Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

It was a plausible but barely disguised lie, and she all but dared me to name it as such.

“Does that bother you, Jonas?”

“No. It doesn’t bother me at all.”

“I didn’t think it would.”

That was the first important step away from me that she made, and I knew that there would be others, and that many of them would be small, hardly even perceptible, which is the way distance between two people normally grows — in baby-step-sized increments. By the end of their life together my mother and father were no longer able to stand being in the same room with each other for more than a few minutes. If one walked into the living room, the other soon left for the kitchen. My father slept and read on the couch. My mother took most of her meals in her bedroom. I used to wonder if there was a space large enough on earth for them to inhabit at the same time. I pictured dining rooms the size of football fields and bedrooms as cavernous as an airport hangar — spaces that were large enough to reduce the person standing at the opposite end to little more than a speck on the horizon. They had always had personal boundaries for as long as I’d known them, and over the years those boundaries had become distended to such a ridiculous size that their sense of hurt and damage at the hands of the other preceded them by miles.

Had we managed to keep that tension throughout our days as well as our nights, we might have ended even sooner than we did, but there was a shared desire to try to retain the last vestiges of the best parts of our marriage. Where we failed in the evenings we tried to make up for during the brief time we had together in the mornings. A new routine sprang up between us. Angela woke up before me as normal, but rather than rush to assemble herself for work she would wake me up with a string of small, barely palpable kisses that ran down the side of my face, behind my ears, and down my neck, and maybe because she thought I was still sleeping and couldn’t hear her, or maybe because she thought I could hear her better because I was still sleeping, she would say one of two things: “I’m sorry. I love you.” Or, “I love you, and let’s not fight again.”

“You look angelic when you’re sleeping,” she used to say. “Why can’t you always be like that?”

We were both suckers for wishful thinking, and each morning, regardless of how quiet and tense we were the night before, there would seem to be the possibility that it had all just been a stupid mistake, and that whatever was wrong between us could be righted come morning by the sheer force of will and love.

Our morning routine was something to marvel over. We floated around our little apartment, picking out clothes, showering, dressing, and drinking coffee as if we had been choreographed to do so, stopping every now and then at perfectly timed intervals to kiss each other on the cheeks or lips. Those moments after waking up were the best thirty minutes of the day and seemed to pass in a dreamlike state all their own, one in which Angela and I were both only partially clothed, so there was always a private piece of bare skin that could be touched or observed — a belly button, a birth-mark on the lower half of a back, or the hard smooth space between Angela’s breasts. And while it’s true that I may have been at least partially aware of the guilt that fueled the change in our morning routine, it’s also true that I remained wholeheartedly grateful for it nonetheless. So long as I didn’t have to stare at anything difficult too directly, I thought I was happy to try to forget where Angela had been or what she had looked like when she came home the night before, if it meant that I could find even a modicum of comfort in exchange.

Angela and I learned to live two separate but simultaneous lives. Several nights a week she vanished into what she claimed to be work while I continued with my classes. We sometimes raised our voices at each other over small, petty things. I remember Angela asking me why it looked like there was piss on the bathroom floor when she came home, and I remember saying that unless she thought I was deaf she could try taking off her heels when she came through the door at night. But more often than not we simply stared at each other from a great distance even when we were in the same room. In the morning we tried to begin all over again. Sometimes we made love before leaving for work. We always made sure to kiss as we said good-bye.

What finally brought that time to an end was a phone call, which in retrospect I can hardly blame Angela for having made. All boundaries are there to be tested, and Angela, having crossed several, could have never retreated slowly back into the woman she had been just one year back, even though I often told myself she would. I managed her absence and the growing distance between us the way I imagined my mother must have managed many of the years she spent with my father — by telling herself incessantly that this too shall pass. Eventually I had to understand that it wouldn’t.

It was the second week in April when Angela called me from her office to say that tonight she would be home exceptionally late. There was something simultaneously callous and tired in her voice, as if she had been forced to make this call after a long, strenuous debate.

“I’m going to be very late tonight,” she said.

“A lot of work at the office.”

“Are you asking me that or telling me that?”

“I’m assuming that,” I said.

“Okay then,” she said. “If that’s what you want to assume. Then yes. I have a lot of work to do tonight. We have a big case. Huge, in fact. Thank you for asking.”

She hung up the phone before I could respond, and while I had thought about calling back, I had also thought that there was nothing to be gained by doing so.

I often went to bed early, but on that night I found it impossible to sleep. I stayed awake until well past midnight when Angela finally came home more exhausted than I had seen her before. She dropped her bag next to the door and slipped straight into the shower. She didn’t see me watching her until she came to bed.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“That’s a first.”

“I have to wake up early to get to work.”

“Don’t you want to ask me how my night was?”

“Difficult, I imagine.”

“And that’s the best you can do?” she said.

“No,” I replied. “It’s not. But right now I’m too tired to try to do any better.”

Rather than continue, I pretended to drift off to sleep, leaving Angela to hover over me. When we woke up we tried halfheartedly to continue our morning ballad. Angela kissed me once on the cheek and apologized for coming home so late.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize what time it was. I had a drink after work and must have been a bit tipsy when I came home.”

We showered and then dressed. As we were getting ready to leave, Angela leaned over to straighten my tie, and as I remember it, a warm, almost blinding sensation swept over me. I can’t say that I did or did not raise my voice. I’d like to believe I didn’t, but if I did, I can’t think of what I might have possibly said. I do know that at some point I grabbed Angela’s hand firmly by the wrist, before she could pull it completely away from me, and that I may have even begun to twist it. I know that my fingers encircled her wrist completely and I could feel the bones underneath, which surprised me because I had never held Angela like that before. At some point shortly after that, maybe three to four seconds maximum, I thought to myself that despite what I may have ever wondered about my own strength, it was more than enough to hurt her. Once I was certain of that, I let her go.

Had I wanted to apologize, I never had a chance. Angela grabbed her purse off a chair and left the apartment without a word, which led me to think as I walked out the door fifteen minutes later that perhaps what had happened hadn’t been serious at all. By the time I reached the academy I had convinced myself of that. “It was nothing,” I said. “And it will be completely forgotten soon.” I was still thinking that when my students entered and sat down — that nothing of any import had actually occurred, and what I thought might have been a transgression of an important boundary that I had long ago placed on myself was nothing more than a slight deviation from the norm, which explains in part why I was so distracted when my class began, and why, according to one of my students, it looked as if I was talking to myself before the morning bell rang.