I blame it on them, though perhaps blame is the wrong word for what unfolds when women gather under the full moon with bottles of Sauvignon Blanc and stories sharp enough to cut glass.
Two years after I’d emptied my retirement account—penalty and all—to help buy the house in Rhode Island, they began arriving. Every twenty-eight days, like clockwork, like tides, they would array themselves across my living room couch, cards spread between them like prophecies, wine glasses catching lamplight while they excavated each other’s grievances with archaeological precision. Men were forbidden from these gatherings, and slowly, inexorably, the woman I loved began to transform.
Over eighteen months, I watched the circle work its particular alchemy: two divorces, one late-blooming lesbian awakening, and my beloved’s descent into a paranoid psychosis so complete she came to believe that everyone she’d ever trusted—especially me—was stealing from her, that the world had organized itself into a conspiracy with her suffering as its sole purpose. The change seemed sudden, like watching someone step through a door and become someone else entirely. But madness, I’ve learned, is rarely sudden. It simply chooses its moment to reveal what was always there, waiting.
*
We met more than a decade before in the worn wooden pews of a Connecticut church, she with her sprouts-and-hummus sandwich, me with an empty stomach and a new book to read from at the local literary festival. She was blonde, Nordic almost, in Uggs and a wool skirt that belonged to some other season. I was brown-skinned and restless, a visiting writer trying to make rent with readings. We’d found ourselves seated together in the leather-and-hymnal smell of the sanctuary to hear Marilyn Nelson read her corona of Emmett Till sonnets. By the time the Connecticut poet laureate finished invoking that murdered boy’s ghost, I was half a sandwich fuller and completely undone.
She warned me from the start: she was a Scorpio. As if astrology could contain what she was—this creature who sparkled like something mineral and dangerous. We’d already traded favorite writers and bands, those intimate archaeological exchanges of new lovers. Even across crowded rooms, her gaze could snare me, the way she moved to cover bands playing Heart and Bad Company, as if music were something she could inhabit rather than simply hear.
Theia mania—madness from the gods—sounds so much more honest than love at first sight, and certainly more credible. I fought the feeling every step of the way, yet found myself powerless against whatever frequency she operated on. When the evening ended, through the din of clacking pool balls and the amber light of a New England college town on a Friday night, we found ourselves walking back to her Airbnb under such a spray of stars that the Brattleboro sky out-Matissed Van Gogh’s view from his asylum window at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. His love had driven him to mutilate himself. Mine would deliver me to handcuffs.
Still, a poet learns to read omens, and the blessing of so many stars felt like permission from the universe itself.
It was as if some enchanted portal had opened and we only needed to walk toward it together. We spent that first night (both married to other people) in a garret room with a four-poster bed and pink cotton sheets scattered with stars that only reinforced the feeling of inevitability. We did everything but, marveling at the contrast of our skin, the rapture we were postponing with such exquisite difficulty, the way desire intensifies when it’s forbidden.
Both our marriages were broken beyond repair. Perhaps we recognized in each other that particular quality, a brokenness so deep it could only be seen by someone equally damaged, someone who might understand the collaborative work of mending.
*
Our early courtship had the breathless quality of teenagers who’ve discovered something their parents would never understand. I made her Spotify playlists; she sent Virginia Woolf quotes; we steamed up car windows on highway overpasses while headlights streamed past like meteors. There was desperation in our coupling, as if we couldn’t quite believe we’d found each other and weren’t sure how long we’d be allowed to keep this.
On our third date, she announced she had two confessions that might end everything. First: she was fifteen years older than me. Second: she had a STD. Neither revelation moved me much. What would matter—what would eventually destroy us—was that she had four children, all older than my two daughters, who would never accept our relationship, and a financial situation so precarious it had its own weather system.
When we met, she was drowning in credit card debt, living in a house remortgaged three times over. She hadn’t been intimate with her husband in six years but couldn’t bring herself to file for divorce because having been out of the workforce for decades, she was entirely dependent on his income. She’d returned to school for her MFA, trying to grow wings, to become something fuller than mother and wife.
In the stories we tell ourselves, we are always the hero. The survivor. The center of the narrative arc. But when convenient, we become the victim, the one everything “happens to.” We blame others to maintain our personal mythology, without which life might appear meaningless and our own complicity impossible to ignore.
I’ve heard her origin story so many times at dinner parties and backyard barbecues I could recite it like liturgy. British parents. Father arrived in America “with only a hammer in his pocket.” Mother a nurse who uprooted the family to immigrate to British Columbia. “Lived in sixteen different houses before age sixteen.” Could have been a famous actress if a theater professor hadn’t propositioned her; could have had a brilliant career in New York publishing in the 1980s working for Self magazine; could have been a celebrated artist or writer or attorney or interior designer, if only…
Her father worked construction, eventually managing a major Boston port project before syphilis claimed him when she was twenty, leaving her to care for her younger brother. She married the first man who proposed: a salesman and hockey fanatic from a large Irish Catholic family with homes on Lake Winnipesaukee. She moved from Manhattan to suburban Boston, stopped working, raised children with ballet lessons and private school tuitions.
I was initially charmed by her story, her resilience, her aesthetic sense, the way she spoke about helping the homeless. I never imagined that loving her would eventually make me homeless myself.
*
Those early years burned bright and erratic. We lived in a soap bubble of our own creation, seeing each other once or twice monthly when geography allowed. I was navigating my own crisis then, circumstances I’d later chronicle in my memoir Correctional—a book I once thought I couldn’t have written without her. Her presence during my darkest period cemented a conviction that we belonged together, that we were two broken pieces that could somehow make each other whole.
But we were more Vronsky and Anna Karenina than Hero and Leander.
Years accumulated. We both divorced. We lived together briefly in Providence before I received a fellowship to the University of Sydney and disappeared for parts of two years. We endured the distance, always dreaming of a day we could truly be together. During this time, she was diagnosed with an intramedullary spinal tumor requiring surgery that left her unable to run or hike or climb mountains. I wasn’t frightened by what this meant for I would have pushed her wheelchair, spooned medicine into her mouth, loved her into whatever version of herself emerged.
When I returned from Australia, she was living in Salem, Massachusetts—famous for its 1692 witch trials but less remembered for being the departure point of the Desire, the first known slave ship to leave New England, carrying Indigenous Americans to the Bahamas in 1638 to trade for enslaved Africans.
She wasn’t alone. She’d invited her ex-husband, now suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, to live in the basement. It wasn’t romantic, this arrangement—it was concerning. This man who had financially abused her, who used racial slurs when referring to me, who’d left her bankrupt while refusing to pay his modest child support, was now living rent-free in what was supposed to be our sanctuary.
“He’s still family,” she’d explain, “even if I don’t love him the way I love you.”
If it weren’t so catastrophic, the situation could have been sitcom material. In his illness, he believed they were still married, bragging to repairmen about their four children, exuding ownership over the woman I loved. We tactically avoided each other, though occasionally we’d share a Sam Adams on the porch and he’d warn, “Good luck with her. She’s a real money-suck.”
When his punch came corkscrewing through the air, the only surprise was that it had taken so long. I dodged, then restrained him against the ground. I wasn’t about to strike a sick elderly man. Yet in the family’s retelling, I became the aggressor.
His calling her “a whore” and swinging at me unprovoked finally provided the catalyst for his placement in a memory care facility.
*
During the pandemic, we decided to buy a house. Her bank account was underwater, but she was employed part-time at four different universities—enough to qualify us for a mortgage on paper. I would provide the down payment and everything else.
I believed her when she wrote: That’s the real trick of this whole mess—you are my family, my lover, my best friend, my Bear. You are already sewn to me. You are my soulmate. Come what may, that persists.
The house had room for our six children. It featured a memory garden left by the previous owner that bloomed in sequence all season long, an enormous kitchen island with bar stools, refurbished wood-paneled ceilings. I bought a king-size mattress for our bedroom, installed a patio and mini-split units. I rose at dawn to water the lawn and tend tomatoes, marveling at how suburban I was becoming. My daughters had their own rooms for alternate weekend visits.
It was the first place I’d ever truly felt at home. Then the moon parties began.
I’d wake the morning after to discover a hanged man tarot card leering from the coffee table, wine glasses marked with lipstick like evidence of some ritual I wasn’t meant to witness. By this point, she’d lost all four teaching positions—one because she’d read aloud from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, enunciating the n-word multiple times to her students’ horror.
Her paranoia crept in like water finding cracks in stone. To be fair, America is vicious to women nearing retirement without safety nets. I tried to help, paying for dinners, vacations, household expenses. Despite my own employment struggles, I covered her mortgage when she fell short. We were a team, I thought—the perfect union Plato described in the Symposium, two halves of one soul.
Then diamond earrings I’d brought her from India went missing. Twice.
The first time, she blamed my thirteen-year-old daughter, convincing me enough that I confronted my weeping child, who denied taking them. When the earrings surfaced in her closet, rather than being mortified by the false accusation, she doubled down—my daughter had stolen my earbuds before, had lied about eating candy in bed. The second time, she was certain I’d pawned them—this gift from me to her!—until she found them again.
These accusations should have been warning signals, but I was in love. I wish I’d connected this behavior to her jealous rages when she’d spot me standing next to another woman in photographs, or her certainty that her elderly mother was slandering her. Her life, I’ve come to understand, consists of writing stories and then skewing or ignoring facts to support them. A blindness that masquerades as insight.
Then, in March 2023, she traveled to Maine with her daughter to collect her ex-husband’s belongings, a dozen cardboard boxes that took up residence in our garage. I wasn’t thrilled, but this was why we’d bought a home: to accommodate our past lives.
One early spring day, searching for a rake, I sent a box tumbling to the ground.
While gathering the scattered contents: index cards, paper clips, old passports, a shoebox of pennies that looked like the archaeological remains of someone’s desk drawer—I suggested at dinner that she sort through the boxes, discard what she could. Her son was visiting that weekend; perhaps he’d want some of his father’s effects.
She was outraged that I’d violated her privacy.
Had we been drifting apart? It’s true I’d been traveling for book readings, sometimes without her because I couldn’t always afford her expenses. Relations between her children and me had never warmed; they were happy to use my car, borrow money, accept gifts of luggage and crystal decanters, colonize the kitchen during visits, but they couldn’t picture their mother with me.
In the weeks that followed, she began insinuating that something was missing and I had taken it. She wouldn’t specify what, because she wanted to give me a chance to confess. Initially, I was puzzled, but as her vague accusations persisted, I grew exasperated. What was missing? I could help her find it if she’d just tell me. She refused.
Then came that fateful morning in June. We’d hosted a house party the night before, a lively affair with neighbors and former colleagues from Connecticut, rum punch and an impromptu Beatles cover concert. I felt, in that moment, that I finally belonged. I owned a home with the woman I loved and had found my tribe.
The apogee of my time there, followed by rapid perigee.
The next morning, when I turned to offer coffee, her lip was curled in disgust. “Admit what you did,” she hissed, “and I could forgive you.” She believed there was “a missing coin” from the shoebox, something worth a small fortune, bequeathed to her children. She couldn’t tell me the date or denomination, but she was certain I’d stolen it. More bizarrely, she claimed coins I’d bought in Australia for my daughters belonged to her ex-husband.
My friends were still asleep in the downstairs bedroom. Insulted, I bounded down the stairs to retrieve proof that those coins were mine, grappling with the absurdity of having to defend myself in my own home. When she tried to slam the door, I put my shoulder against it to show her the receipts, and she yelled, “Stop, Ravi!”
I stopped. I deflated. I hoped my friends hadn’t heard. When she called later to say she was spending the day with her daughter, I was relieved. Over the course of our relationship, I’d gifted her thousands of dollars in presents and trips, even much of the house we shared, and she imagined I would steal pocket change from her?
The next day, while teaching online, I heard pounding at the door. When I opened it, four sheriffs greeted me with drawn weapons. I had fifteen minutes to gather my belongings and leave the house I owned because she’d filed a Temporary Restraining Order against me.
In the actual order, which I later read, she listed such infractions as “recklessly endangering her cockapoo Annie” (whom I adored and who died at sixteen), driving too fast, and appearing to her in nightmares. Based on such testimony, without an evidentiary hearing—but for good reason, given the importance of women’s safety—the judge evicted me from my house for three weeks.
Three weeks became four months.
I couch-surfed with friends, lived in my car in Walmart parking lots, stayed at campgrounds with my dog. I was refused entry to retrieve essentials such as course materials, books, clothes, medications. She rejected mediation. We hired attorneys. She stopped paying the mortgage and shared bills. I was arrested for violating the order by sending her tulips with a notecard that simply asked pourquoi?
The house, of course, had to be sold.
She couldn’t understand that the moment I was falsely evicted at gunpoint was when our great love story ended—for me. She claimed her disability had made her fearful, that she’d filed the order mandating silence between us simply because she wanted to reach me. She thought what transpired might draw us closer. When I was arrested for sending flowers, the officer shrugged: “Buddy, she threw so much shit at the wall, something was bound to stick.”
*
I wonder if the moon parties continued in the house emptied of me. If the women still gathered to sing and clink glasses, celebrating another convert to their definition of liberation. Maybe I’m bitter because I never got to say goodbye. The next time I walked through those rooms, the house was on the market, eventually bought by a Berkeley psychiatry professor relocating to Brown University.
Maybe I’m just sad because what I thought was true love turned out to be a lunar shimmer on water. Sunlight bouncing off the moon’s surface and back down to earth before vanishing entirely, leaving only the memory of illumination where once had been light.
