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Prologue
The courthouse is in a leafy suburb outside of Washington D.C. The couple in question stands on its front steps, facing one another. Above, the sky is blue and airy with just wisps of white clouds. Spring is in full bloom, and there are daffodils ringing the bases of the trees and sprinkled around in the green grass. The woman is wearing a white summer dress and white flats, her hair pulled back smoothly into a bun at the nape of her neck. She wears pearl earrings and a gold necklace with a single floating pearl that rests in the hollow of her throat. She looks up at the man standing in front of her, and for a moment—for just the single, briefest moment—passersby might imagine her holding a fresh spring bouquet in her hands as they share a last word before entering the courthouse to say “I do” before a stately judge.
But the real story behind this scene is anything but hopeful. This is not a beginning. There is no budding love story here, and no wedding night on the horizon. Instead, the woman, Denise, is looking up at the man from whom she is about to be divorced.
“Thank you for coming,” she says simply. "I know this isn't something that either of us wanted."
He would rather be anywhere but there. “It was time,” he acquiesces. "We tried."
And they had; they tried for seven long years. They tried through his difficult career, through her loneliness, throughout the long debate over whether or not to have children. They tried through two presidents, countless hurricanes, earthquakes, and natural disasters, and they kept trying in spite of the realization that trying probably wasn't going to be enough.
"Listen," Denise says now, reaching out a hand to take his. He lets her do this, even though it hurts worse to touch her than to keep his distance.
Denise suddenly looks sad—could she be having second thoughts? Is there any way that she might rethink her decision to sever all legal ties between herself and the man who slept next to her for nearly three thousand nights? Could she possibly be wondering right then, at the eleventh hour, whether there might be something salvageable between them?
No.
“It wasn’t right from the beginning,” she starts, folding her arms across her body and averting her gaze. “And you never truly shared yourself with me. I know you tried," she adds as an afterthought, "but even when we had Ingrid with us, you were silent. And I needed you to be there, to talk, to listen, to help with her."
This is all water under the bridge, but he needs to hear it. When they'd agreed to take in Denise's niece, little Ingrid, and to watch her for six months while Monica, Denise's younger sister, got sober, it had been a trial run to potentially consider a child of their own. And he'd failed. Where Denise had needed him to come home from work, set down his other responsibilities, and help her with Ingrid, he'd needed to distance himself even further. He'd worked longer hours, volunteered for trips that took him away from home, and started hitting the gym in the evenings. Something about forced fatherhood just hadn't gelled for him, and he could make all the excuses in the world but it wouldn't change the fact that he hadn't stepped up to the plate when his wife had needed him to. He’d worried endlessly that he would somehow turn out to be a distant and demanding father like his own dad had been, and no matter how hard he tried to convince himself that he could be otherwise, he’d had a hard time believing it. It had just felt...wrong. All of it.
He is determined now to just listen—to whatever she has to say—and not to be defensive. Certainly there are things he could bring up: her constant need to lighten every situation with a joke, even when it isn’t called for; the way she always insisted that he give her exactly as much as she was giving him at every moment; her jealousy, which was legendary and which caught him totally off guard the first time he experienced it. He’d been telling her about an ex-girlfriend when her face went up in flames and her nostrils flared. Her ears had gone red, and from that moment on, she’d been unable to listen to him evenreferencean ex. He saw it as a sign of a deep vulnerability, an insecurity, but she assured him that her raging envy stemmed from a place of love. Of protection. Of wanting to take him into her arms and never let anyone hurt him, and to erase every woman who had. He’d accepted this, because what else was there to do?
“I tried and I tried,” she goes on now, shaking her head as she looks at the cement steps beneath their feet. “I wanted to be the woman you needed. I held you at night when you were afraid. I listened to anything you would tell me, which was never much. I thought having kids, or at least helping to raise Ingrid, might open you up and show you how precious life is, but…” She pulls both of her lips in and holds them between her teeth as her eyes fill with tears. “Even that was too much to ask.”
This kills him. This admission, above all others, drives deep into his heart. Denise had wanted children for all seven years of their marriage. She’d wanted nothing but sweet-smelling babies to hold and love while he continued to be too quiet and too closed off for her taste. She wanted someone to call herMama, and to hopefully penetrate the fortress that she believed was built around her husband’s heart. But she didn’t understand—she never could. Women like Denise only know what they know, and it’s beyond their comprehension to grasp the fact that there are things theydon’tknow. Places they can't go with their husbands. Wounds they can't heal with their love, care, or jealousy.
Like, for instance, what it's like to feel broken inside. Feeling so fragmented that the only way to hold yourself together is to keep your secrets and emotions hidden away. Women like Denise can’t understand how terrifying it is to contemplate being a father in a world where war and famine and lies and horror exist. She will never understand the singular sensation of falling asleep next to a woman, her smooth, freckled shoulder rising and falling by the light of the moon as she sleeps and dreams, only to wake up and find that you’re no longer sleeping next to your wife, but instead dozing in a foxhole while bombs and artillery explode and kill your comrades. She can’t. She won’t. It’s impossible.
And he can't tell her--he can never make her understand, which kills him. Of course he never truly tried, but this is hard to admit, so he clings to the fact that she would never get it if he did.
And again, he forces himself to nod and just listen. To be present, finally. To hear her, even at this late date.
“I could never be the things you needed or wanted, because you wouldn’t let me,” she says now, one of those gorgeous, freckled shoulders rising and then falling listlessly as she does a neat and tidy post mortem of their marriage as she sees it. “So instead, we’re here.” Denise turns her head and lifts her chin, looking up at the giant clock on the front of the courthouse. “And when we leave, we’ll be officially divorced. It breaks my heart.” She pauses, holding back visible tears. "But I don't think there's any other way for us to truly go on and live together."
The word sits like a stone in the pit of his stomach:divorced. That was never something he wanted. He wanted to be the best for Denise, but apparently he couldn’t even do that, so here they are now, standing on the steps of this damn courthouse.
“I guess we should go inside and get this over with.” Denise sighs and then shifts her purse from one shoulder to the other. There's nothing he can say, and they both know it. In fact, saying anything now would be physically painful for him. His throat is so blocked, so choked up with words that can never be said. “Are you ready?”
Denise looks resigned and so he nods solemnly. He puts a hand on her lower back out of habit and guides her up the steps, holding the front door for her so that she can enter first.
The whole thing lasts less than twenty minutes, and when it’s over, he sets his pen down on the table and looks at his signature scrawled at the bottom of the paper that’s about to dismantle his life as he knows it:Henry David Banks.
* * *
The apartment he’s rented in Bethesda is nothing to look at. It’s a thirty minute Metro ride into D.C. for work, and it sits behind a giant storage facility and down the road from an unattractive clump of stores and fast food restaurants. Every apartment in his block of small, sad dwellings appears to be inhabited by fellow single men of varying ages. Banks would prefer to spend as little time as possible in this bachelor hell.
That night—the night of his divorce from Denise, his wife of seven years—he sits on the couch that he purchased online to fill up the front room of this new apartment and stares straight ahead at the wall-mounted television. There’s a recap of the day’s sports events being shouted at him by a man at a news desk. He tunes it out easily. Banks puts the bottle of beer to his lips and drinks, his eyes unblinking.
Denise had been right about all of it, but even if she hadn’t, there’s no way Banks would have or could have yelled at her or disputed any of it. By nature, he is a quiet man. Raised by a military father (loud when he was barking orders; silently demanding otherwise), and a dreamy, English teacher mother who loved poetry and Transcendentalism (hence the nameHenry David, in honor of Thoreau, naturally), Banks had been molded into the kind of man who watches and listens. It had always seemed easier to be on quiet alert when it came to dealing with his father, but few people know that Banks can hear and see the poetry of everyday life, thanks to his mother's influence. There’s a lot he holds in, and while Denise had always accused him of being closed off, of hiding things, the truth is that Banks is comfortable wearing his inner life like a sheathed dagger tucked beneath a pant leg rather than displaying it as a coat of many colors for the world to admire. In his opinion, far too many people have become overly comfortable displaying their every inner thought and feeling, and—maybe more importantly—they’ve been led to believe that the world cares whether they vote one way or the other, if they enjoyed their elaborate Starbucks coffee drink, and that everyone is interested in every cute thing their children do and say.
Banks has seen the world, and it does not care. The world demands precision to successfully traverse its many varied landscapes. It requires discipline and a keen eye, not sloppy insouciance. Just recently Banks had been riding the Metro to work when he overheard a conversation between two women.
“Wait—does it take three-hundred-sixty-five days to go around the sun?” one had asked with a frown.
The other shrugged. “I’m not sure. Google it.”
Banks had held his jaw firm, keeping his face placid, as if he were wearing AirPods and maybe hadn’t heard this exchange between two women in their thirties.The young people! What was happening to the young people?he’d wondered disapprovingly in that moment, but then revised his musings in his head so that he was instead wondering when the hell he started thinking of people in their thirties as “the young people,” and of himself as a class apart.
