I saw Tom’s ex-wife the other night and was transported back to the bed we had shared, though never at the same time. For so many months she had invaded my dreams, and now I felt her invading my present, a living ghost I had never spoken to. I was at a book reading, and I watched her closely, trying to discern if the person under the surgical face mask was really her. Her hair was longer and straighter than I remembered it from photos, and the mask obscured most of her face, leaving me to wonder if I was imagining her everywhere, a spectral obsession with my old dead life. After the reading, I stood in line to get my book signed, and saw that she was standing a few people ahead of me. I watched her as she chatted to the man she came with. She glanced behind her and looked at me. I turned and walked away quickly, hoping she didn’t know me, still not sure she was who I thought she was but feeling unsteady nonetheless, as if seeing each other had betrayed something to both of us. I stepped onto the Brooklyn pavement with a bitter taste on my tongue, unsettled and cold, like I’d seen a corpse.
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“I have to tell you something.”
I saw Tom swallow nervously beside me in bed in the dark one night. It was not long after we’d met at a party and started seeing each other with the frenetic attention you see in the movies and can only experience a handful of times in your life before you learn to watch out for it. I had not yet learned to watch out for it. Tom looked up at the ceiling in the dark and told me he had been married and was still married. I listened to his four-sentence description of their long courtship, big wedding, short marriage, and efficient separation. The papers signed, the finances split, the bullet dodged, fini.
“I knew there’d be something wrong with you,” I answered. He laughed with relief and assured both of us that the end of his marriage had been clean cut.
But endings aren’t clean cut. Not really.
The first wife is an underrepresented character in literature. Perhaps because she’s an invisible psychological threat, and inner threats are harder to plot out. She isn’t the character who shows up in act two, ready to take back her lover. There isn’t much romantic allure to reuniting with someone whom you paid the state good money to leave. The rosy outcome has already been screwed into a sad muddle of lost promises. A happy ending that transpired and then expired. While an ex-girlfriend can always conform to the cliche of the one that got away, like a fawn running from a hunter, just out of grasp and forever desired, an ex-wife gets away like two broken souls stabbing each other until one of them bleeds out. There’s a time of death. It’s hard to get it up once you’ve seen that kind of carnage.
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In 1938, Daphne du Maurier wrote the book Rebecca, which Alfred Hitchcock adapted into a film in 1940, a film that first terrified me when I saw it as a child in a friend’s dark living room on New Year’s Eve. Rebecca, the first wife, is sophisticated, educated, rich – everything that the unnamed heroine, the second wife, is not. But Rebecca’s also long gone, a dead character we hear about constantly but never see. It creates a desirous absence, never seeing, only hearing. Unlike in the 1944 noir film Laura, in Rebecca the much-spoken-of titular dead woman doesn’t reappear part-way through the story – shockingly alive – to satisfy us. So we’re left longing for Rebecca, our imagination filling in the blanks like it’s a bedtime story. Mrs. Danvers, the sinister housekeeper who adored Rebecca, berates the second, younger, more fragile wife: “You thought you could be Mrs. de Winter, live in her house, walk in her steps, take the things that were hers! But she’s too strong for you. You can’t fight her.”
What a ghost story. To be haunted from the inside, from your own mind, is so much harder than being threatened by a real person. A real person you can scream at, or ignore, or better yet punch in the nose. Your imagination, on the other hand, can really torture you. It can craft the perfect weapons. It can create composites of all your worst nightmares and then make you believe they’re true.
Just like in Rebecca, where the young second wife journeys to Manderley, her husband’s enormous country estate and her new home, I spent increasing amounts of time in Tom’s large apartment, the one with the views of the Brooklyn Bridge, the one he had shared with her. The apartment had walls of glass windows that stifled the sounds of the loud city below, a renovated controllable environment that cut out the unpredictable mayhem of regular life, just how Tom liked it. I spent too much time there. I would wake up early with him, drink coffee and eat eggs and kiss him goodbye. As the door slammed, I’d recognize how I really felt, which was exhausted and pampered, like I was staying in a hotel room that was luxurious but hollow. I wondered what was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I adapt to this more comfortable, richer, simpler life?
There was a pile of empty picture frames on Tom’s shelf across from his bed, and one night I became enraged that he hadn’t put them in a drawer so that I wouldn’t have to look at them. They were mother-of-pearl, creamy and iridescent and hostile. Through Tom’s friends I heard anecdotes of Tom and his wife, whom they didn’t bother cutting out of their old stories, stories of ski trips, birthdays, holiday parties. The very things I was attending with him now. The frame of his life hadn’t changed. The play was the same, and I wondered how the actress before me had played her scenes. In Rebecca, the heroine becomes convinced that her husband is still in love with the first wife and that she’ll never measure up. For me the problem wasn’t that I worried I was inferior; the problem was that I had walked into a permanent comparison. I felt my own individuality acutely, and I worried that Tom didn’t. That he’d washed us out until we were the same. That to him, either of us would do.
He told me stories of her that were so vivid I could hear her. The fight in the taxi. The joke that offended her. The moment he knew it was over. I thought if he talked about their relationship with me, it might lessen her impact on his psyche. Better out than in, better excavated than left to rot. I can see myself now, fanning the flames, convinced I was helping to put them out.
As I tried to coax her out of him, I unintentionally created a living, breathing hallucination of her that I saw everywhere. She stood next to him at the counter opening the mail; she bickered with him in the morning about the organization of the dishwasher. One night I lay in his king-sized bed beside him, a bed so big I’d say I felt like we were sleeping in an entire country. My head lay tucked between the gentle warmth of his neck and the clean white cotton of the pillow, and a vision of her appeared to me. She rested on the bureau across from me in the dark, legs crossed, smug, breathing quietly, watching. In her cold, dark eyes, I could see she knew something about my relationship, about myself, that I didn’t. She knew what would go wrong.
“He’ll play his part until you fall into line and play yours, and you’ll become me, slowly. And then it will fall apart.” I imagined she could recognize the subtle fractures in my relationship that would eventually turn into a full break. Not yet but soon.
In Rebecca, the second wife is finally freed when Mrs. Danvers sets Manderley on fire, burning the estate to the ground. The final image is of a pillow in Rebecca’s immaculately preserved bedroom; the pillow is emblazoned with an “R” and is engulfed by massive flames. You can almost hear Rebecca laughing as it burns.
The hallucination eventually turned into a conscious knowledge that my discomfort was real and worth listening to. I wasn’t having trouble adjusting to his life – he was having trouble adjusting to mine. He wouldn’t bend and wouldn’t take me in. His wife wasn’t haunting me. He was.
Suddenly, I could see the story of Rebecca through different eyes too. Mrs. Danvers was hell, and the specter of Rebecca herself was unnerving. But the heroine’s real pain came from her withholding, uncommunicative new husband; his big, cold house; and his refusal to fire his menacing housekeeper whose eyes seemed incapable of blinking.
After we ended it, I sat in his big, cold apartment and looked out at the gray river and the gray bridge and the Statue of Liberty, who now looked to me like a fed-up woman trying to hail a cab to get the hell out. The protective cloak that veils couples from uncomfortable realities finally lifted. We sat on either side of an emptiness. Our conversation was frank, as if we’d unscrewed the pressure valve and were finally letting the bitter truth come out like steam.
“At least your friends won’t call me your wife’s name by mistake anymore. That’s a problem for the next girl.”
He wiped down his ivory marble counter with a sponge, trying to wash it clean of any trace of us. He gave up and tossed the sponge in the sink.
“Maybe they won’t call her my ex-wife’s name. Maybe they’ll call her yours.”
