Miserably imperfect saccharin happiness
present
“Miranda, we need to talk,” Loren calls through my closed bedroom door. It’s late. We have separate bedrooms. He won’t let me step foot in his in all the months I’ve lived here.
My heart beats double time in reaction to his voice, his words. It makes me angry that his attention can still set off a Pavlovian response, especially after the way he’s been ignoring me, but that’s all it is—an unconscious response. It’s not desire. It’s not need. It’s a physiological chain reaction that begins and ends with my loneliness.
I pull back the covers and crawl out of bed, cloaking my naked form with a silk robe. It’s tied loosely in front, but the two halves aren’t drawn closed when I meet him in the hallway.
He sighs when he looks at me. It’s not the sigh of irritation I’ve grown so used to. It’s sympathy, sadness, something I didn’t think him capable of. “Can I come in?” he nods his head at my door.
My heart has squashed the synthetic excitement and is beating rationally again. “It’s sad you had to ask that question,” I mutter as I turn and walk into my bedroom. He trails behind, both of us weighted by the uneasiness of our fucked up situation. Two adults, three children, one housekeeper: all living separate lives under one giant, dividing roof.
I walk to my bed, prop the pillows up, shed my robe, not in an attempt to seduce, but in an attempt to return to my prior comfy state, and crawl back into bed. With the covers pulled up to my chin, and everything else hidden underneath, I look at him sitting in the antique wingback chair in the corner. “What do we need to talk about, Loren?” His name is an abrasive exclamation point.
He’s sitting forward, his elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped. He’s still wearing his dress pants and shirt, but his tie is gone, and the top several buttons are undone. “This isn’t working. You know this isn’t working. I know this isn’t working.”
I nod. This isn’t working. I thought forcing my way into his life would make things perfect.
It’s not.
It’s far from perfect.
It’s miserably imperfect.
“You’re depressed,” he states.
I don’t answer. I’ve been on medication to treat it for weeks now. It’s not helping.
“You need help.” I meet his eyes across the room. They’re tired. Both from lack of sleep and…me.
I smile. It feels hollow and the corners of my mouth refuse to rise. “I swallow sixty milligrams of help every morning when I wake up. It coats my insides with pipedreams of saccharin happiness. I’ve got help covered. Thanks.” Sarcasm blends maliciously with melancholy.
“They’re not working. Talk to your doctor,” he implores.
I look away defiantly. I don’t want to talk about medication. I don’t want him to look at me like I’m a pile of ragged instability. I want to talk about us. The fact that there isn’t, and probably never was, an us. “Do you love me?” When he doesn’t answer, I look at him and prod, “Did you ever love me, Loren? Before everything went to hell?”
“Do you want me to lie and make you feel better, or do you want the truth?” he asks. I already know his answer. His words formed a question, but all I heard was no.
I want him to lie to me. “I want the truth.” Please lie to me.
He doesn’t miss a beat. “No.”
I nod.
He feels sorry. I can see it in the set of his shoulders. They’ve dropped under the weight of his admission. “Did you ever love me?” he asks.
Years ago I did. I lie, “No,” and then I follow it up with the truth, “Yes.”
His eyes drop to the floor and he whispers, “What are we doing?” The darkness of the hour and the truth filling the room make his question feel substantial, its veracity smothering me.
Denial is rising in me. It’s the gentle boil of failure, bubbling in my stomach, up through my chest, until it clogs my throat and I’m blinking back tears. Fearing what’s going to happen next. “I don’t know.”
“Where do you go every day when you leave for work?”
It’s a loaded question, I know that by the way it was posed, but I lie anyway because it’s what I do. “I go to work.”
He takes a deep breath, both to calm and instill patience, and he continues, “Just be straight with me, Miranda. You haven’t worked since I fired you. Why aren’t you working? Where do you go?”
“Truth?” I don’t know if he really wants to hear or he’s just going to use it against me. We play games. This conversation feels different. It feels honest. We don’t do honest, so I’m skeptical.
“The truth. Please.” He really wants to hear it.
“I have a suite at the Hilton downtown. I don’t have a job. No one would hire me,” I admit. “It seems your HR department didn’t paint me in a flattering light when potential employers called. It was all true, of course, but damning, nonetheless.” The time for embarrassment is over. I worked with a headhunter early on but was turned down for VP positions. It felt like a punch to the gut and my confidence, and accepting any title beneath vice president was unacceptable, so I gave up. And lied. Again.
“What do you do all day in a hotel room?” He’s a workaholic and looks mystified as if the thought of lounging around all day is inconceivable. I used to be him.
I study his eyes. They’re still tired and sympathetic and sad—the kind of eyes that used to make me salivate and pounce on my prey, but now they just make me want to wave the white flag and give up. When my balled up nerves say fuck it and begin to unravel in an unceremonious surrender, I decide to let the truth out. No more lies tonight. “I binge watch bad TV, I order room service, I work out in their gym, I get massages, I fuck lonely businessmen I pick up in the lobby bar.” I shrug. “You know, the usual.” My recent usual is a usual I never thought I’d submit to. My time in Seattle, depression, failure, and rejection have slowly transformed me into someone unrecognizable to the Miranda of old. My master plan has been trampled to dust. I no longer go out and take what’s mine, and what’s not mine—I merely survive my self-created hell.
He sighs and runs his hands through his hair. I don’t know if it’s an act of aggravation or pity. “Really?” It sounds like a little of both.
“Really?” I mock his tone. “Fuck you and your judgment, Loren. You’re the pot. I’m the kettle. Get over yourself.” We both live for bad choices.
He shakes his head. “Your moral compass is bent. Holy shit bent,” he mutters. “But you have a mind for business like no one else I’ve ever known. You’re wasting it. That’s all I’m saying.”
I want to fight. I want this to escalate. But because I’m done lying tonight, I answer, “I know.”
“I know the paperwork you presented me with that indicated illegal activity was fabricated. I know they were all lies. Lies you created to trap me. Deceit only on paper. The law wasn’t broken, your moral judgment was.” He doesn’t sound angry.
“It’s still broken it would seem.” No more lies.
“We’re not married, Miranda. The wedding wasn’t official. I paid someone to create the marriage license and certificate. The ordained minister who came to the house and married us was an actor. Your ring is glass.”
I huff out a laugh, surprised that I’m able to see the irony in this clusterfuck, and then I pull my hands out from under the covers and offer him a slow clap. “Touché, Loren. Tou-fucking-ché.”
He’s watching me carefully now, but he’s not weighing his words. His normal precision is gone, replaced by a version of Loren I’ve never seen, desperate. “It’s time for you to leave, Miranda.”
And that’s when the tears drop, it’s the ultimate rejection, but I’m not thinking about Loren. I’m thinking about Seamus. How hurt he was when I filed for divorce and the last words he said to me that night. He’ll never love you like I do. He was right. Loren never loved me at all. And I know now, after living in his home and being fake married to him for months; that the destiny I chased and thought I deserved, only led me to misery.
“Your kids should be with Seamus, Miranda. You saw what they were like when they left with him last week. You know how sad they’ll be when he brings them back in the morning. I don’t know them that well, but they’re different kids when they’re with him. They light up with life and happiness. That’s what every kid deserves. They don’t have that here. No one loves them like he loves them.”
“That’s because no one loves like Seamus does. It’s tender, and sincere, and intrepid. He’s a saint,” I say in defeat. And then I look at him asking for more blunt honesty. “The kids like Rosa more than they like me. I’m their mother. Shouldn’t they like me better than the goddamn housekeeper?”
He doesn’t try to comfort me. “Genetics doesn’t ensure love, or even like, time and effort do. You don’t give them your time, and you don’t show them effort. Rosa does.”
That stings. I know it’s my fault, but it still stings. “It’s her job.”
“It’s her job to make sure they’re fed. It’s not her job to read to them at night, or to tell them bedtime stories, or to ask them how school was when they get home every day, or to praise them when they do well. She’s a housekeeper, not a parent. Parenting is your job,” he says.
This conversation feels like a long, miserable road trip that I just want to be over, but that I know I can’t escape because jumping out while it’s in motion would hurt more than staying in and enduring it. “I don’t like parenting. I’m not good at it. Seamus was always the parent.” I’m not looking for sympathy; I’m just talking because I have a captive audience, an ear to bend.
“I’d be a horrible parent. Obviously.” His head is hanging low. Shame is a burden.
“We’re a fucking match made in heaven, Loren. Why didn’t we work?” I’m asking because I already know the answer, but I want his take.
“That’s just it, isn’t it? We’re practically the same person. We don’t complement each other. You don’t offset my shortcomings, and I don’t offset yours because we’re both deficient in the same areas. We’re immature teenagers emotionally, both bankrupt in the ability to love and care for another. That doesn’t bode well for matrimony or even monogamy.”
“Will it always be that way?”
He shrugs. “For me? Probably. I’m old and set in my ways. It’s how I’ve always lived my life. For you? I hope not. You’re still young. You have your whole life ahead of you, as well of the lives of your children. You should go back to your husband. Appreciate him the next time around. He was your better half. Go try to live up to that for a start.”
I would say I concede defeat, but to concede you have to have won in the first place. I’m beginning to think I don’t know what winning is and that I’ve never, in thirty plus years, won, because my rules were always skewed. I was the only one playing by them, which made them null and void. “When do you want me out of the house?”
“Ideally?” I expected to hear hope in his voice, but the tiredness has returned.
“No, realistically. Ideally, would involve me leaving right this minute, I’m sure, and I’m tired, I can’t do that.” I’m half joking, half serious. I’m sure if he had his way he wouldn’t even let me use the bathroom and dress before ushering me out to my car.
“You have a week.”
I want to make a smartass remark, but I nod instead to accept the deadline.
He rises and walks to the side of my bed and kisses me on top of my head. “Goodnight, Miranda.”
The gesture seems out of place given our history, given that we just parted ways, but I guess that’s the reason it’s so perfect, so fitting. Despite the lack of love, and the fact that we can dole out mistrust and dishonesty with an earnestness reserved for a minister preaching the gospel, we genuinely like each other, even through the hate, because we understand each other. My ugliness forgives and ignores his ugliness. And vice versa. “Goodnight, Loren.”