Emotional Autism

So now you tell me: Julie recently told me that her last boyfriend, presumably the one she dated before we got married, broke up with her because he said she “wasn’t there.” As if, he said, she were watching their relationship on television. This echoed what another friend of hers told me, “Oh yeah, Julie is emotionally autistic.” Indeed, she gives new meaning to the put-down “emotionally unavailable.” More like “emotionally unlisted.”
Most absent when present, as Deb Unferth writes in her extraordinary new novel, Vacation, a book worth reading both for its minimalist prose and for its portrait of two people who are married but find themselves living with strangers, uncomfortable roommates at best (and the stranger in their life dying of brain cancer, another eerie echo).
You get the point: just not there, particularly when needed most. Which is why the idea that some how I left her is completely ridiculous: You can’t leave something or someone who isn’t there. Julie left years ago, it just took me a long time to figure this out and understand why I could be so lonely in a house where another body seemed to be moving about, usually annoyed by my own movements. Felt like a presence, but was really an absence. You can’t absent an absence, I just turned off the lights on my way out when the darkness in the room became too oppressive. I wish she’d told me the old boyfriend anecdote 16 years ago and saved us both a lot of grief, time, and money.
If Julie had her emotional bags packed and sitting next to the door early on in our relationship—indeed, I try to remember when, or if, she really was there, really was present and engaged, but can’t summon such a time—then she checked out for real when I got sick in 2003. She told me of that period, “I really freaked out, I can only imagine how you must’ve felt.” Of course she can only imagine, she never asked. That line was down, had been cut, or was never open in the first place.