Читать книгу Can't Think Straight: - Kiri Blakeley - Страница 11

Day 8 “I feel like I’m supposed to kiss you,” I say. Old habits.

Aaron looks kind of scared.

“Come on, let’s kiss then,” I insist, and peck him on the lips. He relaxes ever so slightly.

I sit at the bar and order, my hands still shaking. Aaron had agreed to meet me at Boat, a Brooklyn watering hole. I hadn’t told him what I wanted to discuss, just that we needed to talk. To Aaron’s credit, he had yet to shut me down and took all my phone calls, no matter how unpleasant he must have known the exchange would be.

On the subway ride over, I resolved to be calm in my dealings. If I came in screaming at him, he’d clam up or even leave.

I’d also noticed complete strangers on the train giving me a look—a look that said, “Welcome.” They recognized me now as one of their own. I had passed over into an eerie twilight world populated by those whom life had kicked in the teeth. They offered me a kind of solidarity.

I wait until I’ve had a couple of sips of vodka and say it.

“You’re having an affair with some guy who calls himself John.”

He shakes his head and starts to argue. I hold up my hand.

“Please! Just let me finish.” I take a deep breath. “You’re having an affair with some guy named John and you spent the night at his place.”

“Can I explain?”

“No.”

I begin to weep and shake. “I know you haven’t been honest with me, or even yourself, in years. But I need you to be completely honest for one night. I think I deserve that.”

He nods. “Now can I explain?”

I let him. John, he says, is one of his online hookups. They’d kept in touch—I didn’t ask how much—but John had once been married and Aaron hoped to get some insight from him. If you can believe it, his actual name is John, from which he got his Internet handle, “John Doe.” I guess Aaron didn’t choose him for his cleverness with words.

Last night, they’d met at Vegas, a bar I’d been on my way to at the same time, but had very fortunately (especially for Aaron) opted for another dive a block away. Aaron had talked and vented until he was too drunk to make it home. Then he spent the night at John’s.

“Nothing happened.”

I don’t know why at this stage of the game I still expected him to be faithful. But I decide not to press the issue. We weren’t living together anymore, and he could do what he wanted. I just didn’t want to hear about it.

I tell Aaron that the anger that surged through me when I read John’s email—so overwhelming, so horrifyingly large—made me worry I would do something I could never take back. Some of the poison filling me up to the neck needed to be drained or I would drown. Only the plain, ugly truth could do it.

I keep my voice as steady and clinical sounding as I can. “Did you have anal sex or give it during the time we were together?”

“No.”

“Did you use condoms when you gave or got blowjobs?”

“No.”

No condoms! said the ads.

I puff out my lips and take quick breaths, as if I’m in Lamaze class.

“How many times have you done this?”

“A handful? A dozen?”

Jesus Christ. Aaron and I had lived together. I knew where he was at all times. He never came home at 3 A.M., reeking of Axe body spray. But a couple of times a year, I went to Los Angeles to interview celebrities. And then there was the past year. I’d been away quite a lot. Last April, every weekend for five weekends, I’d taken the train to Washington, D.C., where my grandmother was dying of cancer. A few months later, I’d taken another train to a Boston hospital several times, to watch as my only niece, seven years old, died of complications from a cancerous brain tumor.

“When did you do all this? When my grandmother was dying? When Ana was dying?”

“Whenever. After work.”

Aaron worked about twenty-five minutes from our apartment. He usually got home about forty minutes after work ended. So these things were fifteen-minute encounters? How were you ever supposed to catch or even suspect a man of cheating if he only took fifteen minutes doing it? If your man walked in the door every night, perfectly normal, saying “Hi, baby,” and kissing you and then cooking dinner, how would you suspect? Shouldn’t he come home with a shamed face, retreat to the bedroom, and curl up in the corner, wracked with guilt?

That’s what I would have done.

“When did you start having these feelings? Be honest.”

He blabs on about not knowing, not being able to pinpoint it. But then he hits upon something, almost as if the memory comes as a surprise.

“Remember the ‘Have good day’ guy?”

He means the elderly Italian tailor in our former Brooklyn neighborhood—the one we lived in before we bought our own place. The tailor had probably been in the country for decades and still left the a out of his usual “Have good day!” goodbye.

I nod.

“Well, he was taking up my pants one time and, uh, he had his head down there and was running his hand up my pant leg and, uh, I got aroused.”

Aroused by the “Have good day!” guy? He must have been eighty.

“And you don’t remember anything like this happening before?”

“No.”

So that was it. You send your fiancé to the dry cleaners one day and he comes back gay.

“I’ve always had this vision of my life—what I wanted, what it would be—and none of that ever included a man,” he says.

Mine never included a homosexual fiancé, either, but there you go.

I again press him as to whether the viewing of Brokeback Mountain had affected him at all.

“Want the truth?”

“No, I’d like you to keep lying to me.”

“Okay. The truth is, I ran into John in the lobby. I saw him as soon as we came in and I spent the rest of the time being nervous about it.”

Unbelievable. I hadn’t sensed one goddamn thing amiss. There I was, sitting in the darkened theater, having a good chuckle at the small town naïveté and pitiable cluelessness of Heath Ledger’s on-screen wife, and I was unknowingly in her same position. I doubted that John had just happened to come to the same screening—one or both men had probably planned it. Maybe they got off on watching the movie at the same time. Having their little secret.

Sitting there gazing at me with so much tenderness, Aaron looked so innocent. At a time like this—when I could hear him, see him, chat with him—I could forget all this crap. Forget that he was blowing guys while I was at work or home feeding the cats or watching a loved one die in another city. For this moment, he was the person I liked being with more than anyone in the world.

“I don’t know if this will happen, but it would be nice if, maybe, somewhere down the line … we could be friends,” I say.

“Like Will and Grace,” he laughs. When the joke falls like lead, his eyes well up and he nods. “It’s so brave and healthy of you to be here saying this to me.”

“Or stupid.”

We share a subway ride like we had thousands of times before. We hold hands like we used to. We call it the “Bizarro World”: something so familiar, and yet so starkly strange.

When my stop comes, I turn and kiss him goodbye.

By the morning, I’ve stopped feeling so magnanimous.

I wake up around 6 A.M., as I have every day since the breakup, my mind racing. I leave Aaron a message on his cell, which I know he’ll have turned off. It’s become a habit, an easy way of spewing to him without it turning into a dialogue.

“I just want to say that you would come home with some guy’s sperm on your breath and kiss me. I never even saw you brush your teeth. That’s just gross. And, you know, at the end of the day, when the orgasm is over and the spark begins to fade, you’re left with a human being whom you have to figure out if you can live with, trust, believe in, respect, have stuff in common with, talk to, listen to, and love being with. We had all that. You know how hard that is to find? Look at all our friends in their thirties who are single and have been for years. Everyone wants what we had. I just hope when we’re old and alone, we don’t look back and say this was a fucking huge mistake.”

Well, I hoped I wouldn’t look back and say it was a fucking huge mistake. I didn’t wish the same for him.