he swore up and down he would never abandon me. that was, of course, how i knew he would. you never deny something that doesn’t already have a hook in you somewhere. it just never occurs to do so.
i never told him that i had a rule about married men. that they were, in every instance, sexless to me. i made them so. in my mind, they were carefully neutered and as “male” as a ken doll. it kept them safe. hell, it kept me safe.
and when they would start up with the ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ or the ‘it just isn’t like it used to be’ or any other version of ‘i want to have something i’m not supposed to have, come and play a game of lies and infidelity with me’, i’d look at them and ask them how they would feel to know their wife was having this same conversation with some man.
it always amused me how every last one of them thought their wife was ‘too insecure’ to ever leave, or ‘too good’ to ever cheat, or some other version of either super or sub human.
he had a subtle way of flirtation. you know the kind, stop just short of being overt and then you can pretend you weren’t doing it.
or act like what you were feeling was the other person’s ‘fault’ so you could behave inappropriately with impunity.
or pretend you’re both ‘consenting adults’, or pretend you are racked with guilt (but never enough to stop doing it).
i told him i wanted to be a real friend. a family friend. someone his wife could feel safe knowing he was talking to…. and he would tell me that he’d talk with her about this and figure a way to make that real.
at first.
the day he told me that he ‘mentioned me once too often’, i knew this would never happen. of course, by then, i knew enough about him to care about not being able to talk to him anymore.
so i did a very stupid thing. i pretended. and i let him continue to pretend that it was just a ‘matter of time’ before that conversation would happen and i’d finally get to ‘meet’ her and tell her how completely and utterly harmless i was, how i wanted to be her friend. how i wanted to send a shower gift. how i wanted to send an anniversary gift.
i wanted to be a friend of the family. and i wanted it to be ‘safe’ and ‘ok’ to know and joke with and enjoy my friend.
but i knew it would not be. and i was stupid. i let it go on. knowing i was secret. knowing i was hidden in a corner. i let it go on. and in the doing, insured it would never change.
finally, i wasn’t willing to take it anymore. and i insisted. and i said that if it did not change, if he would not have that talk and let me have the rightful and fair shot at becoming that family friend, that it was obvious i was not, in fact, a friend… merely a doll in a box and just as inappropriate as could be.
i asked him to have that talk and he told me ‘he was thinking about it’. i’ve been waiting for him to finish ‘thinking about it’ for a year and a half. and this time, i said i wasn’t going to wait anymore. i told him either make me known and give me the chance i deserved to be a legitimate part of his life as a friend, or i could not continue talking with and to him.
i’m sure you can guess the outcome. he vanished like a puff of smoke in a breeze. not only did he no longer try to lie about it, he actually pulled the ‘guilt’ card on me and in his last reply, served me with, “You deserve better. Sorry I couldn’t be.”
and since then? nothing. dead silence. of course. i’ve been livid for it, strangling on the ease with which he walks away. oh, yes, i meant SO much, obviously.
i broke my own rule and gave him more than the ken treatment. and for it, i got precisely what i deserved. the lesson is most definitely learned, but i wasn’t willing to let the lie of the guilt trip stand uncontested. in the end, finally, realizing all of this, i wrote him and said simply that it wasn’t that he could not, it was that he would not… and it leaves nothing but to say goodbye.
i spent about three weeks staggering around blind with grief for it, but then, i realized — i was grieving an illusion, a dream. and the person and hope i held for friendship never existed. if it had, this simply would not be possible.
i remember he once told me that i could never ‘strike out’ with him.
holding the bat, standing on an empty field, i reluctantly admit that too, was a lie.
game over.