Dilly

When I first met Dilly, my husband had just left me. He had left me for another woman, but I didn’t know that, not at the time, although it seemed that everyone else knew.

He had a lot of money, my husband, and he satisfied his conscience in regard to me by making sure that I would never have to worry about money–that “my lifestyle wouldn’t have to change” as a result of losing him. I forbade him to use the word “lifestyle” again, taking a sharp pleasure in at least forbidding him certain words. “All right,” he said, “I don’t want you to have to change your way of life.” I realized then that it meant nothing to him at all that I had made him modify his language, and I felt a fool for my brief moment of false triumph.

I was exhausted from fighting a battle that I couldn’t win, and that I didn’t really care that much about winning: what I cared about was not being perceived to have lost. So I gave up, and I indulged myself by hiring a cleaning woman for our house in the Berkshires, although I was the only one there (our children, my children, were far away–one in California, one in Buenos Aires) and I could easily, in some ways, clean up after myself. But I didn’t want to clean up after myself; I wanted someone else to clean up for me. The truth is, I have always been untidy. Tidy people think untidy people are comfortable in their untidiness, and some may be but I was not. My living quarters were important to me, and when they were orderly and clear I was much happier than when they were in disarray; it was simply that keeping them that way was a task I found overwhelming or beyond me, as if someone were asking me to scuba dive without an air tank or a mask.

I told myself that I was making this decision as a sign that I was serious about my writing. I was three-quarters of the way through a novel, and I thought that the best use of my time would be to write compulsively till it was done. The writing would be both a distraction and a satisfaction, and if the book were a success, a fuck you to my husband, who had never created anything but capital and who’d claimed to be “really impressed” by my ability to “make things up out of whole cloth.”

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