They Only Eat Their Husbands

by Cara Lopez Lee

  Back at the highway, as we were about to get in the car, he said, “Wait a minute!” and ran across the street. He ran up and down the slope, picking wildflowers, most of them in variations of purple: violet larkspur, bluebells, and indigo forget-me-nots. A warm ache spread through my chest. In that moment, I decided to give my heart to this man.

  Out loud, I said, “Sean, I think it’s illegal to pick the wildflowers.”

  “Oh my God! You think a trooper might catch me?” He rushed over to me and handed me the small bouquet. “Here, then. You better hang onto these. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Purple’s my favorite color.”

  “I know.”

  I pressed them to my nose and inhaled. “This is the nicest thing anyone ever did for me.”

  “Gee, you’re pretty easy.”

  “It’s not that I’m so easy, it’s that most people make things so hard.” I cradled his cheek in my palm and kissed him gently.

  As I held his gaze, he said, “Now don’t go getting all serious on me.” For a moment, I was deeply hurt. Then I realized that this was what I’d asked for.

  Back at Sean’s place, he brewed some hot tea and served mine in a mug imprinted with a martial artist wielding a sword. He glanced at the design and told me it reminded him of a funny story about a Zen master and his disciple.

  As the story went, each morning the student served tea to his master in the master’s favorite cup. One morning, before serving the tea, the student asked, “Master, why do we practice non-attachment?” The master explained that life is temporal, and that attachment only leads to suffering because in the end everyone dies. Then the master said to the student, “Why do you ask?” The student replied, “Because, master, this morning while I was preparing the tea, I killed your cup.”

  This cracked both of us up. It didn’t occur to me that the story, or its punch line, might have anything to do with our affair.

  ***

  “I never-lied-never-lied-never-lied.” That was the mantra I repeated to myself all that spring. Chance knew that I was “seeing someone,” and Sean knew that Chance and I were still “friends.” Since I was honest with both of them, I believed that absolved me of responsibility for their feelings. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened next.

  But I was.

  It started with Chance’s phone call, offering to take me to dinner on my birthday. I felt a guilty pleasure in turning him down. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m going away for my birthday.”

  “Going away?” He sounded perplexed, like someone who’s just gone to the store at the same time he always does, to pick up the same old thing, only to find the place closed. “Going away where?”

  “To Kennecott, to ride that little pulley system across the river and see the old mine.”

  “With a guy?”

  “Yes, with a guy,” I said.

  “When were you going to tell me you were seeing someone?”

  “I’ve told you a bunch of times. You just never listen.”

  “So who is it?”

  “Sean.”

  “Are you sleeping with him?”

  “You’re not my boyfriend anymore. That’s none of your business.”

  “So you are sleeping with him. What do you mean it’s none of my business?! All this time, I’ve been trying to decide whether to make a commitment to you and you’ve been telling me you still love me. I thought you were so honest and true-blue. I felt so guilty about how much I hurt you. And all the time you’ve been cheating on me?”

  “It wasn’t cheating!” I shouted.

  “Okay. Maybe that’s true. Maybe in a court of law you could get away with that. But you never listen to what I’m saying. I’m telling you how it feels to me, okay?” He began to cry, and his tears had unexpected powers of misdirection: I began to feel guilty for hurting him and to forget he’d ever hurt me. He said, “I can’t believe I fell for all that crap about how you imagined growing old with me. How could you say that to me and go fuck someone else?”

  “Look, you and I haven’t slept together in months.”

  “So what? Were you afraid it would seal shut?”

  “That’s not fair. You know I wouldn’t sleep with just anyone.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “When you and I split up, my heart was broken. He was my friend. We talked. We grew close. You kept telling me you didn’t want a relationship. You said we never had a relationship.”

  “You know that’s just angry talk.”

  “Chance, you called me delusional! You called me a Fatal Attraction psycho.”

  “Did you tell him about that?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “So you’ve told this guy everything about us, and I know nothing about him. That pretty much says it all, don’t you think?”

  I suppose it did. But at the time I didn’t see that. I only knew, when he held up a mirror to my behavior, it looked wrong. The fact that it was not Chance, but Sean whom I’d wronged, didn’t occur to me. Chance was the only indignant party, and the man I’d loved for more than two years. He was so angry I thought he must love me after all. Sean had never said he loved me. He’d only agreed to an affair. So it was to Chance that I gave an undeserved apology, and in one sobbing breath, cast Sean aside: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. If you want me to, I won’t see him anymore. I’ve always loved you. I didn’t think you loved me anymore.”

  “I can’t talk about this now,” he said. “I have to think.”

  When he hung up, my pulse was still racing. I assumed this heart-thumping feeling was love, rather than the aftermath of adrenaline in the face of male rage—which has always terrified me. I knew if I wanted Chance back I had to say goodbye to Sean, for good.

  So, still sobbing, I called Sean.

  “Cara, are you okay?” he asked. When I heard his voice, my heart crumpled up like one of the tissues I used to find in the pockets of my grandmother’s robe when I borrowed it.

  Wanting to get it over with quickly, I blurted, “Chance found out about you and me and he got mad and he wants me back and I can’t see you anymore.”

  There was a long silence. When Sean finally spoke, it was in that voice he usually reserved for long, dreary winter nights: “I knew this was going to happen.”

  “I’m sorry. But we did talk about this.”

  “I know, I know. So now we can’t even be friends?”

  “No. He’s really mad.”

  “I don’t see why. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “That’s not how he sees it. Anyway, I’m sorry. You’ve become my closest friend.”

  “I guess Chance will be your closest friend now.”

  This idea gave me pause. I found it hard to picture talking to Chance the way I talked to Sean. Chance and I hated each other’s politics, he thought hiking was boring, I thought multi-level marketing was annoying. He told me I talked too much, but then a lot of people told me that. Except Sean—he always said, “You just have a busy mind. It’s because you’re so intelligent. I always learn something from you.” That much acceptance was so foreign to me that I distrusted it like a ticking gift box. I was sure he was only being polite.

  “I’m glad for you,” Sean said. “I care about you a lot, and I want you to be happy.”

  I said, “I want you to know you’ve helped me a lot. You made a big difference in my life.” I’d meant to say something profound, and was dismayed to hear my voice making sounds so shallow and trite.

  For me, goodbye is never graceful, always a trip over a crack in the sidewalk.

  ***

  When I broke up with Sean, I didn’t know whether Chance would take me back. I believed this was the kind of sacrifice people made to prove their love: giving something up with no guaran
tee of receiving anything in return. I knew I ran the risk of ending up alone.

  Two days later, Chance ended the suspense. “I’m sorry I said such hateful things to you. Jealousy is an ugly emotion.”

  I accepted his apology, but not his invitation to take me to dinner for my birthday. After all that had passed, I felt nervous about the pressure of an intimate evening for two. Instead, I invited him to come to a party with my coworkers. The two of us surrounded by reporters, people trained to be nosy—no pressure at all.

  It wasn’t planned as a birthday party, but my friends remembered my birthday and bought a small cake. They buried the frosting in thirty-four candles, and I obediently laughed as if it were the first joke in the world. As I leaned over the cake and felt the intense heat on my flushed cheeks, I glanced up at Chance and hesitated. I wondered what Sean was doing at that moment. Then, knowing my friends were waiting, I closed my eyes and, for the first time, blew out my birthday candles without making a wish. I had no idea what to wish for.

  Throughout the evening, I caught several friends looking askance at my date. Though they didn’t know every detail of my personal life, they knew this guy had been in the picture, then out of the picture—quite possibly “cut out,” with scissors. But under the influence of wine he soon won the room. His trick was that it wasn’t an act: he truly was a smart, friendly, funny guy. That just wasn’t the entire picture. But for all I knew, everyone cropped their pictures, and the bits they left at home were just as ugly as ours.

  At the end of the evening, came his husky whisper asking me to “come home,” almost the way he used to say it: “Let’s go home . . . back to our place . . . our house . . . Baby doll, when are you coming home?” Hoping to validate my choice, believing intimacy would further commit him to our reunion, yearning for home, I accepted.

  Chance’s body was familiar, but not comfortingly so. Sean was shorter, and I’d grown used to his more compact body wrapped around mine. If Chance and I were two spoons in a drawer, then I was a teaspoon accidentally placed with a soupspoon. I had the uneasy feeling I was cheating—strange, since I’d so readily accepted Chance’s premise that Sean was the “other man.” But this was the man I’d always wanted, and now he wanted me. So I finished what I started. He was a little rough, but that increased my excitement. We tore each other open like two colliding bombs and filled the open wounds with our bodies.

  In the morning, he seemed distant. But then he’d run hot and cold ever since I’d known him. Not wanting to push things too fast—as if I hadn’t already—I didn’t press him for conversation, but simply left.

  When I returned to my apartment, a small package was sitting in front of my door, a gift bag decorated with ribbons. I didn’t realize what a miserable night and morning I’d spent until I felt the stretch of certain facial muscles signaling my first unforced smile in hours. I knew Sean had left this gift, cleverly keeping his promise not to see me without actually staying away. (Chance had given me nothing for my birthday.) With alacrity, I swept up my undeserved prize and greedily opened it. I pulled out a bag of chocolate drops, a videotape of The Joy Luck Club—one of my favorite movies—and a broken cup.

  Sean had purposely broken a large latte cup into several pieces and glued it back together. The cracks blurred before my eyes as I sat down, cradling the cup in my lap, remembering our laughter over the Zen master and the student who had “killed” his master’s cup. I thought about what the broken cup symbolized: non-attachment. The student had killed his master’s favorite cup, and I had killed my favorite relationship. But there was forgiveness here, as well. Wisdom teaches us to practice non-attachment because life is transitory; yet, because life is transitory, wisdom also teaches us to treasure what we have. As brief as it was, Sean treasured what we had.

  As I ran my finger over the cracks in the cup, the phone rang.

  It was Chance. “Cara, I’ve been thinking, and I don’t want to see you any more.”

  I grew livid. “So what was last night about?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of a grudge fuck?”

  “You were just using me for revenge? Revenge for what? I didn’t do anything to you. You dumped me, and I went out with someone else. Then I left a perfectly kind and decent guy because you said you loved me and wanted me back.”

  “If he’s such a great guy go back to him.”

  “So you’re done, now that you’ve marked your territory like a dog?”

  “Who are you now, Cara? The angry feminist who doesn’t take shit from anyone? Next it’ll be little miss sweet, innocent victim. Then it’ll be the reasonable psychologist. Cara, I’ve seen all your personalities and I don’t like any of them. Give it up. We’re history.” He hung up.

  I felt the way Sean’s gift looked. In a daze, I tried to glue myself back together, just enough so I could call Sean and thank him for the equally damaged cup.

  “You should’ve seen me trying to break it,” he said. “I bought two of them, just in case it didn’t work the first time. A good thing, too, because I dropped the first one a couple of times, but nothing happened. So I threw it and it just exploded! There were shards everywhere.”

  Trying to maintain control of my emotions, I spoke slowly and deliberately: “The thing I’ve wanted most in life is for someone to understand me. And the gift you left me, it says you know who I am. Anyway, I certainly didn’t expect it, after I cut you out of my life like that.”

  “Cara, you don’t have to worry about that. I understand. So how’d it go, anyway?”

  “He dumped me again.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I think he just can’t forgive me.”

  “Forgive you for what? What an idiot! Isn’t he the one who slept around with other women and then broke up with you? I’m sorry, I know you love this guy, but I think he’s an asshole.”

  Sean’s empathetic hatred of someone he didn’t know, on my behalf, was as romantic as a dozen roses. But I’d made my choice. And I’d lost. So I remained alone.

  ***

  In my exile, I indulged in internal self-flagellation, mea culpa in the bathroom mirror to a streaked and swollen visage spookier than a heroin addict’s. I frequently soothed my overheated psyche on the coolness of the bathroom floor, until guilt turned to self-pity and self-pity turned to nothing but the itchy imprint of vinyl on my cheek.

  After two weeks passed, Sean called to lure me off the linoleum. “Some of my aunts and uncles are here from out of town,” he said, “and I’m expected to do the family thing, and I was hoping you’d come rescue me. Every time they visit they tease me mercilessly about my love life: ‘When’re you gonna get a girl? So are you ever gonna get married or are you gay?’ Anyway, I figured if you were here it’d shut ’em up. You just have to pretend to be my girlfriend for a few hours. Will you come?”

  “That’s a first,” I said, laughing. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say yes.”

  So I picked myself up, bathed and groomed until the vacant face in the mirror looked at least clean, picked a smile to wear that didn’t look too overdone, and drove to his family’s place.

  I arrived to find Sean taking turns jumping on a trampoline with a boy and girl who lived next door. When he saw me he did a flip, and my heart skipped a beat when he almost went over the side. Instead, he landed on his face. Giggling, he jumped down to hug me.

  We didn’t act as if nothing had happened. We simply looked at each other, and in that look agreed this was the way friendship worked, just as it had when we were kids: knees got skinned, feelings got hurt, we said and did dumb stuff, then came back to play the next day.

  “You look great! Thanks for coming. Hey, let me introduce you to everyone,” he said, and shepherded me into his parent’s place upstairs. “There’s lots of food. My mother made this huge spread, and Grandma made her deviled eggs. They’re my favorite.”
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  I smiled prettily at everyone, ate too many deviled eggs, tried not to fart, and was pronounced charming by all. Sean winked at me, looking as proud as a kid who just brought home first prize from the science fair.

  Afterward we stood outside, slurping up the last dregs of warmth from the late-setting summer sun.

  “Thank you for bringing your pretty face over here and proving to my family that I’m not a loser.”

  “You’re not a loser.”

  “I know. But you know how families are. Anyway, thanks. It meant a lot to me.”

  “We’re friends now, right?” I asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “Just friends?”

  “That’s up to you. I just like having you in my life, Cara.”

  Feeling no need to preserve a dignity I had yet to discover, I said, “I don’t want to be just friends.”

  He embraced me as if I’d been resurrected from the dead.

  Entering his bedroom, I heard a voice in my head, whispering the kind of words a schizophrenic might hear: “Used goods . . . Cheater . . . Liar.” But when Sean made love to me that night, it was without any trace of a grudge. He did what he always did: gave and laughed and played without reservation. Afterward, I slipped into his welcoming shape, like a love letter into an envelope, and slid into the first relaxed sleep I’d had in weeks.

  Surely I must have had a blinding insight after that. But I’ll be damned if I remember what it was. For me, blinding insights, like happiness, are prone to fading. Blissful reconciliation was followed by the day after that, and the day after that.

  One of the nights after that, while we were lying in bed, Sean gave me a warning sure to hurry the fading process along: “I care about you a lot, Cara, and I’m the kind of guy who likes being in a relationship. But I know you want marriage and kids and all that, and I don’t really want those things. So, it’s probably not a good idea to get too attached to me.” I was so livid, if he’d just added the word “babe” he would have finished the conversation talking to a warm dent in the pillow next to him. I tuned out his words, though his voice continued to tickle my ear, the way Grampa’s voice used to when I sat on his lap with my head on his chest