Читать книгу Can't Think Straight: - Kiri Blakeley - Страница 7

Oh … my … God …” my friend Julie breathes into the phone.

I’ve just told her what is happening. Julie has known Aaron for as long as I have. I read her a few Craigslist ads, and, since she’s a writer who works from home, tell her I am coming over.

I get on the F train and stumble off at her stop. I stand on the street corner, completely disoriented. I have been to Julie’s apartment dozens of times, and yet it’s as if I stand in the middle of a strange city I’ve never been in before. I call her from my cell.

“I don’t know how to get there,” I say. I can feel the hysteria rising, my breathing getting shallow and rapid.

“Take a left,” Julie stresses. “A left.”

“Oh God,” I wail. “Which way is left?!”

Julie has to come get me.

I call Aaron at work. “You’ve been cheating on me,” I say, taking a chance. I don’t really know if he has responded to any of the ads.

Aaron is silent. Then I know it is true.

“How long as this been going on?” I ask in a monotone.

“Two years,” he says.

I only go home to get some things so I can stay at Julie’s. I warn Aaron not to be there. I try to go straight for what I need and not look at the rest of the apartment: the furniture, the appliances, pictures on the walls, knickknacks. Anything and everything we had bought together. Anything and everything a big fat lie.

There is a long handwritten note on the kitchen island. I can barely look at it. My eyes fall on one sentence:

“I separated sex from love,” it says.

I throw the letter in the trash, where I hope Aaron will see it.

At Julie’s, she and her boyfriend, Jake, occasionally force me to down a little soup. I have zero appetite, but I think of a male friend who, when he found out his girlfriend had cheated on him, stopped eating and ended up in the hospital with an IV drip in his arm. I want to avoid that fate.

I had hardly been in the office all week. Went in for a few hours here and there, just to try to feel normal. It didn’t work. I tell my supervisor, also a friend, what is happening, because I need people to understand why I might appear a red-eyed zombie. “Take whatever time you need,” she tells me.

I cry so much that when I suddenly stop, I wonder if it’s because my body simply can’t produce any more tears. Then I need the stability of familiar surroundings, my cats. I call Aaron and tell him to get out of the apartment. He says he will stay with our friend Ben, who I know is in the process of divorcing his wife.

“Is it him?” I ask. “The timing seems rather coincidental.”

“Ben is not gay so far as I know.”

I don’t know anything anymore. Anything seems possible.

The night I return home, I dig through Aaron’s personal belongings. I find a bank statement, call the number on it, and listen to the automated teller run down his checks and balances. I find his passport and Social Security card and hide them. I have no idea what I’m doing other than trying to figure out whom I’ve been living with for ten years. Maybe I’d discover identification that said he was someone else—someone who’d been on the run for a long time, who had been holing up with me, pretending to be Aaron, pretending to be a straight man who loved me and wanted to marry me.

I sleep on the couch with pillows stuffed up against me for comfort. I can’t be alone in our bed; I’m terrified I will smell him on the sheets. I leave the lights and TV on all night, like I’m five years old and scared of ghosts.

In the morning, there’s that initial moment when I swim to consciousness and life is familiar and normal for a half a second—then everything rushes back, and I’m trapped in a strange new world I can’t shake off.

Occasionally, someone puts forth a theory as to why Aaron has chosen this particular time to come out. One friend suggests that it’s all an ego thing—since my career is doing better than his. After all, while Aaron was sputtering along with his homemade CDs and sparsely attended local gigs, I’d been in Los Angeles, making the rounds of Oscar parties for my Forbes celebrity beat. At the Vanity Fair shindig, I’d accidentally sat on one of the billowy folds of Jennifer Lopez’s dress, drawing an icy stare. At the ICM bash, I’d been an arm’s length away from Mariah Carey, Elton John and Mick Jagger—all at once. I’d spent a lot of time on television in the past year yapping about Paris Hilton or Gisele Bundchen. Not exactly the stuff of Pulitzer or Emmy. But it was fun. My family and friends enjoyed seeing me on the tube; liked hearing about celebrities I met or interviewed.

But I knew Aaron didn’t have that kind of ego-driven retaliatory nature.

I was more inclined to believe it was our recent decision to end our interminable engagement with a marriage ceremony. Aaron had asked me to marry him about a year into our relationship. The prospect so terrified me that I burst into tears and couldn’t put the ring on for months. Over the years, Aaron had been the one pushing for it; I was the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” hold out. But specter of death—first my paternal grandmother and then my young niece—and the realization that Aaron’s elderly mother and my maternal grandmother (who helped raise me) most likely wouldn’t be far behind, gave us grim impetus.

Plus, it just started to seem silly and impractical. If I got hit by a wayward cab and lay in a coma, he wouldn’t be able to make any kind of decision or arrangement. Once we’d decided, Aaron ran into our local pub hangout, Last Exit, and announced it to his friends, as hyped up and excited as if his soccer team had just scored a goal.

“You know everything about me,” I’d told him. “It doesn’t get any better, and it doesn’t get any worse. I have no surprises.”

“Me neither,” he’d said.

Me neither!

When I asked Aaron why now, he said, “Because I respect you too much to keep doing this to you.”

There was nothing about respecting me enough not to do it in the first place.