“Are you happy?” I asked Jack one night, after dark.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Jack, look at me.” I searched his eyes. “Answer the question. Tell me the truth.”
He hesitated before answering. “No, Grace, I’m not fucking happy. And neither are you.”
I ran my finger along the rim of my wineglass without saying a word.
“Right?” Jack’s head jutted forward, the way it did whenever he thought he was making a clever point. His eyebrows raised, the four wrinkles in his forehead deepened. “Don’t make me the bad guy here. You’re just as unhappy as I am.”
My saliva thickened, as if I had just chugged a glass of milk. I cleared my throat. I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I wanted so desperately to communicate my feelings to him, for my tongue to form words that I meant. But in the face of confrontation, I always went mute. The more I wanted to speak, the more silent I became.
“You can’t even say it, can you?” He edged closer.
I averted my eyes, staring at the rim of clot-like residue on the inside of my glass. I began to count backwards from one hundred.
“Why even bring it up if you don’t want to talk?”
Ninety-three.
“Why can’t you ever just fucking answer me?”
Eighty-eight.
“You start this shit, and then you get all silent, and I’m left looking like the asshole yelling at someone who can’t even respond. You act like a victim when you’ve manipulated me into this situation.”
Seventy-six.
“Say something, for fuck sakes.”
“Shut up,” I snapped. “Shut the fuck up. I can’t keep living like this.”
“There she is.” Jack wound his arm back, like he was about to toss a baseball, and released, pointing his index finger in my direction. “Finally.”
“Stop being so condescending, you fucking monster.” I shot up, planting both palms flat on the kitchen table in front of me. “You don’t care about me. You’ve never cared about me. ”
“You know, you’re so preoccupied with the fact that I no longer worship you, it’s driving you insane.” He was beginning to calm, his anger alleviated slightly by the fact that I was now participating. “It’s not even about me. You don’t even want me. You just want someone. Anyone. It wouldn’t matter who the fuck it was. So long as someone paid attention to you twenty-four-fucking-seven.”
“What about you, huh?” I shrieked, jabbing my finger at him. “The minute I became a real person, that’s when you gave up. When I stopped being some fucking perfectly manicured fantasy, made up of lipstick and high heels that you could tie up and fuck whenever you wanted. The minute I had needs, the minute things got hard, that’s when you changed your mind.”
“Needs, Grace? Seriously?” He threw his hands in the air as he paced in small circles. “As if it was so easy living with you. You are the neediest goddamn person in the entire world. I couldn’t even go out with my friends without you losing your mind.”
“Fuck you. You have no right to tell me the way I feel is wrong. That the things I need are wrong.” The words were flying out of me as if they had been imprisoned in me for decades. I allowed the volume to rise without any restraint. “Oh, and by the way, that’s because you were out fucking someone else. You think I didn’t know? All this time, you really think I didn’t know? Do you really think I’m that stupid?”
Jack sighed. “No, Grace. I know you’re a lot brighter than you pretend to be. All the stuff you keep in, all the things you don’t say. I know you can’t ignore it anymore.” He dropped into the chair and lowered his face into his hands. “So please, can we just admit that it’s over? Why are we prolonging this? ”
“You’re right.” I turned and laid my cup in the sink. “It’s over, Jack.”