On the night I fell in love with the man I thought I really could spend the rest of my life with, I learned that he and I both spent our childhoods swimming in the blue holes of the Pine Barrens—pools of water sprung to life in the abandoned mines hidden in the sand and trees, their surfaces magnetizing the blue of the sky like a mirror. After about a foot or two of silted bank, there were drops of forty, sixty, or one hundred feet, creating temperatures that could cramp and paralyze and drown you. But you couldn’t see the depth because of the mirror, and you wouldn’t guess there was such a plunge because of the smallness of the pool.
He liked to say that my sadnesses were like those blue holes: the depths arrived without warning, the surface said nothing of what troubled it. I worried they might drive him away from me. But that wasn’t why he ended it. He ended it when I finally told him I’d done to my husband what his wife had done to him, and a great deal more of it.
I’m sorry, he said. It would be like drinking a bottle clearly marked poison.
I told him I understood and then begged him to fuck me one last time so that I could tell myself that despite what he’d said, I remained, above all, irresistible. He did me that favor. But I let his decision hurt for longer than I should have or intended to, and let it keep me alone for longer than I should have been or intended to be. I knew I was not supposed to feel shame over my past, or to use the unnecessarily melodramatic phrase my past when describing a series of mistakes that I had not been the first woman to make, but I did; I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel like a failure because this one man had declared me unfit for partnership, but I did.
Did you have to tell him the truth? said Rose. Sitting next to me on a bench on the pier at Coney Island, watching the old men and old women slip raw chicken thigh onto fishing wire and cast the pieces out into the muddy Atlantic, which always seemed to be wheezing down here as it lapped at the gray-faced sand.
Then what was the point of leaving? I said. To start lying all over again?
I hate to say this, she said, but you may be putting too high a value on honesty.
That was the day I stopped telling her everything.