The Man I Love

by Suanne Laqueur

  She was shaking her head, like a girl being told she couldn’t have a pony. “No.”

  “You have your eggs,” he said. “I have nothing.”

  “That’s not my fault,” she said. “What happened to you isn’t my fault.”

  “It’s my fault, then?”

  “Do you even want to have a baby?” She shouted it. The words echoed off the walls. “Because I don’t think you want it.”

  “I don’t want it?”

  “No.”

  “I did everything,” he said, pushing the words through the wall of his teeth. “I did everything, Mel. I subjected myself to every test, every procedure. Every needle and every goddamn way someone wanted to crawl up my works. I never said no.”

  “But you never said ‘I want it.’” The tears ran down her face. “Never once did you say you wanted it more than anything and wanted it with me.”

  He looked at her. Could only look.

  “I’m your wife,” she whispered. “This is a marriage, not an extended playdate.”

  “Mel—”

  “I can’t stand this, Erik. I can’t stand your ambivalence anymore. I plan our social life. I plan our vacations. I plan this, I plan that and you just show up. I proposed because I knew you never would. I shocked you by going off the pill but you didn’t fight me. You just tottered along without an impassioned opinion either way. That’s all you do—passively go where I tell you. On auto-pilot. You can take it or leave it. You don’t have a fire in your belly for anything. What if I weren’t here planning and telling, what would you do?”

  Erik turned away from her, looking out the window. Counting. Breathing.

  “You keep secret the things you’re passionate about,” Melanie said. “I’m tired of trying to dig them out of you. And I can’t take the way you just follow your life around instead of leading it. All the while the best of you is stuck in Lancaster with that bitch who made you feel so—”

  Bitch made Erik whip his head around so fast his neck cracked. Melanie’s sentence never ended.

  “Feel so what?” he said. “What did she make me feel? Go on. Tell me what she made me feel.”

  Across the living room, Melanie stared at him.

  “Useless,” Erik said. His voice sounded raspy and full of sludge, like a broken old man’s. “She made me feel useless. Just like you’re doing right now. It’s no different. I don’t have what you need so you’ll go get it from someone else.”

  “Baby…” she whispered.

  “It must be the type I attract,” he said. “All the women I love make me feel useless. Nothing I do is enough for them. Not staring down the barrel of a gun, not taking a needle in the sack. Nothing.”

  Her hand soft on his shoulder then and he flinched from her touch. “Just leave me be,” he said, with the last vestiges of civility he could muster.

  Weeping, Melanie went upstairs. Erik stood with his forehead and fists pressed against the windowpane.

  “Useless,” he whispered.

  A Map, A Pick Axe And A Vengeance

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” Erik was running with Miles along the canal.

  “Already? We just met.”

  Erik didn’t feel like joking. “Are you and Janey childless by choice? Or did you have fertility troubles?”

  “Ah. I wondered when you would ask.”

  “In my typically obtuse and self-centered way, it only just occurred to me.”

  “Unfortunately, we are childless by choice.”

  “Unfortunately how?”

  “Consanguinity.”

  “Speak English.”

  “Janey,” Miles said, “is my first cousin.”

  Erik slowed to a jog and then stopped, leaning over with hands on knees. “She is?”

  “Technically speaking she is my double cousin. Our mothers are sisters and our fathers are brothers.” Miles ran easily in place. “Shocking?”

  “Surprising to learn but not shocking. I mean, it’s not appalling.”

  “Then I’ll throw in we’re not married, either.”

  “Then why does she call herself Janey Kelly?”

  “Because her name is Janey Kelly,” Miles said.

  Erik grimaced and looked at his watch. “My next asinine question will be in thirty seconds.”

  “I cannot wait.” Miles began to run again and Erik fell into step beside him.

  “If it’s not too asinine, when did you fall in love with her?”

  “The question is when was I not in love with her? I was born to love her. We were five when we realized we belonged to each other. We fought it. We denied it. We tore ourselves apart and went to live on opposite sides of the planet. I married a lovely woman everyone approved of and I made her life miserable. She had the good sense to leave me because she knew I was born for Janey and no one else.”

  A quarter mile passed in silence. Their sneakers slapped in rhythm. Left. Right. Left. Right.

  “Born for her,” Erik said. “Tell me what you mean.”

  “I look at Janey and my heart leaps,” Miles said. “And when I am with her, I want for nothing. We wasted eight years of our youth living apart and being miserable just to make everyone else happy. We finally said to hell with everyone and decided to be together. It had its price. Three decades later and still some people refuse to acknowledge we are a couple. But we found our truth and made our choices. We chose to be together. We chose not to have children because it’s too risky. And we chose not to adopt because we only want each other. Maybe it’s selfish, but…”

  “Or maybe it’s courageous.”

  “I don’t know, Fish. At some point, you just gotta start living the truth of who you are and what you feel.”

  Erik stopped running. Hands on his head he turned in a circle, looking up at the skies, breathing against the fingers of steel darting around his throat.

  “All right?” Miles said from up ahead.

  “Yeah.” He set out again, his body a heavy, sodden weight. “I’m all right.”

  * * *

  Everything at home was all wrong. He and Melanie were dug deep in their separate trenches and fighting a quiet war of attrition. The house grew chill with words and accusations unspoken. Frosty weeks went by. Eggshells crunched underfoot. Gradually the air thawed and small overtures were attempted. The subject of adoption was raised. But by then they were emotionally exhausted and physically indifferent.

  Occasionally they reached for each other in the night, but even their sex was tired. Melanie’s body was present but her head was elsewhere. They rarely laughed in bed anymore. They barely talked. Their connection was full of misunderstood static. Most nights they lay back to back, Melanie hard done by and misunderstood, Erik a useless testicular failure.

  Night after night, they tossed and turned their covers to mush until Melanie caved, took a pill and slept. Only when she was breathing slow and deep did Erik put the pill that was Daisy on his tongue and swallow.

  The best of you is stuck in Lancaster with that bitch.

  True. And now the bitch had taken up quiet residence in the folds of his brain. He let her stay, a one-woman Greek chorus observing as he went about his day at work, willingly talking back to him whenever he silently talked to her. Asking questions. Helping work out a problem. At night, he imagined her voice softer, asking different kinds of questions. Listening and nodding thoughtfully as he talked out other problems. Her hands cupped for whatever he wanted to put in them.

  All the same, even as he idled away the time in imaginary conversations, he never once envisioned the crucial confrontation he ought to have had with Daisy. He never went back in time to rearrange events. To imagine himself walking into the kitchen of her apartment and saying to David, “You need to leave.” Going upstairs and hearing what she had to say. Or even making his way to her as she smoked on the back steps. The next day at dawn. A week later. Even a year later.

  No hypothetical do-over for the calls he didn’t return and the letters he didn’
t answer. No yelling at her, cursing at her, telling her he hated her. He took only the best of the best and constructed an idealized castle in the air, suspended in present tense in a parallel universe. Just Daisy hanging around being Daisy.

  He managed his thoughts with astounding discipline. He was almost smug about the rules. Casual mental musings were allowed. Wallowing would not be tolerated. Sexual horseplay was punishable by death.

  It worked well for a couple weeks. Like a chaste Sir Galahad, he made do with the memory of their bond, their soulful friendship, their effortless support of one another and the comfort her presence always brought him. He kept alive her keen intelligence, her humor and wit, and her astonishing talents as a dancer. He consoled himself with his dumb, made-up conversations, and managed to keep the recollection of his physical relationship with Daisy locked away in a stone fortress. Every now and then he would stick an extra pillow behind him and pretend she was snugged up against his back. Her hip bone softly poking him. His heart calm under her palm.

  It was all he allowed.

  Until now.

  At some point you just gotta start living the truth of who you are and what you feel.

  Miles’s offhand remark was a bowling ball, sending his stringent rules skittering and spinning. The stone walls Erik so carefully built around the ardent memories were crumbling. Through a chink in the stones Daisy appeared and crooked her finger at him.

  He went. Lying in bed, in the shadow of his wife’s sleeping body, Erik went looking for buried treasure with a map, a pick axe and a vengeance. He crawled back through the archives, dug in and began to catalog. And in defiance of all the laws, he wallowed in it. He scooped up the sex, poured it from his hands onto his head and bathed in it.

  The memory of kissing hollowed him out, filled his chest and belly with gnawing heat. He could press his fingers sideways across his lips and in an instant, they were her mouth. But kissing was an innocent snowball tossed down the mountainside. Next thing he knew, Erik was being swept along in an avalanche of sense memory.

  The thought of her lithe, muscled body made his palms ache with memory. He put out a hand and her breast curved into it. He could distill her scent out of mere air. Her perfume. Or the damp, musky smell when she was excited, writhing as he either slid her out of her clothes or just pulled them enough aside to get to what he wanted.

  I want. I want. His body coiled in a quenchless thirst, needing to beat fists against the walls, foam at the mouth and bay at the moon. I want it.

  He gazed into space, remembering how she took her clothes off for him. The sight of her, wanton and hungry, breasts overflowing from an unhooked bra beneath a shirt pulled halfway up, thighs trembling inside panties pushed halfway down. The tips of his fingers prying her open. The slick, pink flesh quivering when he breathed on it. He touched his tongue to the roof of his mouth and remembered the tart, sweet taste of her. The heavy drop of her hand on his head. The noiseless rush of air through her throat when he made her come.

  Lying in bed—hard, crazed, burning—he went through it all. All the lovemaking in dorm rooms and the apartment on Jay Street. Sex in the morning when their bodies were still wreathed in sleep. Sex at night when their bodies were screaming with need. Fingers and mouths, sweat and juice. Craving it. Begging and dying for it. Building a cathedral. Being in love and being wanted. So safe in a web of physical trust, he could make love to her like a sweetheart one night, throw her down and fuck her the next. It was all the same thing. Staring into her eyes without speaking was making love. Being buried in the heat of her frustration was making love. Whether her kiss crashed into his mouth, or just brushed it like a passing dream, he could taste her love. And nothing could top it. Nothing could surpass it.

  Not even Melanie.

  It was deplorable behavior. He knew it. It was selfish and cruel to his wife, her body curved like a parenthesis away from him. He imagined the waves of betrayed hurt radiating off her back onto his. But it was Daisy in his head in hot, candy-sweet ribbons he could not ignore.

  You’re cheating on Mel, he told himself. All this maudlin, mental jerking off to the past? It’s no different than if you were fucking someone else. You’re a shit husband.

  He couldn’t help it. Any more than he had been able to help falling for the high of cocaine all those years ago. This high was even more addictive because it was organic. It was cooked up in the laboratory of his soul. He sucked it up from the depths of his heart, up into his nose and let it melt down from the top of his skull.

  Stoned, he stared into the dark and Daisy’s face materialized. She was lying on her side, staring back at him. One hit and he could put her there. One toke and he could bring it back—the serenity, the stillness. He wasn’t reaching out to her merely for sex. Sex was only part of it. Sex was an extension of the love and peace and deep understanding in the depths Daisy’s eyes. A connection so soulful, it was cellular.

  “Consanguinity,” he said, moving his mouth around the word but making no sound. A blood bond. A soul bond.

  He reached out a hand, touched nothing, yet he felt her. Her jaw in his palm, her hair through his fingers. Her shoulder rising and falling with her steady breathing. Inhaling him. Exhaling herself. Staring through his eyes.

  I want it, he thought, gripped by desperation, a fire in his belly. I want this. I lost this. Why can’t I find it again?

  He rolled over and looked at Melanie. His wife, this woman he had married because he loved her. His heart ought to leap at the sight of her, or be filled with a soothed peace. He should look at her with a vision of the future, a common goal, a mission. She ought to be the love of his life.

  She wasn’t.

  I love her. But my heart never stopped at the sight of her. My fingertips don’t ache when she is not there. I don’t look in her eyes and want for nothing. And I don’t want to fill her questioning hands with my answers.

  I never wanted to ink her into my skin.

  An aching, wailing pain in his heart then, and a sickening sense of shame. He had to get out of bed, physically back away from Melanie, with an ever-growing dread. What have I done? His back bumped against the wall. He was trapped. He was mourning. He was grieving. He was a shitty husband, a heartless son-of-a-bitch who had fucked up badly.

  He was not where he was supposed to be.

  I’m lost, he thought, stumbling down the stairs, stumbling around in the dark of his mind. I lost everything. I can’t find it.

  He wandered the house, trying to wear himself out. He sat at the kitchen table drinking tea, Harry’s muzzle on his knee.

  Where are you, Dais, he thought, projecting his yearning self out into the ether. To the far north and a dark Canadian night where Daisy might be awake, too.

  Where is your home? Are you sleeping?

  Who is holding you tonight?

  “Who loves you now?” Erik whispered to the kitchen cabinets. “Who is the man you love?”

  Harry yawned, making a high-pitched keen.

  When Erik finally came back to bed and slept, the dreams, dormant for so long, came to him again.

  First he was up in Daisy’s room, in a caramel haze and they were fucking each other senseless, safely savage within the structure of their love. Then he was in the theater, and James sent a bullet into Erik’s chest with a dull thud. He could not get up to stop James, who was shooting Daisy dead. The blood was rising up over Erik’s head. A wave of it pouring over the edge of the stage. Blood like a river in the aisle, blood in his hair, blood on his hands, blood on the stage floor.

  It was Daisy and blood and sex coming back to him in the night again. And when he woke up coming, coming and dying in a gasping, heaving sweat, heart pounding in his ears and a name half-formed in his mouth, Melanie slept on.

  Or pretended she didn’t hear.

  Your Father’s Tree

  The final papers were signed on an unseasonably chilly autumn morning, the day before Halloween. Erik walked his now ex-wife out of the courthouse and the
y looked at each other.

  “I’ll get you a cab,” Erik said.

  “Why don’t you get me a drink?” she said. “Let’s go to a bar.”

  Erik stared at her, not understanding.

  “Where was our first date?” she asked. “This isn’t a trick question.”

  “At a bar.”

  “Right. And after we got married at city hall we went to…?”

  “A bar.”

  “I think it’ll be all right if we go to a bar to mark the occasion of our divorce. In fact, it seems fitting.”

  Still bewildered, Erik nodded, gesturing down the street. Melanie took his arm and they walked without talking to a small Irish pub. They sat at a little sunlit table in the window, ordered drinks, looked at each other.

  Melanie was wearing her hair in cornrows again, letting the grey come in at her temples. New lines creased her forehead, but when their beers came, she raised her pilsner with dry-eyed serenity.

  “Cheers, baby,” she said.

  “Skål,” Erik said, touching his glass to hers.

  They drank deeply. Melanie put a finger to the bit of foam at the corner of her mouth. “You will stay in touch with me, won’t you?”

  “I… If you want me to.”

  “I do. Does it surprise you?”

  Erik shook his head. “I don’t know what surprises me anymore. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  Melanie had asked for a divorce ten months ago. Erik conceded. She wondered if she might have the upright piano. He agreed. She asked if she could take the dog. It killed Erik, but he let Harry go.

  Then she threw a plate at him.

  It went wide and smashed in pieces against a far wall but the intent behind it was unmistakable. “You are emotionally retarded, you know that, Erik? Goddammit, you won’t fight for anything you love,” she said. “You spineless victim.”

  And she moved out. With the dog. It was the ugliest moment in an otherwise smooth, no-fault divorce that took less than a year.

  Now Melanie leaned forward and began tapping her index finger on Erik’s left hand. He looked at her, looked down at his hand as her tapping grew more deliberate.