by Lea Sims
Deep down, she knew that their relationship had been built on shifting sand. She’d always known it would not last. Danny was married to his career, and Delaney wouldn’t let herself be truly married to anyone. Her husband was a civil engineer and a brilliant architect. His firm contracted with major cities primarily on revitalization projects, and for the last six months, he’d been working hard on a bid for a Detroit renovation initiative. Before that, it was New Orleans. He lived on a project high he never came down from. He worked long, hard hours chasing both his career and the lifestyle he felt it could afford them. Delaney didn’t think he’d spent more than three nights straight in his own bed for the last four years. She wasn’t sure whose bed he had been in, but it hadn’t been hers. He claimed he’d been faithful, and she had no proof otherwise. She honestly didn’t know. The only thing she knew for sure was that he may have been faithful, but he hadn’t been home.
That’s why she’d had an affair, she reasoned, as brief as it was. What started out as a flirtation with a colleague had led to a few drinks after work and a lot of intense build up through emails and text messages that culminated in a hot weekend in Atlantic City at a conference. A few stolen hours here and there over the ensuing weeks petered out and resulted in a mutual lack of interest to continue it any further. She wouldn’t label it a mistake, but it was a costly decision. This is not how she would have chosen to extricate herself from a relationship. When Danny had discovered her affair, it had given him the upper hand and established the parameters by which each of them would leave the relationship, him as the victim and her as the cause. It blinded him to the underlying realities of their marriage. Danny was like a surgeon who had chosen to focus on a gaping superficial laceration rather than address the terminal cancer on the inside of his patient.
Delaney looked down to see Rogue’s chin resting on her knee, large golden brown eyes looking up expectantly at her. Labs always had a way of looking at you like they would literally die of disappointment if you didn’t pet them. Rogue’s tail was wagging vigorously, as though utterly disconnected from the rest of her body. Delaney often felt like she had two pets—Rogue and Rogue’s tail. It seemed to have a mind of its own and operated independently from the rest of her dog.
“I know, baby girl,” Delaney said, stroking her dog’s silky ears. “I’m ignoring you, aren’t I?” She picked up the leash and stood up. Rogue jumped up, tongue dangling through lips parted and upturned at the corners in her typical smiling way. She was ready to go. She waited for Delaney to wrap the leash around her wrist.
Delaney took off jogging with Rogue beside her. Months of training with a dog expert had resulted in a beautiful relationship between the two of them. Even when other dogs would come near, Rogue would stay in heel or stride with Delaney. This was no small feat because dogs were Rogue’s very favorite thing. She didn’t know a stranger, and she wasn’t partial to sizes, genders or breeds. She loved them all. But her loyalty and obedience to Delaney overrode any temptation to run circles around a new doggie friend in exuberant glee, even though she really, really wanted to.
As they approached the peak of the Balcony Bridge, Delaney glanced over to her left and came to a stuttering halt. Danny was sitting on one of the balcony benches. He was bent over with his elbows on his knees, both hands over his ears. At first she thought he was on his phone but then saw it sitting on the bench beside him. His fingers were threaded through his thick dark hair, his head hung low. For a moment, his defenses were down, and she got a glimpse of what was behind the seemingly cold indifference and biting sarcasm he’d been treating her to for months. He looked like a lost child. She felt a pang of concern laced with guilt. As much as she hated his confident swagger and his often smug superiority, she preferred that Danny over this one. She didn’t want to see him looking dejected and uncertain. She didn’t want to see his vulnerable side, if indeed he had one. And she definitely didn’t want to see his pain, or she’d be forced to dwell on whether she was the cause of it.
She walked over and stood behind him, letting Rogue move to Danny’s side. The dog nudged her wet nose into the crook of his elbow and licked his face. He jerked upward and his eyes flew first to Rogue, then to Delaney. He locked eyes with her, and for just a moment, raw pain was exposed in his dark gaze, but almost as quickly as it was there, it was gone. His face hardened and flattened with admirable control.
“What do you want?” he asked in a lifeless tone, turning to stare out across the lake.
“Nothing,” she replied with soft neutrality. “Just wasn’t expecting to see you sitting here when we came up over the bridge.”
“We don’t always get what we were expecting, do we?” he replied, words laced with bitterness. Delaney was constantly dodging the sharp little barbs on the end of nearly every word he threw at her these days.
“Sooo,” she said slowly as she came around the bench and sat next to him, “what were you expecting out of our marriage, Danny?”
He shifted on the bench to face her, his face haggard. Annoyed to be asked such an obvious question, he shook his head at her and said, “Well, I certainly didn’t expect my wife to fall into the arms of another man while I wasn’t looking. I didn’t expect to be reading text messages between you and another man—text messages that made me sick to my stomach, Delaney. I didn’t expect to be kicking you out of our home. And I certainly didn’t expect to be filing for divorce less than five years into my marriage.”
His voice quavered slightly at the end of this vehement reply. He cleared his throat and focused intently on Rogue, who was trying to wedge herself between Danny and Delaney so that each one of them would be within petting distance. Danny reached down to pat Rogue rather awkwardly on the head. Rogue responded by licking his hand, tail thumping ceaselessly on the ground under the bench.
“And I didn’t expect to be waging war over something as stupid as a dog.”
Delaney’s eyes flared immediately, a tart rebuttal flying to her lips, but Danny hastened to clarify his statement. “I don’t mean stupid. I mean silly. The dog’s not stupid. Fighting over her is.”
Delaney relaxed and looked back at him unblinkingly for a long moment. She wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily. “You just told me all the things you didn’t expect from our marriage, Danny. But that’s not what I asked you. What did you expect? What were you hoping for when you proposed to me on this bench six years ago?”
He sighed impatiently. “I expected what everyone expects—a happy marriage! Not perfect, of course, but…you know…financial stability, kids, a nice home. All that stuff.”
Delaney kept a blank face. In truth, she wasn’t sure she had any better answers than Danny’s, but somehow it bothered her that he’d given her such a clichéd response. Everyone wants those things, of course, but what did they really have to do with marriage? In fact, you could have all those things without even being married.
“So, that’s what it means to have a happy marriage?” she asked.
“Isn’t it?” He lifted his shoulders and cocked his head as if to suggest that this was common knowledge. In Danny’s world, things were very black and white. If there was a recipe for a perfect marriage, he was the kind of guy who would focus on the ingredient list and ignore the baking instructions.
“We were well on our way to all of that, Delaney,” he said, “I thought we’d start having kids in the next year or two. Didn’t you?”
Delaney had to work hard not to roll her eyes in exasperation. Didn’t this man understand how babies were made? She shifted uncomfortably on the bench and stared down at the neon blue stripes of her Adidas jogging shoes. He was so oblivious to how disconnected they had been for so long. They were lucky if they’d had sex more than once or twice a month in the last two years.
“Were you thinking we’d just pencil that in on one of your days home?” she asked, trying to keep the conversation light but struggling to keep
the exasperated edge out of her voice. “Or were you just going to FedEx me a semen sample so I could have a romantic interlude with our turkey baster?”
“Very funny,” he said shaking his head. “You know it wasn’t that bad. Don’t blame all of this on my job. That’s not fair.”
“You’re right,” she said. “None of this is fair. Your job was just one of our problems.”
He stood up suddenly and walked over to the railing. He turned, leaned against it and folded his arms across his chest. Delaney was familiar with this tactic. If you are about to deliver a lecture, stand up and go to the podium. It tells everyone that you have the floor. “Problems?” he said smugly. “Let’s examine those, shall we?” He held out an open palm with one hand and a pointed index finger with the other. Uh oh, she thought, here comes the numbered list. Delaney half expected him to whip out a portable white board and begin diagramming how it all went wrong. He probably wanted to put it all in a flow chart so she would see that all of their problems pointed to [Box 12b] …her.
“First of all,” he said, index finger to thumb, “you knew exactly what my job was when you started dating me. You knew what I did for a living, what the demands were, and what I wanted out of my career. We talked about all of this while we were engaged.”
“Yep.” She didn’t argue.
He paused, momentarily nonplussed, and then continued into the space of tenuous agreement. He wasn’t stopping to question it. He moved on to finger number two.
“Second. My travel. No matter how bad it was, it did NOT give you the right to break…your…vows.” He emphasized the last three words by tapping his index finger on the palm of his hand.
“No, it didn’t.” She said with cool indifference, as if Danny had just asked her if it rained yesterday. So far, there really wasn’t any point in arguing. He was technically right about all of those things, but he seemed incapable of understanding that no matter how much they had talked about his career and his need to travel, nothing could have prepared her for the reality of a marriage spent mostly alone and waiting for him to come home.
Before he could process that response and move on to his next finger, she interjected. “Danny, listen. I know you have a laundry list. We both have one.” At his incredulous look, she added, “I know it seems impossible to believe, but yes, I definitely have a list.” In fact, she would have needed more than fingers and toes if she were truly interested in emasculating him with her list. She had zero desire to stoop to that kind of exchange. It was beneath her. It should have been beneath him.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said, temper rising again. “I have been nothing but a good husband to you. I worked my tail off to get us where we were.”
“And where exactly were we, Danny?” she challenged him softly. It had long been her approach to lower her tone as his escalated. He had an intense nature and a short fuse. Most of the last six months had been an exercise in side-stepping the landmines of his short-trigger temper.
“Are you kidding me right now, Delaney?” he exclaimed, exasperated. “We had the marriage all of our friends envied. We both have amazing careers. We have…had…a great home and the expendable income to buy anything and go anywhere we wanted. We weren’t living paycheck to paycheck or buying scratch-offs with our fingers crossed. We had it all—but that kind of life doesn’t come without working for it, you know.”
“And we arrive again at your rather disappointing idea of what a happy marriage should be, Danny,” Delaney said. “What good is any of that? What good is it to be rich in ‘stuff’ and poor in love? You think the only thing you have to do to sustain a marriage is work hard and make money. You honestly think working 80-hour weeks and traveling three to four days a week nonstop year-round is what it means to be a good husband? You can’t be a good husband until you actually commit to being a husband.”
That blow landed low. She watched his jaw clench and his face tighten in anger. Here it comes, she thought. And she couldn’t really blame him. This time she’d lit the fuse rather than stomping it out.
“And you think sexting hot messages to a married man in your office is the idea of BEING A WIFE? Or hooking up with him in some cheap hotel at a conference is the idea of BEING A WIFE?” She stared back at him without flinching or cowering, then slowly raised one eyebrow as if to challenge him. It’s not possible for you to hurt me, Danny. His words rolled off her like water off a duck’s back. He was not going to make her feel guilty for stepping out on their marriage when he had never stepped into it.
“There is something seriously wrong with you, Delaney,” he said in a low, thin voice. He’d been trying for months to get some kind of rise out of her—some acknowledgment that she knew what she had done was wrong—some apology, some sign of weakness. He got nothing. “You’re not human. You are hands-down one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life. Seriously, it used to make me ache just to look at you. But behind that gorgeous face, inside that hot-as-hell body is a heart of stone.”
She pursed her lips and nodded slowly, standing up and tugging on Rogue’s leash. “That’s probably a good thing, right?” Her eyes narrowed as she stared him down. “Takes a heart of stone to sleep in a stone-cold bed.”
“You found a warm one quick enough,” Danny fired back, flushing red to his hairline.
“Warm and welcoming.” Two could play at this game.
“Of that I have no doubt, Delaney,” Danny said coldly, walking back to the bench to pick up his tablet and phone. “There probably isn’t a man in all of Manhattan who wouldn’t like a go at you. But I pity anyone who gets close to you—the moment they realize they went to bed with Anna and woke up with Elsa.”
This time the low blow was his. The movie Frozen held special meaning for them. When the movie first came out a few years ago, he had indulged her request to see it, primarily because it was her birthday, though he didn’t care for kid movies. He was a good sport about going, and about halfway through the film, he had pulled her close to whisper in her ear, “I’ll take Elsa any day,” referring to Delaney’s long blonde hair and blue eyes. From that point on, whenever she was really decked out or dressed for a formal function, especially in a long gown, he’d call her Queen Elsa. To flip that now into an insult was just cruel.
“Well, even Elsa doesn’t like waking up alone,” Delaney replied. “Ice queens get lonely too, Danny.”
“You haven’t been lonely a day in your life, princess. You’d need to feel something for that to happen.” Tossing that bitter grenade over his shoulder, he strode away from the bench and down the bridge.
“Hey, Danny?” Delaney called after him.
He turned to face her but kept walking backwards down the hill, a smug grin on his face, arms spread wide in a take-your-best-shot challenge. She was tempted to return the favor and tell him to go to h—, but she wanted this to be over.
“Give up Rogue and let’s be done with it.”
The grin slid off his face, all bravado fading from his eyes, his arms dropping limply back at his sides. For a long moment, he simply stared back at her, his dark eyes boring resentfully into hers. He wanted a fight. She wanted Rogue. She held her ground and stared back at him unblinking. And then she saw it—the moment the hate in his eyes gave way to sorrow. He shook his head slowly at her and let out a long sigh of resignation.
“Have it your way, Elsa.”
“Probably the worst pickup line is no pickup line. I mean, at the end of the day, what is the worst that could happen?”
—Dawn Olivieri
A few weeks later, Delaney met Danny at the Manhattan Municipal Courthouse in the chambers of the Honorable Edgar Oliver, where the judge read through their statements, then stared unsmilingly over his glasses at them while they cited “irreconcilable differences” as the reason they were filing for divorce. With a sigh, he put his signature and seal to their paperwork, and just like that, it
was done. Danny did not make eye contact with her at any point during the proceedings, which sadly took less than ten minutes. He walked out and down the courthouse steps without so much as a word to her. He was trying to slam a door and lock it, but she knew he was hurting. Even she was unprepared for the oppressive sadness that had settled in her chest the instant the judge had stamped and signed their papers, looked up at them both, and said, “As I say to every couple who sits in front of me, I am sorry to put my signature to the dissolution of any marriage. Marriages are institutions worth fighting for. But with the affixation of my signature, your marriage is now dissolved. I wish you both well. See the clerk on your way out.”
Delaney strode purposefully out of the courthouse and back to her office, sad but relieved the whole thing was finally over. A year of fighting over possessions and assets, dodging Danny’s diatribes, and waiting for the other shoe to drop had taken its toll on her. As sorry as she was that their marriage had come to a bitter end, she was more than ready to put it behind her, chalk it up to experience, and move on with her life.
After work, she grabbed a taxi and headed out to meet Lexie to celebrate. They had reserved a table at Silk, their favorite little jazz club on West 44th Street that was known for featuring obscure but amazing musicians. It boasted a decor that was an eclectic mix of architectural salvage and abstract art, and they had a cellar full of vintage whiskeys by the barrel, an impressive selection of wines, and a distillery where they offered tours and tastings during daytime hours. Delaney’s favorite thing about it was that it was a mature hangout, one where the business set met for drinks, which meant she wouldn’t get beer-sloshed by some guy in a Jets jersey or leave with a migraine induced by the relentless hammering of loud techno music. But both the vintage vibe and the distillery did increase the likelihood that she would get hit on by at least one millennial with a hipster beard, skinny jeans and perfectly manicured nails.