Affairytale : A Memoir

by C. J. English

  I wished I could be that way, I just couldn’t. I was a chronically discontent, obsessive compulsive overachiever.

  Levi and I were very different. We had conflicting opinions on just about everything that was important to us. We struggled to find balance between our family and our relationship. It didn’t seem so uncommon to have a difficult relationship like ours. In fact, it seemed to be fairly normal, like most of the other relationships I’d seen.

  We rarely agreed on anything and regularly engaged each other in petty arguments over problems like inequitable household chores or opposing libidos. These arguments became a frequent and toxic cloak over our relationship and smothered our future.

  Every sentence began with, “You always,” or, “You never,” and since no argument was ever fully laid to rest or resolved, snippets of previous arguments were continually reconstituted and poured back into the pot, making a more concentrated poison each time we fought. It was a poison laced with resentment over everything that had ever been said or done that hadn’t been resolved. This resentment ate at me from the inside, callousing my heart and turning me into someone I was not.

  Resentment killed my spirit in a record quick time. I became a hardened, empty partner lying dead on a cold metal table with a toe tag that read, “Don’t fucking touch me,” and, “Don’t even dare try to have sex with me.”

  We circled each other like bloodthirsty hyenas in a perpetual power struggle. Hating each other over everything that had ever happened, yet nothing was really worth fighting for. The bottom line was that not only were Levi and I not compatible, at some deep biological level we were also lethal to each other.

  Violent words spewed off my tongue.

  “I hate you.”

  “I wish you were dead.”

  “I wish I could fucking kill you.”

  My mouth was stuck wide open, covering years of ground in just minutes as I unleashed a hellfire of words until words weren’t enough. Then, like a feral animal, physical anger forced its way out from inside of me to get its share of the kill. I wailed and kicked and screamed and pushed him down the hallway, lining him up with the stairs. I wanted to hurt him more than I had ever wanted to hurt anyone before. I wondered if I actually could kill him. Was I capable of that? Was that the mental derangement lawyers called temporary insanity? Had I slipped into the state of mind where a woman wanted to lop off her husband’s penis?

  He stumbled as I tried to launch him down the stairs, but not even a shot of angry adrenaline could give my five foot four inches and one hundred twenty pounds the power to push him more than a few wobbly inches. He easily restrained me. I flailed my arms and legs, trying to jolt free, but my efforts were futile. Levi was thick, not huge like my brother Dylan, but he was lean and muscular. He’d been an athlete in high school and he was still agile and strong.

  When he finally let go, the evil inside of me rose up again but it was another failed attempt to overpower him. I conceded. I ran in to our bedroom and locked myself in but not because I was scared of him or what he might do. He would never hurt me. I was frightened by my own psychotic break and the ease at which I could abuse.

  I had become the alpha abuser. I was the horrible partner who verbally and physically abused, and I hated myself for it. I hated the person I’d become in our relationship.

  That night I cried then slept, then cried. He never knocked on the door to see if I was alright, and I never apologized. I didn’t even know what we had been fighting about. Pointless arguments had become a familiar pattern and created a hatred that lingered between us.

  After each freak-out, I always regretted my uncouth behavior, but inevitably I would be pushed to my breaking point again and throw more berserk tantrums later. Each one made me a little less whole and a little more crazy.

  ***

  God, it just sucks that

  we can’t do what we want.

  2 stay together tonight.

  Chapter 3

  “HIS PRESENCE IN A ROOM WAS MORE CHEERING THAN THE BRIGHTEST FIRE.”

  ―CHARLOTTE BRONTË, JANE EYRE

  Dani and I were sitting cross-legged on our lakeside patio, coloring with sidewalk chalk, when I heard Dylan yelling from the end of the dock.

  “Come here, quick!” He was looking up at an endless ocean of blue sky.

  Dani stumbled as I tugged her plump little hand alongside me. Nanook trotted behind us, tongue flopping and white froth dripping from his black gums. Summertime in Minnesota was brutal for my Siberian husky but a glorious warm vacation for me.

  Just as we reached the end of the dock, a red-and-white plane swooped down unusually low, buzzing what seemed like inches from our heads.

  I instinctively ducked. “What the—who is that?” I asked Dylan.

  He squinted with his hand over his eyes, following the plane through the sky. “Grant,” he said.

  ***

  The cabin was nestled into a hillside surrounded by lush Minnesota forest. Our backyard sprawled out into a secluded wetland that morphed ubiquitously into a hundred miles of rolling hills in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.

  The cabin itself was a time capsule that hadn’t changed since 1979, the year I was born. There was carpet in the bathroom, no shower, and curtains hung where doors should have been. The well water tasted like pocket change, and the electricity went out with every summer thunderstorm. Although Mom made sure we had the fanciest cabin on the lake with a lit palm tree, pink plastic flamingos, and a handwritten sign by the toilet that read: “Here in the land of sun and fun, we never flush for #1.”

  Dylan and I were natural-born lake kids who never missed a weekend. We didn’t care that we had to bathe in sixty-degree lake water and sleep in bunk beds that smelled of mold. The cabin was our warm summer reprieve from the icy cold Minnesota winters. Now that we were grown, the cabin was the only place Dylan and I could reunite with our parents before they flew back to their Arizona home each winter.

  That night, pale pink and tangerine smudged the Western sky. The sunsets over the cabin were enchanting, each one a unique fingerprint yet each one the same. The wetlands surrounding our evening bonfire seemed to come alive at night. Toads and tree frogs croaked, fireflies blinked across the expanse of the damp marsh, and the resident pack of coyotes bellowed their lonesome howls into the darkness.

  Dylan and I were sitting on tree stumps, listening to the crackle and smack of the fire and sipping our sweating Coronas when he asked:

  “Where’s Levi this weekend?”

  I was always ashamed to answer, and my answer was always the same.

  “Working,” I’d say.

  Or I’d make up some other lame excuse about how Levi needed to mow the lawn or repaint the kitchen for the sixteenth time.

  “What?” Dylan replied, “Tell him to get down here, he’s missing out. Work can wait, the summer is way too short to miss a weekend.”

  The truth was, Levi just wasn’t a cabin type of guy. Missing a weekend was his vacation.

  “It’s too boring there,” Levi would say. “What am I supposed to do all weekend? I don’t like sitting around all day on the deck or in the boat.”

  I did. Doing nothing at the lake on the dock, or deck, or in the boat with an apricot brandy slushy were the best parts of lake living, and I wasn’t about to cut my time short. It was my escape to solitude. It was the place where, if only for an hour, I could get lost in the woods without anyone caring.

  My mom and dad were happy to see their granddaughter and occupy her for hours and hours. Every weekend, Dani and I would pack up our beach stuff and leave Levi behind on the hot pavement of our city home to head for the lake.

  As a car approached our cabin its blinding headlights drowned out the color of the flames.

  “Who’s that?” I asked as a car door slammed shut.

  Dylan didn’t answer. He never answered—not to me, not to anyone. If he didn’t like the question or didn’t want to talk, he just simply didn’t answer. For no other reas
on than it was just his way.

  When we were kids he was the kind of brother who shot me with a rubber-band gun while I was sleeping and clipped his toenails in my bed. He made me walk ten feet behind him to school and showed me how to stuff my winter coat behind the bushes because “walking to school in a coat is so not cool.”

  A car door slammed shut and the slap of flip-flops coming toward us grew louder. Dylan stood up to greet the stranger.

  “Hey, bud! Glad you could make it.”

  “Hey, Dylan. Thanks for inviting me.”

  I was instantly flustered by this man’s good looks. He had an All-American smile that was intimidating and distracting.

  “This is my sister,” Dylan said.

  They both looked at me.

  I mustered out a clumsy, “hi.”

  “C.J., this is Grant,” Dylan said. “He’s the one with the plane from this morning.”

  “Very impressive,” I nodded in Grants’ direction.

  He was humble and gave a polite, “thanks, nice to meet you.”

  I went back to doing nothing on my tree stump as they engaged in casual conversation. Except I was doing something; I was secretly analyzing this handsome stranger like an undercover agent would analyze her newest assignment. I listened intently as he and Dylan spoke. It seemed like they knew each other but hadn’t spoken in long time.

  Grant was well spoken, kind mannered and unusually intelligent. Though he also seemed a little distant, perhaps a little lost.

  I twirled my engagement ring, alternating it between my middle and pinkie fingers, as I reminded myself: Ignore him. Stop looking at him. What are you doing? You already committed to Levi, you’re taken.

  After thirty minutes I’d gathered that Dylan and Grant had already become good friends, they’d talked on the phone regularly and even planned his stop by our fire tonight.

  “Come on, bud. Join us for a few more drinks.” Dylan said as Grant finished his beer. “We’re going to hit the lake bars after this one. It’ll be fun. Come with us.”

  “No thanks Dylan, I can’t tonight but I will sometime soon,” He said.

  I was secretly excited and terrified to hear that he’d be back and that he was already a close friend of Dylan. How could I have not known about his super-hot friend before?

  I knew the answer, Dylan was secretive, not a gossip, he’d only tell you what you needed to know in real time. He hadn’t been hiding his hot friend, he just never thought to tell me about him.

  Then Grant looked at me and nodded. “C.J., nice to meet you. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”

  It was in that moment I first saw his eyes. They were nearly transparent, a shade of blue I’d never seen before. They were mesmerizing.

  As soon as Grant’s headlights disappeared into the dense blackness of the rural road, Dylan leaned forward like he was about to tell a ghost story at summer camp. He set his meaty forearms down on his thick thighs and inched to the edge of his stump.

  “It’s so terrible,” Dylan said, his face twisted in disgust. “Grant’s wife cheated on him three months after they were married.”

  “What? That’s terrible. What happened?”

  “I don’t really know all the details. I haven’t seen him in years. All I know is that they were high school sweethearts, and he was with her since he was seventeen.”

  Who in the hell would cheat on that? I thought.

  “I ran in to him a few weeks ago,” Dylan said. “I feel so terrible for him. C.J., Grant is the nicest guy. I always knew he had a cabin but I never knew it was on our lake! Can you believe that? He’s been on the lake all this time and we never even knew it. It’s so great to have another person we can hang out with now.”

  Our lake wasn’t big, not more than a mile across, so it was weird that we never knew he was there, but not impossible. We stayed on our side of the lake, knew our close neighbors but that was all. Knowing someone across the lake was like knowing someone who lives six blocks down.

  Dylan reached his thick hand into the cooler and pulled out two more longnecks. “Guess what?” He said, “You’re never going to believe this. Grant was the guy who got married on the same day I did. Remember there was a wedding party next door to us in the Crystal Ballroom?”

  “Yes, I remember.” I said, “I looked in there. That was him?”

  “Yes. He plays in a band, too. Country music, like us.” Dylan was thrilled as he told me about his new friend who we seemed to have so much in common with.

  In fact, I’d never seen Dylan like someone so much. He wrenched off the beer tops and handed me a dripping bottle. I flung the ice-cold water back on him but got no response.

  “We talked about buying a wakeboarding boat together,” Dylan said.

  “Really?” I gulped and coughed, immediately feeling panicked that this handsome man was going to be around a lot more. “When? You mean, like, this summer?”

  “No. The season is almost over. Now is the best time to buy a boat for next year. C.J., it’ll be so fun. We’ll be able to do all the things we’ve never been able to do behind Mom and Dad’s boat.”

  I’d known Grant for thirty minutes, and already I felt like getting married to Levi was the wrong thing to do. Forget about the arguments, everybody argues, if I could be so smitten with another man almost immediately then maybe I was with the wrong person.

  It didn’t matter how I felt. I’d said yes. We had a child, I could never back out now. Besides, he treated me fine, he wasn’t abusive, and he took care of Dani and I. What more did I need?

  I soon found out what I needed was someone who I was so enthralled with that the thought of anyone else didn’t even exist, which is exactly what happened during the remaining summer. However, it wasn’t my soon-to-be-husband who stole my attention.

  Surprise appearances from our new friend were becoming more frequent, and my high school crush on my brother’s new best friend intensified. I tried to curb my appetite for him. I tried to reason with my mind, but he just kept coming around. Every. Single. Weekend. My fever never had enough time to cool down. Over the course of only a few months, he became like a festering ulcer of guilt and desire.

  It wasn’t only me who lusted over him. Everyone he met seemed to immediately fall in love with our new single and talented friend.

  Dylan had a group of regular friends who frequented our place on the lake, as well as a revolving door of new friends he’d meet and invite over. There were always neighbors around, and my parents had friends and family stop by sporadically too. There was never a shortage of bikini clad bodies lying on the dock or hanging out on the lawn paying bocce ball or throwing a Frisbee.

  It didn’t take long for Grant to become a part of our regular group. He’d stop by with his new, shiny silver Jet Ski and offer take anyone waterskiing or just take them for a ride. He helped Dani fill up water balloons and instigate a war. We played ladder ball and tossed bean bags and did all the things lake-people do. Just like that, Grant had become a regular fixture with us. No one could believe he’d been right under our noses all those years.

  “Who’s the new hot guy? Why is he still single?” Our friends and neighbors would ask.

  Even my parents doted over him. After Grant brought over his guitar and played music with them, they were instantly enamored with his charm. When he wasn’t around they’d ask where he was and why they hadn’t met him before and ogle over what a talented musician he was. They sold him vitamins and exchanged phone numbers.

  They were right to swoon. He had an enticing charisma that drew you in. After saying not more than a few polite words, he held you captive. Men and women alike seemed to adore him.

  Why would a smart, handsome entrepreneur with mysterious eyes and dark hair be single? I often wondered and wasn’t the only one.

  He was frequently assumed to be either gay, or too damaged from his first marriage to ever settle down again. No one, especially me could believe he wasn’t taken.

  “He’s picky,
” Dylan would say when someone asked. “He’ll never settle.”

  Grant was irresistible to everyone, except for Levi. They’d met less than a handful of times since Levi was seldom at the lake, but Levi would hear how people talked about Grant. How Grant was a pilot and a musician, a business owner and taught ballroom dance. He actually sounded like a fictitious character when people would list his attributes. I could see how it drove Levi nuts.

  When the summer ended, I was surprised at how quickly my schoolgirl crush went with it. Everyone went back to their winter homes and regular lives. During the winter months, we rarely saw each other. Nine months passed without a single glimpse of him. In that time Grant faded in my mind, existing as only an apparition in the long gray winter.

  ***

  Summertime arrived again, and overflowing ponds and streams became home to the returning waterfowl. My chapped winter skin rejoiced in the sun. With the first dose of vitamin D I’d had in nine months, my seasonal winter gloom lifted.

  It was a new summer, a new beginning, and just as soon as I settled into my weekend routine, it began: Grant and I were slowly becoming friends, it was as if we’d both missed each other. My spark for him had ignited again. He looked at me, and truly saw me. When his crystalline eyes met mine, everyone else in the world seemed to fall away. My infatuation was back with vengeance.

  Our friends and neighbors gathered around the fire to sing and dance in the sand and enjoy the summer libations. There were harmonicas, washboards with plastic spoons, drumsticks on logs, twelve-string guitars, and everyone sang along.

  Grant was a jukebox that didn’t need a quarter. You could just put in your request and get a personal serenade.

  “Grant, play Bon Jovi.”

  “Grant, play ‘Hotel California.’”

  “Grant, play Keith Urban.”

  His brain was a catalog of music he’d collected over years of singing and touring. Playing all genres and every weekend around the bonfire, he wooed us with his encyclopedia of songs. Grant was a modern prodigy, a musical muse. He lured me in with his tenor and then held me captive with his timbre.