about to take the field for a crucial third down in the fourth quarter. “You can do this. You have to do this. You’re GOING TO DO THIS.”
I shake her off and head for the door. I can hear her voice echo down the hallway until the elevator doors close: “Call meeeeeee.” But it’s not her words I hear in my head as I walk the three blocks home. No, it’s Stanley Smith again, boss-man from Miami. If only ol’ Stanley could see me now, I think as I wipe away a fresh batch of tears from my cheek. I guess it’s a lot easier not to smile when your house is the one on fire.
“She’s not my girlfriend. Why do you keep saying that?”
Here we go again. I don’t know why I’m expecting anything different from a guy who was caught smoking pot on the street, then thrown in jail for fighting with the arresting officer. But when something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. Though the infidelity isn’t the sex; the infidelity is him confiding in somebody else besides me. Her. Somebody else knows him better. Somebody else is walking and talking with him in the middle of the night. She knows more of the truth than I do, and it’s ripping my insides apart.
I survey the man—my fiancé—standing in front of me. Straggly, unkempt curls wrangled by a greasy elastic, tumble to his shoulders. The soles are starting to tear on his black high-top sneakers. Shoelaces: untied. They’re always undone, just like his hoodie. The Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt underneath is torn at the collar and his jeans are ripped, though not naturally so; no, he buys them that way. I shake my head. I want to tell him he’s the perfect picture of “This is your brain on drugs.” I want to tell him that everything about him seems to be hanging by a thread and how I am too, but I don’t. Instead, I look away from him to the wall in front of us. Light from the television fills the dimly lit room and flickers on us like a fire but gives us no warmth. The space between us standing here speaks more about our relationship than we have to each other lately. I look above the TV so I can jog my memory of that other man, the one I fell in love with.
There’s a picture of us outside UCLA’s football stadium, where we had our first kiss. It was the first week of school, and we met at a party in the basement of a fraternity house, our new friends from the dorm in tow. We clicked like two magnets, and hours later as I was leaving, I promised to meet him at the stadium the next day for his lacrosse team tryouts. I watched from the stands as he walked on the field with that quarterback-of-the-football-team confidence and told the coach he should be the one to take face-offs that season. Three days later I sat in those same stands and cheered him on as he, sure enough, took and won the first face-off of what would become UCLA’s first undefeated season ever. JR had that way with people. He could convince them to do whatever he wanted. Like later that same night when, after hours of postgame beer pong, he took me back to the stadium and demonstrated how we were going to climb over the gate. I didn’t want to get caught, but his Midwestern charm was strong enough to hoist me over the metal links. Those lacrosse shoulders didn’t hurt either.
Next thing I knew we were lying in the damp grass, making out on the fifty-yard line. Staying true to his grand gesture ways, seven years later he planned an elaborate marriage proposal in Paris. When we got back I put the best photos in a framed montage. There’s the one of me sitting on his shoulders under the Eiffel Tower. My hands are above my head like an Egyptian dancer, and his arms are wrapped tightly around my calves, making sure I don’t fall as I try, giggling uncontrollably, to construct our two bodies into our very own Eiffel Tower. We wandered through the streets that night, drunk on French wine and our fondness for each other.
My eyes move one to the right, to a photo where I’m sitting on his lap and his arms are extended out and around me, holding the camera, taking a selfie of us moments after he asked me to marry him. I’m holding my hands in the air, palms towards me, ring towards the camera, and the only uncertainty in this shot is which is brighter—my smile, or the reflection of my new, shiny diamond? He meant what he said that day. He did. He had to have. Right?
He definitely meant all the moves he made that night back in our hotel room too. We could barely wait to get inside the door before ripping each other’s clothes off. He threw me down on the floor and we rolled together—kissing, grabbing, giggling—all the way to the coffee table in the middle of the suite. He sat on its edge and lifted me up to him, basking in the shine of that rock on my finger, and told me he never wanted to be inside another woman again. So he stayed like that for hours—from the edge of the coffee table, to the edge of the red armchair next to the bed, to the edge of the tub. He did this thing when I was on top that I savored, that I craved: he put one hand on the small of my back, the other hand where my belly meets my hips, and moved me back and forth with exactly how much force—and at what speed—he needed in order to finish.
I wonder if he does the same thing to Courtney now. I wonder if she’s better than me in bed.
My eye catches the clock on the cable box as I leave the JR I had in Paris and look back at the one I have now, out on bail, in our bedroom. 4:52 PM. Over three hours have passed, and the only thing we’re getting closer to is my breaking point. The anger I had for him when he first got home has now turned to anger at myself. The man I loved for so long is not the man I thought he was. I must have been so blind, wanting this to be a relationship that it was never going to be. Whenever we hung out with friends of his from Chicago who were married, I’d always point out how cute they were together and he’d always tell me that we were never going to be like them. I always thought he meant because we didn’t meet and fall in love in high school. How foolish of me. I always held out hope that he would somehow change, or that we would somehow change. What an idiot I am.
I keep asking myself what I’m fighting for—a thirty-two-year-old guy who’s sleeping with his twenty-two-year-old assistant? A guy who’s dumb enough to get thrown in jail for puffing joints on the street? A man who insists on buying pretorn jeans? I’m not fighting for any of those guys. I know that. But I can’t get myself to leave this apartment, just pack a bag and leave, because I’m fighting for the couple in those pictures. I’m fighting for the life we built together over the last ten years. I’m fighting for the truth. And I’m not going to leave him—not our home or our dog or our world—until I hear the words come out of his mouth.
“Fine. She’s not your girlfriend,” I say in my I’m-negotiating-with-a-small-child voice. I’m willing to concede that point to get an answer to a much more burning question. As the words brew deep inside me I’m thinking, Please—just admit it. Please just be honest with me and be the man you always promised you would be when you got down on one knee in Paris. Now’s your chance. Here it goes, the million-dollar question. “Do you love her?”
He rolls his eyes like I should know the answer, like it’s a stupid question.
“Guils, come on, baby. I love you.”
He says it with the same emotion he’d use to ask a gas station attendant to fill his tank up with premium. And then he checks his phone for the tenth time in ten minutes. It hasn’t beeped or vibrated or let out any indication that someone’s trying to get ahold of him, but he stares at it for a full minute. Nope, nothing important going on here. I see him push a few buttons, but I can’t make out which ones. As if it would matter anyway.
“Listen I have to finish up a few emails before the crew leaves for the shoot. Why don’t you get out of your work clothes and when I’m done we’ll walk Zelda to the park.”
I nod and hop off the end of the bed. I’m angry, confused, and beaten down, but I need to see if he even has a twinge of feeling left for me. The only way to tell is for him to watch me undress. So I hop over to my left, framing myself in the door. I bend over and slowly strip off my Spanx first. Then goes the red Diane von Furstenberg dress that hugs every curve of my frame. All that’s left now is my black lace bra—one that’s always