Alone

by Michelle Parise

  HUSBAND

  What would happen if I was unfaithful?

  WIFE

  Um. What? Uh … have you been?

  HUSBAND

  No. No. But, what if there was someone I was interested in sleeping with?

  WIFE

  Is there?

  HUSBAND

  Yes.

  WIFE

  Who is it?

  HUSBAND

  A woman. At work. We’ve been friends for years. We go for tea every day. We talk about work and Ultimate Frisbee.

  The WIFE takes a deep breath.

  HUSBAND

  She propositioned me once. I thought about it, but of course I didn’t.

  GREEK CHORUS

  Oh yes, but he did! He did and did and did!

  WIFE

  Well, I get it. I mean, you’re friends, you can talk about work and she understands and cares about it. And besides, you have no baggage with her. She sits across from you and laughs at the things you say. She doesn’t ask you to take out the garbage, you don’t hate that she never stops cleaning.

  The HUSBAND sighs. He looks uncomfortable.

  WIFE

  Has anything ever happened between you two?

  HUSBAND

  No. No, nothing has ever happened.

  GREEK CHORUS

  But it was happening. It had probably happened that very same day!

  And ... scene.

  A few weeks later, the car ride, the green umbrella. Maybe they drove to the coffee shop that day because it was raining. But even though I know the umbrella is hers, I don’t push it with him. I honestly think that we’re going through a rough part of our marriage, and that he was finding missing pieces in this woman. I thought he was tempted, but would never actually go through with it. I thought we would work it out, that things would get better.

  Am I the dumbest wife that ever lived, or what? KABOOM!

  AN EDUCATION

  Several times a year, The Husband would go out drinking with other teachers, sometimes after a school play or a colleague’s retirement and always after a long evening of parent-teacher interviews. On these nights, I knew not to expect him home until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., and I was fine with that. But in the past few months, these nights have become more frequent, and he has started arriving home much, much later, at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. Sometimes I wake up to the sound of him crashing around in the kitchen downstairs. He’s such a big, clumsy man at the best of times, but drunk and stoned, he’s an elephant, and all household items beware.

  Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night in a sudden panic. Is he dead somewhere? Did he drink so much that he got in a fight with someone and is now lying in an alleyway somewhere, hurt? My heart races and I call him and text him, but often there’s no answer. Those nights are the worst. I lie there and worry, tossing and turning till I hear the lumbering giant come up the stairs.

  I honestly only ever imagine that something horrible has happened to him. I never once think he’s with a woman. Can you believe it? But that doesn’t mean I’m not angry. By the time he stumbles in, I’m near-hysterical.

  “You are a married man! A father!” I shout at him. “You could have answered me — I thought you were dead!”

  And he mumbles, “Sorry, sorry …” Always so sorry after the fact.

  The best times are when I sleep soundly and don’t wake up in a panic or hear him when he comes crashing into bed. Instead, I wake up in the morning light to find him lying beside me, his breathing heavy, his adorable but drunk face so sweet looking, so calm.

  And this is how it is one morning in early November 2011, when, at 5:00 a.m., he returns from the grade 12 commencement. He crawls into bed and doesn’t realize I’m awake. Turning onto his side, away from me, he lets out a huge sigh. Reflexively we wind our legs together as always. I watch his freckled back as it rises and falls with his breathing and I wonder, What are they doing, these teachers, till 5:00 a.m.? Where do you go?

  He senses I’m awake and sleepily turns and looks at me, eyes half-open.

  “Hi, Love,” I say.

  “Do you think your psychologist could recommend me a psychologist?” is what he says back.

  THE THING WE’RE IN

  “I can see where this is going. I can see we’re going to fall in love,” says The Man with the White Shirt. “You think we’re going to fall in love?” I ask, and he says, “Of course! Look at us. Look at how we feel already!” This conversation is his attempt to explain why we should stop seeing each other. Again. He says he will never be in a committed relationship. He doesn’t believe in labels.

  It reminds me of a conversation with The Husband, a month before The Bomb. It was day one of what I like to call The Blitzkrieg, five mini-bombs, dropped on me one at a time, starting on Christmas Day 2011, and ending the night before we got on a plane to go on a trip to Jamaica. The Blitz lasts five days before the big finale, atomic in scale and efficiency, drops on me and changes everything, irrevocably, for the rest of our lives.

  With all the surprise of a lightning war, I am hit on that Christmas Day as we’re driving to his parents’ house. As soon as Birdie falls asleep in the back seat, The Husband says, “So, I’m not really sure I believe in this whole modern marriage thing.”

  Modern. Marriage. Thing.

  We have an abstract conversation, about marriage and the whole modernity of it. We talk about men and women and gender roles. He says men have no idea how to be men anymore, since they’ve grown up with no role models. I mention that our female role models were just as bad, but my heart is beating so loudly maybe he can’t hear me. He just goes on and on and on. Eventually, I say, “Is there anything specific you want to talk about?” And he says, “Sometimes I’m not sure I want to be married anymore.”

  Just like that.

  He stares out at the endless grey highway, hands fixed hard on the steering wheel and says, so quietly, “Who am I? I don’t know who I am.” At this, I give the most impassioned impromptu speech of my life. “Who are you? You’re you. You are the you you were before and the you you’re going to be. You’re thirty-eight. You’re funny and weird. You’re really tall but you always bump your head as if you have no idea how tall you are. You always want to help strangers, and you do. You laugh at the stupidest movies and that sound is my favourite thing in the world. That’s who you are.”

  I say a bunch of other things, too, things I love about him or admire, things that make him who he is. And I realize I’ve just managed to give a two-minute description of him without saying anything negative. This gives me hope.

  He’s so quiet. He puts his hand on my hand and squeezes it. I stare at the side of the road as it whizzes by. I close my eyes and brace myself for whatever comes next. I believed my speech, but all I keep hearing is “modern marriage thing.” He’s not sure he believes in it. Marriage. The thing we are in.

  A few years later, when I fall hard for The Man with the White Shirt, here it is again. A thing he doesn’t believe in, even though he’s in it. Here he is, White Shirt, back in my bed one morning, staring at me the way he does as if I am the dreamiest thing. And that’s when I say to him, “Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you fall in love with me anyway?”

  “Yes, I have,” he says, “and I think it will destroy me.”

  I throw my arms up in the air, I roll my eyes, I do all the motions of exasperation because come on. I say, “But love should be the opposite of destroying!” because it should, it really should. What is the matter with everyone?

  He has no response, and we just look at each other across my white sheets. His eyes are the best eyes I’ve ever looked into. They’re like the master switch for me, turning all the lights on at once. I run my hand slowly down his face, ending at his chin, where I scratch lightly at his beard. We lie there, limbs inter-locked, still looking into each other’s eyes, endlessly searching for what, I don’t know. And I want to just shake him and everyone, all of you, for being afraid to love beca
use it might hurt.

  BLITZKRIEG

  It’s no wonder we so often use military terminology when describing the breakdown of love; anyone who’s been through it knows it feels just like war. A civil war more specifically, the way a nation once together suddenly finds itself divided and at arms. And so, it’s no different for me. I have told you there was a Bomb, and before it, there was a Blitz.

  Day One as you know, was the “modern marriage thing” conversation. Kaboom and Merry Christmas!

  Day Two, Boxing Day, we’re lying in the too-small bed of the guest room at his parents’ house when he quietly and very seriously tells me that he’s been “emotionally distancing himself” from me since the day I was diagnosed with MS. I’m stunned.

  “You don’t understand how many times I’ve buried you,” he says, and I call him a drama queen. I say, “I’m not dying. It’s not cancer or anything! Why would you bury me? I’m going to live longer than you probably, you idiot!” I am pissed off and really do think he is an idiot in this moment. I can’t stop myself from calling him names and being awful because I can’t understand what he is saying to me. Why would he purposely distance himself from me because I got sick?

  “Self-preservation,” is his only answer to my confused tears. A quiet, simple answer to my angry questions. Self-preservation. He pulled away from me to protect himself. But from what?

  After he falls asleep, I lie awake for hours and I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, looking at things that used to make sense in the real world but now float by me, past me, over me, like they were never mine to understand or keep.

  Day Three of The Blitz. We are thankfully driving away from his parents’ house and back to our own. The second Birdie falls asleep in the back seat, kid-drunk on so much Christmas, I immediately ask him, “Are we breaking up?” and he says he doesn’t know.

  I stare out the window at the cars filled with other families on their way to and from somewhere. Are they as miserable as us? I wonder. I’m so tired of being confused. I close my eyes and wait.

  “All I am is three things,” he finally says, matter of fact. “I’m a teacher. A husband. A father. And only one of those things satisfies me. Only being a father brings me satisfaction.”

  My heart sinks into the passenger seat. My twenty-five-year-old heart, the one that fell in love with him, the one that twelve years later still thinks of him as so much more than just “husband” or “father” or “teacher.” My thirty-seven-year-old heart hurts, too. It’s sustained the sturm und drang of the past six months of our marriage, and now this. This. The anger rises up in me, hot like a kettle about to boil, ready to scald him if he isn’t careful, and me for certain.

  Day Four. The Day I Learn She Exists. You know this story: the post-sex conversation about a woman at work he’s friends with and how she propositioned him once but of course he didn’t do anything.

  Of course not, of course.

  Day Five. The night before we’re getting on a plane to go on a trip. We’re packed and ready and have actually gone to bed at the same time, for the second night in a row, when in the darkness, he says quietly, “I hate this house. I hate living here. I hate having to fix things and cut the grass and shovel the snow and paint.” And I say, “You’ve never painted a thing! I painted every room in this house!” As if that’s the point I should be making.

  The truth is, I also hate our house. And so I turn on the bedside lamp, sit up and tell him. I tell him I hate that no matter how much we fix it up, there’s always something else that needs to be fixed. That the only things we spend money on are things for the house. That most of our “down time” is spent on the house, too, something always to be swept or moved or mowed or dug up or built or painted. And honestly, I hate the neighbourhood, it’s just too far from downtown for me, my commute is unbearable, and I miss the culture of downtown living. Mostly, I tell him, I miss living in an apartment; I’ve never liked living in a house.

  We look at one another and smirk. Here we are with common ground and we didn’t even know it. We both hate living in this house! When I got pregnant, it had been our shared dream, to have a house we’d live in for the rest of our lives, but it wasn’t right for us, it wasn’t us.

  “We belong downtown!” I say and he smiles. He leans over and grabs me, wrestling me into his arms shouting, “We belong in a condo again!” and I laugh. We kiss hard and long, like we just remembered who we were.

  “Fuck it, let’s sell the house. Let’s buy a condo and start over again!” we say, and all the air comes back into our relationship in that moment, as if we really believe selling our house will fix our marriage. We have sex all night long and talk about condos during rest periods.

  The next day we get on a plane and on that plane, we’re excited, like everything old is new again. We kiss and laugh and talk about which downtown neighbourhoods we want to live in. We reaffirm our marriage, we hold hands, we say, “This is going to be the year,” and “Let’s try this. Let’s try this. I think it’s going to work! So do I!”

  The Blitzkrieg is over. It’s ended on a high note, if you can believe it.

  We go to Jamaica with Birdie and two other families and have a week like no other together. Every moment is sexually and emotionally charged, his shiny dark eyes alive again and always looking right into mine, his hands all over me. The laughter and warmth is back, the goofy charm and the sexy roguishness. It feels like 1999 again. My friend The Bright One is with us and she and my cousin keep teasing us, calling it our “second honeymoon.” It feels like it, it really does. On New Year’s Eve we kiss on the beach while a crowd of people party around us, Birdie and the other children asleep on chairs pushed together. We dance and he tells me this will be the best year of our marriage, and I almost believe him.

  When we get back home, the “second honeymoon” feeling lasts about two days before he freaks out on me. I cry and scream, “Nothing has changed! Nothing has changed!” and he spits back, “Of course not! We’ve tried, but things are not getting better!” None of it makes any sense to me. I feel crazy and confused, insecure and unsure. Everything I say or do could be innocuous or could throw him into a rage, and I never know which it’s going to be.

  We fight and then make up. We try and then fail. We look at condos, and our real estate agent comes over to assess our house. I’m as confused as ever, walking on eggshells. He says things like, “I despise the term husband, and the things you have to do as a husband,” on the exact same day as he says, “I love you, I love you, I want to be your husband.”

  Another day, he says, “This is done. I am a shitty husband. This is done. I am not a good husband.” And I protest, “I’m willing to fight for you! For this marriage!” which I am, although he’s right, he is a very shitty husband and has been for a while now. This flip-flopping, this uncertainty, I don’t know how he can vacillate so wildly or whether I can withstand it.

  I won’t have to for long.

  One night we’re making dinner and it suddenly erupts into a huge fight. This time, it’s The Husband who throws an object clean across the room. The object is a cutting board with a pile of freshly chopped parsley on it. The parsley flies everywhere, green snowflakes on our kitchen floor. On my clothes. All over Birdie. My father is there and he scoops up Birdie and runs out of the room with her, shouting, “Calm down!”

  The Husband does not calm down. I run upstairs crying and scribble furiously into my notebook: All I said was “Why aren’t there serviettes on the table?” What is the matter with him?! Why is this happening?

  Later, we will jokingly say to people that our marriage ended over serviettes and parsley. No one else finds this funny.

  We go to bed that night not talking. And the night after that, a Friday, he goes out for drinks after work with his colleagues and he just doesn’t come home. For the first time in twelve years together, I wake up in our bed. Alone.

  The following afternoon, he shows up and we sit together on the edge of our be
d. We hold hands. He says he wants to talk about how we can make our marriage work. We go for a drive and spend hours in a crappy pub talking about our relationship. He says over and over that he wants to make our marriage work.

  I say, “You have to be in it. Are you in it?” and he says, “Yes.”

  As we drive back home I feel hope again, like maybe we are coming through the fire. And then he casually mentions the woman from work. Her.

  I say, “Was she there at the bar last night?”

  “Yes.”

  I don’t know if I can even tell you this next part. God I wish I had a glass of gin right now, but I said I would do this so here’s what happens next:

  I say, “Is that where you stayed last night? Her place?”

  He drives, staring straight ahead, and as flat as the road we’re on, he says,

  “Yes.”

  HERE’S WHAT I CAN TELL YOU

  I can tell you this. When The Bomb first drops, it feels like the hand of God reaches down and pulls everything out of me — entrails, guts, what’s left of my heart, my breath, all sound. I am motionless, airless, frozen, everything has exploded and yet, I am in some kind of cryogenic state. Life is an instant blurry, swooping mess, like I’m underwater.

  I open the car door and run out into the thick snow. We’ve pulled over to the side of the road, into the entrance of the cemetery where my grandmother is buried, and my uncle, and my cousin who died too young. The weirdness of this is not lost on me, even in the shock. It’s freezing out, my coat is open and I have no mitts or hat or scarf, but I just run and run to the cemetery gates. They’re locked.

  I feel like throwing up into the snow. I can’t stop shaking, or crying, or screaming. Alternately I just stand there mute, thinking, it’s not true, it’s not true, this can’t be true. It is so unbelievably cold, the two of us like that, ankle deep in the snow, facing each other beside the massive iron cemetery gates, surrounded by tall twisty trees that sway in the wind, scratching the sky with their bare branches.