This Kind of Jealousy

This Kind of Jealousy 

Jacey throws a glass coffee mug, (Zwilling Double-Wall Insulated Glass Mug), across the kitchen. It hits the freshly painted wall (Behr, Sweet Coconut Milk, M230), and shatters into a trillion pieces. 

“This is what you’ve done to us!” she screams, her voice crackling with jealousy, her manicured pointer-finger nail (Orly Cold As Ice - breathable treatment + color) jabbing at the air toward the pile of glass rubble. 

Blayne drops his head, his second chin hitting his chest first. “I’m sorry, babe,” he mumbles. 

“Sorry?! You’re sorry!” She grabs a box of Wheat Thins and lifts it above her head. 

“Please don’t throw anything else!” Blayne pleads, standing from his half-seated position on the metal stool in the kitchen. It’s a very uncomfortable stool (Grejsi Counter Stool with Metal Frame), but Jacey liked the way the metal was reflective of the sunlight in the afternoons, so that’s what he purchased. 

He leans toward her, but she releases the opened box and shakes the small square crackers over the granite-topped island (Colonial White, imported from India) like confetti.

“Come on. You’re being childish.” As soon as the words release from his mouth, a little spittle landing on his hand from the ‘ishhh’, he knew he shouldn’t have said them. 

Jacey’s voice pitches to a height he’s never heard before, not even in the throws of an orgasm. She screams and screams and screams, pulling at her hair (Soft Copper Balayage, cut in a sleek angled lob), and pacing back and forth on the opposite side of the island. 

He watches her, partly exhausted, partly curious about what she would do next. Her screaming is better than her throwing things. He’d offer to clean the mess but she’d flail her hand in front of his face and deny him the chance because ‘he wouldn’t do it right anyway’. He slumps back down and waits. 

Then his cell phone pings. A text message. 

Jacey stops in front of the stove (Café 30" 7.0 Cu. Ft. True Convection Double Oven Slide-In Gas Range CCGS750P4MW2 - white), drops her arms, and stares at him. 

His phone is in his Navy blazer breast pocket (Lululemon New Venture Button-Front Blazer). 

The husband and wife of twenty-three years lock eyes. Neither moves. 

The cell phone pings again. 

“Answer your bloody phone.” Jacey commands in a low growl. 

“No,” he says. He knows who is texting him. 

“Answer your goddamn phone right now,” Jacey repeats, pronouncing each syllable of each word in a slow, mad drawl. 

He takes out his phone. This part of the scene is inevitable. He slides and taps his finger on the device. Reads the text.

“What did she say?” Jacey whispers. 

“It’s not who you think.” He clicks the phone off and tucks it back into the pocket. 

She bangs her fist on the granite, crushing an unsuspecting Wheat Thin. Then she inhales deeply. A diaphragmatic belly breathing technique she learned from her private yoga instructor, Pacifica-Grace. She repeats this for three rounds. Then she starts laughing hysterically, bowling over and slapping her open palms on the granite, crushing and spreading cracker dust into a wider circumference. 

“Not who I think, eh?” she finally says, wiping tears from her face, disturbing her foundation (La Prairie Pure Gold Radiance Concentrate Revitalising Serum), but it is fine, it is to-ta-lly fine. 

He shrugs. 

She walks around the island to him. He pulls back instinctively. He stands. She stops several inches from his body. He inhales her angry scent, a mixture of control, effort, disdain and hysteria. Does she know? He swallows; his Adam’s apple bobbing for saliva. 

She leans forward and licks it. The length of his fat neck from his trachea to the first of his  two chins.

“What the hell?” The stool scrapes on the floor and as he moves away from her. 

“She does weird sex things with you, doesn’t she?” Jacey pokes his thick chest with her finger. “She lets you stick it in her. In any hole, any time–”

“That’s enough,” Blayne says, walking into the open-concept living room. 

“You’re so predictable, you know that? Turning fifty, bloated and bored–”

“Stop, babe, please sit down with me,” he sits on the sofa (Onyx Sofa by Peugeot, a gift he’d gotten his wife for their 25th wedding anniversary), taps the plush pillow beside him. 

“No,” she folds her arms, her biceps flexing under the sleeves of her off-white top (Bergdorf Goodman Ariana High-Neck Midlayer Pullover).

“It’s not what you think,” he presses. “I’m not having an affair.”

She scoffs before he finishes saying the word ‘affair’. 

He shifts his body to look directly up at her. “Please sit down, love.” He reaches for her. Although she refuses his reach, she sits on the sofa – as far away as she can – and she faces the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that span the length of the living room. 

“I’m not having an affair.” He sighs. “I’m old, honey. I’m old and grey and fat. I have two chins with a third working very hard to join the team.”

The left side of Jacey’s mouth twitches away a smile. 

“I have loved you since the moment I saw you. Do you remember that moment?” he moves a smidge closer to her. 

She shakes her head quickly. 

“Yes you do because you were having the same moment with me. I was at the front of the room, you were at the back. We locked eyes and it was all heat and desire and awe. You rearranged me.” He says quietly, emotion catching in his throat. 

Finally, she turns to him. “You were old then too,” she says, watching his ample belly lift with each breath. 

“This is what I’m saying,” he says, forcing a smile. “And you were young and beautiful, but you are–” he chokes on his words, clears his throat and wipes an errant tear from his eye before it falls. “You are more, so much more, beautiful now than I ever could have imagined.” 

She grabs his hand, his tear wetting her palm, and squeezes ferociously. “You’re scaring me.” She whispers. 

“I am scared,” he whispers back. “I’m sick, honey.” He lifts his eyes to meet hers. His dazzling blue eyes, shining with fear. Her beer-bottle brown eyes, receiving his fear. 

She starts to let go of his hand, but he won’t let her, adds his other hand to the grip. 

“No,” she says, decisively. “Absolutely not.” She tries to stand but he pulls her down, brings her closer to him. 

“I’m not having an affair, I’m having doctors and specialist appointments. I didn’t want to tell you until we knew it was…bad.”

Jacey’s spine is metal-straight. She is freezing, the cold, cold, cold of denial-laden fear freezes her inside and out. 

He takes her face in his hands. “It’s stage four…and all over. They’ve given me weeks.”

A sound comes out her mouth that is the voice of the universe ripping. She folds into his lap, weeping. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, rubbing her back. 

She’s shaking entirely and he waits for her to take it in. He did the same weeks ago, alone in the shower while she was in the kitchen making his favourite dinner. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes. 

The last of the sun’s rays sweep across them before it sets and the earth’s slow rotation pulls the light away. 

“It’s my fault,” she asserts, sitting up, snot and tears dazzling on her face. 

“It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. This disease doesn’t do faults.”

She inhales. “Okay, so we figure this out. We…we…” She looks around the room. “We sell the house and we go to Europe. They’ve got cures for cancer in Europe, don’t they?” 

He laughs. “I don’t want to do that.” He offers her a handkerchief, (she’d found a set of vintage handkerchiefs at a stall on Portebello road during their honeymoon. She’d said to him: Real men use hankies.), pulled from the pocket on the front of his blazer. 

She takes it and cleans her face. 

“God, you’re stunning,” he breathes. (He loves her skin, the lines of wrinkles like lines of poetry on a page.)

She swats his compliment away. “I’m just as old, grey and fat as you. And I already have three chins.”

They curl into the silence of a life near its end. 

Jacey takes his hands. “What do we do?”

He smiles. “We be. Together.”

“Okay.” 

“I want to die here. With you. At home.”

“Okay.”

“I want to drink coffee and read poetry on Sundays again.”

“Yes,” she sobs into the handkerchief. His scent climbs into her nose: cautious hope, effort, willingness and fear. 

“Can I take a minute to acknowledge the elephant in the room?”

She snorts, facing him. “There’s another one?”

“Your jealousy, my love.”

She juts her chin up and out, deflecting. 

“I appreciate it.”

She places her hand gently on his cheek. “I am. I am jealous of your skin, of your veins, of your bones…I’m jealous of this goddamned cancer that is taking you from me.”

He closes his eyes in soft ecstasy. This is his wife, his beloved, his true love. The young woman who was a student in his class, eager and awe-struck. The old woman who is his soulmate, still eager, yet worried and quietly wise. 

He holds her face. They hold each other’s reflection. “I want you to let me help me clean up. I want you to let me help you.” 

She laughs, his favourite, joyous sound bursting from her toes, her belly. She opens her mouth so big he can see the top of her heart at the back of her throat. 

“Your dying wish is to help me clean? You’re bananas.” She rests her head on his chest, listens to the melody of his heartsong. 

He smiles, blinks, holds his favourite person in existence. 

“Okay, dear.” She sighs. 

“Thank you. And…” he hesitates. “Can you do one more thing for me?”

She nods on his heart centre. 

“Stop worrying. We know the ending now. Nothing else matters but our love.”

Her tears spring hot, soaking his cotton shirt. The Old Navy brand he loves that she makes sure is stocked in his side of their closet. Folded perfectly. Ready to cover him. She is jealous of his shirt, and she wraps her strong arms around him, and holds on for dear life.