* * * *
“They won’t listen,” he said matter-of-factly. “They’ll cut me off.”
He said it flatly, like some stiff-neck met weather forecaster.
I realized then how tired he was, how fatigued he had been—not just physically, but psychologically as well. Mentally. Emotionally.Existentially.
Tired to the proverbial bone of living our lie. Of explaining, of resisting, of caring. Of being pressed under the stubby thumbs of four powerful women. Being scrutinized permanently, under review constantly.
I wanted so badly to denounce their folly, to rage on his behalf; I desired so desperately to dismantle the whole structure—culture, class, hypocrisy—brick by freakin’ brick.
Instead, I sat quietly, my calloused hands supporting my ton-heavy head; because outrage required energy that I, unfortunately, no longer had.
Marvin?
He was dispirited. Decapitated at the knees.
He rightly felt the decision had already been made, and all that remained was the endurance to stay unhappily married. The fortitude to remain sadly wed.
* * * *
Something shifted then—not in him, but in me.
That night, I fully understood, was no longer about the wedding, or the dowry, or even our relationship. It was about watching him like a hawk, and keeping positively engaged. Happy, but on check.
I moved quietly, deliberately. Pills flashed down the toilet. Alcohol moved down to the forever-locked basement, and the key tossed into the backyard. Phones fully charged.
I did not announce any of these actions—protection needed no audience.
* * * *
For days, I was worried sick. Careful not to doze off, not to veer off.
See, Marvin had joked about dying before. Twice.
The first time, we were seriously zonked and arguing over something small, something childish—chores, I think. He laughed, exasperated, and said, “Sometimes I think it would bemucheasier if I just wasn’t here.”
The second time was months later, after a family gathering at the family home just a spit-throw away from our not-so-humble abode. “Maybe I should just sleep and not wake up at all,” he said lightly.
We’d laughed. We’d moved on. But I’d not forgotten—jokes of that nature don’t just disappear. They lodge themselves somewhere deep inside your head, waiting to be awakened, seeking to be noticed, hoping to be confirmed as real.
Lying beside him, listening to his careful breathing, those jokes rearranged themselves into something else entirely.
They became warnings that I’d so foolishly—so woefully—dismissed.
* * * *
That night, he climbed into bed and turned away from me without a word. No silly quip about drooling, snoring. No kiss goodnight. Just the silent presentation of his bare python-tattoo-filled back.
I lay there, staring into the ominous darkness, my mind circling the same terrible question:
What happens if I say the wrong thing?
If I told him to walk away, and he collapsed under the unyielding weight of familial exile—wouldn’t that be on me? If I asked him to go through with it, and he disappeared into a life that, in the end, suffocated him—would that not be my doing too?
Slowly, in my nakedness, it dawned on me…his ingenious plan. Maybe that was the Lit major in me suddenly going on overdrive but Marvin—a master manipulator in his own right—was, in a sense, preparing to abdicate. Consciously or unconsciously, he wanted—nay, needed—me to, ultimately, make the choice for him. To make things easy, by either leaving in a huff just so he could convince himself that he could’ve survived the onslaught if I’d stuck it out, or staying so that he could subtlety blame his seemingly endless parental and economic woes on my stubbornness.
He didn’t say it aloud. Not explicitly. But it was there—in the way he’d so deftly emptied himself of decision, handed the proverbial hot frying pan to me with shaking hands.
