The Agreement

PROPERTY SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT

THE AGREEMENT dated the ________ day of _________ ,
2019, by and between X, hereinafter referred to as “she/her,”
A
  N
    D
Y, hereinafter referred to as “he/him.”

WITNESSETH THAT:

WHEREAS, the parties hereto were committed on a day when both X and Y were in a crisis. A low point in their lives where events forced an unlikely partnership.

X had fled from the Southwest to New York City to sober up from a love addiction with a man who secretly had a vasectomy. Imagine the feelings of betrayal. X, all her life, wanted children, to ensure the lineage of X’s mother’s family that could be traced back hundreds of years, to a time when the original colonizers had set foot on their land and ravaged her community. Her great-great-great-great-grandmother was one of the only survivors. It was X’s responsibility to make sure no one forgot what had happened to X’s people. They will pay, is what X’s family said every night at dinner instead of prayer.

Y had been given one last chance by his hopeful and all-loving gallerist to prove Y’s self as an artist in one of the most important art fairs in New York. His gallerist saw himself in Y. He, too, had grown up working-class and had had to charm his way into the bourgeoisie. He too had black behind the ears and had to cut himself off from all he knew to find acceptance in the art world that he discovered was funded by the fascists, inheritors of those who rounded up members of his own people and threw them in cages, investors of corrupt companies who in the end became rich by exploiting his community. For the gallerist, if Y succeeded, the compromises he had made to succeed would absolve him. For five solid years the gallerist wholeheartedly believed that it would just take one collector, one curator, one influential critic, one museum show, just one, to launch Y’s career. Y was full of promise and potential. Y could surely play in the big leagues if only someone, anyone, would give him a chance. But when Y failed once again to sell any of his works at the Armory Show in New York, to offset the extraordinary investment the gallerist had made, the gallerist finally understood that he didn’t have the power and influence to break Y out. The gallerist was deeply in debt. The patronage was over. Y was on his own, devastated and alone.

Oh, Witness, you’ve read enough stories to know that for a love addict like X, who had escaped to New York City to pull the nail out of her heart, she will undoubtedly grab another nail to replace it. Ache begets ache. And imagine Y and his heartbreak. The one person in the world who believed in Y had given up on him. X met Y when he understood he was doomed to failure. Even if many at the art fair had said again and again that Y’s work was among the best of all the fair, not one of the collectors took a risk and bought Y’s work. Instead he was given advice to consider that in today’s art market it’s best to make work that people want to post on Instagram. Something large, something that pops on a cell phone screen. Y’s work was impossible to photograph, it had to be experienced. In fact, Y believed that it would take a great poet to convey how the heart is moved when in the vicinity of his masterpieces.

This is when it happens, the birth of something, when you thirst, when the belly growls, when the streets are bombed, when the walls come down, when the earth cracks open.

This is how X found Y, on a bench, in a park, near the art fair. Both devastated. Both heartbroken.

I must make art. I must make art, Y said repeatedly. What would the world be without art? Unbearable! It’s all I know how to do.

I must make a baby. I must make a baby, said X. My ancestors will never forgive me if I fail at this.

WITNESSETH THAT:

WHEREAS, the parties have resolved that it is impossible to continue the relationship between them for reasons known to them, and X intends to file a Complaint of Divorce in the Court of Common Pleas.

Reasons known to them:

Because in the ten years of marriage Y was continually unhappy and X couldn’t take it anymore. Because Y had some shows but they weren’t reviewed. Because Y was reviewed but the reviewer wasn’t intelligent enough to understand the complexity of what he was doing in his work. Because Y didn’t have enough money to make the kind of art he knew he could make if only someone gave Y the chance. Because Y felt like a loser because when filing his income taxes, Y had not made a profit for so many years that his art making was deemed a hobby. Because all the art shows Y went to were awful. Because all the artists Y saw in museums and galleries were not as good as Y. Because nobody cares about art anymore, they only care about making money.

So Y, for two weeks at a time, would lie down on the sofa with a pillow over Y’s head, only to get up to open another wine bottle. The stench in the house from him not bathing was so bad X left all the windows open, even in the cold of winter, and she would curl up by herself in the guest bedroom with a space heater blasting near her bed, counting the hours and days till the depression would lift. During X’s bouts of insomnia she read countless articles on how excessive drinking lowered testosterone levels and affected the quality and quantity of the sperm. Y rarely had a hard-on. And now X had geriatric eggs. The clock ticked. All of X’s ancestors were drumming their fingers waiting and waiting for the unborn child.

WITNESSETH THAT:

WHEREAS, it is the desire and intention of the parties, after long and careful consideration, to amicably adjust, compromise and settle all property rights.

Before a character can make a big decision, they must face a real dilemma. But before that, they have to experience the kind of disaster that leaves them with no good choice.

I make art to not kill myself, Y says. I make art to make love to myself. It’s a Pygmalion love, the art loves the art loves the art loves the art. Y can’t make art when Y is depressed. Y seems to always be depressed.

X wishes for Y to punch her. To cheat on her. Something she could use against him to walk out. Her mother tells her, isn’t it enough that you’re not happy?

X finds Y one day in a dark apartment dehydrated from binge drinking. The gas burners are on. The windows are shut. X had been away for the day, not even 24 hours. Y did threaten that if X left him alone Y would kill himself. X took the chance. Who says they will kill themselves and actually does it?

X turns off the burners and oven. Y is not dead. The house stinks of the benign mixture of methane and ethane. X learns later that natural gas is not even that lethal. It would take days for anyone to die from it, for the gas to displace the oxygen or for the gas to reach the pilot light and explode. The smell would kill you first. Even this, Y failed at. In the old movies before natural gas, the suicidally inclined would sit on lazy chairs and wait for death to come. The old stove gas was a mix of methane, hydrogen and carbon monoxide. It didn’t take much for it to saturate the blood and starve the brain and nervous system from oxygen. Just a few breaths of it could knock anyone out. A few minutes exposed to it could kill a man. But natural gas?

Suicide hotline:

Operator: How can I help you?
Y: I want to kill myself.
O: How long have you been feeling this way?
Y: Weeks, months, I don’t know.
O: Did something happen?
Y: The art world is full of fascists. The museums are funded by fascists. The gallerists go to parties with fascists. Publicly the artists spit on the fascists but in the end they want the fascists to love them.
O: Are you safe? Are you alone?
Y: I am at home. I am not alone. My wife is here beside me. She made me call you. She says she doesn’t want me to kill myself. I don’t believe her.

Oh, dear witness, maybe you empathize with X who is the one filing for the divorce, who has had to put up with ten years of marriage to someone who buried X in so much debt she may never be able to buy herself a house of her own, who for a quarter of her life has felt trapped and alone inside an apartment with Y. Or maybe her choice to stay in such a marriage for so long makes you angry and think, she made her own bed. No one is trapped. She could have left years ago. But this you must know: X was afraid to trigger another bout of rage, another possible suicide attempt, and then how would X live with herself?

Now you must be wondering what can possibly happen next in this story. We already know that X and Y will get a divorce. But before that decision is made, X will have to work through all the pros and cons. This is the part of the story where a character works through their dilemma before they make their final irrevocable decision.

Reasons to divorce:

• X no longer wants to invest in potential. Even the gallerist understood when to cut Y off. Instead X wants to save for retirement.
• Y no longer believes in his potential. He hates X for making him dependent on her. They were once a team, or so he thought.
• X and Y no longer have sex. Y wants to have sex when he is not depressed. X never wants to have sex with Y. Instead she prefers her vibrator and watching porn of women sitting on each other’s faces.
• X has come to believe it will be easier for X to have a baby on her own, because at least then she’ll only have one other mouth to feed.
• X is tired of men. Could she ever love a man again? They all stink. They all seem to be predators. They all just want to talk about themselves. She no longer wants to be their servant, their trophy, their whore.
• Y regularly gets anonymous blow jobs and the shame and guilt makes it impossible for him to look X in the eye.
• X and Y rarely eat meals together.
• X and Y no longer sleep in the same bed.
• Y no longer wants to bring a child into this unjust world. X wants a child. This is a nonnegotiable.
• X realizes she married her father.
• Y realizes he married his mother.

Reasons to stay:

• Despite how much X suffers, a part of her finds Y’s angry outbursts and verbal abuse pleasurable. Sometimes when Y gets very angry, X pokes at Y so the anger swells, and all his rage feels like a familiar blanket that she can curl up under. She knows all the triggers and shoots them off and watches them blow up around her. 
• Y has realized with time that the humiliation and emasculation that come with being with a woman like X, who pays for everything and makes him feel bad about it, is part of his erotic.
• X does not want to disappoint her mother, who says men are no good yet never left her husband, who punched her in the eye, sending her to the hospital, making her miss three days of work, just because she flirted with the butcher in exchange for the best cut of meat.
• X’s parents also don’t believe in divorce. Promises are made to be kept.
• X loves their rent-stabilized apartment in a prime location in New York City. They both have rights to it. Y can’t afford to move. X is afraid she will have to pay alimony to Y who has never held a “real” job.
• Y is afraid he will never find someone as generous as X.
• X is afraid she will end up alone .

WITNESSETH THAT:

When they married, they made promises to each other. X takes Y and Y takes X to be husband and wife, for better for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, til death do us part. They made a promise at the courthouse. They made a promise in private. I will love you forever. I will never give up on you. We will fight for our love until the end.

X understands that alcoholism is a disease and depression is a mental illness. If she had been afflicted by either, wouldn’t she also want to be loved and taken care of unconditionally? Besides, shouldn’t artists be given some kind of pass? Can they really make great art without being reckless, being that they are so sensitive to the human condition and the workings of the world?

X wonders if she is being a capitalist asshole because she isn’t taking into account that making art is real work. Hard work in fact. One doesn’t have to make money for their work to count, right? She worked as a manager at a restaurant. She found her work fulfilling. She got paid well for it. But is it really Y’s fault that some jobs get rewarded monetarily and others don’t?

Oh witness, you must be wondering, why did X file the divorce papers now and not years ago, when it’s clear she has been miserable for a long time? Is it enough to say that every month when she was ovulating, she had hoped that that would be the month she would get pregnant? In truth, despite it all, X really did believe that Y would hit it big, and all their sacrifices would be worth it, and that finally his depression would lift and that they would live happily ever after. And of course, like any difficult relationship they did have good moments, great moments even, like when he would massage her feet while they laughed over something on TV.

In moments like those, X would think, maybe they should wait it out after all. How many people have weathered through the hard moments in their relationships, given each other enough space to get to the other side of it, and fallen back in love? At the very least they may become great life companions. It’s possible, right?

But then X gets pregnant.

For years X was no longer interested in having sex with Y, but when Y climbed into her bed, she would pretend to sleep and let him fuck her from behind. Her body still, a heavy mass on the mattress. He’d grab her hips and thrust himself inside her, and she imagined the sperm finding its way to her fertile eggs, although geriatric, like the countless videos she watched on YouTube about reproduction.

When she peed on a stick and the plus sign emerged, she understood immediately that she wanted to have the child alone. If she stayed with Y, she would be trapped inside this marriage forever. He would make it so she would have to take care of him and the baby for another decade, maybe a lifetime, and then it would be too late to ever leave him. They would grow old, holding on to their rent-stabilized apartment, and they would watch everything in it decay, like their bodies. Their child would hate them for being miserable together and ruining his or her possibility of ever having a loving relationship. X knew Y was not going to age well with all the drinking he did, the bags of chips he had for dinner, the cookies he ate for breakfast. He would end up like all the men in her family, limping from missing toes chopped from diabetes. And all that waited for her was a life of sacrifice, having to care for Y in ways that he never could or would care for her.

If she left immediately, he would never have to know this is his child. She would relieve him of the responsibility. She can start over in Miami where she has some family and some friends and say, the baby is from a hookup at a bar, to a man she didn’t even get a name from. People might call her a slut behind her back, they will feel bad for the child who’ll never know his or her father, but there is no turning back. She has had the agreement drawn. The lawyer has already deposited their retainer. She will take on all the debt so he’ll let her go without a fight. They’re only assets: his art, her child.

And for the first time in all her life, if she listens very carefully, she can hear her ancestors clap and clap and clap and clap.

Image Credits: Russell Darnell