Benevolent Anarchy
Jace
Melissa gave me a call to tell me when she landed, and that’s when I let her know that we were done.
That was three days ago, and she has just barely walked in the door.
“What the fuck?” she says as she comes into the living room. All of her stuff is already packed and ready to go.
“How was your trip?” I ask.
“It was fine until you told me that you were breaking up with me,” she says.
“What took you so long to get home?”
“Don’t you fucking play coy with me,” she says. “I know it was you that sent those messages to Ty.”
“Actually,” I chuckle, “it wasn’t, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you lied to me. You never had any intention of breaking it off with Ty.”
“He has time for me,” she says. “He makes time for me.”
“I’ve tried making time for you,” I tell her. “I’ve tried really fucking hard, but every time I tell you we should plan something or every time I do something special for you, the best I ever get in return is a lukewarm no.”
“Well, that’s because you-” she starts.
“You know, before we get into a blame game that we both know I’m going to win, why don’t we, you know, not?” I ask. “It’s not going to change anything and it’s just going to piss us both off more. You need to find somewhere to go.”
“I have somewhere to go,” she says.
“Well, I know you’re not going to be moving in with Ty,” I say. “How is his wife, anyway? Let me guess, he’s still giving you the ‘I’ll leave her, but now’s just not the time’ line, right?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” I tell her. “Let me know when you’ve found an apartment. Until then, I’ll give you some money for a hotel. I don’t want you or your crap in my house.”
“You’re such an asshole,” she says. “Whatever happened to ‘we’ll work it out,’ huh? Whatever happened to ‘we’ll get through this?’”
“I don’t know,” I answer, “what did happen to all of that? From what I can tell, you didn’t even bother taking a break from him.”
“You know what, you don’t know anything about it,” she says. “He loves me and he is going to leave his wife for me. We’re in love.”
“Then why are you so pissed?” I ask. “If everything’s going to work out with the two of you, why does it bother so much that we’re over?”
“This has been going on longer than you know. You think this just started a while ago? Well, you’re wrong. Why do you think I wanted you to get a night job? It was so I could go out and be with him.”
“Yeah, I figured that out,” I tell her. “Although, it did take you getting sloppy before I did.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she asks.
“I think you wanted to get caught,” I tell her. “I think you knew that you were doing the wrong thing, but you weren’t willing to stop, either, so you started leaving a trail for me to follow.” I sigh. “What happened, Melissa? When did you stop caring?”
She bites the inside of her cheek.
“I guess it really doesn’t matter. Anyway, I’d like your key back now,” I tell her.
“I’m not giving you a damn thing until I know I have all of my things,” she says.
“Go ahead and look through your boxes,” I tell her. “Look through the apartment. I didn’t throw anything out. I’m done being vindictive; I just want you out of here.”
“I can’t believe you’re throwing me out on the street.”
“I’m not,” I tell her. “I already said that I’d put you up in a hotel until you find another apartment. I’m not throwing you out onto the street. I’m just throwing you out.”
She reaches in her pocket, takes her key off of her keyring, and throws it onto the floor.
“Thank you,” I tell her. “Now, just let me know where you’d like to stay for a while, and I’ll call some movers to pick your stuff up. It’s probably going to take up a good amount of space in a hotel, so I’ll even spring for a double room.”
All things considered, the fake trips to Maine and California notwithstanding, I think I’m being pretty fair about all of this. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m sure if the shoe were on the other foot, Melissa would have just started throwing my stuff out the window.
She has a tendency to be a little dramatic sometimes.
“I’ve got a place,” she says. “Ty’s been renting for us for over a year.”
“Great,” I answer, trying to keep my anger from boiling up to the surface. I pull the phone out of my pocket and pull up the number for the movers I found the night she went to LA.
I hand her the phone. It’s already ringing.
“Yeah, hi,” she says. “I need to hire a couple of guys to help me move. Today would be perfect, if we could work that out…”
She walks out of the room to give the specifics, as apparently, she doesn’t want me to know where her fuck pad is.
I really couldn’t care less about that. There’s a lot to hurt about right now, but knowing where they’ve been doing what they’ve been doing doesn’t matter in the slightest.
She comes back into the room and lobs the phone more at me than to me.
“It’s going to cost an extra couple hundred bucks, but they’re going to have some people come over in the next hour or so,” she says.
“That’s good,” I tell her. “Until then, why don’t you have a seat and I’ll make you some breakfast.”
If we’re going to be stuck in here together for an hour, I may as well try to make it as civil as possible.
Even with everything, I don’t hate her. I don’t even think she’s a fundamentally bad person. What pisses me off about the situation isn’t so much that she’s been cheating on me — although that’s not particularly fun — it’s that she’s been lying all this time.
That’s really the worst part about a situation like this. It would be bad enough if she came to me one day and told me what was going on, but having to find out on my own and then finding out later that she just kept on lying…it makes me feel like such an idiot.
If she’d been honest, maybe I could have seen a future for us, though things have been pretty fucked up for a long, long time. But just that simple, small level of honesty would have told me that she cared enough to try.
That’s over now.
“Breakfast?” she asks. Yeah, it took her that long to respond.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I’ve got stuff for French toast and eggs. That’s still your favorite, right?”
“Why would you make me breakfast?”
After running through the reasons in my own head, I’m a little annoyed at having to explain it out loud, so I simply tell her, “Because I don’t hate you.”
“Yeah,” she says. “French toast and eggs sounds great.”
“All right. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.”
“Okay,” she says, almost hanging her head.
So, I make breakfast. Nice guy that I am, I don’t even try to poison her food.
Even before I found out about her and her boss, I knew that I wasn’t happy. If anything, I should be thanking her for setting me free.
Okay, I’m not that nice a guy.
Still, I don’t know how long I would have stuck with the relationship if it weren’t for her and Ty. Although, I will say that having met Grace, I can’t be certain it would have been too much longer.
After I kissed Grace that night we sent my new ex and her adulterer to different corners of the country, I didn’t feel right staying. I wanted to kiss her, and it felt damn good doing it, but I wanted to be free and clear before anything happened.
Unfortunately, she hasn’t been answering my phone calls.
I left her a message last night, letting her know that I’d set up a meeting between her and Dr. Marcum, my old mentor from med school, but if she got the message, she didn’t let me know.
“Do you need a hand in there?” Melissa calls from the living room.
“I think I’ve got it under control, but you’re welcome to come and talk to me,” I call back.
I really don’t hate her. I just hate what she’s been doing.
Melissa comes in the room and she sits at the counter silently for a while. “Do you have anyone?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have anyone on the side — a girlfriend, a what-if?”
“What do you mean ‘a what-if?’” I ask return.
“You know, somebody who you’re attracted to, but you haven’t made a move because you were in a relationship,” she says. “Do you have anyone like that?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I haven’t really been looking.”
Now, I’m lying. I’ve never really thought of Grace as my “what-if,” but being around her has been the most fun and the most frustration that I’ve endured in a long time. Call me a masochist, but that’s always been my favorite combination.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I think so.”
“What’s she like?” Melissa asks.
“Nothing’s happened.”
“I’m not saying that. I really want to know.”
I know I’m the one who offered to make her breakfast, but this has gotten to be pretty surreal.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she says. “Although, if you’ve been fucking her behind my back, I think you and I are going to have to have some words.”
“I told you, nothing’s happened,” I answer, but Melissa just titters.
“I’m fucking with you,” she says. “I’m glad you have someone. I hope it works out.”
“Things were good for a while with the two of us, weren’t they?” I ask. “I mean, we are where we are now, and that’s the way it’s got to be, but we used to be happy together, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know. I’ve actually been asking myself that question over the last couple of days. I know that I do feel sorry for hurting you, but when I look back, all I can think is that we spent so much time trying to make each other happy or trying to stay out of each other’s way that we kind of lost sight of ourselves. That’s how I feel, anyway.”
“I know what you mean,” I tell her, cracking an egg into a bowl.
“That’s not to say that we haven’t had our good times,” she continues. “I just think that we were never really meant to be with each other that way. I think we made better friends than we did significant others.”
“You’re right,” I agree. “I remember when we first started hanging out, back when you were with one of those morons from that business frat.”
“He wasn’t a moron!” she protests. “I will have you know that Charles Vincent Dunmore III was a very intelligent man.”
“I’d forgotten how ridiculous his name was,” I laugh. “Still, even though I was always envious of him and those other guys you dated before we got together, we really were at our best when we were with different people.”
“I think that was our problem,” she says. “We spent so much time idealizing each other because our own relationships sucked so much that we forgot to think about whether we’d actually work as a couple.”
“I’m glad we’re doing this,” I tell her.
“What, that you’re kicking me out because I’ve been screwing my boss?” she asks, and I can’t believe we’re both laughing about it.
“No, I’m glad that we’re not splitting up by screaming at each other.”
“It’s kind of weird.”
“Yeah, it is,” I agree. “But I think it’s a good weird.”
“I guess so,” she says. “You never did tell me about your ‘what-if’ girl.”
“I don’t think of her that way,” I tell her. “That sounds kind of pompous the way that came out, but I guess I’ve been idealizing her the way I idealized you.”
“Be careful there,” she says. “I don’t know her, and I certainly can’t predict the future — if I could, I’m pretty sure that breakfast and a conversation on a day like today would have still taken me by surprise — I’m just saying that we’ve both been there and look where we’re at now.”
“Yeah,” I respond. “I would tell you to be careful, but I think it might be a little late for that.”
“Probably,” she says, and snickers.
“Still, though, I don’t want to see you get hurt. I’m probably going to be pissed off at you for a while, and I don’t know if we’re going to be able to be friends or not, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring.”
“You know,” she says, “I think this is the most civil, open conversation we’ve had with each other for a very long time. How’s that for irony?”
“Maybe it’s because neither of us feels like we have to pretend that everything’s been just fine between us. I don’t know about you, but I feel like a huge load has been lifted from my shoulders.”
“Yeah,” she says, “me, too. Jace?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think, someday down the line that we actually could go back to being friends?”
“Honestly,” I tell her, “I don’t know. Even though we’re having this refreshingly pleasant conversation, there’s still a big part of me that wants to start yelling and throwing shit. I don’t know if it’s just instinct or what, but I think it’s going to take me a while to really forgive you for everything.”
“That’s fair, I guess,” she says. “To tell you the truth, there’s still a big part of me that wants to go back in the living room and start tossing your shit out the window just so I can lock you out when you go down to try to salvage what doesn’t get picked up by people on the street.”
“I think we’ve been holding each other emotionally hostage for a while, and I don’t know if we’re ever really going to be able to get past that,” I tell her. “If it helps, though, I hope we can.”
“Yeah,” she says and smiles, “me, too.”
I finish making her breakfast and we eat one last meal together. We don’t talk much while we’re eating and even less while we’re waiting for the moving guys to show up, but all things considered, I think things went pretty well.
The movers load everything up faster than I would have expected, so when it’s time for us to say goodbye, it comes and goes very quickly.
I don’t bother lecturing her, but I do tell her not to let her heart get broken by someone who’s never going to make himself completely hers. We both know what that’s like.
Now, as I’m closing the door behind her, I can’t help but think of what she said about Grace.
How much have I been idealizing Grace, and how much of what I feel toward her is based on who she actually is?
Maybe there’s no easy answer to that problem, but Melissa was right: that’s exactly what we were doing with each other before we got together. “Look where we’re at now,” she said.
As I look out the window of the apartment, it’s easy enough to see exactly where we are now.
I wasn’t lying when I said that I don’t hate her, but after all we’ve been through, despite what wonderful friends we used to be, I can’t look at her, even now from four stories up, without feeling a mixture of anger and this sick feeling that I can’t quite put into words.
Is that what’s going to happen to Grace, or are we ever going to get even that far?
I guess there’s no use speculating about it. The only thing I can do is see what happens and try to keep my eyes open.
Still, there’s a sour taste in my mouth that was never there before, even when I first found the video.
I don’t know if I’m going to be able to really trust anyone right now, even Grace.
It’s not her fault, and really, it’s not entirely Melissa’s fault, either. It’s the result of the simple truth that I don’t know how to be happy with the person I’m with.
It could be that that’s just the way I am, that it’s never going to change. It could be that that’s the result of a multitude of past failed relationships.
Either way, it’s there, and I don’t see it going away anytime soon.