Lavender （2016）
Quite frequently before the SCOTUS ruling, when the subject of marriage equality came up, often in heated arguments, I’d routinely dismissed all arguments by saying I didn’t care because just as not being able to marry hadn’t kept Jackson and I apart, getting married wouldn’t keep us together.
Now I feel myself choking on the very truth of those words.
Getting divorced is hard. Aside from the emotional cost, there is the financial cost. Under the terms of our divorce agreement, Jackson gets half of everything.
We’re selling our house, and he’ll get half of that as well.
I could easily have bought him out, but I can’t bear the thought of living across the street from him and Kitt.
My lawyer thinks I am being overly and unnecessarily generous.
After all, he points out, I make more money than Jackson and have for a long time.
I was the one who built then sold a successful business, the one who achieved.
But even after everything that has happened, I can’t bear the thought of Jackson in need, of him living in poverty. I just can’t.
And while it’s true I make more money than he does, that hasn’t always been the case.
When I was in college, Jackson often worked two jobs so I could be free to study.
Even after I graduated and got a job and he got his plumber’s license, he outearned me for years.
And he took care of me. No matter how late I came home from work, he was there to ask how my day was and there was a warm meal on the table.
If I had an important meeting, he made sure I had a pressed shirt to wear and matching socks.
If I’d succeeded, if I’d soared, it was because of Jackson.
He was the source of my power; he was the wind beneath my wings.
Even now, outsiders looking at us may assume I am the hero in our story; no one ever seems to realize that he is my hero.
And his is the only love I’ve ever known.
“Downstairs,” I said before Claude could respond.
“I see,” the ma?tre d’ said dismissively, branding us cowards despite Claude’s outfit that was anything but cowardly, and directed us to the escalator behind him on his right.
As we stepped onto the escalator, Claude looked at me in surprise. “Are you afraid of heights?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m afraid of dying in an elevator traveling at the speed of light to an unnecessary height in pursuit of a forty-dollar cheeseburger.”
She laughed.
The escalator delivered us to the second-floor iteration of the fabled fiftieth-floor dining room; this dining room was populated with the more timid and less pretentious, who recognized the ability to pay top dollar for food made from the finest and freshest ingredients and prepared by chefs trained in France and Italy, and served by stunning out-of-work actors and models, ought not to carry with it the threat of death by fire, mechanical failure, terrorism, or sheer fear.
I was surprised when Claude called and asked me to a late brunch—just us, she made a point of telling me. Now, I watched her carefully as she untucked her hands from her fur muff and laid it on the banquette beside her. Then she removed her matching hat and laid it on top of the muff.
“What would you like to drink?” our waiter asked.
“I’ll have a French 75,” Claude said.
“Very good, ma’am. And you, sir?”
“I’ll have a negroni, please.”
“What kind of gin?”
“Monkey 47.”
Yes, sir.”
The waiter placed our drinks on the table and took our brunch order. When he left, Claude reached for my hand. I guess our small talk and general pleasantries were about to end.
“We need to talk,” she said. “Or rather I need to talk, and you need to listen. I just need to explain a decision Octavio and I have made and our reasoning. After, we can discuss. OK?”
I nodded and took a sip of my drink, nervous.
“Octavio and I have decided to remain in Jackson’s life.
I’m upset with him for hurting you. It was wrong and you deserve better.
And I’ve told him that. If Mary Jane had a husband and she did to him what Jackson did to you, we would be so disappointed and angry, but we would not disown her.
We consider you and Jackson as much a part of our family as Mary Jane.
Nothing could make us stop loving any of you.
You see, when Mary Jane promised to be your family, we became your family too.
And without you, if Jackson didn’t have us, who would he have?
” Claude stopped talking abruptly. “Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share? ” she asked.
“No. No. I mean, thank you for standing by Jackson—I hate the thought of him losing anyone else—and for telling me.”
She reached for my hands again. She noticed the watch on my right hand, then glanced at the one on my left hand. “That’s a beautiful watch,” she said, gesturing to my right hand. “Do you always wear two?”
I shrugged. “It was the last watch I bought for Jackson. It was to be his Christmas present. He left before Christmas.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I know. I could have returned it, but somehow that felt like I was throwing him away…”
“You miss him, I take it?”
“How can I not? He’s the love of my life.”
“I know. You make it sound like it’s over.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure it is, Oren. You must understand, love is like matter in that it cannot be created or destroyed.
It can only be transferred or converted from one form to another.
And I know about matter. Before I was an interior designer, I was a high school physics teacher.
That’s why love so often turns to anger or hatred but doesn’t just disappear.
People talk about falling in love, and that usually means finding companionship with someone based on attraction and friendship, and yes, lust. But true love—love in its purest and rarest form—is preordained, and for those fortunate enough to experience it, falling in love for them is simply a recognition of something…
an inheriting of one’s destiny. Octavio and I are lucky enough to have that kind of love.
Mary Jane isn’t—though I don’t think she misses it or even would want it.
You and Jackson, though—you have that love Octavio and I have.
It was obvious to me from the first time you and Jackson came to dinner. ”
Outside, as we waited for her Uber to arrive, she said, “I believe in your and Jackson’s love, and I have no doubt you will find your way back to each other.”
I smiled with what I thought was benign agreement, but she must have seen hopelessness instead, for she slipped her right hand from her muff and caressed my cheek. “My dear,” she murmured, “you must believe, as I do.”
Her Uber glided to the curb; I opened the door, and she slid inside with infinite grace. Yass, Queen, I thought. She slipped her hand into her muff to join its mate as I closed the door.
Watching me, she mouthed I love you through the closed window as the car pulled away.
Despite my apparent hopelessness, Jackson is still my first thought in the morning, and my last thought at night.
Tuesday, March 31, 2016, Janus—Leaving the lawyer’s office this morning, Jackson and I ended up alone on the same elevator, which ran express to the lobby. During the elevator’s descent, I asked, “Jackson, what happened?” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him that question.
“I love you,” Jackson said, “but now I have to love someone else.”
“It can’t be that simple—”
“It is that simple. See, you—you—overcomplicate everything. You need a back story and a front story and rationality. You need to make sense of things.”
“I do.”
“Things don’t always make sense.”
“Well, you’re right there. I mean, you left me for a woman. Kitt of all women, for God’s sake—”
“I didn’t leave you for Kitt! Look, Oren, love isn’t rational, and there isn’t just one kind of love. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s like the tide. It ebbs and flows. Sometimes it moves in unexpected directions.”
“I don’t understand any of this.”
“Look, maybe I just want a new adventure. Maybe I want to write a new story—one for which I don’t know the ending. Our story was written the day I asked you to stop pining over Rio and give me a chance to love you.”
The elevator door opened, and he rushed out without saying goodbye, stopping only when he reached a corner of the lobby. I watched him bend over a planter; he appeared to be experiencing dry heaves.
Monday, April 20, 2016, Janus—This morning, blowing on my cup of microwaved freeze-dried coffee—try as I might, I cannot master Jackson’s instructions—I stared out the window at Jackson cutting the grass across the wide street and expanses of lawn separating our—my—house from his and Kitt’s.
I miss Jackson most in the morning, not just for his perfect coffee and our chocolate croissants. I miss waking up to feel him moving gently, insistently inside me while holding me so closely it felt like he was trying to get under my skin. I miss him.
Kitt emerged from the house, her blooming belly before her.
They seemed to address each other in a tense exchange.
I wanted to enjoy their apparent acrimony.
I would have wished them both dead except that would leave their child an orphan, unloved.
And having been unloved and without a family of my own, I did not have it in me to wish a similar fate on another unknown to me and born without malice or knowledge of me and what Blue Moon had meant to me.
Eventually, Kitt went back in the house and Jackson continued cutting the grass, his back resolutely turned on our house and its overgrown lawn and unruly hedges.
I made a mental note to look for a lawn service.
When I returned home tonight, the grass had been cut and the hedges trimmed. The lawn mower had been cleaned, and the gas can beside it filled. There was no other indication that Jackson had been here.