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[Today distorte posted his rejected piece for Coming & Crying. I thought I'd post the piece I couldn't finish for Coming & Crying.]
Marriage is first about your husband, and then, a very close second, about your mother. When I started my sleeping with a man who was not my husband, I was thinking very little about the man I married and very much about my mother.
I was thinking about the kind of woman she raised me to be. I was thinking of all the stories she’d told me about being asked to prom by a senior in her freshman year, about dating married men, about driving to Florida with three of her prettiest girlfriends and spending the entire time with all the handsomest, most-tanned, white-smiled, chiseled-chested Floridians they could find. I was thinking of her having an abortion at 18. I was thinking of her showing up at the wedding of the man she wanted to marry in a white dress. I thought of her as that woman. The woman I’d always been for her. I was thinking of her regrets, her nights silent on the couch with her cats, dancing in our kitchen with more hips than I’ve seen on strippers. I was thinking of the week when she stopped talking to all of us because we teased her one night about her teeth. I was thinking about her lying in bed for days on end, dreaming, no doubt of being somewhere, someone else. I thought of her as that woman; the woman I was terrified of being.
I started seeing my husband through the regret of my mother’s heart. I stood in our doorway looking at our bed, saw my mother alone, my father out on the living room couch. I heard my husband talking and remembered the things my mother would say about my father: he lives far away, he has an apartment downtown, we’re getting a divorce-none of which were true. I saw my mother unable to touch my father, but lying her hands and too sweet smiles on men at her work who still had all their hair. I looked at my husband’s head and scrutinized his receding hairline, squinted, tried to picture him 20 years in the future. I looked at my mother and saw her empty arms, her untouched lips, her soft curves left wanting, her passion stagnate and dull, her sex wholly engulfed in loneliness and I panicked.
And then there he was. A man with nothing to offer me but sex. A man with whom I had nothing in common with but sex. A man who wanted nothing from me but sex, and maybe some lies. A man who lived out of town, whom I could only see once every three or four months; a man so far it may have been on the other side of the world. He was everything I didn’t need or want and he was perfect.
“Let’s meet halfway.”
“Between your city and mine. In a hotel room.”
“A cheap one. With a tiny bed.”
“With a bed so small, we have to be inside each other at all times.”
“Just to keep from falling off.”
By this time I had stopped touching my husband. I couldn’t look at him without seeing my mother: alone and unwanted. I looked in the mirror at myself and concentrated on the length of my neck, the shape of my breasts, the slope of my hips; I would keep this sex wrapped around me so I’d never have to be alone.
And we fucked. Not right away because neither of us remembered something so important to two people who are only with each other to fuck as condoms, but we did eventually. And it was passionate because we pretended to be in love, and it was frantic because we weren’t even close and we were both horrible liars. But our bodies responded so well to the wounds we inflicted to one another’s moral integrity. We became insatiable sex things; he was the kind of man that, whenever I thought about him, I felt my knees go weak. I’d think of him and my heart would move down between my thighs and I would have to bite my lip to keep from opening them. Imagining him, I’d unintentionally lean back and would want him leaning in on me. We’d be out and about in that in-between city and I’d look at him and all I could think about was being in between his legs, his cock in my mouth, his hands in my hair. Afterward, I would remember him, and my hips involuntarily would start to move, pushing up into the ghost of him.
[The last time we have sex. How afterward, the sunlight comes in the front window and reflects some sort of yellowy orange off the hardwood floor. The significance I give to this light.]
Before I tell my husband I’m leaving him, I say, “Be right back,” and walk outside with my camera. I balance my camera on the porch railing of our house, set the timer, and walk out in front of the lens. I stand in the middle of the street and wait to hear the click. I come back inside and say to the man I married, the man I love more than anyone else, the man who terrifies me and challenges all the expectations I’ve felt put on me by my mother who was once beautiful, who is now surrounded and alone, I say to him, “We have to talk.” Almost as if he has no idea what I’m about to do, even though he’s known for months. I look at the light reflecting off the hardwood. I see him cry for the first time. He looks like he’s laughing.
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