“I can’t—there’s no other way for me to be.”
He stared at his empty wall. Unhung art prints in cheap frames were piled against the closet door. His eyes flashed over me with a foreign irritation. “Is that true? Or is that just something you say to get what you want?”
There was nothing worse he could have said to me at that moment. It would’ve been better had he just said he hated me or another mushy, unspecific insult. He must’ve known this because, when it was clear I was done speaking, he shut off the lamp and turned on his side.
He drove me to the airport early in the morning. It was two days after Christmas, the roads filling up again, highway humming through the window. His silence was jarring against the pink-orange sky. The city opened up while something in him was closing. I cried while he placed his hand on my thigh, a comforting weight.
He retrieved my bag from the trunk and lowered it onto the sidewalk in front of Departures. Behind us, cars stalled. When we turned to face each other, he brushed away my tears with his thumbs, then said, “I wanted to know if you’d be monogamous with me. Again.”
I was so startled I thought I’d misheard him. But then the request seemed inevitable, the way death is inevitable.
“Why are you asking this now?”
“I feel like with the distance and everything, it’s like we’re not even together.”
“But we are together.”
“I know, but having other people in our relationship is confusing. It’s weird that I see ____ more than I see you.”
The woman’s name went over my head. I wasn’t going to ask him to repeat it.
“I don’t know what to say.”
He laughed. “You could say yes.”
This was the moment I needed language. Not for myself but for this person I loved so fiercely. Artemisia Gentileschi’s fingers being crushed in the machine at trial. The slave woman setting her master on fire. Images arrived, words did not. All I understood was that I was a woman being asked by a man to belong to him in a way I felt I shouldn’t have to belong to anyone. I was almost angry. Women before me did not wrest this strip of freedom for me to tie my wrists with it, to play prisoner, play girlfriend, play doll with some man centuries later. It was too big, what he wanted from me, familiar, like men had been asking me this since before I was born, like I was a patch of dirt they could drive something through to stake their claim.
But Jay wasn’t some man. I’d learned to love with him. He was my voice of reason, my instructor in hope. This was not a love I was willing to let go without clawing to keep, even if I was being clawed from the inside out to keep it.
“Can I think about it?”
He told me, gently, to take my time. As if time could help me become what I couldn’t. “I just… I love you. But I don’t think I can be open with you anymore.”
I tried to speak but couldn’t.
“Maybe we should take a break while you figure out what you want,” he added, thumbs still pressed to my cheeks.
I nodded, gutted. I already knew what I wanted: to be with him, to be myself.
When I got to my gate, he texted me.Have a safe flight. This hurt more than if he’d said nothing. A reminder that seven years couldn’t be easily undone, that the undoing would be slow, painful, like a Band-Aid catching on your skin, again, again, in the wasted attempts to rip it off.
THE BLOWUP
FADE IN:
INT. ST CLAIR HOME, LIVING ROOM - EARLY EVENING:
New Year’s Eve. CNN plays beneath a stream of screaming.
DORINDA
FOUR MONTHS. That’s how long you been at that job, now you’requitting?
JOEL
I’m not working for some dictator.
DORINDA
