One evening during the year of my separation, the weather was such that I put on a large, soft tan sweatshirt with thin sweatpants and black backless mules to walk to a movie theater. On the way there I was a few steps behind a boy and a girl who were heading in the same direction. You have to trust other people, he said as he dropped his banana peel into the trash. Oh, I don’t trust other people, she said. Then you have to trust luck, he replied. She said: I definitely don’t trust luck! And not your luck, that’s for sure.

I was early—always early—and went into a bookstore nearby to look, trying to remember my list of books I’d been meaning to buy. When enough time had passed I met three friends for a showing of Waiting to Exhale, the 1995 movie about four friends experiencing very different stages of grief over the men in their lives. The most famous scene is of Angela Bassett setting her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s car on fire in anger (this is my first-favorite divorce movie that begins with a car on fire), though when I rewatch the movie now I always think about the scene right after, when the fire department arrives and she is calmly, simply smoking a cigarette while the television plays behind her. Then there is Whitney Houston in love with a married man, confusing aloneness with loneliness; Lela Rochon trusting the wrong men, constantly bargaining with herself; Loretta Devine in denial, still in love, even though her husband has come out and is in a relationship with a man.

Written by Terry McMillan, Exhale is part of her own canon of divorce literature. As a teenager I had watched her infamous interview with Oprah on live television, too young to have seen How Stella Got Her Groove Back but somehow the right age to watch her interrogate the man its romance was based on. When I did finally watch Stella I saw an obvious precursor to Eat Pray Love, in its luxurious travel interspersed with deep wells of emotional despair, as well as an aura of melodrama in its tragic deaths and questions of whether a young man would really want to be with a woman older than him, much like in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 movie, All That Heaven Allows.

The real story, of course, turned much more complicated: McMillan had met Jonathan Plummer on vacation in Jamaica. She was forty-three and he was twenty. They spent five days together, and after a few months of talking on the phone post-vacation, she invited him to visit. They married, and stayed married for six years, until Plummer came out and they divorced. Their breakup was a bad one, with both using the media for their own ends and McMillan even suing Plummer for emotional distress damages of $45 million. The 2005 episode of Oprah featured McMillan accusing Plummer of intentionally deceiving her, something she apologized for in a 2010 episode, acknowledging that her anger had taken over. The movie adaptations of her works, much like the difference between Ephron’s novel Heartburn and the film, retain a little bit of that sadness and hurt and anger, but soften it by shortening the length of time between catharsis and the pain that incited it.

The theater for Exhale was full of women in groups like ours—almost all threes and fours—and it had the feeling of a shadow play, everyone in the audience yelling the lines they remembered, cheering for the scenes they knew were coming. The man Whitney Houston is in love with is played by Dennis Haysbert, who has been on a lot of television shows and in a lot of movies but I, like most people in the theater, it seemed, recognized him mostly as the spokesperson for Allstate insurance commercials. In the scene when Whitney Houston finally breaks up with him, he accuses her of basically conspiring with his wife. “What,” he asks rhetorically, “do you and my wife work for the same firm?”

“State Farm?” someone in the audience yelled.

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Afterward we walked down the street to the corner with the bookstore on one side, a bar on the other, a restaurant across the street, pausing to decide where to go next. In front of us a man was lighting matches and blowing them out, making the whole block smell like a birthday.

I went back into the bookstore and walked around, now that I had remembered the book I meant to buy. An event had just ended. The folding chairs were being stacked to one side by the staff; an author was sitting behind a table, talking to the last people there. I turned one corner to see if the book was in a certain section; I turned around to try a different shelf. I saw, very slowly, that the man I had been seeing in the spring was there, the man with the cigarettes in the backyard and the plums in his bedroom and the feeling of not being part of time. He was standing beside the cookbooks.

“Hi,” I said, for a second wondering if he would remember me. He asked what I was doing there and I told him I had seen a movie down the street. I asked him the same. His girlfriend knew the author of the book, he explained.

Things had not ended well for us. They had not really ended at all. The last night we saw each other we had both been more than a little combative, maybe hostile, for reasons I don’t want to think too deeply about. He had admonished me for seeing a movie he thought was too stupid to pay for, and I had been insulted when he suggested I see more of the movies that played at prestigious repertory cinemas. “I’m a film critic,” I had snapped. (I am not.) I made predictions for the future: I told him I thought he would remarry within the year, and that I never would. He did not think this was true.

Our last night had not gone well for other reasons, too. He had asked me questions I thought he knew the answers to; he was confusing me with other women. He couldn’t remember how many sisters I had or what I did for work, but he did text me later to say he had found my earrings on his nightstand. A pearl, set in gold. Every time we had run into each other since—once at a bar in the city, another time in the backyard of a house party, I think once on the street—I had been uncertain he would remember me at all.

I remembered, then, one long night we had spent together at the beginning. We had gone to a bar near my house and he had told me an involved story about how he was the best man for his friend’s wedding happening that upcoming weekend, and how most of his responsibilities revolved around getting the good drugs. When we went back to my house, accordingly, he took out a pretty big bag of cocaine, and asked if I wanted some. “It’s a Thursday night,” I said, listing the reasons I shouldn’t. “I have work tomorrow. It’s already 10 PM.” Of course I wanted some.

After, we realized there was a problem with the condom, and I became very angry—speedy and mean. I accused him of not wearing a condom at all. “Haley, I know you,” he said, trying to get me to be calm. “You don’t know me,” I told him. “You know a lot about me.” The difference seemed important in that moment.

He walked me to the drugstore—by this point it must have been 1—and walked me back home, sat with me on my stoop while I took the Plan B, smoked cigarettes until the drugs wore off and I could sleep. He was very decent about the whole thing. When I told this story to my friends we all agreed this was the only way a man in this situation could redeem himself.

The next day I had gone into work at 8 AM., as I always did, and left at 1 PM, the way our office always did on Friday afternoons in the summer. I walked to a movie theater that was not close but was basically two straight lines away, a perfect L-shape of a walk, and crossed the street to stay in the shade as many times as there were blocks. I bought a sparkling water in a glass bottle. I sat in the balcony and sipped it while watching Beau Travail for the first time, feeling the sun in the desert onscreen like it was the air-conditioned cool in the dark room—a relief—and feeling the obsession between the men in the movie like it was in my body—an ache.

Teo came with me. They sat beside me and we didn’t say one word until the lights came on.

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Teo and I had met sideways, introduced at a friend’s birthday party, and then, months later, I was hired as an editor at a publication where they worked as a writer. One afternoon they came to my cubicle because another coworker had told them I would want to see their sweatshirt. It was screen-printed with Gena Rowlands’s upturned face, her eyes closed, a still from A Woman under the Influence. They were right, I told them. I absolutely did want to see that sweatshirt.

On our lunch breaks we planned a union-organizing drive for the office. We would go to this café that was small enough that we could see everyone in there (no eavesdroppers), far enough away that it didn’t really make sense to walk there and back (no one would look for us there), a little too expensive to be reasonable (too decadent for two dirtbags). “I’m a socialist, because if capitalism worked I’d be rich,” Teo explained to me after we had ordered scrambled eggs prepared with crème fraîche. “We’re friends now,” I said.

Back in our cubicles we would often pass afternoons between meetings and deadlines listing movies to each other. Sometimes it was just a report of what we’d watched; mostly they were assignments. They were movies that we needed to see to understand each other. Teo, a critic and graduate of a film studies program, did most of the assigning, and I took the responsibility very seriously. In my phone I kept a note called “Teo Movies” and beside every title there was a checkbox for me to mark off when I had seen it, when I was ready to tell them what I thought.

Most of the movies that we had both seen were divorce movies. Since my husband had moved out six months before, I had been watching and rewatching anything about breakups, endings, affairs—allegorical or realistic, romances and tragedies, I often described these evenings as though I was self-programming a divorced woman’s film festival.

I knew what I was doing here. I even joked about it, suggesting to other people going through breakups that they redirect their hurt and sorrow into organizing their workplace. Into programming a film festival about their experience. Anywhere else but as something kept inside. The night before we were all laid off, I prepared myself for my last bargaining session to negotiate severance, and then I sat on the edge of my bed and wept—really wept—about everything for long enough until it all became a feeling as large and hopeless as nothing.

Being laid off did give us lots more time to go to the movies. If I hadn’t seen a divorce movie that Teo recommended, watching it became an event. Once we went to a small movie theater that was showing what was then a rare print of Possession, the 1981 Andrzej Żuławski movie that Teo described as having cured their depression. This seemed unlikely until I watched it. Isabelle Adjani is so beautiful and so manic, her wardrobe entirely made of slightly different navy blue silk dresses. As a former ballet teacher, her movements are sadistic, every vein in her hand poised to draw blood and every step containing words she won’t speak. Eventually we find out that she left her husband not for another man but for a hollowed-out flesh monster she fucks in a decrepit loft, while secret agents in brightly colored socks track the estranged couple under the overcast West Berlin sky. Watching this movie cured my depression.

One night I watched Take This Waltz, a movie directed by Sarah Polley, filmed near the street I used to live on. The movie has that feeling of an afternoon when everyone is on their front porch, watching the neighborhood drama and everything that can happen on a residential sidewalk. A marriage ends, a love affair begins. I worried the movie would make me too sad, as though recognizing where I once lived was too dangerous. Instead it made me feel the opposite of homesick. I was grateful for how far away I was from what I was seeing.

I was reminded of Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of the class dynamics in his chosen comedies of remarriage. He thought that wealth had to remain a given for at least one character: not because the working or middle class can’t spend time inside their sadness, but because their days don’t have the time to maintain the same dedicated interest in it. “This is why our films must on the whole take settings of unmistakable wealth,” he wrote. “The people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily.” A movie or book about that sadness in between shifts would have so many smaller revelations, the single moments alone and unremarked on, but no less deeply felt. Like when I, on one workday, turned the corner in the hallway of my office kitchen and felt myself to be so completely grateful to be divorced. What would that have looked like? Like any other day, which it was.

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