by Jana Casale
“I’m sorry,” he said as he saw her. “I don’t know what I’m saying right now.”
“Look, I shouldn’t just get so upset.” She sat down beside him on the couch. “We should just talk about this. What is it you’re worrying about?”
“I don’t know what I’m worrying about.” He sighed a heavy sigh and ran his hand through his hair, a gesture he only ever made when they were fighting. “Sometimes I think about getting married and it seems like the best thing ever, and then other times I think about it and I just start panicking.”
“What do you think about when you start panicking?”
“I don’t know. It’s nothing really. It’s more a feeling than a thought.”
“But this is the thing, John. You’ve never been the type of guy to be like this. I’m in total shock over the whole thing.”
“I know. I feel the same way. I don’t know what’s going on with me.”
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, that’s not helpful. I mean, you need to try a little harder than that.”
“I guess what I keep thinking about is just that I had wanted to do all this stuff before I was supposed to get married that I didn’t get to do yet.”
“Like what?” Leda tried to imagine what he possibly could be talking about. Her mind immediately went to wanting to sleep with more women, even though she knew that wasn’t the case. “Do you mean date other people?” she had to ask him anyway.
“No, of course not, jeez. I just mean, like…”
“What?!” She hadn’t meant to yell, but she felt the anger building up again.
“Well, sometimes I just think I would have liked to travel more.”
“That’s it? We can travel. I’d love to travel.”
“I don’t mean travel exactly. I mean I’d always thought I’d live in different places. I always wanted to live in Colorado for a while.”
“Colorado?”
“Yeah.”
“But we moved to California.”
“I know, but it’s just something I’ve wanted to do.”
“Colorado?” Leda tried to place the concept of Colorado in her mind. It was in the middle of the country, away from the ocean. There were cowboys and Republicans. What John wanted with it all of a sudden she couldn’t understand. His secret ambition felt like a betrayal. It was as if he’d revealed that all along he’d been an anteater. Colorado? she thought. Who are you?
“It’s not about Colorado,” he said.
“Then why are you saying it?”
“Because you asked me to.”
“Okay, but why Colorado? I mean, all along you’ve just been wanting to move to Colorado, and you haven’t said anything for all this time? Why didn’t we just go to Colorado instead of California if that’s the case?”
“It’s really not about Colorado. I’m sorry I said it. I was just using it as an example. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I just feel like I’m not ready.”
“But we’ve always talked about marriage. Do you think that I would have moved across the country with you if we weren’t going to get married?”
“Of course not. I do want to marry you someday.”
“So I’m expected just to wait until you’re ready? Whenever that might be? We’ve been together for four years. We’ve been living together and building a life together. How would marriage be any different from what we’re doing right now?”
“I don’t know, but it just is.” His face looked sad.
“But I love you,” she said.
“I love you too.”
She started to cry. I can’t, I can’t. She tried to catch her breath, but she kept crying harder and harder. All the realness was at once. He hugged her and she wanted to push him off, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said through the tears. “Do you want to break up?”
“Of course not!”
“But you don’t want to marry me.” And she cried even harder at hearing herself say the words out loud.
“I’m so sorry.” He hugged her more. She kept thinking of what it all meant. Things are no longer like they were. He can’t really be my best friend anymore.
“I need a tissue,” she said. She got up from the couch and went to the bathroom. It was nice to get away from John for a few seconds, to be driven by something other than what he was saying, even if it was just her runny nose. They didn’t have any tissues so she used toilet paper. It was the cheapest brand, so it was rough on her skin. I’ll never buy this cheap crap again, she swore to herself, as if the ambition not to buy the cheap crap extended to anything and everything in her life.
She looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were swollen from crying so hard, and her makeup had smeared. It surprised her to see her own face that way; it had been a long time since she’d looked in the mirror after crying. The last time was at the age of fourteen after a girl at school called her bloated. She didn’t look that different than she had then. It was as if she’d been kidding herself all along, thinking that she’d been aging.
She grabbed a wad of toilet paper and went back to face John. When she saw him, she had a fleeting impulse just to look at him and laugh at it all as if it were some kind of big joke. Sometimes when they’d get in a fight the two of them would just start laughing, as if they’d realized how silly and petty they were being at the exact same moment. This felt different. This was like dying. Her mind was racing. I need to fix it—I need to stop it, she thought.
Until this moment she had believed that if any man would ever do what John was doing to her now, she would just walk away. Just like that. Not even a second thought. She remembered her friend Sonja telling her how her boyfriend, Carl, of seven years, still wouldn’t even talk about them getting married.
“Why don’t you just leave him?” Leda said to her once on the phone.
“I don’t know. I really love him, and I really love the apartment,” Sonja said.
She later told John about the conversation. “Can you imagine staying with someone for an apartment? It’s absurd.”
But now, standing here staring at John, still himself, the one she knew, the one she loved, she understood what Sonja meant. You couldn’t undo your life with someone just like that. Loving an apartment was a real thing. She couldn’t just let things change. She needed to put it back together again.
“Look, John, let’s just let things rest for right now with the whole thing and talk about it again in a week.”
“Okay, let’s do that. I’m so sorry.”
He got up and put his arms around her and buried his face in her neck. If only Sonja could see me now, she thought.
The next few days teetered between torture and normalcy. She had said they wouldn’t talk about getting engaged until the week was over, but of course that didn’t happen.
“Don’t you know how horrible it feels to tell someone you want to get married only to have them tell you that they don’t feel the same way? You have all the power in the relationship now. Do you realize that?” she said on Monday.
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is true. I’m completely powerless in this situation. You know I love you and want to marry you, and I don’t have the luxury of knowing you feel the same way.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not my intention.”
John often apologized and said it wasn’t his intention. Every time he did it infuriated her.
“Apologies don’t make it better, John,” she said on Wednesday. “I wish you’d stop saying sorry and just stop making me feel bad.”
Throughout it all, the day-to-day rigors persisted. No matter how bad the fights got, no matter how angry or hurt she felt, at some point they just resumed things as usual. It was too exhausting to keep up such a high l
evel of anger or sadness; she had to just let go of it and move on with the day. They would fight for two hours straight, not resolve anything, and then just clean the bedroom or make dinner. Sometimes she would try to act mad for as long as possible, but realistically it wasn’t practical. There were too many hours to fill not to find temporary relief.
By the end of the week nothing had changed. John vacillated between fear and apology. Leda became more and more desperate at the prospect of their possible demise. Saturday night they decided to go out to dinner.
“I’m really sorry about this last week,” John said as they ate soup.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She really wanted to tell him about the screaming in her head at his millionth “I’m sorry,” but she refrained.
“Don’t be like that.”
“I can’t help it. It kills me.”
“It kills me too.”
“Really? How is that possible?”
“Do you think I thought I wouldn’t be able to get married after all this time?”
“I don’t understand you. I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know who you are. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.”
“I guess all I can say is that if you knew how it feels in my head you’d understand why I can’t get married.”
“Can’t get married? You said you just needed some time.”
“You know, honestly, I can’t even say that right now. I’m just freak-
ing out.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I feel like my life is ending.”
“Your life is ending because we’d be getting married?”
“I know that’s not the case, but it still feels that way.”
Leda felt like someone kept slapping her in the face over and over again. Her rage and shock and misery and disbelief and confusion and sadness and hurt and everything were hitting her over and over with each word. They were in a restaurant, though, and so she just sat there with soup in front of her, carrot ginger. A taste she would forever associate with nausea.
“What I don’t think you realize, John, is that I gave up my life for you. My life is what ended. I gave up grad school, I gave up my family, I gave up my home. I did that for you. I did that to spend forever with you.”
“I know you did, and I feel terrible about it, but that still doesn’t change anything.”
The moment he said it she knew he was right. No matter what he promised her or what she sacrificed, in the end it didn’t matter. Whatever she labeled it in her mind, whatever she told herself the last four years of her life were, the reality was that her success was completely dependent on him. My life is not really mine, she thought.
“We should go. I can’t just sit here and have dinner and pretend everything is fine. Where’s our waiter?” she said.
They got their food boxed up and John went to go get the car. Her ankle pain had been getting worse, and it was a long walk back to where they’d parked.
She sat alone at the table waiting for him. She thought about her mom and the last time she’d seen her at Christmas. It felt very far away.
“Hey, there.” An older man walked up to the table. He was in a checkered sports jacket with a brightly colored pocket square. His hair was thinning and his eyelids hung with old age. She’d seen him come in a few minutes before with a whole group of old men.
“I just want to tell you that you are beau-ti-ful,” he said.
“Oh, thank you,” she said.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Yeah, he’s getting the car.”
“Of course you do. He is one lucky guy. I would do anything to have a beau-ti-ful girlfriend like yourself. My name is Marv, by the way.” He put out his hand for her to shake.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Leda.” Normally, she hated these kinds of come-ons from dirty old men, but tonight it felt like the greatest victory. It was as if he’d been sent to her as an angel from dirty old man heaven, a representative of the abhorrent male ego.
“What a beau-ti-ful name for a beau-ti-ful girl. Well, you take care there, Leda. And make sure that boyfriend of yours treats you right, okay?”
“I will,” she said.
Marv smiled and walked over to the group of men sitting at a big round table at the back of the restaurant.
“I met a beau-ti-ful girl,” she could hear him say to them.
She told John about it in the car.
“I’m an asshole,” he said.
The next morning as John went out to get them coffee she called her mom. It was something she had been unable to do for fear that her mother would be disappointed in her. Moving across the country for a man’s career and being left out in the cold wasn’t exactly any parent’s dream for their daughter, especially not her mom’s. Her other fear was that her mom would come to dislike John. It was strange, but she felt oddly protective of him and of their love together. She didn’t want her mom to start cursing him out, saying all sorts of unbearable things about him. It was a ridiculous fear, though. Years later she’d look back on it and say, “The one thing I regret about that horrible time is that I didn’t tell my mom sooner.”
“I’m so sorry, honey. What an awful thing to be dealing with,” her mom said. She was calm and her voice was soothing to hear, even in a time when any kind of real comfort seemed implausible. “It’s something all men go through. I really believe that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, your dad freaked out right before we got married. He told me he wanted to spend a year in India. Can you imagine Dad living in India?”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I was really upset for a while, but then I told him to just go, and of course he didn’t, and the next spring we got married. Men are afraid of things women aren’t. That’s why they’re so oppressive. They’re afraid of our fearlessness.”
“I don’t feel fearless. I feel terrified of losing him.”
“Don’t be terrified. I think he’ll come around, but even if somehow he didn’t, you’ll be fine. You can’t forget that.”
The talk with her mom made her feel better. When John got home they sat outside on the patio and had coffee.
“Are you okay?” he asked her.
“Not really, but…I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry about what I said last night about not wanting to get married. That’s not how I feel. I was up all night thinking, and I realized that I’m just being crazy. Yes, I’m anxious about the whole thing, but it’s insane for me to be acting on anxiety. And I do want to marry you. Maybe I feel nervous about doing it right now, but that’s just something I need to get over. I owe that to you. You moved out here and everything. You deserve stability.”
“John, even though that’s all true, you still have to want this. I don’t want to be pressuring you into getting engaged. It has to be something you want or it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“It is what I want. I’m going to buy the ring tomorrow.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I’ve decided.” He reached over and grabbed her hand.
Leda felt a huge rush of relief. It was as if the air had been let back into her lungs. I’ll have to call my mom back, she thought.
The next day she spent cleaning the apartment. She wanted things to be perfect for when John got home. He told her he’d surprise her with the actual engagement, so she figured he wouldn’t ask her that night, but it still felt as if they had a lot to celebrate. She wanted to walk down to the market and get something special to make for dinner, but her ankles were too painful so she made spaghetti instead. Most of the day she felt happy, but occasionally she’d remember the things he had said over the past week, and there just was no way to feel good about it. Anne texted her, “How are you?” at around noon. Anne still didn’t know anything,
but that didn’t make it any easier to know what to say. Was she happy? Was she miserable? Was there anything besides herself and the spaghetti just boiling the ever-frenzied day away, her frantic thoughts rising with the steam? “I’m pretty good,” she wrote.
At around 5:45 she texted John. “Almost home?” He didn’t answer, but she didn’t think much of it. He must be at the jewelry store by now. She put on a nice dress and did her makeup. The apartment looked as clean as it ever had. She felt like a woman who had won a contest. I’m like that sad makeup girl, she thought. A few weeks back she’d gone on YouTube and stumbled upon a thread of makeup tutorial videos. She hadn’t realized it, but apparently making a makeup tutorial video and posting it on YouTube had become a thing. Many of the videos were by preteen girls who had entirely too much money and not enough adult supervision. How ironic that they choose to give tutorials in what they probably know the least about, Leda thought. After clicking through a few videos, she came across a nineteen-year-old Canadian girl who had amassed a considerable following. She was a very skinny, pretty girl with overdone eyebrows. Most of the comments said things like, “You are so so gorgeous!” or “You should be a model” or “I was feeling pretty today until I saw your video. Stunning!” Almost every single one of her videos had over a million views. She even had a video devoted completely to her hair that she began by saying, “Hi, guys, I decided to do this video because I get thousands of questions about my hair nearly every week.” What must it be like to devote sixteen minutes to explaining your hair? Leda thought. At the bottom of the page was a video titled “Victoria’s Secret Runway Challenge.” It opened with blurred lights and booming electronic dance music. The girl walked through an empty subway stop in red lingerie, her skinny frame emphasizing her youth and need for nourishment. Everyone was oohing and aahing over it, and after reading down a bit Leda figured out that this had been the girl’s audition for some kind of Victoria’s Secret competition open to the public.
