Alone

by Michelle Parise

  He sits there. More silence. And then he makes a little joke and I laugh. We hug. “You’re so stupid but cute.” My hand in his hair. Then he says, “Oh, I meant to ask you — do you want to have any more kids?” Just like that, as if he’s asking me if I want to go get some pizza.

  “Uh … I don’t think so. But even if I did, what’s it to you?”

  “Well, I meant do you want to have any more kids with me?” My head — literally —explodes. Yours did, too, just now, didn’t it? Do I want to have another baby. With him.

  “Are you fucking SERIOUS?” Because, really, is he fucking serious? “WHY WOULD I DO THAT? WE JUST SIGNED OUR DIVORCE AN HOUR AGO.”

  He is really fucking serious. He says, “It’s just that I’m thinking of getting a vasectomy. But before I do, I just want to be sure with you, because you’re the only person I would want to have a baby with, so if you did …”

  He wants to kill me. He won’t stop until he kills me. He can’t help himself. It’s like he can’t help himself. I cry and cry. “That’s all I am to you, a baby-making machine?”

  “No! No!” he says and I can see the desperation on his face. This day will kill me. This man will kill me. I suddenly feel profoundly sad for whatever poor woman comes after me. I say, “Why would you get a vasectomy anyway? You’re only forty! What if you fall in love again and that woman has never had a baby and she wants a baby and can’t have a baby because you’re a stupid idiot who got a vasectomy when he was single and only forty!”

  “Why do you care about a fictional woman?” and he tries to touch my face but I flick his hand away.

  “Because I’m nice! Because first of all I feel sorry for her for having fallen in love with you, but second of all I feel sorry she won’t be able to have a baby because you’re an idiot!”

  “She’s not even real!” It looks like he’s kind of enjoying this. But I’ve completely lost my mind. “GET OUT OF MY CAR!”

  “Not till you’re okay,” he says, and I laugh. I laugh and laugh and continue to grip the steering wheel with the strength of ten men.

  “I am not okay, I will not be okay. I was okay and you destroyed me and now I am not okay!”

  He sits there. I sit there. I want to close my eyes and sleep and not wake up until summer. I want to know what I have done to deserve this. We stare at the teenagers jaywalking back and forth from the school to the pizza place.

  My breathing and heart rate start to return to normal and he finally assesses that I’m fine enough for him to get out of the car. From the street he flashes me a peace sign. I flash him one back. But when he turns around, I flip him the bird. Fuck you. A baby.

  And then I realize: This is it. The divorce! This is it. Every decision is mine from now on. He’s made all of the biggest decisions in my life for thirteen years, including this divorce, but it’s signed, so this is it. I feel lighter. I drive straight home instead of going to work. I crawl into bed and sleep for four hours straight, and when I wake up, I feel a strange calm.

  I’m okay. He didn’t destroy me. I’m okay. He didn’t destroy me.

  I’m okay. He didn’t destroy me. He didn’t destroy me. I’m okay. He didn’t destroy me.

  I’m okay.

  I’m okay.

  TOO CANADIAN

  It’s a hot one this year, the summer of 2013, my second summer alone. Exactly one year ago, I was a shelled-out mess who ran to Italy to be with my childhood friend. To sit with her in the mountains and at the seaside and among Roman ruins, to cry about the man I loved and how he deceived me, to feel the kind of comfort and support that only your oldest friend in the world can give. To be anchored to something, if even for a short while.

  Now, that same friend is here in Toronto on vacation. She’s in my car with me and even though it’s been a year, The Ex-husband is still all we’re talking about. She’s shaking her head at my fairness, at the way we separated without acrimony, without courts, without me finding his mistress and punching that putana in the face. She finds this very un-Italian of me, and disappointedly shakes her head, “You’re so nice. So Canadian.”

  I laugh and tell her plenty of Canadian women take revenge on their cheating husbands, or find some way to shame the mistress, or, at the very least, punch the putana in the face. I just don’t want to do that. I just want us to be on good terms so we can raise Birdie. She sighs. “Well, at least you damned him to hell, right?”

  At first I think she’s joking. I mean, what? But she’s dead serious. Obviously I should have at least damned him to hell, asked God to punish him if I wasn’t going to. We’re in my car as she says this, and I stare out at the lake from the expressway we’re on, the sun blinding, the traffic crawling. Holy shit, I’ve never damned him to hell. I’ve never even wished a bad thing on him. What’s wrong with me?

  Her voice cuts through the static in my head, like an echo of my own self-doubt. “What’s wrong with you? He had an affair! Like any good Italian woman you should have at least damned him to hell. I sure would have.”

  Affair. I hate that word. It sounds so romantic, like something that just happened one night in Paris or something. It’s so whimsical, like a magical feeling that just swept two people up and caused them to act beyond their control. It also bugs me because it sounds like a singular event. And what he did was far from singular. I even said this to him once, right after The Bomb, as we were packing and dividing everything in two.

  “Please, please, stop calling it ‘an affair,’ like it was this charming mistake you made once! It was over and over and over again!”

  In the car with my Italian friend, I think about wishing him ill. But I just don’t. I hate him, I do, but not him, the person. I hate what he did. I hate that I was an afterthought. But I know he has his own demons. And honestly, all I want is for him to be happy with his life, for this all not to have been for nothing. I want him to find a way to be a better man than he is, than he’s been. I guess I am too Canadian. I guess I don’t know how to damn him to hell. Instead it becomes a prayer.

  A SURE THING

  Revival is back. I’ve given in after several months of ignoring his texts. I can’t help it, I need that thing he has, that way about him that’s just right, even when the rest of the situation is wrong.

  It’s 1:00 a.m. and I’m in a bathroom stall at the back of a bar, texting Revival. I swore I wouldn’t contact you again, but I want to see you. He instantly replies, Hey baby, how you doing? like I haven’t been ignoring him for months. I tell him I’m out dancing with friends, and give him the intersection. He says he’ll be there in twenty minutes.

  Revival pulls up in a fancy-looking SUV. “Damn, will you look at you in that dress!” he says as I climb in. Hot fire rushes through me. I just spent all night dancing in that dress, to excellent and sexy music, but not one guy danced with me or talked to me or even looked at me as far as I could tell. As we pull away, Revival puts his hand on my hand. “Baby, I have missed you.”

  At my place he kisses and kisses me, says, “I’ve missed you. Damn, I’ve missed you,” over and over again. I can’t hear it enough. I let it fill all of the empty space inside me, those spare rooms. Revival is looking at me. Right into my eyes. His skin is so soft and warm. I brush the sweat from his forehead, kiss his eyelids, his gorgeous mouth. I nestle my head in his chest. “You have to come back again soon.”

  I know he won’t.

  He doesn’t.

  It’s a few weeks later. He’s supposed to be here at six thirty. But at six-twenty, I get that familiar sink in my stomach at the sound of the text notification. I think, Maybe he isn’t cancelling, maybe he’s downstairs and the intercom isn’t working. But that, of course, is wishful thinking. Something’s come up with his son, he’s at his sister’s, he doesn’t know what time he’ll be able to get out of there …

  I’m sitting on the edge of my bed in lingerie. I came home from work in a hurry to freshen up, got myself all ready. I head to the fridge and stand in the open door, staring
blankly. God, I’d better go shopping tomorrow before Birdie gets here. There’s nothing for a kid to eat. There’s nothing for anyone to eat. I forage a bit, then scarf down two pieces of salami, just plain like that at the kitchen counter, still in this goddamn getup like a fool.

  I make myself a gin and tonic and can’t be bothered to cut a wedge of lime. I consider a smoke but the rain is too heavy outside. Plus I’d have to put some actual clothes on. I’m too lazy to even do that, now that tonight’s sure thing has left me hanging. You know it isn’t good when your sure thing isn’t so sure.

  I watch the rain. I think about how I was once part of love, and now I am apart from it, standing on the sidelines in wasted sexy underwear.

  HOW SHE SEES IT

  When I was pregnant, The Husband and I had only one hope: that our crazy personalities would cancel each other out and we’d have a calm and gentle daughter. That didn’t happen. All of the qualities we share — determined, impetuous, quick tempered, headstrong — they didn’t cancel out at all. Instead we had a child who was all those things times a thousand. We called her the “über-us.” She was, and sometimes still is, a force to be reckoned with.

  In the second summer after The Bomb, her sharp, inquisitive mind becomes focused on the breakup. One day, The Ex-husband drops her at my place. As the door closes behind him, Birdie, six years old at the time, turns and yells at me, “I don’t think it’s fair that Dad gets to make the decision about where we live!”

  “What are you talking about?” I say. “I bought this apartment, I chose it.”

  “Yeah, but he is the one that didn’t want to live with us in the house anymore! So he’s the one who decided we should live in separate apartments! And you didn’t even fight for it!” She’s got his face as she says this, how his jaw would get tight just before a giant wall would go up between us.

  “Birdie, you don’t know if I did or didn’t fight for it …” I’m trying to be calm, trying not to burst into tears, trying not to phone him and fly into a rage over why he decided to tell her it was his fault, when all along I had been pretending, achingly, that it was both our decision so that she wouldn’t hate him for it. But here she is now, hating me. Here she is, six years old, telling me I didn’t fight hard enough to save my marriage. According to The Ex-husband, she doesn’t have these kinds of conversations with him. As if he hasn’t already gotten a free ride, he’s been spared this, too.

  I pull her close to me, her blue eyes blazing into my brown ones, and I just let the tears fall. “You can’t make someone live with you if they don’t want to anymore, Birdie.” She hugs me, as tight as her little body can, and I feel like the worst mother in the world. She shouldn’t be comforting me. Not again.

  A few nights earlier, as I was reading her a bedtime story, I got so overwhelmed by a memory of him, my eyes filled with tears. She snapped to attention. “It’s okay to cry, Mom. But don’t cry. Look!” She jumped off the bed and made a series of crazy faces while hopping on one foot. I laughed. Oh my little bird. Then she said seriously, “I know it’s about Dad,” and my heart broke in a thousand new ways.

  “Maybe he’ll come back to you, Mom.” I can’t believe she just said that.

  “I don’t think so, Birdie. He’s definitely not.”

  “But what if he did?” God, how do I answer that?

  How do I tell her that even if, in some magical storybook way he decided he wanted to be together again, I couldn’t do it. How could I say to her that sometimes loving someone just isn’t enough?

  “He won’t come back, Birdie. But listen, we’ve got each other and this great place, and he’s right across the street, so that’s cool. And you’ve got both of us in your life. It isn’t perfect, but it’s all right, we’ll get used to it. We still have love all around us, all the time.”

  “Yeah Mom, we have love. For sure we do.”

  The memory I had was this: Every time I would say I was cold, no matter where we were or what we were doing, he’d immediately say, “Want my shirt?” and begin to take it off. It was such a stupid joke we had with each other. It’s hardly even a joke. But I laughed every single time. He would say it with his sincere, good-boy face on. The one where his eyes look like Bambi. He’d have his T-shirt half off even though we’d be in a restaurant or a movie theatre, and I’d be dying of embarrassment but also laughing. So stupid, but it was our thing.

  So that’s what made me cry in her bed. Because a dumb character in the book I was reading her said they felt cold.

  THE MATCHMAKER

  The Matchmaker loves me. “God, I love you!” she says. I love her, too. “How are you single?” she asks, and I shoot back, “How are you single?”

  And here it is, the same question, the same conversation, it just keeps on happening, every time I meet new women, we say to each other, “How are you single?” and we mean it, it’s not just false propping up. All of the women at my work, the friends of friends I’ve met — even The Matchmaker herself! — are all smart, funny, good-looking, grounded, with good jobs … blah blah blah, the list goes on.

  “You’re still young,” I say to The Matchmaker, who’s thirty-two. I say this to any single woman who isn’t staring forty in its stupid face like I am. I say this to all of them, as if it’s somehow easier for them, because they are slightly younger, and they don’t have joint custody of a child and an ex-husband who lives across the street. At this point, I’m lost. Down a well of self-pity. When I’m down there, I don’t even realize that everyone has their own stories, their own demons, their own struggles. And so I say, “You have time, you’re still young, you have hope,” because they don’t have a giant Caesarean scar that runs across their abdomen. They don’t have a daily needle to inject, because of a stupid anything-can-happen-or-not-happen disease. They don’t have to hide the disease, or fret about the right time to mention the child or The Ex-husband. I agonize over the disclosure of these things. I forget sometimes, when I’m down the well, that other people have things to agonize over, too. Jesus Christ, I’m not the only one.

  I don’t tell any of the guys I meet about the MS. There just isn’t any point. I already feel like I’m a scary baggage-filled old lady, why add to the pile? Dating and disease don’t exactly go together, even a mildly-presenting, nothing-to-worry about disease like I have. Disclosing to the guys I date makes absolutely zero sense to me and so I never do. I don’t tell The Matchmaker about the MS either. It never comes up. I answer all of her questions truthfully though, because what’s the point otherwise? I want her to match me, since the internet and real life have brought me interesting and hot men, but no one to have a real relationship with. I tell her I would die and go to heaven if a man my age would want to date me for real, but so far that hasn’t happened. She flatters me by saying that’s because I look ten years younger.

  “You wouldn’t think so if you saw me first thing in the morning!” I say to deflect the compliment. I always deflect compliments. I haven’t met The Man with the White Shirt yet, but it isn’t very long after I do meet him that I tell him about the MS. I tell him about the everything, because that’s how it is with him. He feels so real, so good. I also don’t deflect his compliments, which are many, because with him I believe what he’s saying to me, I believe what I see happening in those dark shiny eyes. I’m a hopeless romantic; I never learn.

  Anyway. The Matchmaker asks me to show her photos of my ex-husband. “Wow, cute,” she says, which is what everyone says (God, I hate them all). Then she wants to see photos of “my favourites.” She means men I’ve been with since The Ex-husband.

  Because I haven’t met The Man with the White Shirt yet, I don’t even know the real meaning of “favourite.” I don’t know yet what it’s like to want to drop everything for someone you just saw across a room. I don’t know yet what it’s like to feel understood and connected on a deep, magical level.

  So I scroll through the photos on my phone, because yeah, I have a folder full of photos of my “favourites.
” Sue me. There’s Revival, of course. “Wow, niiice!” she says.

  Then I show her Cute/Crazy Guy. “Whoa! So adorable!” which yeah, no kidding, but too bad about the crazy.

  I save Hot Actor for last. She practically fans herself as she scrolls through his photos. “What … Oh. My. Really? Can I see him … oh, oh wow, really?” I feel that same mixture of pride and also what-the-fuck, since everyone always seems a little too surprised that I could have had a thing with him. “Oh, he’s an actor. It was just a fun thing for a few months while he was in town.”

  “Ah-MAZING,” she says.

  Yeah, it is ah-mazing. What an amazingly fun experience this sexual liberation has been. I was once a bored wife, and now I am shamelessly showing a total stranger a folder full of hot guys on my phone. The perks of a skewered, broken heart. But I’m showing her these guys because I am paying her to find me a version of them that wants to have an actual relationship. “This will be so easy,” she says, because she loves me, remember? We always love each other, the single ladies of Toronto. We’re always so much better than any single guys we meet. It’s the worst.

  A few weeks later, The Matchmaker matches me with a man who is very, very handsome, like even more than Hot Actor! He is sharply dressed when we meet for drinks and a nice summer stroll. He makes me a bit nervous and I end up getting a little too drunk. We make out a bit at the end of the night, but nothing more. A few days later I text him about plans for the weekend and he texts back simply, You are an amazing person, and I’d be crazy not to keep you in my atmosphere, but I don’t want to date you.

  The words hit me hard. Really fucking hard. I don’t want to date you. Later, I’ll focus on “atmosphere” because seriously, what? My friends and I kill ourselves laughing about that statement, shouting, “Yo, you’re great and all but I just want to keep you in my ATMOSPHERE!” But in the moment, seeing that text, I think, Of course. Of course you don’t want to date me. Why would anyone?