Hating men was easy. Convenient. Like a hobby. Something she could do by herself during lockdown in her apartment. Men gave her a real person to blame for life’s rotten spots. Her fury at her dead husband was a ripping wind that had stripped her supple nature down to iron spikes. Illinois Boy’s cheesecake betrayal was just a reminder of all that. His duplicity was the reason she had excluded men from her life in the first place. When he unexpectedly showed up in her Facebook feed, a guy she knew fifty years ago, the idea of reconnecting seemed romantic, like a fairytale. Now she couldn’t be sure. Day drinking embellished her stories.
Texting photos with him made her feel like she knew him. She thought she had insight into his state of mind, his life. She flattered herself. Then the sight of Mary Jane hiding in the corner of the cheesecake photo was a gut punch. A tsunami of antipathy swamped her and she was drowning in self-pity. She had allowed herself to become vulnerable. She had gone too far with daydreams of a situation that did not exist in real life. He was cheating on her, and they hadn’t even kissed yet. Fuck! That made her mad. So, she ghosted him.
A couple days passed without communication and he called. She didn’t respond. Then he called again the day after that. After a few days of calling he started texting again and when she didn’t reply to his texts, he called again. This was really starting to piss her off. First, he cheated on her. Now he was harassing her. And they hadn’t even met. This whole situation was backwards. She was smoldering. Words jammed up in her mouth with so many thoughts she couldn’t think what to say.
So, she took the call and blurted, “You, sir, are an asshole.” Knock-out. There was a long silence in which she imagined a dazed man picking himself up off the floor.
“Hello?” He wasn’t hitting back.
But she was in the mood for a fight. “You’re a fucking liar.”
“We haven’t talked in a couple weeks.” His voice was shrill by the end of that sentence.
“You shouldn’t be calling me.”
“I like you.” That sounded like a confession.
And yet it felt like a trap. “Oh, fuck you.” She couldn’t pivot that fast.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“She’s in the photo you sent.”
“What photo?”
She could see him in her mind’s eye holding his phone to his face and thumbing through old texts. When he took too long to get her point, she clarified, “The photo of your birthday cake.”
“The photo of my birthday cake?” He paused for a moment. “It’s cheesecake.”
She could hear the uncertainty in his voice.
“I saw her shoe.” This was her big reveal. She imagined him pinching the cheesecake photo larger, as she had, to see the details.
“That’s my best friend’s daughter.”
“Right.” The daughter trope: she had heard it all before. It wasn’t even interesting.
“They took me out to dinner for my birthday and we came back with cheesecake. She was cutting the cake.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
He exhaled with obvious exasperation. “Don’t over think it.”
The top of her head opened like the lid on a missile silo and released a mushroom cloud of feminist rage. Gaslighting was not new to her. She had been gaslighted before.
“Don’t over think it! Are you fucking kidding me? I already hate you, and I don’t even know you.”
There was another long silence.
“I’m not a player. I don’t play women. My friends took me out for my birthday. That’s all.”
Her victory was sagging. “I thought you were alone on your birthday.”
“I was. Then later I went out with friends. What’s the big deal?”
It was a boyish question. She didn’t have an answer for it, and the sweetness in his tone was disarming. Unfair. Her arrows were going limp. The urge to retaliate was alive in her muscles, but she had lost the target. So she hung up the phone.
It had been so long since she was this angry. And it was so easy to escalate egged on by the voices in her head. That vehemence had been sitting there inside her waiting for circumstances to tap into it. She wanted to break a window. Letting go of her preconceived ideas felt like falling. She was going down. Her tongue twisted alone in her mouth. Reanimated corpses squirmed inside her. The relationship zombies in her mental graveyard were feasting on the remains of her mirage.
She had gone too far. Moved too fast with too little information. Maybe he was gaslighting, but maybe he was completely innocent. She had assumed too much. She was unsure of herself. He said all the right things, but she couldn’t let go of the idea of betrayal. Her heart was wrapped in razor wire and she wasn’t letting anyone near it. Fantasies of connection had made her weak. Wishing was her mistake. Now she had to unwish him. Wine like Windex. Spray on, wipe off. She crawled into a bottle and tried to forget.
~ : ~
I am publishing “The Cohabitants” my memoir of a romance each Wednesday on my website and newsletter. Posts will be numbered so you can read them in order. Click on THE COHABITANTS tag to get the whole series.
Wonderful writing as always Billie. Entertaining, identifiable and a pleasure to see how you put words together. Looking forward to reading more. Would be even better if it was on Substack!
Thanks for the encouragement, Jane. I appreciate your feedback. I am posting this series on Substack, but I do not have many followers there because I don’t want to load my list of newsletter subscribers into Substack.
I had the pleasure of taking a class with you at Wordcrafters. I said it then, and I’ll say it now: nobody writes as you do.
I am in awe of the writing in your current email book. I love the way you put words together to show your deepest feelings with wit and sensitivity. As a new memoir and short-story writer, I was lucky to receive your critiques and feedback in class. I can’t wait to read your next chapter.
Very cool to get feedback from a Wordcrafters classmate after all this time. I appreciate your thoughts. This story means a lot to me because I found happiness in an unexpected place, and I want to share that with people my age. Life keeps getting more and more interesting.
You’re rush to judgement jealousy (given Chet’s 10 cheat romp) makes sense in the blackest part of my jealous mongering heart. Then again, is wildly to one side of Billie ‘it’s just one blowjob’ Best.
Thanks for the juice. With this series called “The Cohabitants” I am telling the story of my relationship with Roger which began in 2020 when I was freshly traumatized by reliving my relationship with Chet as I wrote my memoir. It’s not how I feel now, it’s how I felt six years ago. And it is a bit extreme, boosted by a bad bourbon habit at the time. I get your point about me being inconsistent. But those revelations are what make the story interesting. We will get there.