Open: An Autobiography

I walk into the house, a zombie. I pull a suitcase out of the closet, which I notice is so organized, so neat, it’s unsettling. I realize how difficult it must be for Brooke, living with my losses, my silences, my peaks and valleys. But I also notice how little space in this closet is allotted to me. Symbolic. I think of J.P. This is not your house.

I grab the few hangers holding my clothes and carry them downstairs.

Brooke is in the kitchen, sobbing. Not crying as she did at the restaurant and in the car, but sobbing. She’s sitting on a stool at the butcher block island. Always an island. One way or another, we spend all our time together on islands. We are islands. Two islands. And I can’t recall when it was different.

She asks, What are you doing? What’s going on?

What do you mean? I’m leaving.

It’s raining. Wait until morning.

Why wait? No time like the present.

I make a pile of essentials: clothes, blender, Jamaican coffee beans, French press - and a gift Brooke recently gave me. The scary painting Philly and I saw years ago at the Louvre.

She commissioned an artist to make an exact replica. I look at the man hanging from the cliff.

How has he not fallen off that cliff by now? I throw everything in the backseat of my car, a mint-condition convertible Eldorado Cadillac, 1976, the last year they made them. The car is a pure lustrous white, lily white, so I named it Lily. I turn Lily’s key, and the dashboard lights come on like an old TV set. The odometer reads 23,000 miles. It strikes me that Lily is the exact opposite of me. Old, with low mileage.

I peel out of the driveway.

A mile from the house I start crying. Through my tears, and the gathering fog, I can barely see the chrome wreath of the hood ornament. But I keep going, and going, until I reach San Bernardino. The fog is now snow. The pass through the mountains is closed. I phone Perry and ask him if there’s another way to Vegas.

What’s wrong?

I tell him. Trial separation, I say. We don’t know each other anymore.

I think about the day Wendi and I broke up, when I pulled over and phoned Perry. I think of all that’s happened since - and yet here I am, pulled over again, phoning Perry with a broken heart.

He says there’s no other way to get to Vegas, so I need to make a U-turn, head back toward the coast, and stop at the first motel that has a room. I drive slowly, picking my way through the snow, the car spinning and skidding on the slick highway. I stop at every motel.

No vacancy. Finally I get the last available bed at a fleabag in Nowhere, California. I lie on the smelly bedspread, interrogating myself. How the hell did you get here? How did it come to this? Why are you reacting like this? Your marriage is far from perfect, you’re not even sure why you got married in the first place, or if you ever wanted to get married - so why are you such an emotional wreck thinking it might be over?

Because you hate losing. And divorce is one tough loss.

But you’ve suffered tough losses before - why does this one feel different?

Because you don’t see any way that, as a result of this loss, you can improve.

I PHONE BROOKE TWO DAYS LATER. I’m contrite, she’s hardened.

We both need time to think, she says. We shouldn’t talk for a while. We need to go inside ourselves, not interfere with each other.

Inside ourselves? What does that even mean - for how long?

Three weeks.

Three? Where do you come up with that number?

She doesn’t answer.

She suggests I use the time to see a therapist.

SHE’S A SMALL DARK WOMAN in a small dark office in Vegas. I sit on a love seat - how exquisitely ironic. She sits in a chair three feet away. She listens without interrupting. I’d rather she interrupted. I want answers. The more I talk, the more acutely aware I become of talking to myself. As always. This isn’t the way to save a marriage. Marriages don’t get saved or solved by one person talking.

I wake later that night on the floor. My back is stiff. I go out to the living room and sit on the couch with a pad and pen. I write pages and pages to Brooke. Another pleading handwritten letter, but this one is all true. In the morning I fax the pages to Brooke’s house. I watch the pages go through the fax machine and I think of how it all started, five years ago, sliding the pages into Philly’s fax machine, holding my breath, waiting for the witty, flirty reply from a hut somewhere in Africa.

This time there is no reply.

I fax her again. Then again.

She’s much farther away than Africa.

I phone.

I know you said three weeks, but I need to talk to you. I think we should meet, I think we need to be working through these things together.

Oh Andre, she says.

I wait.

Oh Andre, she says again. You don’t understand. You just don’t get it. This isn’t about us - this is about you individually and me individually.