The sailor wanted to sleep with me. My husband did not. And although I found the sailor unappealing in various ways—like the time I gave him a ride in my car, and he smelled terrible—his desire for me was very appealing indeed. Besides, although he smelled bad that one time and had a drinking problem he claimed to have under control but clearly didn’t, the sailor had a certain sexiness about him. He was a good artist—he drew and made things out of copper—and I found his confidence seductive. Perhaps most important, I knew that having sex with him was not merely a fantasy but something I could do in real life if I chose. This knowledge was thrilling. It was like walking around with a burning coal in my pocket, a coal I had no intention of using for anything in particular, but whose heat I liked to feel all the same.
The sailor’s interest was by no means specific to me. He was like a sea creature whose mouth was permanently agape, happy to eat whatever washed in. The sailor wanted to sleep with me, but it might be truer to say he wanted to sleep with someone. Likewise, after countless tearful arguments with my husband about his lack of interest in sex, I had become painfully aware of my own desperation to sleep with someone, which was feeling even more urgent as my thirty-sixth birthday approached.
My husband and I had met when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-six, when we both happened to crash on the living room floor of a mutual acquaintance in San Francisco. I was charmed by his bushy red beard, batik shirts, and tales of the famous computer scientists with whom he’d studied and worked at Stanford and MIT. Our relationship was the first time either of us had felt truly loved and wanted, and the experience was intoxicating. We made love on a sunny hillside in Berkeley, on a forest floor in the San Juan Islands, and in the rainbow-painted camper van in which we took a cross-country trip. Sex was an expression of joy and affection for us, an opportunity to revel in our precious and unexpected bond. It was also deeply healing: After years of wondering if we were just too weird to find love, here we were, feasting on a seemingly unlimited supply.
But after two or three years together, my appetite for sex was still expanding, while his was beginning to contract. I felt that he’d unilaterally canceled an essential part of our relationship; he felt that I’d leapt so far ahead of him he had no hope of catching up. Now and then we’d still find each other, and I’d rejoice—but those instances grew fewer and farther between, until sex felt like a comet that could only be spotted from a precise set of coordinates I was forever scrambling to locate.
My husband showed his affection by ruffling my hair and cooking me nachos. He didn’t seem to understand that, while I delighted in these gestures, they weren’t a substitute for making love. I felt baffled and hurt that he didn’t share my distress. Didn’t he miss sex? How could he act like everything was OK?
Again and again I’d set my birthday as the deadline for solving the problem. Surely, by the time I was thirty, we’d be back on track. OK—thirty-two or bust! Thirty-five? Good God, would I still be doing this in my forties? Would I be telling myself that I would really put my foot down when I was fifty-seven or fifty-eight?
There were many things I treasured about our marriage: our well-matched intellects, our unparalleled ability to make each other laugh, our shared taste in music and art. My husband and I were seen by our friends as a quirky power couple: him a wacky genius whose exuberance both charmed and overwhelmed people, and me the dependable sidekick who reined in his excesses and kept our lives running smoothly. With his job at a tech company he made more than enough money for the two of us to live on, and I’d gradually given up my own career as a writer and editor in order to tend to him during his frequent, severe bouts of depression and hypomania. We prided ourselves on staying together, while our friends cycled through short-lived relationships.
But when it came to sex, I felt like my life was passing me by. Sex, to me, was like a solvent, cutting through layers of everyday grime. Without it, irritations accumulated with no way of wiping the slate clean; disappointment coagulated into distress. I felt forlorn, restless, and disconnected. Yet no matter how many times I sounded the alarm, my husband never seemed to hear me.
I wanted him to tell me that he, too, was devastated by the loss of our lovemaking. I wanted him to join me in researching potential solutions. But his responses left me feeling even more alone. He’d claim that temporary circumstances were to blame for his lack of interest: It was summer, and the room was too hot; it was winter, and the room was too cold. It was the high season at work, and he didn’t have the energy; it was the low season, and he needed to recover; it was his vacation, and he should be able to do what he wanted to do. If he’d been taking his meds, then the meds were to blame; if he was off his meds, well, how could I expect a depressed person to feel desire?
When I pointed out that these supposedly temporary circumstances were adding up to something permanent, he became angry. I was too pushy, too anxious, too desperate. I didn’t know how to read his moods. Couldn’t I see that he was already at his breaking point? Why couldn’t I just lay off?
He saw my requests, no matter how meek or carefully worded, as intolerable pressure. Sometimes, after lashing out at me, he would cry. “Don’t you know how shameful this is for a man?” he’d sob. “Of course I want to give you sex. I just can’t.”
Flooded with guilt and exhausted by the emotional intensity of his responses, I’d resolve not to mention sex for an entire month, or even two. I’d be patient, easygoing. During the times I refrained from initiating, we seemed to get along better, but my sense of loneliness was like a stream slowly undercutting its bank. From some angles, the extent of the erosion wasn’t visible; then entire sections would collapse, trees toppling for lack of soil to hold their roots, the water claiming an ever-widening bed.
As I neared my thirty-sixth birthday, these collapses were happening with greater frequency. I envisioned the sexless decades stretching out ahead of me, and fury and despair foamed up in places where compassion had once been. I would not, could not, accept this future.
Two years earlier my husband had had a particularly severe and chaotic episode. He would cry for hours, tear at his clothes, and pace around the house, ranting at God. His agitation frightened me; although he’d been depressed plenty of times, this latest bout had an angry edge that hadn’t been there before. His blood pressure shot up, and he stopped eating and sleeping. I worried he would kill himself, or have a heart attack.
I called his aunt and uncle in Hawaii and asked if we could stay with them for a while. “I can’t take care of him on my own anymore,” I said. “I need help. And he says the sun will make him better.”
I packed our bags and drove us to the San Francisco airport that same afternoon, my husband quivering and sweating as we went through security.
After about a month in Hawaii he began to improve.
“I told you,” he said. “I just can’t handle winters. And if we move here, we’ll never have to live through a winter again.”
I grieved the loss of our friends and community in California but grudgingly agreed. At his insistence we bought a small piece of undeveloped land in a valley and lived there in a tent as he continued to recover. After nine months we moved into a condo in a small city on the coast.
Since then, the bright sunshine and daily ocean swims had been good for him; I stopped worrying that he would die and applied myself to everyday concerns, like how to keep him from interrupting me so much. Sometimes, when we were out for a hike or a swim, he’d take my hand, gaze meaningfully into my eyes, and tell me I’d saved his life by bringing him to Hawaii. I knew I ought to feel moved by these pronouncements, but something in me squirmed. Yes, but what about me?
My husband loved life in our new city, but I felt distressed about being uprooted again so soon after moving from California. Two or three days a week I would make the two-hour drive to the land we’d bought in the valley. I had decided to build a small structure on the property, and I spent my days priming lumber and my nights poring over carpentry manuals by the light of a Coleman lantern. When I wasn’t working, I spent time with the neighbors I’d befriended when my husband and I had lived there in our tent.
One day I was out for a walk with a friend when she pointed out a ramshackle cabin surrounded by vanilla vines and tangelo trees. “I wonder if the sailor is home,” she said. She whooped, and the sailor came out. He was tall and skinny and had a fern tattoo. My friend asked him to show us the shower he’d built from stones and mortar and the paintings he’d done depicting psychedelic visions of cats. He lived alone in the cabin, which belonged to a friend of his, and he’d built a beautiful workshop out front, where he worked on copper sculptures late into the night.
I told him I was in the process of building on my land—nothing fancy, just an eight-by-twelve picnic shelter where I could set up an outdoor kitchen and a couple of chairs. He offered to take a look at the plans I’d drawn. Whenever our eyes met, I felt a little ping.
Don’t make a fool of yourself, I thought. You’re married.
But as my friend and I left the sailor’s cabin, I knew I would be back.
I sought the advice of another friend, a gem dealer with a bald head and a hairy chest who I knew had cheated on his wife. We were driving along the coast road. The ocean sparkled. I told him I’d never cheated on my husband, though there had been men who’d made their interest clear. As time went on, however, I was feeling more and more desperate, and my husband wasn’t showing any sign of changing.
As I said this, I could see the men who’d wanted me float past me one by one: the black-haired photographer, the brown-eyed carpenter, the tanned surfer, their eyes twinkling, their arms beckoning. Was I a fool not to have slept with them when I’d had the chance?
The gem dealer let out a bark of laughter. “Lemme tell you something,” he said. “When you’re starving, you’re gonna eat out of the trash.”
I remembered the times I had literally eaten out of trash cans, which is not as bad as you’d expect.
That evening I went home to my husband and felt a familiar strain in my voice when I greeted him.
“Your face is doing the thing,” he said.
My face was always doing the “thing.” When I talked to my husband, my face was like a lid I held over a bubbling pot to keep hissing streams of soup from escaping around the edges. The thing was a state of tension: eyes that couldn’t soften, a mouth biting down on words it wasn’t allowed to say. His complaints about the thing struck me as unfair. He had made it clear he wasn’t interested in my real face—the one that was lonely, love-starved, and angry. He’d refused my gentle entreaties to try couples therapy, scorned the self-help books I’d hauled home from the library, and gone through the roof when I’d floated the idea of nonmonogamy.
The more stridently he denied there was a problem, the harder it became for me to wear the face he wanted to see: the uncomplicated one, the adoring one, the one that took only joy in him. The thing was my best attempt to suppress my howling discontent and avoid starting another argument. But we’d end up arguing anyway.
Lately he’d identified the thing as the reason he couldn’t get interested in sex, a claim I found galling, seeing as how the absence of sex was the reason my face had started doing the thing in the first place.
It seemed to me my sexuality was a small animal I’d entrusted to my husband’s care, only to have him put it in a cage and starve it. We had to pretend this animal didn’t exist, because my husband became upset when it was mentioned. Now and then, when I demanded he care for it, he would pet it half-heartedly or promise to feed it later. When pressed, he would swear that he loved it dearly, but he never even looked it in the eyes.
It was starting to feel outrageous to me that my husband should retain control of my animal if he was only going to neglect it. Surely I could take better care of it on my own. I could take it to visit the sailor, where it could play in the tall grass and eat from a copper bowl. If my husband wasn’t interested in the animal, why should he mind? Perhaps if the animal were not so thin and weak, I would have less strain in my voice when I greeted my husband, and that would be good for us both.
The following week I was in the valley having tea with a neighbor when the sailor stopped by. We sat on rusting metal chairs under the monkeypod tree and drank from the chipped cups I kept in my tent. The sailor told us about the vanilla blossoms he’d hand-pollinated that morning and the sign he was painting for his friend’s shop. As we talked, he snorted from a tin of powdered tobacco and blew his nose to clear the resulting slime. I felt my initial attraction to him wane.
When we all stood up to say goodbye, the sailor gave me a long hug. I was startled and slightly mortified—the sailor’s lean body was pressed against mine, right in front of my neighbor. People in the valley didn’t hug, and definitely not in this intimate and lingering way. At the same time an involuntary flood of pleasure swept through me. I could feel some essential communication taking place between the sailor’s body and my own.
In the weeks that followed, the sailor read the books I lent him; he gave me small gifts made of copper. He was moody and inscrutable, had ghastly manners, and boasted about his self-control while surreptitiously drinking all the alcohol he could get. In certain lights he looked utterly haggard.
I felt anxious around him, yet I sought him out compulsively, like a child licking a nine-volt battery to give herself a shock. It confused me to feel so attracted to a person who also repulsed me. I could see that the sailor had moldy bits, yet in my fevered state I had the curious urge to gobble him up all the same. My husband’s rejection had left me feeling frumpy; now I began to realize that my body was not so unattractive as I’d started to fear. The sailor wanted to touch me, if I would let him. What a delightful inversion after years of being batted away.
It seemed to me a secret life was unfolding within the confines of my official one. I went about my days both disturbed and invigorated, as if I were living through a natural disaster. My visits to the valley felt charged with mystery and purpose: Would I find a note from the sailor tucked into the frame of my tent? If I hiked over to his cabin, would he be home? Spending time with the sailor made me want to write and draw, build and experiment. I sat up late in my tent filling notebook pages; I sought out new music to listen to and books to read.
A plucky voice inside me offered up the theory that this secret life was helping my marriage. I could ask less of my husband, knowing the sailor would give me the attention I craved. As long as I had my days in the valley, I could be as cheerful and adoring as my husband wanted.
I knew the prickle of sexual possibility that hovered around my interactions with the sailor was something that I, as a married woman, was supposed to squelch, but the gifts he gave me were too precious. You might as well have asked me to cut the rope that was pulling me up from the bottom of a well.
I would have liked to consult the gem dealer a second time, but he was in New York City, selling off diamonds to pay for his divorce. His wife had their condo to herself and spent her evenings baking elaborate cakes and organizing her seashell collection. She told me she was happier than she’d been in years; what an improvement from screaming arguments night after night!
I fantasized constantly about leaving my husband, but I told myself that fantasizing about something wasn’t the same as actually wanting it. After all, I fantasized about all kinds of things I didn’t want in real life—like going to grad school, or dying tragically at a young age. Surely my visions of leaving him belonged in the same category: symptoms of unmet yearning, not action plans.
My fantasies of leaving my husband alternated with fantasies of having sex with the sailor. These fantasies were varied and relentless. I was infested with them as a cat is infested with fleas. Sometimes when I saw the sailor in the daytime after thinking about him all night, I felt a little insane. The sailor in real life was so different from the character he played in my mind. Imagine if I’d done something, only to come to my senses and realize I’d done it with him! But I was like a pregnant woman uncontrollably scooping clay into her mouth. I wanted the sailor, even though this wanting puzzled and unnerved me. It was all my mind could do to negotiate for restraint.
“Your face is doing the thing,” said my husband. The evening before, I’d gone to the sailor’s cabin for dinner. While I was leafing through his sketchbook, he’d invited me to spend the night, and I’d pretended not to understand. Instead I’d bundled up my sexual energy and brought it home.
Don’t you know I could have given this to the sailor, I wanted to scream at my husband, but I saved it for you instead?
I struggled to keep my voice even. “Can we talk about—”
“See,” my husband interrupted, slamming his hand on the counter. “This is why you never get sex. You always have some problem. Come to me sometime when you don’t have a problem!”
He began to talk and talk, clouding the room with words as an octopus clouds the water with ink. I understood that this barrage of speech was my punishment. I thought of the valley, the walls of my tent flapping companionably in the breeze, and wondered why I’d come home.
In the morning I sat on our front stoop and wrote in my journal, I need to leave him. It was getting harder to pretend that sex was the biggest problem in our relationship, let alone the only problem. How had I been reduced to begging for sex from a man I was starting to despise? Ever since we’d met, I’d seen my husband as a sensitive misfit whose flaws were more than compensated for by his brilliance and generosity. When he traveled for work, he let unhoused people sleep in his hotel room, and when neighbors came to our door with computer problems, he always helped them, no matter how busy he was. People adored him. So what if he could be a little bossy and dramatic?
My eyes welled with tears as I remembered our early days in the condo, when he’d gone on meds for a while. We’d drunk coffee in the sunshine and gone shopping for potted plants, and we’d even had sex a handful of times. Maybe I could convince him to go back on his meds. Maybe the new aggression in his voice and body language was a reaction to all the weed he’d recently begun to smoke. Maybe with a few tweaks to his brain chemistry, he’d be back to my sweet, sensitive genius.
I scratched out the traitorous words in my journal. It wasn’t time to give up yet. The man I loved was still there—I just had to help him come back.
I redoubled my efforts to kill my attraction to the sailor. The internet offered helpful advice: Make a list of all the things you find disgusting about the person and review it frequently. Imagine yourself sobbing every day and filled with regret after you break your husband’s heart. Imagine your friends and neighbors finding out, and the shame and self-loathing you’d feel.
The tips were effective. For hours and sometimes days at a time, my mind would clear, and I’d feel amazed that I’d ever entertained such crazy thoughts. I recalled stories I’d heard about people who jumped from buildings after eating magic mushrooms, believing they could fly. I was just like them, I thought: I’d come so close to doing something preposterous, something disastrous, while under the influence of forces I didn’t understand.
One day my husband and I went snorkeling in the little bay near our condo. We swam out past the break to the place we called the “blue zone,” where huge green sea turtles glided past the coral heads. We stayed there for more than an hour, diving and surfacing, our bodies freed from their earthly weight. I thought of the line from Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron”: They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun. They leaped like deer on the moon. “Come look at this!” my husband would say, and I’d follow him through an underwater portal that opened into a towering blue cathedral shimmering with fish.
I’d been afraid to swim in the ocean until my husband had appointed himself my personal guide. He had opened up this vast and sparkling world for me, just as he had opened up worlds of music, art, and philosophy. I thought of how tiny and shrunken my life might have been if we’d never met; surely I owed him my patience and loyalty, no matter how obnoxious he could get in his worst moments.
After snorkeling, we walked back to our condo hand in hand. But as we climbed the stairs, the sense of gratitude I felt was touched with sadness. I knew that after showering, he’d want to go out for dinner, and after dinner, he’d want to watch a movie. Sex had no place in his list of desires. Still, we’d had such a nice afternoon. Maybe it was a good time to talk.
As we walked inside, I nuzzled his shoulder, and he made our secret sound: a catlike grao. I hesitated. Should I say it?
He noticed me hesitating. “What?”
“I know you think therapy’s pointless,” I said. “And you’re probably right. But I found a couples therapist who looks really smart, and I want to make an appointment. Will you humor me just this once?”
He cringed. “Do they have a PhD or just a master’s?” he said.
“A PhD,” I said, eager to show him I’d kept his requirements in mind. “And it’s over Zoom, so we don’t even need to drive.”
“All right,” he sighed. “Let’s get therapized. But it’s not going to be how you think.”
As we parted ways to shower, I felt giddy with hope. I’d finally done it! Maybe in addition to solving our sex problem, the therapist could talk him into taking his meds and cutting back on the weed. Just like all the other crises we’d pulled through before, we’d pull through this one, and I’d be glad I’d stayed.
For months now I’d felt caught between two impulses: One urged me to feed my animal by any means necessary; another wanted to protect my marriage at all costs. The two sides yanked on my sleeves, issuing clashing instructions, making convincing cases for opposite goals. I couldn’t satisfy both at once, so I alternated between them, making promises to each.
One day the sailor and I went mushroom hunting together, high on the cliffs above the valley floor. I dressed in dirt-streaked Carhartt pants and my ugliest shirt, to signal to both myself and him that I did not have seduction in mind. I felt a sense of preemptive disappointment, like a child with a sprained wrist heading to a birthday party where she won’t be allowed on the trampoline. The sailor and I searched for patches of almond agaricus mushrooms under the ironwood trees. The mushrooms smelled like marzipan: sweet and clean. I felt how far away we were from the valley, and how alone. Even the sound was different up here, spooky and silent, whereas the valley always boomed with the crash of the surf.
It was a hot day, the trail steep and winding. When we came to a waterfall, the sailor stripped naked and got in, and I felt a pang of yearning so intense it brought tears to my eyes. How good it would feel to peel off my Carhartts and shirt, my sweaty underwear and bra; to feel that my body was mine again, the way it was before I met my husband. How good it would feel to show my whole face, unencumbered by concepts of goodness and loyalty.
The sailor was more beautiful out of his clothes than I’d imagined, his arms more muscular. He smiled at me, and an unspoken question drifted down from the sky and came to rest like a leaf on the surface of a pool.
This was the moment, I knew, when a certain woman would have gone to him. Not a bad woman or a good woman, just a woman whose body was her own. I had fantasized about being this woman; in certain moments I’d felt possessed by her. Now I could feel her detaching herself from me and swimming toward him. She and the sailor kissed, their limbs entwined in the cold water. I watched them revel in one another, feeling jealous and heartsick at all that I was missing. I watched them make love, innocent as two nymphs, while my own guilty body stayed pressed against the rocks.
Ever since I’d met the sailor, I’d been wondering who I really was and what I really wanted. Did I now have my answer? Was this proof that I intended to stay with my husband, that I was loyal and self-abnegating and good? Or was it proof that I was a coward and a hypocrite, clinging primly to the moral high ground while coming as close to the edge as I dared? Proof of an attachment to wealth and comfort? Proof of a terror of the unknown?
I wanted to dip myself in a chemical bath and have the answers exposed once and for all, like images on photographic paper. But a true picture of my self was proving to be elusive. It wouldn’t hold still; it refused to signify anything, or it signified everything at once, dazzling me with its contradictions.
When it came time for our therapy appointment, my husband refused to go. Instead he smoked weed in the bathroom, then announced that he would analyze our situation himself, no therapist required. The problem wasn’t a lack of sex, my husband declared; the problem was my face, which was the wrong face. If I could only present to him the right face, I’d get everything I wanted. I wouldn’t even have to ask. He went on and on, until his words bled into a kind of evil incantation. I should be grateful to him, he said. I could never survive without him. He was my savior—the only person who would ever love me. The only person who could ever love me, given how damaged I was. By the end of his diatribe, I felt ill. Was this my reward for being faithful and forgiving? For leaving the valley and driving back to the condo week after week, even as my stomach clenched with dread?
The next morning he made a show of being chipper and affectionate. I felt like he was daring me to bring up the night before—to ruin things, yet again, with my ceaseless complaints, when all he wanted was peace. I wrote again in my journal, I need to leave him. This time I didn’t cross it out.
On my next trip to the valley I stashed clothes and supplies in my tent. When I came home, my husband cried and told me how lonely he’d been without me. He made me a plate of cheese and crackers and followed me around the condo as I put laundry in the washer and dishes in the sink. My growing fear of his angry and unpredictable moods mingled with an agony of grief. What would happen to him without me there to buy the groceries and sort the mail? Who would be there to love him, if not me?
The sailor got drunk and trashed the cabin he was caretaking. The owner kicked him out, and he moved to a piece of land on the side of a volcano, where he made his home in a shipping container surrounded by rare orchids and delicate ferns. The grass grew tall outside his old cabin.
One afternoon I put on my boots and hiked to the waterfall. I cried the whole way, staggering up and down the gulches like King Lear. At the waterfall I stripped naked and swam in the cold water. Was my body my own now, with nobody there to see it? What good was that? The sight of it pained me, its slenderness wasted, its vigor unused, like a book of matches fallen behind a couch. What rage I felt at being prevented from burning. What anguish at the way I’d allowed my husband to push me into a kind of early grave, shoveling dirt over what was still urgently alive.
I could see now that my sexuality wasn’t the only thing that had been buried. My agency and authority, my ambitions, my very sense of reality were there too. I knew I had to dig them out while there was still time, but I was so exhausted, and the dirt was so damp and thick.
My husband’s rants grew longer and more aggrieved. One night he grabbed my arm to keep me from walking away from him. Another time he threatened to follow me into the street screaming if I tried to leave.
I parked my car down the block from our condo and did a phone session with a therapist I’d found online. “I think my husband is becoming abusive,” I said. As soon as abusive left my mouth, I felt guilty, dirty, as if I’d just broken the most important promise I’d ever made. I hurried to explain that he had a mental illness, ADHD, a high-stress job, and other challenges; besides, could a person really become abusive after so many years?
She asked me if he’d ever punched a wall or broken anything. When I admitted that he had, she told me to make a safety plan. I was mortified.
“But he never did that kind of thing before,” I said.
“There’s a first time for everything,” she replied.
My face went hot. After I hung up, I told myself she was taking things out of context, making his behavior sound worse than it really was. I should have done more to emphasize the stress he was under—the stress I’d put him under with my endless demands.
A few weeks later I began to see a different therapist over Zoom. This time I presented myself as a woman whose otherwise stable and loving marriage had hit an obstacle. I told her about my crush on the sailor and my husband’s disinterest in sex. She guided me through a visualization involving a school bus, and as I closed my eyes and imagined myself taking the steering wheel while my anxiety rode in the back, I felt like I was doing the right thing.
On the day of our third session, I came home from the valley to find the door of the condo wide open.
“Hi, darling,” I called as I walked in. “You forgot to close the door.”
My husband was at the kitchen table. “You need to tell the couples therapy clinic to stop calling me,” he said.
“Can we talk about this in an hour?” I was keeping my voice as sweet and cheerful as I could. “I have an appointment with my own therapist in five minutes.”
He ignored me. “From now on, I’m not filling out any forms, answering any messages, agreeing to any schedules, or going along with any rules,” he said, following me down the hall to our bedroom and looming over me while I hunted for my headphones. “If you need sex that badly, consider our marriage open, starting today. You can fuck anyone you want, and I can too.” He made a gesture like he was wiping his hands clean. “There, I’ve solved the problem. I don’t want to hear another word about it ever again.”
The suddenness and vulgarity of this pronouncement stunned me.
“You don’t just declare a marriage open,” I said. “We need to talk about it. We need to agree.”
He stared at me in silence. His batik shirt was stained with coffee and stank of sweat. I wondered if he’d showered since I’d been gone.
“I have therapy now,” I said slowly. “Can you please leave the room?”
“I’m done with your boundaries,” he said. “And I’m done with you gaslighting me. Any decent therapist will agree with me: The problem in our marriage is you.”
It was clear that, in his state of agitation, he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, leave me alone, so I grabbed my laptop and locked myself in the bathroom. As I fumbled with my headphones, I could hear him speaking on the other side of the door, an unbroken stream of grandiosity and vitriol.
A minute later my therapist came online. “Where are you?” she said. “Is that a shower curtain?”
My fantasies of leaving my husband had always skimmed over the actual moment of departure. I’d never thought about what I might say to him or what our final interactions would look like. Instead I’d just magically wake up in a sunny apartment in Paris or Lisbon, having left all traces of my old life behind.
Now I opened the bathroom door and cautiously stepped outside. My husband was loudly arguing with nobody, gathering objects into a pile as if he were packing for a trip. The scent of weed and tobacco hung in the room.
“Let’s go to lunch,” he said, his voice a blurry mimicry of reasonableness and calm.
This was the moment, I knew, when a certain woman would have gone to him—not a bad woman or a good woman, just a woman whose life was not her own. I had been that woman; now I saw her float toward him, her outline getting thinner, while my own solid body walked to the door.
“I’m going back to the valley,” I said. The doorknob was cold against my hand. Then I was in the bright sunshine, jogging to my car.
I drove to the valley and staggered to my tent just as night was beginning to fall. I sat in the old wicker chair and sobbed, then typed an email to my husband’s parents, telling them that I no longer felt safe around their son and begging them to fly out from the mainland to help him with what looked like the beginning of a psychotic break. In the morning I would drive several miles to the nearest cell signal to send this message.
The next few weeks were a seasick blur. I cried for hours, had nightmares, and lost so much weight I looked anorexic. Worried neighbors brought me protein shakes and scrambled eggs. When I drove to town, my phone pinged with enraged texts from my husband insisting I meet with him; instead I filed for divorce.
In the midst of the chaos, I lost track of my animal; for all I knew, it had run away or died. Then one day I woke up to see that it had returned, a creature far stranger and wilder than I had reckoned, whose proper care and feeding I was only beginning to understand. I had shed so many tears over this animal and made so many sacrifices in its name. I felt a pang of self-consciousness as I considered how little I now had to offer it: this tent patched with duct tape, this lonely valley filled with wind and rain.
Our eyes met. The animal’s gaze was bright and alert. Slowly, carefully, I reached out my hand.
