Chapter 32
An acquaintance of Jay’s was hosting an art pop-up downtown. Inside the gallery, people drifted about in loose clothing—exuberant nods, floppy hand gestures, tinny laughter—their demeanor airless in a way that felt the opposite of the crowd at Nia’s showcase.
Jay touched the small of my back. “Do you want champagne?”
“I’m okay.”
“I’m gonna grab some. I’ll be back.”
I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, so I browsed the art. In one piece, a woman was stabbing her doppelg?nger. I bent down to see the title. Violence Against Women. I laughed. A man standing nearby looked disappointed in me.
“What do you think?”
I looked around. A different man had materialized behind me. Why were men like tampons, inserting themselves into everything?
“I’m sorry?”
He laughed like I’d said something riotously funny. “About the artwork. What do you think?”
“Oh, it’s cool.”
“I like this one.” He pointed to a three-panel piece beside it. In the first panel, a woman is standing on a train platform, waving. In the second, a man looks out of the train window at the waving woman. In the last, a different woman is being hit by the train.
What?
“It’s a triptych,” he said.
“I don’t get it.”
He laughed again. “You’re fine. Art doesn’t have to be for everyone.”
The urge to escape this guy hit me over the head like a giant cartoon hammer.
I scanned the room for Jay, spotting him in the corner talking to an attractive woman, her hair framing her chubby face in auburn ringlets.
I knew they were sleeping together by her body language, the territorial intensity in her eyes.
I cleared my throat. “Well, it was nice meeting you.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sabrina.”
“Pretty. Are you from LA, Sabrina?” I hated how he hissed my false name.
“No. DC.”
His face hardened. “How do you feel about the election?” He said this like the election had only happened to people in DC.
“It could’ve gone better.”
I was relieved when Jay caught my eyes. But my relief wavered. He was upset. I went toward him. He shoved himself through the door. The girl went after him, her heels clapping against the sidewalk as I lagged behind. She gave up when he didn’t turn around, slumping back to the gallery.
I said, “That was rude,” when I caught up to him at the crosswalk.
“What?”
“You just left that girl.”
He laughed. “Why do you care?”
“What?”
“I mean, I just don’t see why that’s your business.”
I paused, deliberating my response. “I mean, I just don’t see why you’re being an ass.”
He shook his head. “No, you know who’s an ass? Estéban.”
“Who the hell is Estéban?!”
“The guy you were flirting with.”
The light changed green. Jay marched across the street, turning sharply at the corner, arms and legs bouncing as he descended the steep slope toward the car.
Wildfire smoke blackened the sky as we left downtown.
Squat houses, palm trees blurred past. He turned the radio up so we couldn’t speak.
NPR was saying it was the worst flu season in fifteen years.
Suddenly I felt like I was coming down with something.
I pressed my face against the cold glass to feel anything other than what I felt.
In bed, I pulled the covers over my head while Jay made a lot of noise in the kitchen: faucet running at full force, silverware jerking in drawers.
Later, the mattress shook with him climbing in beside me. He opened the political thriller I’d bought him. Each time the page turned, it sounded like a crisp wind.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I just don’t understand what that was about.”
He let his book fall into his lap. “Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who cares in this relationship.”
“What? Why?”
“You didn’t even care that I was talking to that girl.”
It took me a moment to grab hold of the threads unraveling in my mind. “Were you trying to hurt me?”
“No, I just… I don’t know. No. I wasn’t.”
“Just because I don’t express jealousy the way other people do doesn’t mean I don’t care. Do you want me to go through your phone?”
He laughed humorlessly. “That’s not fair.”
“Then what?”
He stared at the cover of his book without seeming to see it. “You know I only agreed to this because I love you.”
An invisible hand shoved me against the headboard. “Where is this coming from?”
“I don’t know. Some of the guys…”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“That, that, boys club bullshit! I don’t know.”
He turned his body toward me. “You know how much crap I’ve gotten?”
“You think more than me?”
“I don’t want this as bad as you do, though,” he cried.
His phone rang, the sound expanding to swallow the whole silent room. I could tell by the way he looked at it that it was the girl from the gallery. He didn’t answer.
“When Tristan asked us how things were going at the bar, you didn’t even let me speak. You were just like ‘great!!’ You didn’t even wait to see what I said.”
I strained to remember this. “I’m sorry. I do care.”
“It’s fine, whatever.”
“I can’t—there’s no other way for me to be.”
He stared at his empty wall. Unhung art prints in cheap frames were piled against the closet door. His eyes flashed over me with a foreign irritation. “Is that true? Or is that just something you say to get what you want?”
There was nothing worse he could have said to me at that moment. It would’ve been better had he just said he hated me or another mushy, unspecific insult. He must’ve known this because, when it was clear I was done speaking, he shut off the lamp and turned on his side.
He drove me to the airport early in the morning.
It was two days after Christmas, the roads filling up again, highway humming through the window.
His silence was jarring against the pink-orange sky.
The city opened up while something in him was closing.
I cried while he placed his hand on my thigh, a comforting weight.
He retrieved my bag from the trunk and lowered it onto the sidewalk in front of Departures. Behind us, cars stalled. When we turned to face each other, he brushed away my tears with his thumbs, then said, “I wanted to know if you’d be monogamous with me. Again.”
I was so startled I thought I’d misheard him. But then the request seemed inevitable, the way death is inevitable.
“Why are you asking this now?”
“I feel like with the distance and everything, it’s like we’re not even together.”
“But we are together.”
“I know, but having other people in our relationship is confusing. It’s weird that I see ____ more than I see you.”
The woman’s name went over my head. I wasn’t going to ask him to repeat it.
“I don’t know what to say.”
He laughed. “You could say yes.”
This was the moment I needed language. Not for myself but for this person I loved so fiercely.
Artemisia Gentileschi’s fingers being crushed in the machine at trial.
The slave woman setting her master on fire.
Images arrived, words did not. All I understood was that I was a woman being asked by a man to belong to him in a way I felt I shouldn’t have to belong to anyone.
I was almost angry. Women before me did not wrest this strip of freedom for me to tie my wrists with it, to play prisoner, play girlfriend, play doll with some man centuries later.
It was too big, what he wanted from me, familiar, like men had been asking me this since before I was born, like I was a patch of dirt they could drive something through to stake their claim.
But Jay wasn’t some man. I’d learned to love with him. He was my voice of reason, my instructor in hope. This was not a love I was willing to let go without clawing to keep, even if I was being clawed from the inside out to keep it.
“Can I think about it?”
He told me, gently, to take my time. As if time could help me become what I couldn’t. “I just… I love you. But I don’t think I can be open with you anymore.”
I tried to speak but couldn’t.
“Maybe we should take a break while you figure out what you want,” he added, thumbs still pressed to my cheeks.
I nodded, gutted. I already knew what I wanted: to be with him, to be myself.
When I got to my gate, he texted me. Have a safe flight. This hurt more than if he’d said nothing. A reminder that seven years couldn’t be easily undone, that the undoing would be slow, painful, like a Band-Aid catching on your skin, again, again, in the wasted attempts to rip it off.