A screening interview with the American Consulate—anywhere, I’d imagine, but ours happened to take place in Madrid—makes you feel like you’ve done something wrong, criminal, even if you can’t remember what. Even though we knew where the moles and the birthmarks were. Knew the mutual preferred breakfast cereals (muesli, for Husband #1—he was kind of paranoid about what he ate, an obsessive self-carer before that became a Thing: we will be hearing more about these Self-Carer tics in future posts—a li’l sum’n for y’all, my dear and faithful readers, to look forward to… I like to keep you happy). We each knew how the other took her or his coffee, and mothers’ maiden names.

The consulate detected no crime. It stamped Husband #1’s papers and welcomed him to America. I have never seen a man so close to jumping right outside of his very own self—he wasn’t hugging me, he was hugging New York (I know that now, I kind of didn’t then). I have never seen a man take such care with a folder full of papers. He got nervous if I tried to touch them. Oh, hindsight, hindsight…

We spent the week prior to our departure para los Estados Unidos in Madrid, lodging in a cheap hotel just off the Gran Vía. Right around the corner from where all the hookers—at that time, there were still Spanish ones among all the dominicanas and peruanas and Eastern Europeans—used to strut their stuff.

There was a lot of sex that week; maybe it was the proximity of the prostitutes. I had the strange, out-of-body feeling that it wasn’t really me there, in the bed with him (or over the desk or in the shower). I felt like my name had been changed, maybe to Manhattan.

We spent the majority of that week, especially the nights, in various altered states, pretty much 24/7, saying goodbye to (my) friends (he didn’t really have any friends in Madrid: red flag, hello, anyone paying attention? No one was…). We did this in living rooms over coffee and hashish, in restaurants and bars and clubs over food and drinks and more drinks, dragging ourselves home as the earliest risers, generally those with the bluest collars, headed off to work. At the restaurants and the bars and the clubs, incidentally, my friends were always paying; I don’t think they let me pull my wallet out once. Their finances were far less precarious than mine, they were mostly stewards and stewardesses working for Iberia at a time when being flying hosts and hostesses actually pulled down a decent income, and they loved me. For that reason, they also paid Husband #1’s tab, and I tried—usually reasonably successfully, we drank a lot—to squelch the discomfort provoked in me by his failure, even once, to pay for a meal or a round of drinks for the group.

Instead he tried, unsuccessfully (at the time, I felt anxious about this lack of success; now I am glad of it), to sell them paintings. His reasoning: he was shortly to become a Famous Artist in New York, so this was an investment for them, one they shouldn’t pass up. I’m only half kidding. Actually I really think he thought that.

Umm, right.

I used the word opportunist in the last post, and I will use it again in this one. Opportunist, and very, very unsubtle about beating opportunities out of the bushes. And if he didn’t see an opportunity anywhere conveniently nearby, couldn’t scare one up, he’d make one.

In fact, there were crimes committed in that Screening Interview. The first was Husband #1’s: today, looking back over the trajectory of our sad marriage, I believe he knew exactly what he was doing, from the moment he first spotted me in Barajas airport, waiting to board that plane to Rome, to the very last (about which you shall hear, dear reader, you certainly shall; all in good time). He was getting to New York, however he could get there, using whatever means necessary. The fact that the vehicle, those necessary means, just happened to be a beautiful woman he didn’t mind screwing, was whipped cream on top of the béchamel.

The second crime was mine against myself. If Husband #1 was an obsessive self-carer avant la lettre, I was the exact opposite. I offer you, dear readers, the theory that this marriage-that-wasn’t-really-one was merely the latest in a series of sentimental/romantic situations into which I let myself be drawn, that some part of me could see way ahead of time would turn out badly, but which some other part of me felt, in some inexplicable way, that I deserved. I’ve mentioned in previous posts—though not sure how many of my Bad, Bad Love readers saw them—that I am a survivor of sexual violence. Let’s just call it what it was—rape. Bad. Violent. It left scars. I’m lucky to be alive. I never reported it. I never got counseling. It happened while I was living in Cairo, though it did not happen in Cairo. When I got back to Cairo, I boxed it up and stuffed it into the deepest, darkest closet of myself, and then proceeded to drink enough—contrary to popular belief, it is not all that hard to drink, and drink well, in Cairo if you know what you’re doing—to forget where I’d hidden the key. But it doesn’t take an advanced degree in psychology to draw the lines straight from this pretty much undigested trauma to the strange, truncated, unhappy string of relationships I’ve made for myself throughout my adult life, and to the modus vivendi I have finally adopted. I attempted, very very belatedly, to put it to rest by giving a very similar incident to Jes, the main character of my debut novel BIRDS OF WONDER, to shoulder, and I think to some degree I succeeded (it took me a very long time—years, even—to realize what that novel was actually about…).

But I digress.

The last night in Madrid we went to an extra-nice restaurant, and an extra-long string of clubs, each one with its muscular, shiny-pated bouncer and swank velvet ropes. I hugged my friends, over and over again. At every club, a fresh round of hugs, dances with each one, dances with us all together (Husband #1 watched from the edge of the dance floor. Actually he watched all the dancers). When we left, finally, for the hotel, I cried.

In the hotel room, I sobbed, disconsolate and not able to offer a coherent explanation as to why. Husband #1 tried for a while to comfort me. Then he wanted to have sex—he was hot for Ms. Manhattan—and I pushed him away.

I think, in retrospect, that that push might have broken something. If so, it was a very, very fragile something.

We were leaving. Really leaving. We were flying a kind of stand-by that no longer exists—the people who decided to weaponize planes ruined that for us, along with so, so much more—and we had our seats already confirmed (in the back row, predictably, next to the restrooms) on a flight from Barajas to JFK for the next day, around noon. We were leaving.

Or rather I was—I was the one leaving behind something I loved, a place I loved, people I loved. He was following an opportunity—one that he had found, even created—toward a new life that would include that opportunity, take her into account, as long as she was handy, convenient. As long as he felt like screwing her. As long as screwing her felt like screwing Manhattan itself.

The ride would last for a couple of years, anyway, and I’m about to take you on it. Buckle up.

Thanks for reading, my friends. Sorry if this was a little brutal. I’m counting on the holiday weekend sending me less website traffic than usual, and I just needed to get this stuff off my chest.

Catch you next week, from the Big Apple itself. I’m betting the memory pot will be stirred, if only by the giant, unforgiving spoons of Proximity, Hindsight, and Regret.