Summer 2006, Massachusetts

By Claire Adelsay Browne

My mascara is running, dripping ominous black rivulets onto the greeting card trembling between my fingertips.

I want it to be more, to become an inky flood. To blot out their happy faces. To blot out her perfect teeth. To blot out his perfect sweater. To blot out their perfect life.

Standing in the Hallmark store, drowning in the viscous, cotton candy-colored treacle, I suddenly see the truth: I am the black spot in his marriage.

I’m also his best friend. And his lover.

I’m miserably happy, but no one cares about my feelings, once they know my sin. And it is a sin. I feel that to the bottom of my soul. So much so that I’ve stopped going to church because although I’m sorry, I know I won’t stop.

But on days like today, when I must choose an anniversary card for two of my dearest friends, I feel the sting of loss so profoundly. Mike doesn’t love me – he loves her. I know this. He knows this. She knows this. I am an accidental detour, a lemonade stand on a long, dusty road, a forbidden treat on the way to somewhere else.

Who lunged first across that deep divide? Did he pull me to him? Did I lick my lips and offer a subtle invitation? It ended before it began – a frantic 30-second fumble-grope-kiss before we broke apart, skin scalding with guilt and desire. It would be weeks before we would speak of it, and when we did, it was to say it could never happen again.

Wrong, wrong, so wrong. We agreed it was wrong. We laughed quivery, high-pitched, near-death experience laughs and said it was a good thing we were best friends, because that meant we were almost always on the same page.

Except we weren’t.

By Mike’s logic, if he loved his wife, he most certainly couldn’t love me, and he most definitely loved his wife, so this must be lust – except most of our time was spent dreaming dreams, sharing secrets, pushing each other to be better, pulling each other up.

Oh, I felt the lust all right. And later, in a fit of jealousy, he admitted the love. But it didn’t solve the dilemma: how to remain friends forever.

We decided to dedicate ourselves to the two things we both cherished: our friendship and his marriage. And then one day, I was sitting on his floor, eating cold chicken and basking in the glow of a halo so cracked I could never right it again.

Adulterer. Home wrecker. Tramp. Slut. The words crashed through me. One look told me that he was going through the same thing. He was detached. Morose. And then he was gazing into my eyes with so much love and warmth that it made me dizzy.

Walking away doesn’t work. We’ve tried it and failed. If you take away the wrong, what we have is so right. It’s confusing. It hurts. And there’s not a damned thing that can be done about it.

I grit my teeth when he tells me what he’s buying her for Valentine’s Day. My own relationship with my fiancé, Jack, is a torturous mix of boredom and violence. He rarely touches me unless he’s beating me. Sometimes I aggravate him just to feel his hands on my body.

Mike says I should leave. I tell him there’s nowhere to go. If he’s married, I might as well get married. But even as I say the words, I hear the twist in logic. How many nights have I come to him, bruised and broken, just to lay my head on his shoulder and cry? How many nights have I whispered in the darkness, “Where are you?” And how many nights has he answered, “I’m here, girl, I’m here. Tell me what happened.”

We are always friends. We are sometimes lovers. Right now, we’re not lovers. He’s focused on his marriage, and I’m focused on painting. I stumble from the card shop empty-handed, dry heaving in misery, blinking in the pale sunshine. I’ve spent weeks locked in my house, trying to do anything to keep from writing to him, calling him, begging him to change his mind.

But I am preoccupied, wound inside my head like a tightly coiled spring, my thoughts wrapped among the sinews, curled so deeply within myself that sound glances across my cochlea with the flinty-sharp bite that would be a bullet through the head if I had the guts.

I wouldn’t take that way out now. Not anymore. Not since we became friends. It’s an answer, just not my question these days. There are no questions in this chasm of silence: the answers are too final.

I crank the stereo until the walls shudder as I paint. The sticky rhythm lulls me along in my reverie, pulling me down paths I’m trying so hard to paint my way out of.

Jack doesn’t love me. I’m in love with my best friend. I sling-paint the color of chocolate sauce against the walls and picture it running down the hard edges of Mike’s body, sucking it from his fingertips. I shake my head and throw my paintbrush into the bucket.

The last time we made this “no play” pact, I stumbled shell-shocked into the faded Wal-Mart and slammed a paint chip on the counter, daring the thin, too thin, bespectacled Harry Potter clerk to mock my choice. Golden margarita. He’d probably never tasted the salty-sweet. Never knew the sour that follows. I went home and coated the walls in liquid sunshine to stave the darkness, ease the chill of loneliness.

It wasn’t so easy this time. My color deck is jumbled, my life dumped upside down, spilling into a swirl. Jack used to love me in his flannel-gray world. He doesn’t love me anymore, and our lives puddle into inky black. Mike’s hands rake across my body and paint my skin the color of fire. Jack’s hands lie still, and I suffocate under a blanket of snow.

Last time, I wandered into the hardware store in a daze, looking for warmth. Loss had come calling again. Boston was the color of rain. Mike was in his world, where he belonged, and I was in mine. His life streaked orange and red through my slate gray. I remembered the ambers and golds of the Boston library and smiled as I bought mahogany paint.

Later, in the stillness of my house, I opened the can carefully and peered inside with mingled fascination and fear. I want this. I like this. I’m scared of this. I want this. I cranked my stereo and let the pounding drums silence the doubts. The color was bold. Vibrant. It looked out of place in my house of shadows, like a favorite dress, scarlet among a sea of navy pantsuits. Temptress. Tears fell, and I headed back to the store.

The paint I have now is dark brown. Almost black. People will think I’ve lost my head. I want to shake them. Slap them. Scream that I haven’t lost my mind, just my heart. I’m wild and messy with my strokes, slashing them across the pristine white trim work carelessly as I listen to Mike’s music.

Slowly, I slide my brush across the fire-tinged walls, erasing them, etching the color into my head so that I won’t forget. As if I could. When the wall is covered, I sink to the floor and cry, great heaving sobs that drown out the music, leaving me spent. Mourning a physical loss. Mourning an emotional loss. Mourning the loss of something that never had a chance. Something doomed from the start.

In frustration, I rip fitfully through the paint book, searching for something I’ve already found. Jack doesn’t love me. It’s not as black as it should be. Black like his heart. Black like my soul. Black like the gaping hole that is our future.

I can’t have Mike. It’s more blue than I expected. Blue like the airplanes that bring me to him. Blue like the airplanes that take me away. Blue like the skies that lie between. I think of lying on my back in a green field, him above me. Above him is the open sky, the heavens looking down on a mistake we can’t seem to stop making.

I want him, but he wants her. And Jack doesn’t want me at all.

Sound ripping from my chest, tears streaming, I fling the paint book at the wall, satisfied ever so briefly by the bang. In curiosity, I drag my body to it. The body Mike would touch if he could. The body that craves him like it craves water. Wrong. So wrong.

Blind with tears, fumbling, clawing, crawling, my hand meets the sharp edge of the book, spine broken, colors mingling, overlapping in crazy combinations that would never work in real life.

And there, on top – God, the mockery – lies a flame-tipped orange-red, poured out like molten fire, embers among ashes. Even as it sears, it warms. And grateful for the light, I curl myself around it and fall asleep in its glow.

Claire Adelsay Browne is a decent, if flawed girl, struggling to make her way. She daydreams about a simpler 1940s life, when all the streets were lined with elms and all the families were happy. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 | Email This Post

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