After my lover left me, I went a little crazy for a while. What kind of person walks out the door after seven years with a wooden spoon, a spatula, a whisk? For months, I would find myself in the middle of a recipe only to discover that some basic, necessary implement was missing. But at night, after my daughter was in bed, I would settle myself at the computer with a cup of coffee, and till one or two in the morning I would browse the Internet, searching for information about him.
What I did fell between zeal and monomania. At first, I felt guilty, as if somehow he could know. After all, if an e-mail program can tell you whether your message has been opened, maybe a search engine can tell you that someone is checking you out. Still, I would plug his name into Google, Lycos, HotBot, AltaVista, and up would pop, in distilled, allusive, elliptical form, like a haiku or a mathematical curve, everything I should have known: the life behind my life. There on my screen glowed the programs of academic gatherings he had attended going back for a decade: the same female names appeared over and over entwined with his in panel announcements.
Was I even aware that they attended these events together? They were on those panels, too. I had been so out of it! But of course I already knew that. After he left, I walked around my semi-dismantled apartment and interrogated the ghost-squares on the empty walls. Were any of the pictures I had lived with gifts from women he had romanced?
The cat cartoon? The charcoal of sad-looking trees? A splashy abstractionist painter, as a thank-you for writing about her work, had given him a big acrylic of black stripes laid over red swirls, like flames billowing behind an iron grille. He hung it in the living room and refused to take it down when I said I hated it, it reminded me of the gates of Hell. He had left only one art work behind—a colorful picture of two ambiguously sexed people embracing, by a jolly, tough-talking artist we had socialized with when her child and mine were small.
I left her picture up in the bathroom, next to the towel rack. Still, it astonished me that she believed that business about my permitting his philandering.
