The Empty Chair
The morning of the hearing I put on the charcoal dress I had owned for five years, the one I kept because Keith had long ago taken over the decisions about what I wore and when, and I stood in the bathroom mirror of my friend Diane’s apartment where I had been sleeping on a pull-out sofa for six weeks and looked at myself for a long time. I looked tired. I looked like a woman who had not been eating enough and had been sleeping in three-hour intervals and had spent the last two months learning, in vivid and costly detail, exactly what it means to have your financial life controlled by someone who has decided to use that control as a weapon.
I looked like someone who had already lost. I thought about how useful that might be. My name is Grace Simmons, though it will not be Simmons much longer, and that is the whole point.
I had been married to Keith for eleven years. In those eleven years I had watched a man I once genuinely loved reveal himself, gradually and then all at once, as someone who experienced other people primarily as resources to be managed and liabilities to be mitigated. The transition had been slow enough that each individual step seemed explicable: the joint account that absorbed my freelance income, the gradual narrowing of my social circle as Keith made dinners with my friends awkward enough that I stopped arranging them, the clothing allowance that felt like generosity until the day I understood it as inventory control.
By the time I saw it clearly, the infrastructure of my independence had been so thoroughly dismantled that leaving required a kind of reconstruction from nothing, which is not impossible but is much harder than leaving would have been from a position of any remaining resource. I had filed in January. By March, Keith had moved with the speed and comprehensiveness of a man who had thought about this contingency well before I had, which told me something I should probably have known sooner.
The joint accounts were frozen before I could transfer anything. The credit cards were canceled one by one, not all at once, in a sequence that felt calibrated to produce maximum disruption and psychological exhaustion. He had retained Garrison Ford within a week of being served, which told me the rest of what I needed to know.
You do not call Garrison Ford when you want a fair division of assets. You call Garrison Ford when you want to leave the other party with so little that the cost of fighting you exceeds the value of what they might recover. He was known in the New York legal community as the Butcher of Broadway, and the name was not ironic.
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