“Still, I can’t pinpoint when things changed. Maybe when I graduated? He was in his postdoc, I was in residency, and life got hard. And I thought it was just that we were both stressed, not our best selves. That maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention to him, and that’s why things went south.”
Arguments started over things that I didn’t understand—my taking calls from work was “disrespectful,” hanging out with Winona after work was “not prioritizing him.” He’d punish me by leaving our home, turning off his phone, only to return days later and pretend that nothing had happened. Physical altercations that seemed likethey could be accidents—shoves that could be explained as him “moving my body,” pinches at my side so hard they made me yelp that he claimed were “playful.”
“It was always something. At some point, I started catching him talking to other girls—nothing too crazy at first, because he was smart enough to never completely cross the line, you know? They were just friends, they were bonding over video games I didn’t play, couldn’t he have a social network, et cetera. He’d tell me,Don’t you trust me?And that would turn into this whole thing about how I was a terrible partner fornottrusting him, and I would sit and wonder. Like maybe he was right, and I was the problem? I felt…crazy. Everything was upside down and inside out and nothing I could do was right. I was so sure he was going to leave me. So scared he’d decide that I was too insecure or controlling or whatever the issue was that day and finally dip. But instead, one day, we went to his family’s barbecue and he pulled out aring.”
Julian stops playing; it takes me a second to realize that I have stopped too. This memory plays back too crisp and too loud, the sounds discombobulating to the point of distraction. The crunch of dry grass under Eric’s knee as he knelt before me, the rattle of his emotionally incestuous mother’s envious gasp, the sizzle of the noonday summer sun on my exposed shoulders. The distant, foghorn sound of his question:Will you marry me?
“He proposed? After all that?” Julian asks, his tone lethally flat.
I laugh mirthlessly.
“Yeah,” I say. “And you want to know the worst part?”
“What?”
“I said yes.”
I laugh harder, but Julian doesn’t join me. He is stone silent as I finish, as the words rush out of me like they’re pressurized. This isn’tthe first time I’ve told this story, but telling Julian feels like a different sort of release. I am showing him my belly, stripping away more than just clothes, and there is something freeing about this. Suddenly, I don’t care if Julian respects me less. What matters most is that heseesme, for more than the hard-shelled, soft-inside woman he thought he knew at Margaret’s exhibition. What matters is that he doesn’t look away.
“I thought it would fix everything,” I continue. “That Eric changing was my fault, that I gave him too little, demanded too much, and that by saying yes I was proving my commitment to him. That he’d just been stressed, just suffering, just struggling. And that his proposal was evidence that he loved me and was just looking for reassurance that, even after all the ways I’d let him down, I loved him back. I thought, well, things will get better now, he’llfeelbetter, now that he knows what I’m willing to compromise for us.”
I pause. We are riding the crescendo of this story, about to reach a deafening climax, and I need my fingers to be busy again.
“We need a new song,” I say.
Julian bends to grab a binder with a label that, in better circumstances, would have made me crack a smile:Film scores, most certainly stolen. We sift through the printed, well-loved pages, taking a brief intermission, and then settle on a theme fromGladiator.
“What happened then, Sean?” Julian’s voice is soft.
“Then I got pregnant,” I say. The notes shiver on the page. I hit a treble A instead of an F that makes us both flinch but we carry on. I don’t search for his reaction, because I know that if I do I’ll lose momentum. “Who knows how. We used two forms of birth control. That psychopath probably microwaved my pills. Only found out because I had a miscarriage. Ended up in the ICU. My fiancé was nowhere to be found, of course, because a couple of days earlier hedecided we were done and skipped town to be with his new girl. Just, you know, forgot to break up with me first.”
It’s the most concise manner in which I’ve ever told this story because I leave out the details. How I’d had no time to reconcile with the reality that I was pregnant before I abruptly was not, how despite having no desire for motherhood, there had been no relief alongside my horror. I should have gone to the emergency room, should have sought immediate care, but I was still an interventional cardiology fellow, the first woman my program had matched in fifteen years, and so I bled through three sets of scrubs, stole bulky hospital-issue pads from the supply closets, stuffed my underwear with toilet paper, and cried in bathrooms between cases as I waited for the nightmare to end. But it didn’t. I remember waking up a few days later, feverish, disoriented,wet. In the dim light of dawn, the blood had stained my sheets black. And there was so much of it, more than I thought my body could hold.
Silence rings in my ears; it takes me a second to realize that we have once again stopped mid-song. Suddenly I am self-conscious. I hate how recounting this memory makes me feel small and simple-minded, hate the urge to reach back into my past, grab my old self by the shoulders, and scream at her to demand better for herself before it’s too late.
“You almost died,” Julian says. “He almost killed you.”
My stomach clenches.
“I was stupid,” I say softly. “I know what they say:Hindsight is twenty-twenty, I was only operating with the knowledge that I had, et cetera, but it doesn’t change the fact that he treated me like trash for years before the end. If I’d just seen the signs, had more self-respect, none of that would’ve happened—”
“You were not stupid,” Julian retorts. We’re wedged so close thatwhen he turns to face me, he’s blurred and out of focus. Everything but his eyes, which are creased with rage that soothes rather than unsettles. “You promised to love someone. To give them grace. That level of trust, that capacity for forgiveness, is a gift that people spend entire lifetimes seeking in others. It isn’t your fault that your ex was so shortsighted and weak-minded as to exploit that.”
Oh god. I am going to cry again. I bite back tears, turning away so that he can’t see them.
“Thank you for saying that,” I manage. I don’t know whether he knows how deep his words reach. For so long, I’ve felt ashamed of this anguish. Like I should have gotten over it years ago. Like the hollow I still feel in the pit of my belly is power that Eric still has over me. I’ve never heard anyone call that love I’d given, so selfless, so self-abandoning, agift.
“Thankyou,” Julian says. “I know what it must have meant for you to tell me this. I don’t take it for granted.”
My exhale comes out in a shudder.
“You’re good at this, you know,” I say, smiling weakly at him.
“At what?” Julian asks.
“At cracking me open,” I say. “I feel, I don’t know. Safe with you.”
Julian’s eyelids flutter, and I see something shift in his gaze. He sits back, swallows, and tilts his head up to the ceiling.