The Toast
Elon and I had been married for two years when I heard, through a phone he thought he’d hung up, exactly what my husband thought of me. And in the space of about ninety seconds, standing in my own kitchen with my newborn daughter’s bottle warming beside me, my entire understanding of my life came apart.
But I’m going to make you wait for that, just a little, the way I made him wait. Because to understand the toast I gave that Sunday, the toast that ended one life and began another, you have to understand the six days of silence that came before it, and the two years that came before that, and the woman I had slowly, without noticing, allowed myself to become.
My name is Grace. I was thirty when I married Elon, thirty-two when Sophie was born, and for most of those two years of marriage I had been quietly, gradually, disappearing.
I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because it’s true, and because it’s the real subject of this story, more than the affair, more than the betrayal. The affair was just the thing that finally made me look up and see how far I’d faded.
Elon was charming. That was the first thing everyone said about him, and it was true, and it was, I would come to understand, also a kind of warning I’d been too flattered to hear. He was charming in the way that some people are charming, which is to say that his warmth was a resource he deployed strategically, turned up bright when he wanted something and switched off the moment he had it. When we were dating, that charm was aimed entirely at me, and it was intoxicating, and I mistook the intensity of his pursuit for the depth of his love. I didn’t understand yet that a man who pursues you like that is often more interested in the winning than in the having.
We married. And slowly, so slowly I couldn’t point to the day it started, the charm turned away from me. Not toward cruelty, at first. Toward absence. Elon worked, or said he worked, longer and longer hours. He was building his career, he told me, doing it for us, for our future, and I believed him, because why wouldn’t I, because that’s what you do when you love someone, you believe them.
