist’s question, two years later, standing in his dark, silent house. This is what I thought would happen. Cleaning up after him again. Standing in rooms I never wanted to stand in again, picking up his dirty clothes off the floor and throwing them into a big garbage bag. This is exactly what I thought would happen.
Obviously it isn’t her fault he died. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s fault. It’s just that I understood the likelihood of everything, all of this, when I made the choice.
Maybe you can’t kill someone with silence. Maybe you can.
If I had kept writing back to him, kept indulging in his circular arguments and his anger and his endless questions, then he likely would have stayed alive. He would have kept living for the pure fight of it. He would have stayed bitter and vengeful, and full of a zealous hope that everything would be made right again.
But—some voice inevitably rises to my defense—hadn’t I already given him a decade in which to speak? I had listened to him, every word. I had swallowed a lifetime of his stories, and it was enough. A decade of listening was enough.
I don’t really question if it was the right decision to stop answering him. It was the only way to clear any space in my mind. The only way to think my own thoughts again. I wanted a life where I could refuse to do what I didn’t want to do, and the first step was refusing him. Only then could I finally accept the things I hadn’t believed I could have. Like love. I have learned that I am capable of a delirious, mind-altering kind of love. And kindness. More than anything, I am drawn to kindness.
Some mornings now, I put on my running shoes and run from my apartment to the Hudson River, then I run south toward Battery Park. I can see the Statue of Liberty across the water as I go. I can see the faces of a hundred other runners passing by, and I can see dogs on their walks and babies in their strollers. And sometimes, when I’m running, I feel so alive, it’s like a drug. I feel exhilarated. And then sometimes, lately, after everything that’s happened, the impact of my feet against the pavement shakes me. I begin to think of him and then I have to stop along the water, just to breathe.
I can’t understand him. I can’t ever understand. Even if everything I had now were taken away from me, even if I had to begin again with nothing, I would still choose to live. I would build something new. I would find a way to be happy again. Somehow I have an instinct in me for happiness. Maybe I was born with it, or maybe it was cultivated in me, but I bend toward happiness like a plant toward the sun.
I know I was given gifts that he wasn’t given. I was given love, a fierce and honest love, all my life. I never once wondered whether I was loved. He never got to feel that, not even as a child. The wrongness of that can’t ever be undone.
He never had the kind of love I have now. The kind where there are no tests. Where there are no trick questions. It’s a gift I’m still marveling over. I still count the days of my new life like I would count the toes on a baby, delighted that each morning, when I wake up, the miracle still exists. He lived a whole life and he died without understanding this kind of love. Though I do believe he always wanted it. He didn’t see how he made it impossible. I think he died waiting for a real, unconditional love.
Or, no. He must have stopped. On that last day, he must have finally stopped waiting.
And that’s the thought that halts my steps, so I have to walk to the railing and just look at the water for a while. It falls on me with such harshness, I lose all my oxygen.
I want to tell you what’s true. I spent enough years telling lies that I hate the taste of them now. I knew what I was choosing when I chose to leave him. I knew I was his best chance at survival. I knew, as soon as I let loose my grip on him, he would fall down to his blackest place. I knew the pills would get worse. The drinking. I understood that he would likely die, one way or another. A slow suicide or a fast suicide. I understood that the cost of my life might be his. And, knowing it, I chose.
Setting aside all questions of fault and what one person can possibly ask of another. Setting aside the decade of swallowing and absorbing pain. Setting aside all the inarguably good reasons to leave. My own life, for one. Setting it all aside, though, I knew.
I always wanted it to be different, but I knew.
Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.
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I was on the board of a Abie House, a home for abused women. what you describe is text book, Tonya. I know you know this. I think it's time to delete his voice from your phone.
powerful, honest writing. bravo
Oh how easily we are manipulated when we are young and hopeful. You tell so brilliantly the pain so many of us have felt, trying to make a love gone wrong work. What's really maddening here, though, is how he strung you along, making you the one causing the problems, relentlessly. He death was yet another manipulation. "See what you've done to me. You've killed me." Oh Tonya, I know how difficult it is to remember all these painful things and write about them. The purging of them with every word. To read here how you take upon the guilt for his death, his choice of shooting you down again, is so agonizing. Some day you will be free of it all. May it be soon that you will be flooded with joy. It is your due.