The Night My Marriage Fell Apart

I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the big leather chair in our den in the dark, my brain buzzing with jet lag and worry, listening to the sounds that our beautiful, crumbling house made in the night. It was the manse for a long-fallen church, and I’d been taking it apart and putting it back together piece by piece. The spine of our house was a 60-foot beam that ran the length of the basement ceiling, hand-carved from the trunk of an ancient Douglas fir. It was magnificent timber. For more than a hundred years, it had held the weight of however many families. Now it held the weight of mine, and it groaned like a wooden ship.

It was the summer of 2016, and I’d just come home from covering the European Football Championship in France for ESPN, a glorious assignment. I’d been based in Paris, and they’d put me up in a boutique hotel that lent its guests bicycles with baskets on the front for their trips to the boulangerie. When I had a game to cover farther afield, I’d take a fast train to Lyon or Toulouse and maybe stay a night or two and eat outdoors somewhere, and then I’d return to Paris for a few more days in the capital’s sun. I’d take long walks along the Seine and tell myself how lucky I was.

I did not feel lucky. When I had said goodbye to Amy—the crush of my teenage dreams, my wife of 14 years—we cried and hugged and said we’d miss each other, the way we’d done when I’d left for work a thousand times before. But that goodbye felt different. Our marriage was in a bad place, snared in a tangle of resentments. We each had our share of grievances and believed our complaints were more valid than the other’s. Neither of us shifted from our positions, so nothing got fixed. (Amy is a pseudonym.)

We had two young boys: Charley was 10 at the time, and Sammy was 8. Amy thought I wasn’t spending enough time with them, because I wasn’t. I had lost my job at Esquire three months before. It had been my identity as much as my work, and I was feeling a mounting panic, hustling to keep my grip on an industry that was less than robust. I also had our renovation to finish. Amy faulted me for my lack of achievement there, too, complaining about how long I spent restoring a bit of trim or a pane of bubble glass. But I felt like I was going full out, never had enough time in a day. “What do you want me not to do?” I asked when she complained again that I was coming up short, especially as a father. Amy didn’t have an answer, except to tell me that she was tired of living with someone who was always tired, always in a grump. She had me there.

The fall before I’d gone to France, I’d been raking our yard, which was mammoth and took me a week to clean up. I was filling another bag with leaves when Amy opened the door and asked if I’d walked our dog, Kismet. I hadn’t. I’d been raking.

“Can you take her?” I asked.

“Why don’t I just do everything?” Amy said, slamming the door.

I snapped like I never had before, swinging my rake as hard as I could against our fence, breaking both, everything in splinters. I stood in my yard, still surrounded by leaves, and now with a fence to repair and half a rake in my fist. I flung it away and got into my battered little pickup to drive to the hardware store. Two blocks from home, I made up my mind that I didn’t like Amy very much anymore. Another couple of blocks, and I realized that she must have come to the same conclusion about me, a little sooner than I’d arrived at mine.

After that, our marriage limped along, somehow surviving another Canadian winter and an up-and-down spring, and then I left for France. During those long, lonely walks beside the Seine, I had conversations with myself about my state of mind, trying to reason myself into a better place. One afternoon, I stood beside the river and looked up at the Eiffel Tower. It was a perfect day, cloudless and warm. The tower looked almost black against the sky.

Amy and I had fallen in love in Paris. In the summer of 2000, I covered the Tour de France, chasing cyclists through the Pyrenees in a motor home. A few months into our late-blooming romance—we were friends for years before I first kissed her in my apartment kitchen—Amy decided to join me in Paris. I went to the airport to pick her up, excited as a little boy.

I hadn’t been there long when a wildcat strike closed the airport and Amy’s flight was diverted to Brussels. I waited in Arrivals for news, and when it came, it was delivered over loudspeakers in French. From what I could gather, the plane had already deboarded in Brussels when suddenly there had been a window to sneak into Paris after all, and the pilots had called for everyone to scramble back on and then made a break for it, meaning that about half the passengers would arrive shortly in Paris and the other half were stranded in Brussels. I had no way of knowing which half Amy had found herself in.

The passengers were released through sliding glass doors, and the sun filled the terminal with so much light, it was impossible to see the faces of the arriving. They were shapes before they became human beings, rushing into the arms of their loved ones. I was struck by how joyous that little pocket in Arrivals felt. I watched dozens of beautiful reunions. And then, just when I feared that I might have to make a quick scoot to Belgium, Amy walked through the sliding doors and into the light. I ran to her and picked her up off the floor, and any stranger watching us would have thought we were the people most in love in the world.

I looked across the river at the Eiffel Tower and tried to conjure that long-ago moment. It was gone, I feared, for good.

Fiending for anything that resembled hope, I turned to the soccer in front of me. I had loved the game since I was a child, but I was a peculiar kind of fan. I loved soccer the entity, the universe; I was a neutral, an admirer of the game itself rather than of any club or country.

That began to change that lonely summer in Paris. Wales, my dad’s country, had made it to the Euros, their first appearance at a major tournament since the World Cup in 1958. Game after game, my investment in Wales grew, defying anything like reason. By the time they advanced to the round of 16, I began to imagine an almost cosmic connection between me and those players. Heading to their quarterfinal against Belgium in Lille, I stared out my train window and acknowledged the insanity that had taken hold of me. I didn’t want Wales to win; I needed them to win.

Their run was probably doomed to end that stormy night against Belgium. I tried and failed to hold it together during the anthem—“Land of My Fathers” always unbuttons me, especially when it’s sung by a chorus of football or rugby fans—and slipped into my more usual state of resignation when the Belgians scored after only 13 minutes.

Then the Welsh scored twice to claim an unlikely, even miraculous, lead, and I spent most of the second half a different kind of wreck, hoping they could hang on. There is no cheering in the press box, and I could feel the glare of judging eyes while I struggled to stay fastened. The Welsh scored a third with a few minutes left to play, and I was kept in my seat only by the desk in front of me, like the bar that sits across your lap on a roller coaster. When the final whistle came, everything I’d been fighting to bottle came to the surface, all of it rushing out of me at once: happiness, absolutely, but the sadness I’d been struggling to reconcile as well. I was seated next to a friend and colleague named Iain, and I buried my face in his back, sobbing into his jacket until it looked like the Shroud of Turin.

By the time I filed my story and found my way to my hotel, I was spent. I stumbled into the lobby to find three Welshmen standing in the semidarkness together, still in their red jerseys and Wales bucket hats. They were silent and unmoving, refusing to go to bed and dream lesser dreams than the one they were living, and they turned together to look at me and knew. One, bless him, wordlessly opened his arms, and I staggered over and fell into them. I put my face on this strange man’s shoulder and found tears I didn’t think I had left, and soon the four of us were wrapped in a single, heaving embrace. That was one of the great hugs of my life, and it was with three strangers whose names I never knew.

That was the end of a great run. Wales lost their semifinal to Portugal, who would now meet France in the final, and I fell into full-blown misery. I spent a long time walking along the Seine before I worked up the nerve to ask my editor, James, if I could go home early. He expressed surprise: Who covers an entire tournament only to leave before the final? I had already asked myself something similar a thousand times: What is so wrong with me that I don’t want to see France play Portugal for a trophy? James acquiesced when I told him that I needed to go home to save my marriage—and, failing that, my sanity.

I flew to Toronto and then took the train to Port Hope, the pretty lake town we called home. Amy was waiting at the station with Charley and Sammy. My wife looked beautiful, wearing a sundress that waved in the summer breeze. I’d never seen her wear it before. I stepped down from the train and our boys ran into my arms, a reunion unencumbered by anything but love. Then I hugged Amy. She did not hold me or press against me, and I did not lift her. She leaned over and across to me, as though there were an invisible railing between us, and patted my back.

“You look nice,” I said after she pulled away a little too quickly.

“This is how I always look,” she said.

My best friend, Phil, came down from his home in Ottawa for my supposedly triumphant return, and after a couple of gauzy, upside-down days, he and I sat on my porch, mostly in silence. We’d met in high school and had known each other for 25 years. I had always seen friendship as an all-or-nothing proposition, which meant that I’d never had many friends. Phil was one of the few people who had met my standards for loyalty. Even as teenagers, when most boys keep their confused feelings to themselves, we had been unvarnished with each other. Our friendship was one long series of confessions.

“What’s up with you, Jones?” Phil said finally.

I told him how low I’d been feeling, how I’d felt unlucky in France, and how I’d come home early to try to make things right, and I wasn’t going to be able to make things right. I was too late, and I knew it.

“You’re out of your mind,” he said.

Phil knew me. But I knew Amy. Within an hour or two, everyone but me had gone to bed. I didn’t even bother trying to sleep. I sat in my leather chair, listening to my creaking house, until I decided to make use of my wakefulness. Amy’s MacBook was on the coffee table in front of me. I had secured a precious freelance assignment, a profile of Vin Scully, the famed baseball announcer, and I figured I’d do a bit of research online. I picked up Amy’s laptop, dropped back into my leather chair, turned on the brass lamp beside me, and opened the screen.

Amy’s texts appeared immediately, synced to her iPhone. The most recent was from a friend of mine, whom I’ll call Brad. He lived with his own wife and his own two children in his own big old house across town. It was a string of heart emoji.

That’s a little strong, I thought.

Then I saw three dots flash on the screen. Another text was incoming. Amy might have gone to bed, but she was not sleeping. She was texting Brad.

I sat in that leather chair in the lamplight and watched their conversation unfold in real time, text after text. They talked about how much they loved and needed each other, and how much Amy didn’t love or need me anymore. They never referred to me by name. I was either Gargey—short for Gargamel, I later deduced, the evil wizard from The Smurfs—or I was reduced to an anchor emoji. I was not the good kind of anchor, the one that keeps you from crashing into rocks. I was not the anchor as certainty. I was the anchor that drags you to the bottom with it.

Her: I just can’t believe, in moments, that you could feel for me what I do for you. Him: You can believe that, feel that, I look at you that way because it’s you. Her: I don’t know why you think that, but I love that you do. Him: Your husband is selfish, inconsiderate, unappreciative, and arrogant. Her: Yes. I’m more aware than ever. Him: The fact you are so positive, confident, and full of life is a testament to your character despite him. Her: Thank you baby. Her: I work at it. Her: Life’s too short.

Her: I just can’t believe, in moments, that you could feel for me what I do for you.

Him: You can believe that, feel that, I look at you that way because it’s you.

Her: I don’t know why you think that, but I love that you do.

Him: Your husband is selfish, inconsiderate, unappreciative, and arrogant.

Her: Yes. I’m more aware than ever.

Him: The fact you are so positive, confident, and full of life is a testament to your character despite him.

Her: Thank you baby.

Her: I work at it.

Her: Life’s too short.

While I waited for the next three dots to shoot another arrow into my chest, I saw that Amy had been having long exchanges with Phil as well. Fuck it, I thought. I opened them and scrolled my way back into oblivion. Amy had been venting to my best friend about me for months: I was fat, I was moody, I was jobless, I was a loser, I was in France. Phil never came to my defense. He heard her unkindest assessments and agreed with them.

Phil: You deserve better.

Phil: You deserve better.

Amy had found better. For maybe 20 minutes, I watched her profess her new love. Three dots … arrow. Three dots … arrow. Watching that conversation was a physical experience, as visceral as a beating. I was soon lathered in sweat, bile coming up in my throat.

I wanted to close that laptop.

I could not close that laptop.

Instead, I switched into journalism mode, stepping outside of myself as if I were my latest subject. I had written a lot about endings. I liked sad ones the most, or at least bittersweet ones. Someone once called me “a professional eulogist.” I set about documenting just another catastrophic conclusion—taking screenshots, constructing timelines, making notes—and putting together some other sap’s tragic story. I was probably in something like shock. But it was easier for me to record the end of my marriage than reflect upon it, to report on its dissolution than experience it.

At last Amy and her new love said goodnight to each other, looking forward to the day they could leave their respective anchors—his lawyer wife, away that night for work, had been reduced to the same emoji—and be together forever.

Him: Everything we have ever done I want to do again. I like everything I do with you.

Him: Everything we have ever done I want to do again. I like everything I do with you.

I finished the last of my reporting. Then I closed Amy’s laptop and took a long, slow breath before I lifted myself out of my chair and went upstairs. I tiptoed past the doors behind which our children slept and opened the door to our bedroom. The late hour meant that no one thought to spit or shout. I did not vent the rage that coursed through me. There were only whispered recriminations in the dark. My marriage ended with a hiss.

“I saw everything,” I told Amy.

“What are you talking about?” she said, pretending that I’d woken her up.

“We’re done,” I said.

Then I went up some more stairs to the attic, where Phil was crashed out on the floor. I kicked him awake. I told him that our friendship was also over. It was maybe two or three in the morning. “You have until seven,” I said. “If you’re still here, you’re going to leave in an ambulance.”

By then, Amy had already texted Brad that I’d found them out. I demanded her phone, threatening that I’d wake the boys and tell them everything if she didn’t give it to me. I saw those texts, too.

Her: He knows. Her: I’m sorry. Him: You’ve got to be kidding me. Him: We’ve made a huge mistake.

Him: You’ve got to be kidding me.

Him: We’ve made a huge mistake.

Amy and Phil evacuated downstairs to the den. I took Phil’s place in the attic. I texted Brad. His wife was coming home the next day; I told him I was going to sit down with her and show her my accounting of their betrayal. He couldn’t lie his way out. I’d make sure of it. I was going to be his Oppenheimer.

Me: If I see you, I will break you in half.

Me: If I see you, I will break you in half.

Then I remembered Charley and Sammy, still deep in their dreaming, and realized that enough of their universe was about to change without their father going to jail, too. I stayed in the attic, not out of any self-restraint on my part, or anything like nobility. My sleeping boys kept me up there. They were my anchor.

A few minutes before 7 o’clock, I looked down from a window as Phil hugged Amy in our front yard and drove away. My predominant emotion was still anger, and I was overflowing with it. Then I caught my reflection in the window and was surprised to see that anger was not my only feeling. Three months earlier, I had lost my job. In the span of 20 minutes, I had lost my wife and my best friend. In the coming weeks and months, I would lose my house, half my money, and some equal measure of my time with my boys.

I watched the sun peel back the longest night of my life, and I felt my anger already making room for sadness, fear, disbelief. I was 42 years old. Nothing true of my life would be true again.

Read: How I demolished my life

By the end of the summer, my anger had dissipated a little; more sadness rushed in to take its place. I had started to take some of the blame for the end of my marriage with Amy. I was not an easy man to love. We had agreed to a domestic truce, marked mostly by its stillness and silence, each of us lost in our quiet regrets. Whenever we weren’t sure what to do next, I think both of us asked ourselves what was best for Charley and Sammy, the stars by which we now navigated. They were headed back to school in less than a week. We had put it off as long as we could. Amy and I hugged each other in the basement, and it felt like she meant it this time—“We can do this,” she said—before we went upstairs and walked together into the den. She sat on the couch. I sat in the big leather chair. We called out for our boys.

Charley arrived first. He has autism, and he sat down next to Amy holding the trusty bag of books he’s never without. Sammy strutted in, goofing around as though we were going to give him good news, because good news was the only news he’d ever received. He sat on the other side of Amy. I had told myself to keep it together, to not make the scene any more traumatic for them than it had to be. Amy started crying before she got a word out. I started crying too.

“Daddy and I have decided we’re not going to be married anymore,” Amy said. “We’re just going to be friends.”

I’m not sure what Charley registered. He didn’t express any emotion. Sammy made a noise, instantly, that I will never get out of my head, a kind of gasp, all his air coming out of him at once. Then he burst into tears.

Amy and I had both read about the best way to do this terrible thing. The divorce literature was unambiguous. Children are self-centered; they see the world through their wide eyes. The heroes of children’s books are always other children. We told Charley and Sammy that although we were splitting up, nothing about their lives would change. We’d all still live in Port Hope; they would have all the same toys and games; their mummy and daddy still loved them both very much and always would. We were still going to be a family. We would be a family that lived in two homes.

I moved over to the couch, and the four of us hugged one another hard. I loved Amy in that moment. All that mattered was what was best for our children, and I never had to wonder about Amy’s love for our boys. I was never going to have to ask myself if they were being looked after when she had them. She was devoted to them, if not to me, and if I had to choose, that was the choice I would want her to make.

Sammy eventually got his breath back, and we unlocked our arms. All four of us went to our corners to regroup. When we emerged, Amy started putting together dinner; Sammy and I went outside to play soccer, the way we so often did; Charley sat at the kitchen table and dug out some paper and a fat red marker and started to draw.

Out in our yard, I got in net, and Sammy started taking shots on me. It took him a few minutes to find his feet, but soon he was shredding the grass with his usual passion, focused on the ball with the single-mindedness I hoped might save him. When Sammy and I came back inside, red-faced and sweating, Charley handed him a note he’d written with his marker.

Charley can read but can’t write well, his fine motor skills rudimentary. For years we had wondered how he could read when he couldn’t spell. One of his therapists had eventually explained to us that Charley used his ridiculous memory to compensate for his phonetic deficiencies. Charley didn’t read the way we did, by sounding out words. Charley remembered what words looked like, as though he had learned Mandarin rather than English, turning it into a language of shapes rather than syllables. He couldn’t write out words, much like the way I could remember faces but couldn’t draw them. But he knew those words just as well as I did. In Charley’s special way, with his reversed letters and wild misspellings, he told Sammy that everything was going to be okay. “Don’t be sad, brother,” Charley wrote.

Sammy read the note. His bottom lip came out when he did. I stuck Charley’s note on the fridge with magnets. I read it every morning when I got out the milk.

Nearly 10 years after that night in the leather chair, I’ve made a new and different life. I think back to the man I was—such a toxic presence that even my best friend thought my wife deserved better—and feel almost grateful for the cataclysm I suffered because it forced me to make some necessary corrections. I’ve gone on and off medication and made a more lasting commitment to therapy, which, for me, evolved into a larger de-escalation campaign, less about immediate anger management than how I wanted to enter a room in the first place. That was the foundation of the rest of my rebuild. I’ve rescued my finances and friendships, including with Phil, who I greet happily and with hugs; bought a home; fallen in love and become a more attentive father. I also take long walks with a trash claw, picking up garbage.

I first did that at the advice of my therapist, Gary, who thought I might like the sense of accomplishment when I didn’t feel like I was capable of much. Gary was right. No piece was too small, too insignificant, to escape my eagle-eyed attention: gum wrappers, bottle caps, the little yellow strings that unwrap the cellophane from cigarette packs. Sometimes people walked past and looked at me sideways, like I was part of a prison work-release program. Other people called out their encouragement, and I tried to pocket their kind attention along with my next beer can, my next coffee cup, my next white plastic spork.

While I was making my rounds, I sometimes saw other men doing the same thing. They were always older, always alone. We never spoke, but we saluted one another with our trash claws, like veterans of some forgotten foreign war acknowledging one another’s service. I wondered whether they were also Gary’s patients. It’s possible, I thought, that he had grander plans, and he was assembling an army of wounded men, setting us loose on the world with trash claws.

One afternoon, about a year after Amy and I split up, Gary asked me what my motivation was. I’d just shown him pictures of the piles of garbage I’d picked. I was better than I had been, but I was still angry at Amy and scared enough about my future to feel the need to stifle my emotions, distracting myself from my still-constant low boil by scouring the lakeshore for discarded fishing line and bits of Styrofoam. Back then, at least, those bags of trash were my only proof of progress, and all I wanted from Gary was a little praise. “What do you mean?” I asked him, more sharply than he deserved. “My motivation?”

“When you’re working, when you’re writing, what’s in your mind?”

That was a stupid question. My work was in my mind. I worked because I needed to work, because I needed money to buy things, and writing was the easiest way I could imagine making a living. If there was something other than writing that would pay me more and allow me to continue living without alarm clocks, I would do that instead. My dream job, it turned out, was picking up litter. I was a virtuoso with that trash claw. I could happily do that all day.

“That’s not true,” Gary said. “You don’t just do it for money.”

“I kind of do, actually.”

Gary shook his head. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

I stopped again, and Gary didn’t try to fill the void. I had to give him credit—he was good at silence. I had learned the value of quiet during my own interviews. Most people, confronted with silence, will find it uncomfortable and try to occupy it. I want my subjects to talk. Silence can be a useful tool to make them.

Gary was quiet. He waited.

I filled the silence. I told Gary that he had mistaken me for a different kind of writer, for an artist. I wasn’t an artist. I’d always thought of my work as manual labor. I liked how it felt to write a good sentence, the way it feels satisfying to cut a perfect dovetail or find the most efficient way to run pipe. I thought of words as parts, and I liked how words looked when they fit together well. I didn’t believe in muses, or divine inspiration, or writer’s block, or any of the other tropes that writers use to make procrastination an affliction rather than a choice. If an electrician showed up at my house and announced that he wasn’t “feeling it,” I’d tell him to get over himself and start unspooling wire. I felt that way about writing. It was a job, and I did it as well as I could so that I could keep doing it until I didn’t have to do it anymore, when I wouldn’t.

“Did you always feel that way?” Gary asked.

No, I don’t suppose I did. When I was young, my mum caught me copying out a book—word for word, line by line—and she’d worried that I was plagiarizing it for a school assignment. I told her I was copying it for fun, for the beauty of it, and she seemed worried, as though she’d passed on a disorder. She was an English teacher, and her love for grammar bordered on the maniacal; I watched her grading assignments, and I saw the agony she suffered with every misplaced comma, every incorrect homonym. By the time I was a teen, I had fallen in my own love with words, enraptured by their simple power. My friends wanted to be carpenters, mechanics, doctors, athletes. I couldn’t tell them I wanted to be a writer, so I wrote stories I never showed anyone. I would have rather someone caught me masturbating, my other principal obsession at the time. But behind locked doors, on pads of paper in the middle of the night, I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, every word a testament to my secret love, every word a private expression of it.

“But that must happen to people all the time,” I said. “You get tired.”

Gary nodded. “Sure,” he said. “So let me ask you again: What’s kept you going?”

Now I really did think about the answer.

I had never really thought about it, but everything I did in my life, everything I valued, was a competition. That was the essence of soccer to me, the game’s only lesson for the first 40 years I had played and followed it. Soccer was a fight, and either you won or you lost (or you tied, which was another kind of loss). Everything else followed; everything had a side to it. Once, I had copied out books because I loved words so much. The next thing I knew, I saw words as weapons.

“I’ll show you,” I said to Gary. “That’s what I think when I write.”

“Do you see what’s happening here?” he said. “Every motivation you’ve talked about is negative. It’s either fear or it’s anger.”

“It’s worked,” I said. I had lots of trophies on my shelves and plaques on my wall.

“Has it, though?” Gary asked.

“It did until it didn’t, I guess.”

“So why don’t we try to find you a different, more positive source of motivation? Doesn’t that sound better? Doesn’t that sound healthier?”

I made a face. “Like what?” I asked.

Gary was quiet, and he waited.

This article was adapted from Chris Jones’s Legs Hearts Minds.

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