Manhattan

by Steiner, Kandi

  I had a plan. I knew how this conversation would go. I had everything in control.

  I know about her. I know what you’ve done. I’m leaving. We’re done.

  But my uncanny sense of control and my ability to make a checklist didn’t matter once I actually sat down at our kitchen table across from the man who’d lied to me for years.

  Because he spoke first.

  And everything changed.

  “Gem,” he rasped, his voice broken under the weight of his words. “Gemma, did you hear me?”

  “I heard you,” I managed.

  My own voice mirrored his, broken and raspy, laced with dread. Of course, he assumed it was because of the blow he’d delivered. My sad-eyed, exhausted husband thought he’d broken my heart with his news. But the truth was my dread was born of a different source. It was simply me mourning the absolute conviction with which I’d believed in my plan and its certain success.

  Now, I had no plan.

  Now, my cheating husband and his secret lover were not the center of this conversation.

  Now, my cheating husband had cancer.

  The kind that couldn’t be fought.

  The kind that would end his life.

  Soon.

  It’s okay, I tried to assure myself, pressing a hand to my chest so I could feel how fast my heart was beating beneath my ribcage. Just make a new plan.

  But, as it went with my special brand of anxiety, my plans not working out the way I envisioned them often left me grappling. Suddenly, everything I thought I had on a leash was running wild, and no matter how I tried to talk myself down, I couldn’t. Every time that happened — every time my plan went wrong — my emotions would win, all logic gone, all sense of what should be done lost like a whisper on a breeze.

  “Please,” he whispered, grabbing the legs of my chair and pulling me toward him. The wood made a terrible noise as it rubbed against our kitchen floor, sparking a wave of chills from my ankles to the top of my spine. “Don’t cry, my sweet gem. It will be okay. We’ll be okay.”

  He wrapped his arm around me, one hand cradling my head into his chest as the other caressed my back. Those hands had touched another woman, and they were now touching me, and I wanted to pull away just as much as I wanted to stay there forever.

  He was going to leave me. He was going to leave this world.

  My tears felt like they belonged to someone else as they soaked his sweater, and I tried to decipher where they came from. It didn’t take long for me to realize they weren’t born from one, singular source, but rather from all of them — like a waterfall made of glaciers melting all at once in the first warm wave of spring.

  My husband was cheating on me.

  He loved another woman — one who did not bear my name.

  I would be alone, because I would lose him.

  Only now, it wouldn’t be because of his infidelity. The choice to be alone would not be made by me standing tall, demanding more, not accepting his affair.

  Instead, he would fade from the Earth and I would remain, mourning him along with his other lover.

  Maybe I cried because, though I had a plan, I secretly prayed he would thwart it. Perhaps I half-envisioned me leaving him, chin held high as I walked away, and half-envisioned him begging me to stay, promising to relinquish his love affair, for our marriage meant more to him than she ever could.

  Regardless, it didn’t matter now.

  Now, I had a cheating husband who would never learn my knowledge of his infidelity.

  Because now, I would never tell him I knew.

  What would be the objective? With a blow as hard as terminal cancer, was there really any point to leaving him now, to letting him fight the final weeks of his life alone? Was there any point to telling him I knew about the other woman he touched, other than satisfying my need to feel in control, to shove my proof in his face and say Ha! I know what you did!?

  Death has a funny way of putting life into perspective for us. And what had once been so important to me — that need for vindication I held so tightly on my drive home — didn’t seem to matter now. There was really only one thing that did.

  I loved him.

  That emotion was easy to pin down.

  And because it was the only thing I could truly grasp, I held onto it tightly, knuckles white and aching. Carlo Mancini was my husband, and I, his wife. He was my everything — and that was still true, regardless of who else he’d shared a bed with.

  So, I pulled back from his embrace, and kissed his lips — lips I always thought would be only mine to kiss — and I told him I loved him. I told him I was there. I held his hand and told him that, come what may, he had me by his side.

  And by his side I stayed, until the very day he died.

  Somewhere in that warped, whirling span of time, I think a part of me died, too.

  I watched cancer wither my strong, commanding husband into nothing but skin and bones. I watched his eyes grow hollow, his lips ashen, his hands weaken where I held them in mine. Every day that I looked in the mirror, I watched my own eyes change, a hardness settling in. I watched a twenty-nine-year-old girl become an old woman in just weeks — weeks that felt like years, but flew by like days.

  And on the day of his funeral, I watched a girl younger and prettier than me mourn him from the back row of our church.

  She cried the same tears that I did, though I swore her heart was in more pain than mine. Because she had the satisfaction of being the other woman, of being the one he couldn’t live without — so much so that he was willing to risk his marriage, his reputation, his life that he had built. She knew without a doubt that she had been his world, that she had been the last face in his mind before the light was extinguished and he faded off into nothing.

  I didn’t have that same comfort.

  I had casseroles from neighbors and life insurance policies from lawyers and a house full of things that smelled like him. I had a down payment on a condo downtown that I’d secured, thinking I would be walking away from him, away from his infidelity. I had an empty hole in my chest where a young heart used to beat, where love used to grow like flowers, now turned to weeds.

  I had a secret to keep, one that would eat me alive every second it dwelled in the dark, unspoken depths of my mind.

  And I had a plan.

  To preserve control over my future, over my heart, my soul, my well-being, over the life I would lead after my husband — I had to eliminate the factors that were uncontrollable. It was just that simple.

  And right there, in that first-row pew, with my dead, cheating husband’s mother’s hand in mine, I made one simple plan, with one simple rule.

  Never fall in love again.

  It was more than just a plan, more than just a goal. It was a promise.

  And it was one I vowed to keep.

  Gemma

  eight months later

  “No.”

  I only had one word for my best friend-slash-boss as we flowed with the crowd spilling out of Soldier Field, the warm, early-September air sweeping over us. Despite the fact that Belle and I had sweat through most of the Chicago Bears preseason game until the sun finally went down, I still smiled, reveling in the last few weeks of summer.

  Soon, the heat would fade, and the Illinois winter would hit with all the subtlety of a Mack truck.

  I was in no rush to be greeted with the kind of cold that hurts your face. Still, while I would miss summer, it was fall that was my favorite season. It had always held a special place in my heart for many reasons — my birthday, Halloween, pumpkin-spiced everything, and, most of all, football.

  “Shut up. You don’t get to say no to me,” Belle snapped. She swept her long, strawberry-blonde hair off her shoulder before looping her arm through mine. “In our friendship, I’m always right. And trust me when I say I’m right about this.”

  “I’m not ready to date, Belle. Drop it.”

  “I didn’t say you had to date,” she stated, matter-of-factly, as she he
ld up one black-lacquered fingernail. “I said you need to get laid. And this, my friend, is literally every man’s fantasy.” She gestured to the stadium we had just walked out of. “Free tickets to a football game and a hot chick to bang at the end of the night — with no strings attached?” She shook her head. “Honestly, I wish I had thought of this first. It’s genius.”

  “I didn’t think of anything,” I reminded her. “I bought season passes for my husband to give to him on his thirty-fifth birthday.”

  “Your cheating husband,” she reminded me, steering us left toward the street lined with sports bars. And though my face didn’t show a single sign of weakness at those words, my stomach tightened into a knot.

  Belle was literally the only person who would ever know that Carlo was unfaithful, other than the woman he cheated on me with — and not even she knew that I knew. I’d only told Belle after Carlo had passed away, mainly because I knew she’d speed up the process of his death before the good Lord could take him if she found out about his infidelity.

  Belle was the kind of best friend who loved fiercely. She was honest with me always — bluntly so — and she never let me get too comfortable in my little land of control. Just when she saw me slipping into any kind of complacency, she would challenge me.

  I hated her as much as I loved her for that.

  Still, while I knew I’d need someone to talk to about Carlo’s infidelity, someone who knew the whole story, sometimes I regretted telling her. Where I was all about suppressing, boxing difficult emotions away and focusing on tasks I could complete, Belle was a processor.

  She was not the kind of girl to let something go.

  Especially this kind of something.

  “And I say this with the utmost respect for you and him and all of God’s creatures,” she continued, drawing a cross over her shoulders with her free hand. “But he’s not here anymore, Gemma. May he rest in peace.” She paused. “And also, be castrated in the name of Jesus, amen.”

  “Belle.”

  “I’m kidding.” She paused again. “Sort of.”

  I was ashamed of the small smile climbing on my lips in that moment. If he was still here, if my original plan had actually come to fruition, these types of jokes would be fine to make. After all, what woman didn’t support her best friend after she was cheated on? Comments of castration and ill-bidding were welcome, and most certainly expected.

  But when he was no longer breathing, when cancer had taken his life before I could take my life back from him, it wasn’t the same. It was cruel, and heartless, and it produced a type of guilt that sat low and unsettling in your stomach.

  This was my entire existence, it seemed, for the past several months.

  “While I appreciate the attempt to make me laugh, I’m not ready to make jokes about Carlo like that,” I said softly. “I probably won’t ever be.”

  “I’m sorry,” Belle said on a sigh, squeezing my arm as we flowed with the crowd. “Really, I am. That was too far. You know me, I can’t help but make jokes, even when it’s wildly inappropriate. Remember when my cousin had a funeral for his cat?”

  “And you made a cake that looked like a litter box with little pebbles of poop, and wrote Sorry your cat hit the shitter, at least you don’t have to change any more litter on it with hot pink frosting?”

  Belle pointed at me. “Exactly. I’m awful at death, it makes me feel itchy and so I resort to humor. Apparently, very poorly placed humor. But,” she continued, taking that finger she had pointed at my face and re-directing it to point at my lady bits. “Let’s bring this back to the real subject at hand, which is that that region is about as dry as the Sahara Desert.”

  I rolled my eyes, pulling my arm from where it was wrapped around hers to fish in my purse. I rummaged around for my lipstick as we made our way toward the South Loop bars.

  Play the humor card, Gemma. You’re good. Everything’s okay.

  “This region is just fine, thank you,” I told her, gesturing to my crotch as I finally found my lipstick. I rolled the burgundy tube up, pointing it directly at my best friend. “It gets plenty of action.”

  Belle scoffed. “Oh, right. Forgive me for thinking a twenty-nine-year-old woman might want something more than a dildo with three vibration speeds.”

  “Four,” I corrected, smoothing the deep burgundy cream over my top lip and blotting it together with the bottom. “And this twenty-nine year-old woman is perfectly content.”

  Belle huffed, and for the rest of our walk to the strip of bars we frequented after games, she continued, on and on about the importance of my libido not going stale and my vagina getting action.

  This was part of what infuriated me about Belle, and part of what I loved — she could argue a fish into buying an oxygen tank. In Belle’s mind, she always knew what was right and what was wrong, and she had all the right words to convince you, too.

  It was one of the things that made her a successful entrepreneur.

  Belle started her own interior design firm as soon as she graduated college. In fact, she already had clients lined up, thanks to outshining the full-time employees at her internships. And, luckily for me, she needed an assistant — AKA someone to run her life. Where she was great with the people, with the design, I was great with the numbers, with the organization, and together? We made the best team in Chicago.

  She never crossed over — she hung her boss hat up in the office and wore her best friend hat, instead. But, regardless of if we were on the clock or not, Belle was just a boss kind of lady.

  And she was adamant about this particular job.

  By the time we finally hit the strip of bars we were aiming for, I was in desperate need of a drink, and for my best friend to drop the subject.

  But she wasn’t done yet.

  “Ugh, you haven’t said anything in like ten minutes,” she said, pulling me to a dead stop outside a bar packed with Chicagoans celebrating the Bears’ win. It was the last preseason game, and the entire city was alive with the hope of a promising season — especially in the south side by the stadium. While most Bears fans went back to their tailgating spots or made the commute back into the heart of the city after the games, I was beginning to prefer the rowdiness of the sports bars in the South Loop.

  Honestly, I preferred almost anything other than going back to my empty condo.

  When Carlo was alive, we would usually watch the games at home with a group of our neighbors. I would cook, he would entertain, and it was everything I’d ever dreamed of having when I was a young girl.

  When I bought him the season tickets, I envisioned more for us — tailgating, building a community in the seats around us, starting traditions…

  Belle sighed, and I blinked away Carlo’s memory.

  “Look, I know I joke a lot,” Belle said, taking my shoulders in her hands. She lowered her gaze to mine, ensuring I was listening before she continued. “But I’m serious when I say that I love you and I know you’ve been through a lot in the past eight months.”

  Her eyes softened, and I forced a swallow, warding off any emotions that might try to sneak in with her looking at me like that.

  “I’m not saying you should date. Hell, if anyone is against love as much as you, it’s me. Hello,” she said, sweeping the back of her hand over her lean body. “Single for life and loving it, okay? But, just because I don’t date doesn’t mean I don’t go out, have fun, meet people.” She eyed me. “And get some.”

  I just stared at her, still not convinced.

  “You have these tickets, right?” she continued. “And you love the Bears.”

  “Da Bears.”

  “I’m not saying it like that.”

  “Say it, or I’m not listening to the rest of this.”

  Belle rolled her eyes. “Da Bears.”

  I smiled. “Better.”

  “I hate you.” She readjusted her grip on my shoulders. “Anyway, you’re like an enigma to dudes. A girl who actually enjoys football? It’s gold, Gemma. So, i
nstead of forcing your fun-loving best friend who absolutely loathes sports of all kinds, to suffer through every home game with you, take a chance and meet some new people. Have fun with a few guys who have the same interest as you, and, who knows,” she said, smirking. “Maybe a big wang to rock your world with at the end of every game. Now that’s the definition of a win-win.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at that. “I think you’re the horniest woman to ever exist.”

  “Guilty as charged. Now,” she said, holding out her hand. “Give me your phone, let me download this app, and just… trust me. For once. This doesn’t go against any of your plans, right? There’s no roses-and-chocolate dating, no Facebook-official relationship status updates, no love, no marriage or babies, or any of that.”

  Chewing the inside of my cheek, I debated her reasoning. In a way, she did have a fair point — I maybe did need a little affection. I was dead set on never trusting anyone again, never falling for those stupid puppy-dog eyes as they stared into mine and told me they loved me and only me. I was done with that.

  But football, beer, and a little romp in the sack?

  I wasn’t not into that…

  And, if I could be like anyone, it would be Belle. At thirty, she was happily single, successful in her career, and traveling like it was her only job. She’d never needed a man, never even given a guy more than a week to try to nail her down. She was my inspiration, my hope that there was a life to live after Carlo.

  My heart sank when I thought of him again, because there was a time when all I wanted was everything that Belle just listed. The very things that now made me want to crawl into a ball and hide or start kicking the first man to approach me used to be the only things I desired. I wanted a husband, and a family, and a suburban life. I wanted a partner in life to grow old with, to laugh with, to lean on when life got hard.