Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Speak to coroner, “I’m just the hospital family counselor”

After that she gave up on answering the rest of the questions. My guess is that she had gone through and asked them, just as she would have liked to have done under the most ideal circumstances, but that in the end she hadn’t found the energy necessary to care what the response was. She could only be a lawyer for so long, and on that day she had held out for a good ten minutes before giving in.

She took her lunch in her office. She passed on to one of her colleagues two memos due the following day. In an e-mail she wrote that she wasn’t feeling particularly well and needed to go home. When I came back from the academy late that afternoon, I found her tightly coiled on the bed with one tissue still waiting to be used in her hand. Her mother’s death had left her nothing to speculate over.

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “I knew this was coming. Even when I was a kid I always thought she was going to die. It used to terrify me, and then after a while it didn’t anymore. I’ve hardly even thought of it these past few years, and now that she’s dead I’m not even the least bit surprised. It’s like someone had called me a long time ago and told me to wait for exactly that phone call. But they didn’t call just once. It was like they called every few months to check in and make sure I remembered to keep waiting.

“You know, I almost didn’t come home from work. I hung up the phone and I felt sad, but I said to myself, ‘You knew this was going to happen. You can’t even pretend to be surprised, so why make a big fuss about it. You have a ton of work to do.’ I finally decided to come home because I was afraid she would be mad if she found out that I didn’t. She’d say, ‘I raised you better than that. How dare you not mourn your mother,’ and I’d want to say back to her, ‘No, you didn’t,’ but of course I could never say that to her. So maybe she did raise me better than that.”

She sent an e-mail to her supervising partner and took one more day off from work. She stayed in bed and waited for her grief to find her.

When I called I wanted to be greeted by the same Angela who took notes on her mother’s death, even if that Angela was no more real than the fictional portrait I had recently made of myself. What I got instead was my wife, tender and soft-spoken.

“Jonas?”

It was unlike her to answer her phone like that, but I had never called her at that hour. I tried my best to be direct, although the first thing I said to her was that I hoped I hadn’t disturbed her.

“No,” she said. “You haven’t disturbed me at all. I was just sitting here staring into space.”

That was what Angela claimed she did all day at work. “They only think I’m being busy,” she said. “When in fact, as soon as I close my door, the first thing I do is find a corner of the wall to stare at. I do it for hours.”

“Do you remember what I told you last week?” I said. I waited a moment for her to tell me that she did, or at the very least, for her to ask me to be more specific. Instead she countered with her own question.

“None of it was true, was it?”

I tried and wanted to say no, but the only thing that came out was a silly gasp of air that had been lodged in the back of my throat from the moment I called.

“I knew that already,” she said. “I had a meeting with Andrew on Friday, just before I left work. He said he spoke to someone at the school to congratulate them for promoting you. I don’t really believe that was why he called, but I couldn’t argue with him. Whoever he spoke to told him they knew nothing about that. He called me into his office and asked me if it was true what you had told him, and I said of course it was. He hasn’t said anything about it since.”

“Why didn’t you say something to me?”

“Because when I came home on Friday and saw you sitting there with our bags packed, ready to take this imaginary vacation, I wanted to have that with you. We were suddenly happy. I probably would have done almost anything to have kept that going for as long as possible. I even began to fantasize on the train that maybe you really would find something great, at the school or someplace else, and that everything we talked about would still be possible.”

We slipped into a pained, awkward silence.

“This wasn’t to get back at me, was it?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It was never that.”

“If I told you I wasn’t going to come home tonight, you would know that I wasn’t saying that to hurt you, and that I wouldn’t go see someone else?”

“Yes. I would know that.”

“Okay. Then maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She hung up before I had time to question her. Even though I knew it was unlikely, I waited that night for several hours for her to come home. I perched myself on the edge of the bed and regarded the clock from time to time. At a few minutes before ten p.m. I gave in and called her on her cell phone. The phone was off and went straight to her voice mail:

“This is Angela Woldemariam…”

She came back home early the next morning, still dressed in the dark gray flannel suit she was wearing when I last saw her. I had fallen asleep fully dressed and there seemed to be something in that, as if somehow we had successfully deceived time and gone back to the previous day when we had both woken up together and parted in the train station. It was that morning all over again, except now we knew how the day was going to end and could act accordingly.

Angela placed her palm against my cheek once I sat up to greet her.

“I don’t want us to fight over this,” she said. “There’s no point in doing that anymore. I think if we’re careful we can do this properly. We don’t have to yell. We don’t have to be angry.”

Her words were undoubtedly rehearsed but never once as she spoke did they feel like that. She was careful to never say I’m leaving you, or this marriage is over, much less something as harsh as I want a divorce. No one was leaving and nothing was over and neither of us wanted what we were about to have.

“Where did you go last night?” I asked her.

“To a motel. I thought I was going to stay someplace lavish where I could take a bath and look out the windows onto the city, but in the end I went to an overpriced motel six blocks away from here. I didn’t want to see you, but I didn’t want to be far away from you either. I thought, What if I get up in the middle of the night and change my mind. I want to be able to run straight home.”

“Did that ever happen?”

“No. It didn’t. I wanted it to, but it didn’t. I spent the night thinking, though, that actually, if you looked at us from a distance, we haven’t done that bad by each other.”

“Are those the standards now?”

“I don’t know. But maybe they should be.”

“And if they are?”

“Then I think we both can come out ahead. Or that at least it’s still not too late for us to do so.”

Those were the final words we spoke directly on that topic. We weren’t leaving or quitting each other so much as we were strategically retreating while taking account of our mutual gains and losses before one or both of us was resolutely defeated. The next day while Angela was at work I packed a small suitcase and went to a friend’s apartment deep in Brooklyn. I called Angela during lunch and told her that I was going to be staying with friends for a while. Up to the very end that was how we conducted our separation. We neither denied its permanence nor tried to enforce it. For several weeks we spoke almost daily about small things that I had forgotten to pick up until eventually there was nothing left; the only reasons we would have had for calling after that would have been to say I’m sorry, or I miss you, both of which we knew already.