One He said it and slid past me, the scent of wet tobacco coughed from the tattered pockets of his silly professor’s blazer and turned my stomach upon itself. His words cut into my skin, like a razor’s slip: the actual depth became more clear in the seconds after his odor left the room.
Earlier in our story, I’d been discoverable to him. That had cost me. He used that part of me he knew he owned to twist me whichever way he chose. Nine years of my life I’d lost to that vulnerability. Shifting at his critiques. Responding to what he said I lacked: energy, autonomy, vivaciousness. He added that I had no depth of femininity. The kind of femininity that engenders dedication. He’d said something similar, earlier and I had fought it. I worked.
The returned spring sunlight made it easy. Committed and bright, I had stumbled through a few capoeira classes to build my stamina (though it was always he who collapsed after six minutes of mediocre love-making that hadn’t felt lovely for at least nine years now). I paid forty dollars for the new Capoeira whites that that limber and muscled, Danilo, had insisted I buy. “Anything for you, Danilo.”
Under Danilo’s command, I tumbled and sweat like an air conditioner for three weeks, 6:30 to 8:00 pm, pepping up each time Danilo announced my progress to the class. I doubtless favored a grandmother sloth, following the circle’s Portuguese chants … and to what end? Our love-making progressed to nine minutes, then within a week, back to six.
I next volunteered to suffer the social lash: sipped black coffee half of three whip-cold nights in a Berkeley chat group for research widows. The coffee burned every sweet and salty sensor from my tongue -- me nodding through petty Berkeley gossip— bobble heading, startled to more droll topics – (imagine an exhausted airline pilot’s eyes opened at two thousand feet and just before the crash, screaming, “You lackaluster bitches are killing me!”)
I had wanted this marriage.
I indulged him. I held on. We both did, ostensibly. And now he, unsatisfied, whiffed past me and announced his desire to openly stray from our marriage bed; he had a date. He wanted a reaction from me.
I felt that familiar sensation: the nerves in my stomach began to dance heavy into my lower bowels and I imagined that bum dog of his shitting all over the burnt ceramic of the mud room floor, standing upright, then spackling it all about the cracks in his sinister face. But the dog didn’t shit the one time I needed him to.
My outward resistance to my husband’s abuse: my calm, my disregard, my stoic replies—I had once judged as pitifully reactive, cowardly and survivalist—would in fact, soon emerge as my greatest strength. I would always win with him. My victory, alas, would be him admitting my superiority. I would prove it.
First, I summoned my angels, whom I had yet to properly name. (I’m chewing on Cordelia and Eddie). Friends really. Dears to me. They would watch over me. Direct my action. Keep me from running into the street or from grabbing a blade from the wood block in the kitchen.
… Drop your shoulders, Cordelia said. Eddie, her half-brother, insisted I turn my chin. Lean to the right. Nod inward slowly. Up down drop, once. Part lips slightly, flatten eyes, speak without excitement. Drop a bomb: “Let me know if it works out. I might be able to help you find someone.”
My stoicism hit its apex. Give him nothing. Make him wonder over you. Make him puzzle his decisions, his waistline, his speech.
He wouldn’t believe me. But, I meant it. I would help him. After the initial chill, I realized I no longer minded. I had thought about it increasingly as I knew he had no way of finding a decent woman on his own.
I had recently come to know that I had been his last best effort. It took a regrettable amount of time for me to awaken. He was old now. And the charm of wit and an agile mind – which compensated for the knot atop his bald red dome –would no longer work as it had on me.
First, his mind was more placid now, lazy. No pop to it. And he repeated himself: Whitman ruined America. He fell into himself and stayed there … Tell me more Professor Nothing New.
And over the years, I had met two of the others. I immediately sensed who they were. At two separate department panels, like automatons, they both handed me drinks and cheese, (as if in homage to him, they stared in my eyes with wonder). I recoiled from both, sickened by their gullibility. Idiots. This is his game. Corduroy blazers and wine and obscure implausible assertions to the unwitting dilettante. I had been that TA, but stations above these two. He is old now. He can no longer corner the taut-figured, engaging TA I had been. I, at least, married him before his big run. When his ideas were fresh. My discernment abilities were growing.
I didn’t know who he’d set aside for this night’s date but Cordelia and Eddie had prompted me to toss it across the mud room portal, “Let me know how you succeed." Had he not heard me? "I am committed to your happiness.”
“Wonderful. Wonderful,” he said.
