by Zaina Arafat
He shakes his head. “But I decided that what I want is you. Besides, I think my son would be better off with happy, divorced parents than with miserable married ones.”
I think of my own parents, how relieved I was when the fighting stopped. Back in New York I’d often wake up in the middle of the night certain I could hear them yelling at each other, only to peer out my window onto a sidewalk quarrel.
I look at Matías. I fear I’m being paranoid, that I’m projecting my own insecurities onto him. He takes my hand—he must sense that I’m softening. “I was a jerk for being so distant,” he says. “I should’ve called. But I’m not cheating. I promise you nothing like this will happen again.”
“I need some time,” I tell him.
“I’ll give you ten years, mi amor, if that’s what you need.”
Two days later I’m still thinking about Chicago and that extra night. Finally I call someone, a mutual friend of mine and Claire’s.
“Hold on,” she says, “you’re still dating him?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I had no idea.”
“So he was with Claire in Chicago?”
“Of course. They’ve been seeing each other for a while now.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” she says. “I would’ve told you myself, but I had no idea you were still together.”
In that moment, I am surprised that rather than feeling angry or sad, I feel relieved.
My phone beeps with a call from Matías, which I ignore. He calls back, again and again. In between comes a call from a familiar D.C. number. And that one I do answer.
“Ahlan wa Sahlan!” says my mother. I take a deep breath as the sound of her voice courses through my veins. “How are you, mama?” she asks.
Over the next hour I pour out everything, collapsing the distance between us that I’ve spent the last six months working to create. “Habibti,” she says, and again I feel her voice run through me. I can tell she’s relieved that it’s a man I’m torn up over, not a woman. “Yalla, come home for a few days,” she says. “I’ll take care of you.”
I hesitate. “I’ll think about it,” I say. I know that by letting her in when I’m in need, I tie myself to her again, this gaping vulnerability nothing less than the rope.
At home later that evening I hear a knock on my back door. I lift the shade and see Matías standing outside the window, sweating and frowning. I point to the phone pressed to my ear. “I’m talking to Claire,” I tell him calmly, as though that’s normal. I’d sent her an email after finding out, along with my number. She called ten minutes later, and right then we’re running through our calendars, each remembering nights we weren’t with him, the lies he’d told about staying in to work when in fact he was with one of us.
He puts his hands in the air like I’m about to arrest him. “I’m crazy,” he says. “I’m just . . . crazy. I only did this because I was terrified you were going to leave me. I need to tell you—”
“Why don’t you tell Claire as well,” I say, placing the call on speakerphone.
“It’s you, not Claire. I’m in love with you.”
My stomach twitches. He’s desperately trying to salvage one of us, and I am the most susceptible. “You are a sick fuck,” I say. “You have no conscience. You’re a sociopath. A narcissist. You’re a sex addict!”
“I’m not! Sometimes, people recently out of marriages—”
“Shut up,” I say. “Just stop talking.”
“I think I’m gonna go,” Claire interrupts.
“Do you want to come over and confront him yourself?” I give her my address and she says she’ll be over in ten minutes. We hang up, and now I am alone with him. “You purposefully led me away from the bar after my reading the other night, didn’t you? Because you thought Claire might be there?”
He nods, and I shudder. I take a deep breath and wait for the wave of fury to subside. “I’m actually afraid of you.”
“Look, I may be pathetic,” he says, “but I’m not dangerous.”
“How do I know that? I don’t even know who you really are.”
“Did Claire tell you I ended things with her on the car ride back from Chicago?”
I feel my blood heating. “After fucking her all weekend? That’s classy.”
“I know I’ve lost you,” he says. “I know you don’t believe anything I say anymore. But when she gets here, I want to tell her—”
“Don’t. Don’t even dare.”
After what feels like hours I hear a knock on the front door. “Follow me,” I say. “I don’t trust you alone in my living room.” I open the door and find Claire standing there, her hands cupping the sides of her waist, her weight shifted to one side. Her hip juts out from a turtleneck dress, like a finger beckoning from her body. The two of us take a moment to examine each other. I can’t reconcile how different we look—Claire is about a foot taller than me, blond, and very angular. It seems strange that the same man would be attracted to both of us. We exchange polite smiles. “Come in,” I say. She follows me through the corridor, walking past Matías without glancing in his direction, and into the living room. She sits down on the couch, and suddenly I feel this may be the worst idea ever. Once we’re all seated, she crosses her arms and looks up at him.
“You disgust me,” she says.
He doesn’t answer. Instead he turns toward me. “Can I please tell you something?”
“Get out,” I say, with difficulty.
“No,” he says. “I won’t.”
His defiance makes it less difficult to insist. “I will literally call the police right now,” I tell him. At this, he nods solemnly, and leaves.
Claire and I sit silently as the air thickens and then thins. I’m the first to puncture the silence. “Want some tea?”
She nods, and I get up to boil water. “I have mint, chamomile, and—”
“I ended a three-year relationship for him,” Claire interrupts. “He was making all kinds of promises. And the sex . . .”
“Yes,” I say. “I know.”
I had never been able to escape the hollowness. Always, in the moments immediately after coming, I felt a sharp and excruciating emptiness. Within moments it was gone, but for those first few seconds, as my muscles relaxed and my breathing slowed, I would experience a despair that I’d come to dread. With Matías, though, the emptiness was replaced by something. Not so much a significance, but a barrier that kept me from descending into unbearable sadness. I’d interpreted this as a sign that our relationship was somehow meaningful, that it might carry me away from my past and allow me to untether from it.
“Well,” Claire says. “I’m glad we found out. At least we won’t romanticize him anymore. And we certainly won’t be sad when he’s gone.”
Before she leaves we agree to keep in close contact. “Call me whenever you’re tempted to call him,” she says, “and I’ll do the same.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Though I’m sure it won’t be long before one of us runs into him. Definitely at the visiting writers’ farewell party.”
Clare rolls her eyes. “I forgot about that.” She shrugs. “Well, let’s go together, then. That way neither of us has to go alone.”
•
It’s almost been a week since it ended, and I’ve been wondering how I could’ve actually believed that Matías was sincere, that he was in any way real. How did I not see through him?
I leave the café where I’ve been all afternoon, and as I’m walking across the pedestrian thoroughfare, I spot him. I try to keep walking, to look down at the to-go cup in my hand, but I can’t stay focused. Without meaning to, I walk toward him, as if a rope is pulling me. I stand in front of him and say nothing.
“Give me five minutes,” he pleads. I cross my arms and stay quiet. “Two minutes. Please.”
“Speak.”
“I keep remembering.” He looks away. “The little red lights.”
He goes on to say things that sound sincer
e but that I can’t let myself believe, as much as I want to. They sounded sincere before, and I believed them before. To my frustration I understand his behavior: I’ve been that person, the one holding two people hostage in case I were to lose one.
“I wish you knew how much I love you,” he says to me.
“Of course you love me,” I snap back, if only to keep my ego intact. “I have no doubt that you love me.” I begin to laugh crazily. “I gave you the most authentic parts of me,” I tell him. At least this is what I want to believe, that I’ve practiced healthy intimacy with him, despite how much I’ve actually withheld. I want to him to think that I allowed him every point of access, every vulnerability, and that he’d allowed me his, too, that we had guns to each other’s head and he just happened to shoot first. “You don’t get to love me anymore.” I push past him and walk home, alone as ever.
I arrive home to his name once again in my inbox. And, of course, I open the email. “The trip to New York was real. My concern when you were upset about your mother was real. My pride when you read on stage was real.” The sentences come at me like knives, each one cleaving deeper and deeper into my chest. “You cannot fake the affinity we have, and I very much wanted us to last. I finally met a woman I loved, and who loved me, and who made me happy, and whom I made happy—and I hurt her beyond repair. I did the terrible things I did because I was a mess. If we had met six months from now, when I’d fully recovered from the hang-ups of my marriage, everything would’ve been different.”
The cheating, the lies, all of it should hollow out every last word. And yet somehow, in a way that disturbs me, it doesn’t.
I forward his email to Renata, who calls me moments later. “Love aside,” she says, “what matters is how he treated you.”
“I know,” I say, but then I find myself telling her about the emptiness, the feeling I’ve always experienced afterward, how I didn’t feel it with him, how with him, I felt fulfilled. I felt healthy.
“Then maybe it’s time you find some healthy love.”
•
He sends more emails. Several each day, and their heaviness drains me. “There may come a time when you want to see me again,” he writes. “And then, if you allow me a chance, I’ll show you that the guy you knew, the one who wanted to stand by you in your life and your career, is really me, this time without baggage.”
Baggage. No one ever breaks free from it. Everyone has to figure out how to go on living, to be decent, in spite of it.
“Trust me,” I write back, emboldened by hurt, “there will never be a time when I want to see you again.”
He continues to write to me. He begs me to see him before he leaves, half an hour, just thirty minutes. “There are things I am aching to tell you,” he writes, “and I can’t help but feel that the clock is ticking.”
It’s true. He’s leaving in a few days. And I feel it, too, the pressure of time running out, though at this point it shouldn’t matter. I’ve lost all faith in him. But the danger exists, that I might still leap.
Finally, I concede. “I will meet you in a public place, for one drink.”
I bury my face in my hands, wishing he were already gone.
•
We meet at a wine bar several blocks from my apartment. The things he is “aching to say” turn into four hours of conversation, two bottles of Malbec, and countless tears. “I was just using her,” he says. “To protect myself from getting hurt. You were just so . . . distant, and I was falling deeper and deeper in love.”
I internalize his implicit criticism, his blaming his cheating on me. “Well, I was scared too,” I say. “And trust me, I’m more scared now.”
“Don’t be!” he says. “There are no more secrets now. I’m just so relieved to be through with Clare.”
We say our goodbyes on the street outside the bar. Just as I’m about to turn away and walk back to my apartment a truck comes roaring down the street. Matías grabs me and pulls me out of the way as it speeds past, the two of us tumbling onto the sidewalk, his hand protecting the back of my head. As we lie side by side on the cement, both breathing heavily, he looks at me and says, “That would be the worst ending . . .”
“I was just going to say that!”
He caresses my cheek with the back of his finger. “So will I ever see you again?” he asks.
I close my eyes and shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe someday.”
•
It’s the night of the farewell party. In the morning the visiting writers are all leaving. As planned, I meet up with Claire beforehand. “Have you heard from him?” I ask, and immediately regret it.
“Not a word,” Claire says. “You?”
I hesitate. When you don’t want to lose someone, it’s so tempting to deceive them.
AFTER THAT NIGHT AT THE WINE BAR WITH MATíAS, IT’S as if Claire, the cheating, and the lies never happened. That next night he is back in my bed, which entails more crying, and the following evening we are having dinner at the fanciest restaurant in town—the only fancy restaurant in town—followed by Tanqueray and tonics at the bar next door. I cling to his arm the entire night, not wanting to let go, knowing he’ll be leaving in the morning. At five a.m. he kisses me goodbye as he gets up and returns to his hotel, where a bus waits to take him to the airport.
When he arrives in Argentina the next afternoon, he calls me right away. “There’s someone here who wants to say hello.”
“Ciaoooo bella,” Simoné, his three-year-old son squeaks into my ear, giggling before handing the phone back to his father.
I immediately melt into a puddle, picturing myself with him and his son, mothering them both. At that precise moment Matías sweeps in with his initial invitation to Buenos Aires. Three weeks, all expenses paid, guaranteed time of my life. “Think about it,” he says. “We can spend Christmas Day at Iguazu Falls.”
I find myself accepting the offer the next day, just before heading home to D.C. for Thanksgiving. Since things with my mother are still fragile in the wake of our six-month hiatus, I decide to stay with Renata and Thomas in Cleveland Park. “I’m going to Buenos Aires for three weeks,” I tell them. “I’ve already decided. I know you guys disapprove, but I just don’t think he would hurt me a second time.”
“Okayyyyy,” Renata says as Thomas sits beside her nodding solemnly. Now that he’s finally committed, Thomas has taken on the distinct responsibility and conviction of a former player, called upon to fight on behalf of all women who’ve suffered at the hands of his abandoned ilk.
Over drinks that night, they ask me to hash out the events of the past few months, how I came to find out that Matías had been cheating on me for the majority of our relationship. As I retell the story, I feel a renewed sense of shock, and I’m humiliated by the depth of his lies. I chew an ice cube from my vodka soda as the three of us go through his emails, the ones he sent begging me to see him one more time, emails with pictures of newborn babies attached.
“Since you’re craving kids right now,” Matías wrote, “here’s a picture of me holding my son when he was only a month old.”
“You fell for this?” Thomas asks, seeming genuinely disappointed, and possibly ashamed. Maybe it reminds of his own past tactics. By the end of the night I am intoxicated enough to see things clearly. And to realize that I’m not going anywhere.
I tell Matías this in an email, that I no longer want to go to Buenos Aires, that I don’t want to continue on with him at all. “It’s just too much,” I write. “Too much to try and move past.”
I wake up the next morning to a deluge of missed calls and emails. “At least tell me this to my face, over Skype,” he writes. “Breaking up over email is like spitting on everything we’ve had.”
I want to point out that he already did that by sleeping with someone else the entire time we were together. Instead, I sign on to Skype and accept his call. He sits on the other end, a lit cigarette resting in the ashtray beside his computer, his lips contorted into a force
d pout. “Baby, what’s going on?” he asks, cocking his head to the side like a confused monkey. “Come on, talk to me.”
As I try to explain myself, staring into his eyes encircled by dark planetary rings of sadness and experience, my resolve begins to weaken.
“I just think if this going to work, we need to move a little slower,” I say, completely reneging on my stance from the night before.
He nods. “I see. Well, since you won’t come here—he pauses, swallows audibly and takes a deep, dramatic breath—“I’ll come to you. Once the academic quarter ends in late January. I have a month off, and we can spend it together.”
“I need to move on, Matías. I can’t keep—”
“Just think about it,” he interrupts. “That’s all I’m asking.”
“GREG’S DEAD.” IT’S THE FIRST LINE OF MOLLY’S EMAIL. Blunt, with nothing there to soften it. “He overdosed in a parking lot. I wanted to tell you over the phone but you never answer when I call.”
I’m in the midst of debating Matías’s proposition when I get Molly’s email. The news launches me back to that day at the coffee shop in Bowling Green, when Greg told me that he was planning to meet up with his intern in Miami instead of going home and putting his life back together. I think about what he told us during the first week, how his father had left when he was a kid, how he’d never thought himself worth sticking around for. Never thought himself worthy of love.
While I was in treatment I heard about others who’d checked out and died soon afterward. They overdosed, drove drunk, committed suicide. It was hard to make sense of these incidents, especially since everyone I encountered left the Ledge seemed so determined to get clean and sober. At what point did that resolve fade? After a few months, a few weeks? On the car ride home?
It terrifies me to think about how close to danger I’ve often lived. “Better safe than sorry.” Everyone at the Ledge echoed the adage whenever I vowed to distance myself from destructive behavior and people, and especially from my mother. For a long time, I’ve imagined telling her that I want everything she’s wanted me to pursue—a marriage, children, a lucrative career. But growing up in her house, subjected to her erratic rages, I didn’t have the energy. I was exhausted just trying to survive.