Nobody ever tells you that prince charming may cheat on you. How would that work out in a Disney movie? In the epilogue of a happily ever after you would have the Prince getting frisky in an attic of the castle with a maid or even one of the ugly sisters. Cinderella getting hysteric and throwing out the Prince’s clothes and her glass slippers from the highest tower of the castle. What would that teach young girls and boys? That maybe getting a prince is not all there is to life and you may want to work on some other hobby (like your career). Or that being charming is not the same as being good, and it may not be enough. A cheating prince does not gallop in on a white horse to save a damsel in distress, he has a dark horse and usually ominous music is playing in the background as if saying: beware this is the bad guy!
That’s why when it happens to you, you don’t know what to do. The ominous music didn’t play in real life, the horse is a battered metallic blue Twingo that looks exactly the same the day before as the day after and no casual spectator of your life is none the wiser. But you are definitely different on the inside. Guilt chews at you, as you try to salvage your marriage.
It has been a year now, day to day. A year since that catastrophic corporate Christmas dinner. The fight we had just before I left, our moods in stark contrast with my silly rain-dear socks and the elf headband you were wearing. We both stomped out leaving a rather flustered babysitter to put Emily to bed. Most of the evening is in a blur, I drank too much mulled wine and I can’t even recollect what was on the menu, let alone if I even ate anything. It was one of the first times that you didn’t come to one of Lexu’s social events and everyone was asking about you.‘ Where is your beautiful wife, Gordon?’ over and over again.
The first person that asked me something else, was her. The new bright star in marketing, young but not too much, confident and detached. Two things you always struggled with. I remember she came up to me at the bar, swivelled a stool in my direction and asked me how I had managed to become a director and keep a full head of hair.
Vanity, you must be thinking, is what got me. It’s not even that. That question was like a release. Air hissing out of a balloon. All the bottled up anxiety and stress came tumbling out. For pity or probably for a lack of a better option she sat next to me cradling a Martini and listening. She listened actively, something that in a couple is difficult to keep going. You start a relationship wanting to constantly talk and be with each other, asking questions and wanting to know everything. But after fifteen years of marriage, there comes a time when you can dry up. When it seems like a locked tune, the same pattern over and over again. It demands courage to actively engage, to not give up because it’s too complicated to explain or just because you cannot be bothered.
What hit me the next day, was first of all the smell of stale tobacco that follows you everywhere after a work dinner, as if you spent the evening in an ashtray instead of a restaurant. The second thing was that the woman’s nails were red as the lingerie that was hanging from the frame of a bed I did not recognize. That led to a second bout of nausea. My brain took a few seconds to get over the conundrum that it was winter and her nails were red. Being a very logical person I came to the obvious solution: the woman in the bed next to me wasn’t you. I had never given your little rite of passage of the seasons any thought before, except that I found it quirky. Red for spring, yellow for summer, orange for autumn and dark blue for winter. I have never had the interest to ask you why you do that, what it means for you. Now each season I watch you carefully apply the layers of varnish with a knot in my guts. A seasonal reminder of my sins.
A year has gone by. No one ever tells you how difficult it is to go back home, knowing you are the bad guy. Knowing that nothing makes sense anymore and that you are going have to live with yourself.
I saw an ad the other day, in that local magazine that comes through the post. ‘Who would you like to see again this December?’, the picture of an old lady smiling close to a kid with presents. It made me think of who I would like to see again.
I would like to be able to go back in time and see you again that day. I would like to find you at the supermarket where you stood staring at the shampoos for hours, tears running down your cheeks, and hug you, like I couldn’t at the time. I would like to tell you that you were right to have faith in me and that now we are happier than we have ever been. I would thank you for keeping a cool head, for not throwing my clothes and your glass slippers from the highest tower and for believing in me even when nobody else would have.
After that first terrible day when I saw an alternative lonely life unfurling before me, I knew I could not let that happen. I knew I had to fight to get you back, to get back on my white horse.
I remember you talking to your parents on Christmas day on the phone. No, we are not coming down to Cornwall this year, Emily has caught a stomach bug. Your voice sounding strained to the attentive ear, while you bounced a totally healthy baby on your hip. We did this together and now we are stronger than ever. I don’t know why you believed me, I certainly wouldn’t have, but you are still here, and I’m here more than ever.
Disclaimer: The prompts for ‘A story a month’ are from Neil Gaiman’s project A Calendar of Tales (in collaboration with BlackBerry), but the content is mine. 🙂
Photo by Luna Lovegood from Pexels
Crafty Poulette 