Jake

 

I walk into the room and she is stooped over the table, crying. She is shaking, really. Quietly bobbing, the deep stuff of agony. My standing there in silence for too long means foregoing the right to ask what is wrong. So, I go over to the window to look at a pigeon on the eaves. It is very sunny. It makes shadows against the slate of the buildings, iridescent and cruel when compared to our apartment. The apartment is dim and hasn’t been cleaned lately. Dishes are piled in the sink and the smell of peanut butter and crayons and coffee grounds, and maybe candy bars, fill the space. I open the window a crack and hear the breath of city life outside. It comes in and tampers with the illusion that we are alone and isolated here, all by ourselves. I turn around then, my brows knitted, because I know what is wrong. The laptop is up on the counter and her sloppy wet tears are dripping on their keys. I came home early because of a text: I saw your history on the laptop. I know.

            “Jessica,” I whisper, and her hand goes up behind her and her head starts to shake.

            In our church, in our block, in our life, I am known as the nice guy. My smile is conditioned into my very genes. It is the mantra I was given, the code, the law. Niceness and happiness, or its appearance, gets you out of all the trouble of having to actually be a self, to stand up and say things you want and believe and do. This way, in my niceness, I remain a shadow, and sure, I get thinned out, but at least no one is ever mad at me. They don’t care to hang out much, but that’s better than breaking hearts, right? Than getting “involved.”

            A car honks and Jessica finally turns to face me, and suddenly I realize the strategy is exhausted, my life becomes nothing, and she asks the shadow to give an account for its hidden substance. If there is a convenient way to escape the scrutiny of a deeply wounded wife, the nice guy could not find it.

            “How long have you been addicted?”

            I don’t recall. It must be fifteen years now. I say so, and she leans her head back and her lip starts to tremble, and I want to hold her in my arms and repeat my apologies until I’m blue in the face. As if that’s what she wants. An apology. She wants the browser history erased. No, not erased, to have never been in the first place. She wants the man she thought she had lived with for thirteen of those fifteen years. Her husband. That’s who she wanted. Words are nothing.

            “Why didn’t you tell me?” she says, softly again, more tears coursing down her face.

            I blush and look at the ground, my heart speeding up and all my emotions devolving into a blank space where no explanations live.

            “Thought you’d be mad,” I say.  

            “Yes.” She threw her arms up and let out a wheezing gasp-like sob, a sound I don’t believe I have ever heard her make. “But then I would have trusted you. If you had come to me, I might have been able to help you. Don’t you love me?” Just like that, and the edifice falls. Fragility on her part? Or poor foundation planning on mine?

            “Yes.” Now I come forward, but she still shakes her head. “Brandy, this has nothing to do with my love for you.”

            “Jake.”

            The name, for the first time in years, sounds and doesn’t sound like mine at the same time. And I say nothing more, struck dumb in my tracks. It doesn’t sound like my name because the nice and compliant and religious seminary guy once associated with it has no reality. It does sound like my name because now it’s being spoken towards a self I can’t escape. She was calling for me. And there is a kind of liberation in that, you know. A sort of quiet and welcome death.

            “Jake.”

            I’m on my knees now. I do feel like I have died. Fists crumpled and defenses gone, at the mercy of the sword.

            “Jake.”