We are told that the dream is definitively dashed by the second track on the new album, and the later ones continue the story, charting Allen’s torment over the state of the marriage.
“We had an arrangement / Be discreet, and don’t be blatant,” she sings on Madeline, apparently about another woman the husband has been seeing. “There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers / But you’re not a stranger, Madeline.”
As if all this were not enough to make Harbour an uncomfortable listener of his ex-wife’s new record, the song Pussy Palace is a devastating tale of what Allen finds in the marital bedroom that references Duane Reade, an American pharmacy chain, and Trojan condoms.
Duane Reade bag with the handles tied
Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside
Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so f—–g broken
How did I get caught up in your double life?
Allen said in an interview with Perfect Magazine this week that she did not like the concept of an open marriage. “I grew up in a really unstable household,” she told former Esquire editor Alex Bilmes. “Neither of my parents was particularly present. And so what I craved in adulthood from my relationships was to be centred. And I’m not particularly interested in anything else.”
The break-up pushed Allen to the brink and almost caused her to relapse into drink and drug abuse, leaving her to check herself into rehab. “The feelings of despair that I was experiencing were so strong,” she told Vogue. “The last time that I felt anything like that, drugs and alcohol were my way out, so it was excruciating to sit with those [feelings] and not use them.”
Allen recorded the album in a frenzied 10-day period last December, as she came to terms with the end of her second marriage. “It was incredibly manic, and it was emotionally traumatic. But nothing felt forced,” she said in the Perfect interview.
Even before the apparent revelations from Allen’s new album, theirs was not the most conventional relationship. They met on Raya, the celebrity dating app, while Harbour was filming in London and first stepped out together to see a production of The Lehman Trilogy on the West End in August 2019. A little over a year later, they were married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator, before the couple ate with Allen’s two daughters from her first marriage at In-N-Out, a fast-food chain.
