Marriage

Where does blame lie?  Does it lie with the man who was too oblivious to see anything happening in his own home? It was he who was too stupid to realize that his wife had begun to exercise more.  It was he who failed to notice that she started wearing make-up to go shopping again.  It was he who forgot his glasses which forced him to come home to the moaning and groaning coming from the bedroom his wife was currently sharing with his neighbor.  He just stood in awe as he dropped his briefcase with a loud audible thump.  The couple in bed went quiet.  “John,” his wife began to say as she saw him there. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“Really? Than what is it?” John hissed through his teeth.  “Because from where I’m standing it’s pretty fucking easy to see what is going on here.” He stepped forward to an audible crunch, his glasses, lying on the ground from where they had been tossed of off the bed. 

“We thought… I thought you had gone to work.” His wife was sliding out of bed now, wrapping herself in the bedsheet while the face of the other man became clear.

“So, every time you told me not to worry about Steve, ‘Oh he’s just being a good friend’ you were actually stabbing me in the back!”  The words drowned out the sounds of tears falling on the wood if the bedroom floor.

“Please, John can’t we talk about this?” She touched his shoulder tentatively, caringly, like she had done so many times before.  She did it at their wedding when he had to clear his eyes from the tears.  She turned him toward her and smiled, her smile could always make him feel better, but not today.

“I’m leaving now, and I don’t want you to follow me.” He whispered, and turned back to look in her face “You were my everything Elizabeth, now you’re nothing.”  He walked out that same moment, not taking anything with him other than the clothes on his back and the things in his pocket.  He got into his car and started driving, and for some odd reason went to work.  For the rest of the day he refused to talk to anyone, even throwing his cell phone out of the window to stop it from buzzing.  When the day was done, and his coworkers invited him to go get a drink, he just looked at them, a blank stare.  After they all had left, he aimlessly took his coat, and left his car in the parking lot.  He would no longer need it. 

Rain, small droplets at first then replaced by showers, began to pour from the ashen dull grey clouds looming above the normally stunning cityscape that laid ahead of him.  The water that flowed from the heavens pattered down his heavy coat, rolling off the thick material while it clung to his hair, matting it to his forehead.  It didn’t seem to bother him one iota as he continued to walk.  The border on the far side of the city was a large river that emptied out into the ocean.  For as long as he could remember, there had ever only been a single way across; a long and narrow suspension bridge hung between two large pontoon towers.  This bridge was a staple of their family excursions as his son Tommy was obsessed with it.  It was the age, John assumed.  Bridges, cars, trucks, practically anything on the road would peak Tommy’s interests.  Today however, John couldn’t look at Tommy from his rearview mirror, gurgling at some new interesting item his eye had fallen upon.  Today Tommy wasn’t even on his mind anymore.  When John reaches the middle section of the bridge, an area marked by the large cables being attached to the platform of the bridge, he stopped.  Was this the spot?  He shrugged.  Good a place as any.  Not like he’d be there for very long.  Between the pedestrian walkway and the edge, a good meter of space ensure that no one could simply fall over the edge and plummet to a watery grave.  One would have to jump.

“Can’t you see how this makes me feel?”  Samantha sighed, watching her fiancé walking passed her, clothes in hand.  “I’m not comfortable with you going to Atlantic City for the night.”

“Look,” Damian drops the clothing into his bag.  “It’s for one night and Tommy never got to have a bachelor party.  You know how whipped he is.”  A short chuckle leaves his throat.  “Otherwise I wouldn’t go.”
            “So you’re saying that the ONLY reason to go a casino and a strip club is because your best friend never did it when he got married?”  She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.  “Get over yourself Damian!  If you want to go to a strip club and roll around with hookers then just say so!  Don’t blame it on your friend.” 

“Sam,” he snapped his bag shut, “stop talking about this! It’s happening.  You decided not to have a bachelorette party, that doesn’t mean I have to follow suit!”  His phone buzzed and his hand reached for it.  “Tommy is here.  Look I gotta go.  I’ll see you at the hotel yeah?”  He walks up to her and kisses her forehead before walking out the door leaving Samantha alone with her thoughts.  All she could do is sigh and sit on the bed.  All they did the last few weeks was fight, fight, fight and there seemed to be no end to it.  Was it just the pre-marriage jitters? Or was this something more?  Over the last few days she thought she saw new numbers appearing on his phone and he had even gotten a new wardrobe.  He always assured her that nothing untoward was going on and yet… That voice remained, the one that told her ‘don’t trust him, he’s lying.”

She shook her head.  This was not what she needed to think about.  She had to prepare for tomorrow.  Her dress, and all her makeup was already all at the hotel with her parents arriving in the morning.  What did she still have to do?  She had already started her vacation days, the two weeks expiring well after her honeymoon concluded.  “Wow, I guess I’m done.” She smiled to herself, “I’ll just get some reading done.”  The library was the favorite room in their apartment.  It was also the only room she had genuinely fought to have.  Damian hadn’t been much of a reader ever and so he didn’t see the point of an entire room dedicated to something he never did.  She had tried to get him interested in literature, reading from some of her favorite authors; Vonnegut, Chaucer, even Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” but no such luck.  He just didn’t seem to enjoy the work that was involved.  She sighed again as she walked by the shelves, her fingers sliding across the spines of all the books she had collected over the years, a smile playing on her lips.  Reading had been something she and her father did together when she was younger.  She’s sit on his lap and often fall asleep listening to his gravelly voice.  Even after the cancer set in and every sentence was undercut by a cough, she still found comfort in his sound.  This was over a decade ago and now… now she couldn’t even remember what his voice truly sounded like.  She had a memory sure, but when she sounded the voice in her head, it never felt the same.  She stopped, pulling a random book off the shelf and began to read. 

The hours crept by slowly as the sun reached its zenith and descended again.  Her arms reached up and stretched like a cat.  It was only then that she realized what day it was.  She was getting married in less than twenty-four hours.  A shiver ran down her spine as she thought of this.  Did she even want to get married anymore?  She sighed again, no bachelorette party tonight, what should she do?  A second later she grabbed her coat and was out the door.  A drive would clear her head. 

The sky had greyed by the time she got to the bridge, rain pouring down onto the roof of her car.  Her trek brought her in from the northern part so she had to cross a large pontoon bridge to get to the city.  It was then that traffic slowed to a halt.  It seemed that everyone seemed to want to go downtown tonight.  As she stared out of the window a flash of lightning illuminated an oddity on the side of the bridge.  There was a man standing there just on the other side of the barricade.  She sat there wide eyed.  This man was going to jump.  In that second she did not think of anything else, put her car to the side as much as she could and got out.  “Hey mister!” She called out, the man turning to face her, the water pattering down on his coat, “are you ok?”

“Don’t come any closer!” He shouted back, his hand outstretched in a stopping signal.  “And don’t talk me out of it.”  He looked down at the water and closed his eyes, “I have to do this.”

“Ok” she edged closer and lent over the barricade.  “Well I’m not leaving until you tell me what is happening, and to be honest,” she waits until he looks at her, “if you were really gonna jump, you would’ve done it already.”          Nothing happens for a second but then the man breaks down crying, sinking to a squat.  Samantha reaches over just in the nick of time to grab his collar and save him from falling down.  “Hey mister,” she hisses through her teeth.  “I’m not complaining or anything, but did you ever think about losing some weight?  You’re kinda heavy you know.”  Again nothing happens until a small chuckle comes from the man, culminating later into a louder laugh.

“Yeah you’re probably right,” he sighs, “but what would you do when you find your wife in bed with another man?”  He slowly slides his back up the pillars and is just able to turn around to climb over.  “I didn’t really know what else to do.”

“Ummm divorce?”  She cracks a small smile, her hand still clutching his coat, finally letting go when a muscle cramp started to set in, and her hand was needed to wipe the rain from her brow.  “Look its freezing out here, can I drive you to this diner I know?  Then you can tell me why you were up there okay?  Please?”  Her eyes pleaded with him to follow her. 

“Screw it,” he sighed softly.  “Don’t have much to lose anyway.”  A soft smile played on his lips as he followed her back to her car. 

The sounds of the diner wafted out of the doors as they approached.  The sounds of joviality and familiarity.  The two figures, drenched in rain found this happy location a welcome reprieve from the downpour.  As soon as they sat down an older, lighthearted waitress came by and took their orders, returning with mugs of coffee almost immediately. 

“So,” Samantha sighed as the woman left.  “You wanna tell me why you were up there?  I mean other than the obvious reason?”  She shook her head.  “You know what I mean.”

“Not particularly no, but I feel like I don’t have much of a choice.”  John chuckled, clasping his mug in both hands, “Where do you want me to start?”

“Start at the beginning.”  Samantha smiled, “that’s where most good stories start, don’t they?”

“Very well.”  His chest puffs out, coughs slightly, and with a slight southern drawl begins to say, “I was born in the year 1982 on a cold winters day…”

“Oh god you’re impossible.” She rolled her eyes and sipped at her cup, looking out of the window.

“Sorry, I took theater classes in college and this has been the first time I’ve actually been able to use anything I learned there.”  His smile turns to a scowl.  “Beth… Beth doesn’t like it when I do that.  ‘Get to the point,’ she’d always say, never wanting me to really be…” he frowns, “never wanting me to really be me.”  His eyes widen.  “Wow, that’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud like that.”

“You gotta start at the beginning man, I’ve got no clue what you’re talking about.” She sighed

            “Oh right, sorry.  Beth is my wife, the one I caught having sex with our next door neighbor this morning.  We met in college, lived across the hall from each other freshman year.  We saw one another intermittently.”  He pauses to sip and collect his thoughts.  “We didn’t really run in the same crowd, she was a sorority gal and I… well I was a free thinker.  I don’t think we fully met until like sophomore year?  Yeah, she had been dating a friend of mine…” his voice trailed off as he pondered the chain of events. “… Then she dumped him and went out with me.”  He stopped.  “She was the type of girl you dream about, you know the one that all the songs are written about.”  He sighed and stirred the brown liquid in front of him.  “She has the only girl I’ve dated.”  His eyes started to water, his voice breaking softly.  “I’ve never been the popular guy, never got the girl.  I was always that guy who watched the jock get the girl, imagining it was me up there.  And then when Beth started coming up to me I was just like ‘wow, is this really happening to me?’  I just couldn’t believe that a girl this pretty would be interested in me.”  He pauses to catch his breath.

            “I can understand.”  She sat up, having had her head resting on her forearms on the table.  “I’ll admit I’ve not been in that particular position, but at the same time I never was the cheerleader.  You might say I was average in high school.”  A small smile played on her lips. “I didn’t really start looking like that girl you described till college, and that was cause I went to the gym every single day.  You know that joke people make about the freshman fifteen?  Yeah I lost that much that year.”  Her head shakes and she takes another sip.  “I didn’t get my ‘Beth,’ Damian, until I left college.  Mom was going through dad’s funeral and well I needed the shoulder to cry on.  Damian was just a kid from our old street who reconnected with me through Facebook.”  She shivered suddenly, the water from the rain still permeating her clothing.  “We met up and started dating.  That was three years ago and now… now we are getting married in the morning.”

            “So then why aren’t you on a bachelorette party right now?  Where are your friends?” 

            “I wasn’t interested in having a bachelorette party.  I mean my mom is my maid of honor.”  Her chest heaved high and dropped low.  “To be honest none of my friends could make it.  And if it was my choice I wouldn’t even have this big wedding.  That’s Karen, Damian’s mom who wants it.  I think she wants to have the wedding she never got to have.”

            “I can understand that, but if I’m being honest here, you don’t seem like you wanna get married.”  He sips his cup, the conversation halting as the waitress walks over with some food that they had ordered.  “I mean, I could totally be reading you wrong but that’s what I’m reading.” 

            “Can I be honest with you?”

            “If you can’t be honest with a stranger who can you be honest with?”

            “Deep but I’m serious here.”
            “Yes, you can be honest with me.  What have I got to gain by lying to you?”

            “True.  To be honest I don’t know what to do.  Like I love him but there’s that gnawing feeling in the back of my head that something isn’t gonna work out.”  Again she shivered and held herself close.

            “Well I can tell you that if you’re not sure about it then you shouldn’t do it.  But I also know that marriage, at least for me, has been, for a long time has been the happiest time of my life.  I know what happened to me today is not commonplace.  Please don’t let what happened to me change your mind about getting married.  If you aren’t gonna go through with it do it because you don’t want to do it.”  At that moment her phone buzzed in her pocket.  She pulled it out slowly, almost dreading to see who was texting her at this time of night.  As she opened it, tears began pouring down her eyes and a smile crept onto her face.  She could do nothing but slide the phone to John.  He picked it up and read out loud the message that was there; “Hey babe, you were right, Tommy did drag us to a strip club.  Didn’t like it there.  Got a cab and coming home to spend time with my real best friend.  Love you.” 

He handed her the phone back, stared at her for a second and just laughed.  He began laughing so hard all the other patrons looked over, a terrified look in their eyes.  “Wow, it feels nice to see something like that.”  He finishes his coffee and only then does he look out the window to see the skyline glowing with a light amber light.  “Wow, we talked all night,” his voice grows quiet, “shit!  You’re getting married today.”  His eyes grow wide as he pours the cold coffee down his throat.  “We gotta get you to… wait… did you ever tell me where you were getting married.”
            “No,” she looks up to him, his frantic energy reminding her of her father.  “You wanna come?  I could use a friend there.  Plus it would piss Karen off.  She’ll have to redo the entire seating arrangement.”  A giggle left her throat. 

“I would love to.”  He grinned softly.  “I’m gonna have to stop by my house though to get a suit.  Wanna be my bodyguard?”

“Yes, definitely.”  They dropped some money on the table, and as they walked out of the diner, in which they had spent the entire night talking, their clothes finally dry, both could finally breathe anew for the first time.  Today was the beginning of their new lives.  His as a divorcee, and her as a happily married woman.