You've Changed, page 23
And it wasn’t a vacation, I clarified.
The therapist made a note. She waited for you to explain but you didn’t mention that you travelled to have surgery so you could make Black guys stop in their tracks and whoop over your booty. I didn’t disclose.
You kept saying things I couldn’t predict: I don’t want to work at the gym anymore. The plan was for me to manage Locale, our short-term rental business, and host people. He put the kibosh on that.
I didn’t realize that it was so important to you. It was just a passing idea, something to make our home life as interesting as the gym life. You wanted to buy another place (uh-oh, you were plotting your escape). You wanted to stay home (uh-oh, to monitor me). You were tired. Of everything.
I’m hearing a lot of things from you, Princess. The therapist consulted her notebook. It was so dark in her room it had to be impossible for her to read anything. I’m hearing things from childhood, from your vacation, about job satisfaction, about broken promises. And I’m going to lift all of those concerns—she made a forklift of her arms—and put them here—she deposited the imaginary load on a side table beside her. It’s still in the room with us but I want to make time for the main reason that you’re here. She looked at the intake form we (you) filled out in the waiting room.
Beckett, am I correct that you had an affair?
I wouldn’t call it an affair, I said.
Are you and Princess in an open relationship?
Your lip involuntarily curled in disgust at the term.
I shook my head.
What would you call it then? the therapist asked me.
Friends, I wanted to say. An overlap. But I didn’t answer.
It wasn’t just an affair, you said.
I looked at you, begging.
He had an affair with this young—You looked down.
Silence.
Do you feel betrayed? the therapist asked.
I feel—You tried to find the words. Your eyes welled up, but you did not cry. I’m an athlete. I know pain. But this was far and away the worst [inaudible] I have ever felt. You shaded your eyes with your hand. I expected the therapist to hand you a tissue. You continued: I came back from my trip and he had given Pamplemousse, she’s my cat, away to this person, this person, this, this—
I looked down. You were so tense you were flexing your calves. Internally, I was begging you.
This woman, you finally said.
I hung my head and sideviewed your trembling mouth, vibrating from not saying what you wanted, but I recognized that you had sided with me in front of the therapist despite my petulance. I reached for your hand. You pulled away.
He’s romping away with her and he doesn’t even want to touch me. I knew it. I could hear it in his voice when he called me in Costa Rica, that he was with someone. Your tone, Beckett. And you were never at home. Always in your truck or out somewhere. And I was like, Princess, all of that good energy is not because of you or for you.
And here you did cry. It was an extremely rare occurrence to see you vulnerable. We were at an inflection point in our relationship, like the time when I removed the bothersome extensions from your hair and told you that you didn’t have to cover up the hyperpigmentation near your sideburns or pout to make your lips look fuller. You had stood before me, eyes so wide I could see myself swallowed up in them. I had said, Not bad and made a little joke, although the script demanded I say the word beautiful. It was then that I decided, if you wanted me to, that I would stay with you forever just so one person in the world could know you to the studs. Sensing that, your eyes filled, drowning my reflection, but you did not cry. Now there were tears on your cheeks. As if I had never cared for you, as if I was always thinking of someone else while I was with you. A couple of days before you flew back, when Gluten had ghosted me, I sent you a selfie from my truck of me pinching my nipple. I captioned it with a joke about getting implants.
Everything that was supposed to be mine, you continued, he gave to somebody else. He gave this woman my cat and then called me to make a joke out of it.
I was still looking down at my shoes. I said, I got Pamplemousse back.
The Doberman looked at me like, Is that the best you can do?
I responded by saying what I would say if I were on a talk show: It’s the only time I’ve ever done something like this. I don’t know what got into me. I want her—
Address Princess.
I want you to trust me again, I said.
You quoted me: The only time.
The therapist responded, looking at me, not you, with a line out of her poetry slam shadow life: Sometimes the only is only the first.
Possibly, I did roll my eyes here, but I was looking down so nobody saw me.
The therapist’s voice became stern: Is the affair over?
Yes.
Did you end it?
Yes.
Tell Princess how and why you ended it.
I erased her contact info, I said. True. Before you came back, I met her outside her building, not so true, and said that my wife was coming back, true, and I needed to take care of her, implied, and that the affair was a lapse of judgement, not completely true, and I hoped she would understand, mostly true. I didn’t reveal to you or the therapist the last words that Gluten and I exchanged because they were irrelevant, untrue, because I wanted them only for myself, true. After the display about erasing contact info and gifting him the baseball glove, he said to me at the side of my truck, You are not a teardown, Beckett. I couldn’t think of what to say, it had to be deep, so I embraced him instead and waited for snow to fall in Maine. I said, You are not a weed. That was the best I could do. I thought it pretty poetic. When I let him go, he swivelled his head around, hoping that someone had caught him being tenderly regarded. In retrospect, he was always looking for an audience, fans, followers, witnesses, a phone held up to record—a desire particular to his generation.
The therapist said, I’ve found that in these situations the offended party often needs certain information before they can go forward. To be clear, going forward doesn’t mean steps toward forgiveness and reconciliation. It can sometimes mean that the offended party decides to sunset the relationship, based on the information they have. So what do you need to know, Princess?
I already told her everything, I said.
The therapist ignored me. Princess, what do you need to know?
You considered the question. I expected you to demand a last name again or another photo or the kind of detail that you relished of other people’s lives. But you kept thinking in silence. Snow swirled in Maine. I did want you to have faith in me—and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity—but I was paralyzed to explain my feelings. Why wasn’t sorry enough? I scratched my back. If you left me, who would tell me to trim my nosehair? Who would renovate my Instagram and cheer every job I got? You knew the answer to my banking security question, What is your favourite song? You cleaned the oven.
Princess asked, Did you talk about me with her?
No.
Wrong move. You were hoping that I flooded Gluten with information, that I couldn’t stop talking about my wife this, my wife that.
So I added, I told her you work at the gym.
I don’t work at the gym, you said. I’m a personal trainer. Are you a handyman or a contractor? I have a degree.
In Human Studies, I could have said, which was like Sociology lite. But I didn’t.
Princess, the therapist said. He’s being honest with you.
You held your shoulders back and refused to apologize. I scratched my nostril with my pinky.
What else would you like to know? she asked.
Did you enjoy being with her more than you enjoy being with me?
No, I said.
Sexually, you clarified.
I paused to consider. You didn’t want to hear yes and saying no would really confuse you.
And don’t say I don’t know.
Finally I said, About the same. I glanced to see whether you believed me.
Silence ensued. The Doberman at the therapist’s feet had curled itself into a croissant.
Keep asking your questions, Princess.
What’s the point? You composed yourself. I don’t know what I’m competing against. I don’t even know what event I’m competing in.
It’s not a competition, Princess. The therapist used the words market forces, helplessness, agency, and repossess in a muddy sentence where I couldn’t determine what she meant.
Her tone changed when speaking to me. She said, All actions come with consequences.
She said that like I needed a moral education. I knew that already. The consequence of my actions was my memory.
That’s not a judgement, she said. That’s a reality.
In the silence, your phone vibrated, three messages in a row.
Would you mind silencing that? Dr. Simmons said.
Of course, you said. Then you added while glancing at your screen, You didn’t ask him about his card.
Beckett, your turn to respond. What is your preferred relationship status? How committed are you to this union? What do you want?
I hadn’t written anything on my card.
A sandwich, I said.
Nobody laughed. I began creasing the card into an origami heart.
The therapist repeated her question. What do you want, Beckett? Please don’t violate the integrity of our space with cynicism.
I looked down. Married, I said.
What does marriage look like to you?
I shrugged. I don’t know how long the silence lasted.
He’s going into caveman mode, you said.
I had bathed under a cave of cedar branches. I had received a golden egg of light. I had beheld his face when I opened my eyes.
That’s okay. Now the therapist spoke to me as if to a child. Can you say a little more?
I shrugged again. Like the conga line.
You explained, My friends were in town last year. Princess attached herself to Keza’s hips to start the line and Wood attached to Princess’s and Beckett had no choice but to grip Wood’s hips.
I liked it when you called me Snuffleupagus, I said. And I said nothing else for the rest of the session.
* * *
After therapy, you took down the tent in the backyard. You moved back in and slept in our bedroom. I continued to sleep on the sectional, waiting for a sign from you that I should return upstairs.
Toward the end of July, while I was hosing out my wheelbarrow in the backyard, a man with a purple rolling suitcase let himself into the house. I saw it through the glass wall. You had resumed the Locale business without telling me. I tucked in my shirt and went in. Pamplemousse croaked its haunted hello. I tried to be welcoming, and when you arrived a few minutes later, to be the picture of marital normalcy. The man stayed two nights and smelled like crotch. After him came a nightly stream of people and their diseases.
You spent more time at home, inside the house, preparing the suite, washing sheets and towels, making dinners from recipes. It was the most vibrant you had been in a long time. More and more, we talked as we had before, not simply as administrators of a house, but as people who took pleasure in their lives. Wasn’t it wonderful to try making something out of kohlrabi and to debate whether pomegranate or tangerine was the more luxurious scent for shampoo?
I should have known that your enthusiasm was not for me. You picked up where you left off, with a barrage of men. This time the hosting decisively felt like you were going on dates right in front of my face. I could hardly bear it. Sensing my uneasiness, you hosted a few women and waited to see how I would engage, which made me nervous, so you flirted on my behalf, which made me prefer the evenings with men.
Despite my social demotion whenever we had guests, I told the therapist that the hosting was fine, except for you telling the same stories, over and over. That comparatively small complaint unhinged you. I was not suggesting that you were boring. In retaliation, when we hosted a male airhead from Australia you pretended that you were a guest too.
It got to be too much. To escape watching you giggle, I worked late. Viv’s backyard deserved to be an ecological heritage centre. I went for runs and listened to eighties rock. I hung around the dog park and fed treats to Pointy’s friends. I took my meals in the basement. I went to Home Depot. I made origami dogs and hearts out of the receipts. I got a cold. You got a cold. But the mens kept coming.
* * *
I entered a restless period. My obsessive work on Viv’s yard was arousing her suspicion so I had to direct my energy elsewhere. In the night, I organized all my tools, sorted all the screws, tracked invoices, reviewed my accounts, tallied Optimum points, claimed travel points, compared mortgage rates. I made a soup of every vegetable in the fridge, used up open packages of pasta. You mentioned small tasks, like caulking the tub and windows. I adjusted the storage in our walk-in closet to look like custom built-ins. That night, I lay in bed with you, to see what would happen, and you shuffled close to me and said, You smell like particle board. I tried touching you during this period, even after you came back from your various lovers. Sometimes you lifted my hand away. The last time you rejected me, I got out of bed and sorted our linen closet. Why did we still have king sheets. Our bed was a queen.
This time, my period, my restless period, lasted longer than usual. You told the therapist that you found me collapsed at the base of the stairs near a tray of paint. You thought I had had a stroke. In fact, I told them, I was taking a power nap.
Have you had manic periods in the past? Dr. Simmons asked.
I knew that she was eager to pronounce a diagnosis on me, touch her sword to each of my shoulders, to frame my decisions as impaired, so I said no.
A few moments later, the conversation had gone on, but I clarified: They’re not manic periods. They’re completion periods. I work on deadline with clients.
During this phase, the sex spam messages arrived occasionally in my @BeyondRepair inbox. If you message me again, I will take legal action, I wrote back before blocking addresses. The messages stopped, but not before I received one from the original email address. Weeks had passed since the first message from Gluten, presumably, and I was caught off guard by the message’s sincerity. I happened to open it while I was eating an apple pie in a Walmart McDonald’s, forever pairing the snack with the message. Then I bought a pair of gloves although it was almost August. The email read, Why can’t you love me, Beckett?
Like you, Princess, I was not a crier but I drove Becky to the loading area behind the Walmart and put my head down on the steering wheel, cried until my nose was blocked. I went fishing through the glove compartment for tissue you left there. I couldn’t breathe in, only blow my nose out. I looked at the floor of the passenger side and remembered where the empty carton of coconut water had been. I felt a pressure in my windpipe that I hadn’t felt since COVID. I cried through the tissue until the hair of my arms was slick. A cry like I haven’t had since my mother died when the debris of childhood had resurfaced, and even while crying, I was both ashamed and proud, wanting to tell someone that the ice inside me had broken up but who to tell, now that you weren’t my confidant? It was all there: you and my mother and Gluten and my pathetic business and the mocking voice, Look at you, big shot with your Mark’s Work Warehouse pants, playing Bob the builder, instead of your Easy Bake oven like a neighbour girl in Maine, and the life of a good woman being wrecked, getting fat pumped into her body alone in some operating room so she could come home and be loved by you, a girl who had no friends her whole life and said you were the first man who loved her, to do this casual cruelty to her, to a man eating his spaghetti, who hosted you in his life, gave you his ball of light, maybe never kissed a girl his whole life, how many years before his lips relaxed on yours, kissing your cat, looking at the side of your face as if you were the best thing his eyes ever saw, wanting to eat your very ear cartilage. All these impressions lapped against each other, lapping the shore. My breath was jagged.
With that message, I forgave the others. I turned on the ignition, glimpsed my red eyes in the mirror, popped an antihistamine and drove past Viv’s house to observe the garden in the evening light.
I wanted to be in the mangrove (Some people have a man cave, I have a mangrove), taking a bite from Gluten’s apple and telling him how ridiculous therapy was. See, I’m in therapy because of you. I’d complain that the therapist had absolutely nothing to contribute, that I was spending money (since I had no extended healthcare benefits) to listen to you and the therapist talk. Where’s the advice? When was that coming? And like you, Gluten would probably defend the process: the talking is the therapy.
I suppose if I rang Gluten’s buzzer again, I shouldn’t be surprised if he faked an accent and said, No, no, Mr. Gluten no live here no more. Who knows? Maybe he moved neighbourhoods or back to Brantford? Bromont? Brandon? Brandeis? Brasomething.
Google Photos sometimes sent nostalgic albums from my time with Gluten. Pictures of desserts and views from landings. When my mother died the world became overcast for a long time. No one had ever seemed so delighted by my very existence. She kept every picture I coloured, every ashtray I made, every photo with a piece of me in the frame. How could I give a penny of her away? But Gluten wasn’t dead. If Gluten had opened his apartment door when I retrieved Pamplemousse, I wouldn’t have this rainy feeling. I would scroll my eyes over him. See if anything was left of me or for me. Then I wouldn’t have to see him again. I wanted to see him so I wouldn’t have to see him again. He could have opened the door. Realistically, what did he want me to do? To change my life for some friend of a friend I barely knew? This was probably the kind of material the therapist was hoping to get from me.
I opened my Instagram. It had turned into a before-and-after shrine to Viv’s garden. I went to messaging. I found his name. I wrote, Look what Google sent me. I waited while looking at the screen. Nothing.
