They Called It Love Anyway

The separation packet arrived in a white envelope thick enough to make the mail slot clap when it dropped onto the tile inside the front door.

Cynthia stood in the hall with one hand on the banister and looked at it before she picked it up. The envelope had Julian’s name and hers printed on a label, both names spelled correctly, both names sitting on the same line as if the paper had not noticed that one of them was already trying to leave the other. The return address belonged to a law office downtown, a suite number above a bank, and the flap had been sealed with the kind of pressure that left a faint shine along the glue.

She carried it to the kitchen because serious papers had begun to require the kitchen. The dining room was too formal. The den was Julian’s territory even when he was not in it. The bedroom had become a place where she listened to him breathe and tried to decide whether breath counted as staying. The kitchen still had counters, sink, towels, ordinary light, the bowl, the telephone, the place where a person could stand and do something with her hands.

Inside the envelope were copies. Not originals. Copies made from originals she had not been allowed to see first. Temporary separation agreement. Disclosure schedule. Preliminary division of household property. Banking summary. Suggested communication protocol.

Communication protocol made her laugh once, a short sound with no humor in it.

The first page began with both names again. The second page referred to them as parties. By the third page she had become Wife and Julian had become Husband, each word capitalized until it sounded less like a person than a small office. Husband shall maintain. Wife shall vacate if. Husband and Wife shall refrain from unnecessary contact. Temporary possession of the residence shall be determined by mutual agreement or court order.

She read shall five times before the word stopped meaning anything except a hard little gate closing in one sentence after another.

Julian came home at six-thirty with his briefcase in his left hand and his coat over his right arm. He paused at the kitchen entrance when he saw the pages spread across the table. He did not look surprised. He looked as if he had expected exactly this.

Julian stopped at the end of the table. “You got the envelope.”

Cynthia tapped the first page with one finger. “I got a packet from your lawyer.”

“I asked them to send copies so we could go through it.”

“You asked them before you asked me.”

“Cynthia—”

“No. Tell me what ‘standard’ means. Standard for which one of us?”

He put his briefcase down beside the chair he no longer sat in unless the conversation belonged to him. The brass latches clicked at the same time, a neat small sound that made her teeth touch. He took off his coat and folded it over the back of the chair instead of hanging it in the hall closet, and the choice seemed intimate in the wrong direction, as if he were staying for the discussion but not staying in the house.

Julian rested one hand on the chair back. “We need some structure if we’re going to get through this.”

“We had a structure.”

He looked at the pages between them. “We had a situation we kept pretending was a structure.”

She looked down at the pages because if she kept looking at his face she would begin asking him which word had been hers and which word the lawyer had given him. Situation. Arrangement. Protocol. Vacate. Refrain. He stood near the table with his hands at his sides, clean cuffs showing, watch against bone, his wedding ring still on his finger and already no longer proof of anything.

After a moment he said, “You can keep the bowl.”

She looked at him then.

“It’s listed,” he said, reaching for the property schedule.

“Don’t touch it.”

He stopped. Not because she frightened him. He could hear the professional steadiness in her voice: nurse, receptionist, woman at a counter who made people stop and listen. He had once liked that in her. He had called it steadiness. Now he treated it as another problem to manage.

Cynthia folded the first page along a crease that was not there yet. The crease cut through Husband and Wife at the same angle. She pressed it flat with two fingers until the paper held the wound.