Check, Please

This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.
- Billy Collins

Yet Another Big City. Yet another hotel. As I cross the lobby, a woman rushes me, “Are you with the band?” “No,” is the easiest answer to this question.

In the room, with others. I bend my head to a menial task that won’t do itself. I make conversation with Cute Girl. I ask what she’s been up to, whether the guy she’d gone out with a couple of times had turned into a date. It takes her a minute to remember, “Oh,” she says, “I’d forgotten about him. I started dating Lover.”

Here is what I am prepared for: First Aid, Choking, Lost Children, Wardrobe Malfunctions, Dietary Needs, Late Planes, Missed Rides, Malfunctioning Electronic Equipment, Rabid Fans, Surly Security, Anxious Clients.

This does not fall into any of those categories.

I am hot and then I am cold and my hands are shaking enough to trouble the task. The Mandy Brain takes over, the Writer Mandy not the Whore Mandy, and like my ideal mother figure takes my hand, turn away, that’s nasty, don’t look, come over here and we’ll sing a song together, play a game, and that’s the part that’s sane enough to catalog reaction, note the increased pulse, the urge to vomit, the mindless chatter.

“When did that happen?” I ask in my lightest, cheeriest, teasing girls-together voice. Apparently, it’s recent. I know that already, last week Lover rang me as I boarded a plane and asked me to text him when I landed instead of calling because he would be on a date with Cute Girl. Given that he had left my bed not three hours previously, I told him I didn’t necessarily need all those details at this time. I called anyway, pretending the conversation had never happened, figuring that if he’d grown any class during my flight, his ringer would be off. Cute Girl sketches the bits I’ve missed, catching me up like those Soap Digest summaries, dinner three nights in a row, long walks, developments to come. In my heart, I already knew about the second night when he didn’t tell me he was alone or specify whom he was with when we spoke later that same night. Sometimes I wish I was a lot fucking dumber.

The other people in the room and I express how pleased we are for her, for him. Cute Girl says, “He’s so romantic,” and ducks her head from my gaze, that glance saying everything I say here by not writing about Husband, it’s too precious, it’s mine, it would diminish it to share it with you.

Mandy Brain slaps me, soothes me, bites my tongue, trots out the metaphor parade, starts analyzing the sentence structure and corralling this moment into this post. Mandy Brain says, do not be afraid to be alone, there are others, there is enough, there is Husband to love you, there are boys to flirt with and fuck with and just because you have spent four years with the second-most-important bond of your life does not mean that there should be even one minute more. Mandy Brain rummages through the files and chooses the poem to quote, the past incidents to mention, the parallels to draw. But underneath the poem and the past and the parallels, my blood is one long icy scream and my hands are still shaking and even when the others have gone and only Power Girl is left to hide my feelings from, I am cold enough even under blankets to turn on the heat.

It doesn’t matter that Lover and I walked through the seaside town and talked rationally about him dating, that I of course cannot be full time, that as long as he lets me know if there’s someone serious before it gets too far, so I can bow out, or better yet when he realizes he’s ready to look for someone serious, let me know then, that sometime, in the future, he would of course be dating more than casually. It doesn’t matter that I said, yeah, you should take out Cute Girl, she’s really smart and quality. What matters is the duck of her head when she breaks my gaze, the look on her face when she talks about him. We’re girls. I cannot see her like him like that and have this particular secret from her, not when I know her, not when I like her. I’m a girl. It doesn’t turn me on to hear how he walked on the beach with her, too, the way it turns him on to hear the story of how I got fucked, carried home the details in my mouth, tidbits given back up for his masturbation.

I can’t be too. Or also. I am neither like nor as.

I have changed Lover’s name in my phone to DO NOT ANSWER. I am not going to Foreign City for a week in winter with him. I am not meeting him halfway in Midwestern Town for a day out of time. The dealer has clapped his hands, the faux-leather folder is on the table, the runners have broken the tape, we are all processing from the church in a shower of environmentally-sound birdseed, sticky with sweat from our grasping hands.