My Husband Chose Her on My Thirtieth Birthday

Chapter 1

Ten minutes before the guests arrived, I locked myself in the bathroom, pressed a cold spoon to my eyelids to take down the redness, and did my face over again — layer after layer, covering what foundation couldn't. On the other side of the wall Mark was laughing into the phone.

The doorbell chimed. I blotted my eyes with a tissue, stretched my lips in the mirror, testing the smile the way you test whether a bandage is holding over a wound, and went out to the guests.

I met my thirtieth birthday at the stove, my back to the room. And when I finally carried out the cake — the one I'd baked myself since early that morning — Mark didn't even turn his head.

He was pouring wine for Ella. Her first, before me, before everyone.

He leaned so close his lips almost brushed her temple, hanging on her every word, while she laughed — bright, ringing, throwing her head back.

She was twenty-three. Exactly as old as I'd been when Mark still looked at me like that.

I set the cake in the center of the table — cream roses, thirty thin candles that no one ever lit — but at that very moment Ella tugged Mark by the sleeve.

— Mark, come on, show me again — I don't believe you can open wine like that, with one hand!

— She pulled him toward her, and instead of taking his hand away he covered hers with his palm and held it longer than he needed to, longer than was allowed, longer than was decent, while a sickening cold crawled slowly down my spine, as if someone were trickling ice water under my skin.

— You have golden hands, — she breathed.

— So I'm told, — Mark smirked, not looking at me.

— Ariana, don't tell me you cooked all this yourself, on your own birthday? — cut in Dana, my only friend at that table, and I barely managed a nod.

— I know, I know what a wife I got, — Mark let drop, still not tearing his eyes from another woman's dimples. — Irreplaceable. In the kitchen department.

Someone snorted a laugh, Ella hid her dimples behind her hand, and I — not recognizing my own voice — asked quietly, but in a way that made the whole table suddenly go still enough to hear a fork ring against someone's plate:

— And in the other departments, then — replaceable?

— Ariana, bring another bottle of that white, the cold one, it's in the door, — Mark ordered, at my own birthday, without looking at me, without granting my question an answer.

And I went, because in seven years I'd grown used to jumping at his first word. When I came back with the frosted bottle, Ella was whispering something in his ear, and the two of them were laughing — that shared laugh that exists only between people with a secret in common.

I set the bottle down as carefully as if it were a glass grenade. No one, not a single person at that table, raised their eyes to me.

— Ariana, do you really not drink anything, even on your birthday? — Ella turned to me with that young, serene cruelty that doesn't yet understand it's hurting someone. — Mark says you're so… proper. Domestic.

"Domestic" she said in exactly the tone others use for "boring," and glanced at my husband, seeking approval. And Mark approved — smirked with one corner of his mouth, and that brief smirk scalded me worse than if he'd slapped me across the face in front of everyone.

— I drink, — I said, and drained the glass in one gulp, feeling the sour wine scrape my parched throat.

But they'd already turned back to each other, forgetting me within a second, the way you forget a switched-off television in the corner of the room.

— So — to the birthday girl? — one of the guests offered, and everyone turned to Mark, waiting for beautiful words about the wife who turned thirty today.

Mark only stretched his lips wider in that dazzling smile he'd perfected over the years, the one meant for everyone but me, and raised his glass:

— To Ariana. To the hostess, without whom this table would simply be bare. In the most literal sense — she spent the whole day at the stove.

And not a word that today was my day. Not "thirty," not "beloved," not "happy birthday.

" Everyone laughed, good-naturedly, without malice, and it was that very lack of malice that made me want to howl aloud — because you can hold a slight against someone, but good nature you can hold against no one.

Under the table Dana gave my knee a quick, fierce squeeze, and that hurried gesture of her hand said more than all my husband's toasts: she knew. She knew everything. And, worst of all, she stayed silent — the way everyone else at that table was surely staying silent too.

She wasn't the first. And, I knew, not the last. In seven years I'd learned to recognize them all — by the way Mark came alive beside them, as if I'd been holding him underwater all those years and each new one gave him a gulp of air.

The guests left past midnight. While I scrubbed the sticky traces of my own birthday off the plates, Mark stood in the kitchen doorway, lazily picking his teeth with a toothpick, and looked me over as if I were the one who'd spent the whole evening doing something shameful.

— You walked around all evening with a funeral face, — he tossed out, and there was so much sated superiority in his voice that my hands clenched on the wet plate of their own accord.

— Today was my birthday, Mark. Thirty years old, — I said quietly, almost without hope. — You didn't even wish me a happy birthday.

— And what now — should I pin a medal on you? — He didn't even turn around. — All wives get older. It's just that no one else buries herself alive in front of everyone while she's at it.

— You held her hand. In front of me. In front of Dana. In front of everyone. — My voice trembled on the last word, thin, traitorous, and I hated myself for that tremor.

— I was showing her the corkscrew, — he said with such lazy, sated certainty that my throat went dry all at once. — It's called hospitality, Ariana. You might learn some, instead of standing guard all evening like a warden, counting who I touched.

— And what if I "showed the corkscrew" to your friend like that? Took him by the hand. In front of you.

He laughed — short, condescending, as if I'd said something unbearably sweet and stupid, looked me over slowly, head to foot, the way you appraise an old thing long overdue for the trash, and dropped a single word:

— You? Don't make me laugh.

— I'm your wife, Mark, — I said, and my voice came out pitiful, like a beggar woman's, pleading for what had once been hers by right anyway.

— Exactly — wife, — he pronounced the word with such disgust, as if spitting out a bit of bone stuck in his teeth. — Not a prosecutor. And be grateful I still come home at all.

— Home? — I finally turned around, water streaming from my palms onto the floor, but I no longer cared. — You call this home? You live here like a guest in a hotel where you don't even have to pay for the linens.

Something like surprise flickered in his eyes — as if a piece of furniture had suddenly spoken. Then he crossed the kitchen in two strides and grabbed me by the chin, squeezing until my teeth cut into the inside of my cheeks.

— Say that again, — he said quietly. — Go on, say again what you just yapped.

— Mark, you're hurting me…

— Hurting? — He shoved me, and my back slammed into the edge of the sink, and his open hand swept across my cheek — short, matter-of-fact, as if he'd done it a thousand times.

Maybe he had. I slid down the kitchen cabinet to the floor, pressing my hand to my burning face, and the tears came on their own — ugly, hot, mixed with running mascara.

— And don't you dare open your mouth again, — he tossed down from above, calmly straightening his cuff. — Birthday girl.

He went to bed, and I stayed sitting on the cold floor of my own kitchen, on my thirtieth birthday, smearing mascara and blood from a bitten lip across my face, and cried — soundlessly, into my fist, so he wouldn't hear and come back.

I didn't pack a bag. I didn't call anyone. In the morning I scrubbed out the blouse, powdered my cheek, and made him breakfast — and in that lay my most terrible crime against myself. I stayed. The way I always stayed.

On Friday he had a work party, and all week Mark kept letting drop, as if in passing: it'll be dull, it's purely for work, you know you don't like gatherings like that. Before, I would have obediently stayed home.

— I'm coming with you, — I said.

He froze in front of the mirror, tie half-knotted, and looked at my reflection the way you look at an unexpected obstacle on a road you've long since memorized.

— What do you need that for?

— Don't wives go to work parties with their husbands? — The words sounded so foreign in our bedroom, as if I'd spoken them in a long-dead language.

— Suit yourself, — he pulled the knot tight. — Just don't embarrass me with that face of yours.

I put on the black dress he'd once loved, did my makeup longer than usual, and clung the whole way to a pitiful hope that stuck like a burr: maybe today, maybe today of all days, he would see me again.

But we didn't end up going together — someone called him, he gave a curt nod into the phone and sent me on alone, promising to come later, and I found myself in that entirely booked-out restaurant before anyone was even expecting me.

Golden light, lazy music, polite strangers' faces, waiters gliding silently with their trays. I took a glass just to occupy my hands, to give them something to do besides tremble, and texted him: "I'm here already." He didn't answer.

I wrote again, then again — short, ever more pitiful messages that hung in the void without a single read receipt, and with each unread word a cold, slimy knot of foreboding pulled tighter inside me.

Right by the entrance someone from his department intercepted me — a man with moist eyes and a too-firm, clammy handshake.