Chapter 10 Damon
Damon
‘Everything alright?’ asks Adrienne from the seat next to me.
‘Sure, why?’
‘You look a little out of it.’
‘That’s my default setting,’ I try to joke. ‘Perpetually bewildered.’
‘That’s handy, because that’s precisely the quality we are looking for in the father of our baby.’ Melissa smiles. ‘A perpetually bewildered man.’
‘Is there any other type?’ Adrienne asks.
I pretend to be amused, but I’m not feeling it.
Or much of anything else, beyond preoccupied.
Powerfully preoccupied. But I’m trying hard to disguise it.
Be the person I was before I drowned. I repeat those words to myself.
Before I drowned. It almost sounds as normal to me now as saying before I turned on the TV or before I ate lunch.
The walls of the waiting room in the fertility clinic are decorated with posters of couples and single people smiling and cradling babies or holding their toddlers’ hands.
I’m seeing nothing mirroring our situation: me, my ex-wife and her girlfriend, who I’m trying to get pregnant.
We are a reality show waiting to happen.
I absent-mindedly move to twirl the silver wedding band on my ring finger, forgetting it’s in my bedside table.
It’s been three years since I last wore it, the day the decree absolute was granted in Melissa’s and my divorce hearing.
Right up until that morning, I’d clung to the hope she might yet change her mind, might wake up to the realisation that she’d made a huge mistake and still wanted to be my wife.
She didn’t. Still hasn’t. She won’t.
I first sensed something was troubling her months before she finally sat me down in our (now merely my) flat.
The first red flag I chose to ignore was our dwindling sex life.
We hadn’t even reached our second anniversary when it virtually dropped off the radar.
She’d blamed her lack of libido on the final stretch of her paramedic training, a course I’d tried to discourage her from pursuing.
She claimed the stress of revision and on-the-job training left her exhausted.
I’d tell myself it was fine, that all couples went through this, that it’d pick up.
And then I’d have a sneaky stealth wank in the bathroom so she wouldn’t feel I was putting any pressure on her.
And on the rare occasions we were intimate, she’d become more aroused using the sex toys I’d bought us to spice things up than by my presence in the bedroom.
It didn’t matter that we no longer kissed or held hands as often.
Romance was for teenagers. We were perfectly fine.
Later, when I lost the charger for my tablet and used her laptop, red flag number two appeared: I discovered what she’d really been looking at on the nights she said she was studying in the spare room. She’d regularly been visiting gay porn sites and chat rooms.
‘You’ve always known I’m bicurious,’ she told me by way of an explanation. ‘I’ve never hidden it from you. Looking doesn’t mean I plan to do anything about it.’
Up until then, I hadn’t felt threatened by what I took to be her passing interest in the same sex, nor had it turned me on thinking of her with another woman like it might some men.
She’d always felt comfortable mentioning if she found someone attractive.
I’d tease her about her girl crushes on Blake Lively and Margot Robbie, and I joked I’d consider going gay for Timothée Chalamet or Harry Styles.
She told me I’d be punching above my weight.
It was all in fun. No, I told myself, her fantasies are nothing to worry about.
I was lucky to have an open-minded wife.
And I convinced myself with little trouble that her curiosity was a phase – and phases, by and large, passed.
The ‘we need to talk’ conversation came weeks later. No conversation beginning with those words is ever going to end positively for one of the two people involved. And it finished with her tearfully admitting she wanted ‘to explore her sexuality further’.
‘Explore what, exactly? Sleeping with other women?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, soon followed by an admission: ‘Yes.’
‘Is this because of what happened with the—’
‘No,’ she replied, quickly shutting down that line of questioning.
We fell silent for a moment.
‘And what about us?’ I said eventually. ‘What am I supposed to do while you’re “exploring”? Or is this your way of saying you no longer want me?’
‘No, no, not at all.’ She’d taken my hand in hers. ‘I want to, I guess, press pause on us. Who we were when we met at thirteen isn’t who we are at twenty-four.’
‘I’ll change,’ I said, failing to conceal my desperation. ‘I’ll do better. I’ll find a better job, I’ll explore your sexuality with you, I’ll do whatever you need me to do.’
‘You need to let me do this by myself,’ she said gently. ‘With the best will in the world, I can’t do it with you.’
Melissa moved back in with her parents that weekend and we would never spend another night together under our roof, until the days following my drowning.
Having her there, close by, felt terrific, even if she was wrapped in a duvet and sleeping on the sofa in the next room.
I even allowed myself to fantasise this might be a turning point in our relationship.
That almost losing me might make her fall in love with me all over again.
But life doesn’t offer happy endings like so many of the movies we watch.
Besides, she now has Adrienne. And while it kills me to admit it, I’ve never seen her more in love.