Emily and I

The night had been going fine. Of course Emily and I had kept a careful, casual distance the whole night which was likely the true cause of our success.

She’s a better liar than I am, so she’s better at these kinds of social events. The kind where everyone is pretty, charming, and utterly insincere. Emily's tinkling laugh and sharp smile fit right in. My careful listening and interest do well enough, but I had enjoyed these nights a hell of a lot more when Emily would look me in the eye. 

For the past half hour I had been listening to some fool bloviate about how poor people should just work harder if they didn’t want to be poor, then smoothly transition into how he’d managed to avoid taxes on his third yacht. I kept turning to look for Emily, to exchange glances which would convey exactly what we thought, and leave us both on the verge of laughing as a joke passed between us in the language of carefully raised eyebrows. 

She used to make these things bearable.  

Now there's no one to exchange glances with. No silent jokes. There's just her across the room and me, pretending I’m not hoping she’ll turn to me and flash a smile. 

It’s almost embarrassing how much I love the wife that's probably thinking about divorcing me.  

There's a pause as the idiot in front of me stops talking and looks at me expectantly. 

I nod politely “Really? That's fascinating.” As expected, that's all the prompting the fool needs. He continues on and I let myself drift away. I could probably go and find another conversational partner. There's plenty of people at the party, I’m sure there's at least one who knows how to talk about something other than themselves. The truth is I prefer this misery. Someone who knew how to have a conversation would notice how little I want to participate in one right now. 

The only person I really want to talk to is my wife from six months ago. Back when things were good and every conversation with her ended in laughter. 

I don’t even know how it happened. This silent war we find ourselves in. It’s the little things, I guess. The little accumulations of tension and anger, little annoyances that sting like mosquito bites and itch like hell no matter how hard you try to ignore them. 

She’s going to leave me, and I’m almost already resigned to it. I hope she waits at least another month or so. By then I’m almost sure I’ll have enough of a hold on myself to resist the urge to beg her to stay. If it's the last of what we had I don’t want her last memories of me to be pathetic. 

 There's a hand on my shoulder, when I look there she is. She’s smiling but not at me. “Hello Bob.” she says. Is that what this fools name is? Idiot Bob looks delighted to see her. People are always delighted to see my wife. 

“Emily! How have you been?” 

“Oh wonderful and you?” 

The fool, Bob, opens his mouth and I can already tell we’ll be stuck here another half hour if I don't intervene. 

“Well, it was a pleasure speaking to you Bob, but we really must go.” 

I pull Emily away before he can do anything but look surprised. 

When we’re far enough that he won’t hear Emily says “Oh, thank Christ that guy’s such an asshole. Last time I had to talk to him, he spent the entire time talking about his favorite pickup artist techniques.” 

I snorted. “Wait until you hear the bullshit he was talking about tonight.” We exchange looks, and it's as sweet as it used to be. Then we both remember that it isn't at all like it used to be. There's a sudden awkward silence, the kind that we haven't had since the beginning of our acquaintance, when I was rude, and she was fake.

Just like that, I’m tired and grieving for the person whose standing right next to me. 

“Lets go home.”

Emily sighs. “Yeah. All right.”

We get home to the silence and cold. 

She kicks off her heels at the doorway with a little sigh of relief. My beautiful, elegant wife who only ever wears heels and always complains about them. I used to tease her about that, telling her I’d love her just as well in flats. She used to give a teasing little smile and say she only wore them so she could know how the weather was, up in the clouds where my head lived.

We go to bed. Our domestic rituals are well-worn and comfortable, but all the warmth and joy that they used to have is gone. We used to talk, to undress each other, to brush up against one another as we brushed are teeth and put on our sleep cloths. Now its silent and cold. A mockery of what we had. A corpse where our living, breathing love used to be. 

I take off my jacket and lay it on a chair. On the other side of the bed Emily’s trying to take off her dress. It’s the one with the zipper in the exact spot where its hardest to reach. She struggles with it for a moment before looking at me. She raises an eyebrow and, before I even realize, I’m already moving to help her. 

She gives her back to me. I place my hands carefully, tentatively against her shoulder. She leans into my hands. Just enough to give me a thrill of hope. A sudden anxiety creeps into me, the type I haven’t felt since we were first doing this, back when I didn't know what lines I was allowed to cross and feared her openness. 

I pull the zipper down and let the shoulder that was on her hand slide down onto the bare skin that it reveals. 

“Jackie…” She whispers. 

“Yeah.” My mouth feels dry with want. I push down one of her sleeves, mapping out the bared skin with my thumb.

“How long are we going to keep doing this?” There's something trembling and miserable in her voice. 

I take a step back, and then another. My suddenly cold hands sink into the pockets of my pantsuit.

She turns to look at me and its clear I won't have another month before she asks for a divorce. 

I’m almost ruefully proud at how brave my wife is. It was something I had always admired, the way she could confront her own emotions. It always took her a while, but she never shied away from them the way I did. If it were up to me, we would live in this misery forever,  continuing on as if her love for me hasn't been slowly dying in front of us. She’s better than that, she deserves better than that, than me. 

“Jackie, we can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep doing this.” 

I look at the ground. My face feels crumpled and transparent, I’m overexposed in her gaze.

She takes a deep shuddering breath. 

“Are you cheating on me at least?” My eyes snap to her face, shocked, but she has her eyes closed. “I think I could bear it better if there was at least another woman. If the reason that you didn’t love me anymore was because you found someone else and not just because you were tired of me and thought of me as another annoyance.” 

“I- what? No.”

She nods and takes another breath. “I didn’t think so. You’re too moral to cheat and too moral to tell the wife you don’t love anymore that you want a divorce. You are exactly the stupid, selfish, self-righteous type who would rather grit her teeth and touch the wife she doesn't love than just have an affair and get a divorce like everybody else does.” 

She's crying now, but she does it furiously. Wiping the tears away before they have a chance to mess up her makeup.

“Well I’m not having it Jackie. I’m not going to wait and see what it feels like when you touch someone you don’t want but feel obligated to.” 

I have thoroughly lost the fucking plot of this conversation. 

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Don’t. Just don’t. At first, I thought you just needed some space. I thought well it’s been a few years now of course she's not going to be as interested in me as she was in the beginning. I thought I’d give you some space and I’d let you be and it’d be fine, you’d come back to me like you always do. But you just kept getting colder and colder. You stopped letting me in. You haven’t touched me in forever, damn you! And then you started treating me the same way you treat strangers, the same way you treat the annoying people we used to make fun of together, all politeness and silent contempt. I’ve lost your interest and you don’t love me anymore and I love you, but I’m not staying just for your contempt. I won’t do that no matter how much I love you!” 

The tears have stopped now. It’s just Emily’s fury and my utter confusion. 

“Emily,” I say a bit embarrassed. “I love you more than anything in the whole fucking world.”

“I-” She stops and looks at me, narrow eyes and suspicious. “You’re a terrible liar. You always make a face like you just bit into something rotten.” 

I raise my hands, exasperated. “I know.”

“I-” her voice is small and something twists in me to hear her like that. “You’re not lying?” 

“No. Emily I love you.” I resist the urge to squirm in embarrassment but this is where my obtuseness has gotten us. It seems best to state everything out loud. “I love you. I do not want a divorce. I-” I steel myself for this piece of unfortunate vulnerability. “I thought you didn't want me anymore. When you started getting distant I thought well, I wasn’t surprised when my lovely, charming wife didn’t want someone like me anymore.” 

She sits down, heavily, on the bed with a stunned look on her face. “We’re so fucking stupid.” I sit down on the bed next to her. “Yeah, we already knew that though.” My chest feels light in a way it hasn't for a few months now.   

She curls into my chest and I hold her there. She’s crying again. “I thought for sure you had gotten tired of me. That you were tired of how much I talked and how I dressed and how I’m so emotional all the time. I thought you were done with me, I couldn’t read your face anymore because you wouldn't let me. You shut me out and I kept waiting for you to tell me it was over.” 

I pat her long, silky hair. I feel warm all over. 

“How could you even think that? Do you even know what its like to be with you? How I admire you? How I want you all the time? I thought. I thought you were done with my bullshit. I know that I get quiet and moody. I’m not a people person like you are. Most of the time I’m a bitch. I thought you realized you could do better.” 

“I like that you're a bitch.” She says. 

“I like that you never stop talking and that you’re more emotional than me.” I said into her hair. 

“Oh.” 

“Yeah.” 

We stay like that for a while until she says: “You’ve been so polite.” She says the word like its something dirty. “It was driving me crazy.”

I start laughing at that. My poor wife who thought I didn’t love her because I was trying to be nicer. She starts laughing too. 

Just like that everything's all right. Everything is going to be fine because we’re laughing in between kisses, and she loves me, my beautiful, wonderful wife Emily loves me.