If You Only Knew. Kristan Higgins
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important to him, and even if we weren’t working out (news to me), it would kill him if this was the end.
I’m still not sure if that was kind or incredibly selfish of him. I’ve been going with kind.
I moved out of our apartment the day after Owen told me he didn’t want to stay married, and it felt like I’d slept through the apocalypse. The air had seemed too heavy to breathe, and panic had flashed through me in razor-wire slices. How can I do this? How can I do this? How can we be apart? How can he not want me anymore? What the fuck went on here? Where was I when it all went to hell?
The only island on the horizon had been the idea that the following week, I’d be having lunch with him.
You may think I’m quite an ass for hanging around, hoping for a few kind words. I understand. I feel that way myself quite often. The thing is, there will be a lot of kind words. Let’s not even bring up the great food those two always have on hand.
Owen still asks about my work. He loves my sister and nieces and mother. He thinks I’m pretty and funny and smart. He admires my creativity. We have a similar sense of humor. Conversation comes easily, and since the day I met him, and even through our quickie divorce and his marriage, I have yet to go three days without hearing from him. Even when he’s been in a third-world country with Doctors Without Borders. Even now.
So. Being Owen’s ex-wife is still better than any relationship I’ve ever had, except for one—when I was his actual wife.
It’s not just his job—Dr. Perfect of the Great Hands and Compassionate Heart. It’s not just his looks, which sure don’t hurt. I always had a thing for Ken Wantanabe, after all.
It’s all those things and just how golden he is. How privileged I felt as the chosen one, Owen Takahashi’s wife.
In most marriages, lust and love become tempered by normalcy. If you hear your husband farting in the bathroom seconds before he emerges and asks if you want to fool around, you generally don’t want to fool around. You might, after a few minutes, but you have to forgive your husband for…well, for being human. For eating a bean burrito. After all, you ate the bean burrito, too.
You discover his irritating habits. He uses your shampoo and doesn’t mention when it’s gone. He leaves his workout clothes in a sweaty pile in the bathroom. When his parents visit, he runs out to the package store around the corner to buy his dad’s favorite beer, even though you reminded him yesterday to pick it up, and that errand takes him ten times as long as it should, and you have to text him twice to say Where the hell are you? Your mother wants to know why I’m not pregnant yet! and he doesn’t respond, claiming not to have received that text when he finally walks in the door.
Maybe he grunts at you when he comes in home from work, but he gets down on all fours and croons to the dog for ten minutes, using that special voice that sounds vaguely familiar because he used to use it for you.
Maybe he’s just boring, and you sit across the table from him night after night as he drones on and on about the tuna sandwich he had at lunch, amazed that this man is the reason you didn’t go into the Peace Corps.
Yeah. But it was never like that with Owen and me. I’m serious.
If he was sick, which hardly ever happened, he insisted on staying in the guest room—and using the guest bathroom. I’d make him soup and he’d accept it, but the man is a doctor, and the last thing he wanted to do was spread germs. A day or two later, he’d emerge, clean and showered, and he’d apologize for his downtime, and then make me dinner.
But if I was sick…oh, happy day! I loved being sick. And here’s a secret. In the five years Owen and I were married, I was never once sick. Just don’t tell him that.
I admit, I was feeling a little neglected one night. I’d made a really nice dinner, but he was late coming home from rebuilding children’s faces, so I could hardly complain, could I? As the risotto coagulated on the stove, I waited. He texted that he’d be half an hour late. After half an hour, he texted again. So sorry. Closer to 8. At 8:30 p.m., he came through the door. I pretended not to mind, but I’d had this fabulous call—Bride magazine was featuring one of my dresses on the cover, and I’d been saving the news all day long, because I wanted to tell him in person.
So I poured the wine and Owen and I sat down—I’d set the table beautifully—and we ate the now-gelatinous and slimy risotto, which Owen proclaimed delicious. He was late, he explained, because he’d had to rebuild a child’s nose in a particularly difficult surgery, and he’d wanted to stay until the little guy woke up from anesthesia, and then the little guy wanted to play Pokémon with Owen, and he just couldn’t say no, and the parents were crying with amazement that their son was once again so beautiful and would no longer have to endure the stares and cruelty of the unkind, and the horrible fire that took the kid’s nose could now be a memory and not a flashback every time the kid thought about, touched, saw or had someone look at his face.
The cover of Bride now seemed pretty unimportant.
“Is something wrong, darling?” Owen finally asked.
And because I couldn’t say I’m tired of you being so damn perfect, especially when I made risotto! I said, “No, no.” Pause. “I’m not feeling that great. I’m sorry, babe.”
“Oh, no! I’m sorry! And here I’ve been going on so long! What’s the matter, honey?”
I spewed out a few made-up symptoms—aches, some chills, a sore head—feeling perversely happy with my lie and my husband’s subsequent guilt and attention. He tucked me into bed, found a movie I loved, then went to clean up the kitchen. “I’m running out for a few minutes,” he called. “You need anything?”
“No,” I said, immediately peeved once again. Stupid hospital.
But he returned fifteen minutes later with a pint of the notoriously hard-to-find Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Brittle ice cream. My favorite. “I thought this might be the best medicine,” he said with that sweet smile. Then he lay on the bed next to me as I ate straight from the carton. Later, we held hands. There was no guest-room sleeping for me, no sir. Owen wanted to be close, in case I needed him. He stroked my hair as I fell asleep, told me he loved me.
And he did. But he never needed me. I didn’t complete him. He felt we both deserved more.
All those other marriages—those imperfect marriages with their smelly bathrooms—had something ours didn’t. That moment when you’ve had the worst day ever, and you come home, and you can’t go one more step without a long, hard hug from your spouse. Only they have the arms that will do. Only they really understand.
I don’t think Owen ever had a day when his life was in the shitter. When we met, he was already a star resident, on his way to greatness. And when I had a crappy day, when someone shot down my work, or when a buyer treated me like an assembly-line worker, when a bride had a tantrum because I had done exactly what she asked, I felt as if my complaints were petty and unimportant. After all, I still had my nose, didn’t I?
I told myself that it was good, keeping things in perspective. In order to have interesting things to talk about with my husband, the heroic saver of faces, the smiter of deformities, the changer of lives, I’d listen to TED Talks on my computer while I worked. I’d read important novels. Listen to NPR in order to have interesting things to contribute to our dinner conversations.
But I never let myself have regular feelings when I was with Owen. I was almost afraid to bitch about Marie, the mean and less-talented designer who trashed me to our coworkers after Vera told me my work was “glorious.” When a homeless man peed himself on the subway, and I only noticed because it leaked into my own seat, it was such a sad and horrifying occurrence that I wept as I gave him all the money in my wallet to the disapproving stares of my fellow riders. I cried all the way home and took a forty-five-minute shower. Threw that skirt in the trash and triple bagged it. It was one of my favorites.
But I didn’t tell Owen. He’d just returned from Sri Lanka, fixing faces marred by war, after all. My brush with the homeless