Comfort by Ann Hood

Author:Ann Hood [Hood, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE THING ABOUT MARRIAGE IS, you’re not supposed to leave. You stand up in front of a hundred of your best friends and closest family members and promise them and the person you’re marrying that you will stick it out. No matter what. I know people don’t. All the time. I was even one of those people a couple years earlier, a person who left a marriage after five years. And having left one, the pressure to stay in the next one is even greater.

The thing about this marriage of mine was I wanted it to work. I really love my husband. He is handsome and kind and thoughtful and romantic and passionate and smart. Every year he makes my anniversary present out of our wedding picture, translated into paper or glass, whatever material tradition deems that year’s gift is. It gives me real pleasure to watch the shelf where they sit gather more of these gifts—me clutching a bouquet of white tulips, both of us looking younger as time passes, our faces free of the pain and loss waiting for us just up ahead, those grins captured in tin and wood and cotton. I am happy to watch these accumulate, marking off another year together.

Still, for some time, I missed the life I had left behind. I missed walking down Bleecker Street before the city woke up, the quiet of Manhattan in the early morning, the smell of espresso and sugary pastries drifting from old Italian cafés; I missed the ballet class I took two mornings a week with its crazy array of NYU students, injured ballerinas, and plain old New Yorkers like me; I missed the noise from the street that played like a lullaby when I went to sleep at night; I missed the graduate students who crowded my apartment every Tuesday night for pasta and wine and discussions about writing fiction; I missed the friends I met for coffee, the friends I met for beer, the ones who fed my cats when I went out of town, and the ones who walked for hours with me on Sunday afternoons.

I missed all of it. I struggled to navigate the car through the strange and sudden one-way streets that littered my new city. I struggled to make friends. I wondered where a person bought good cheese here, where to find a movie theater that played foreign films, where the good independent bookstores were. I loved my husband, but every day when he put on his suit and walked out the door, I missed my real life, the one with lunches with magazine editors and book parties and other writers flopping on my sofa wondering if our new manuscripts would ever get finished.

I had promised my husband and all those people at my wedding that I wouldn’t leave, but whenever we had a disagreement or a full-out fight, I imagined packing my bags and getting on Amtrak to Penn Station. Sometimes, I said it out loud: “I’m leaving! I’m

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