memories of grey rooms

He had seen him come in, recognized him only barely, it had been years and he hoped that he would pass on by. It had been a long time. But like clouds off the coast purple with a promise, a half hour or so later john walked over, a drunken rhythm to his saunter. he thought then that time tended to heal most things, but perhaps not wounded prides.

He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to do it here, with these casual acquaintances, ringing him in this position, and publically it was hard to control judgement. But he didn’t want to do it in general. ‘john, do really want to do this now?’ he said before he could start, ‘its been a long time’. After he said it he thought on it, it had been five, maybe six years, ‘half a decade’

‘yes I want to do this now, I don’t care how long its been, you’

He cut him off, ‘why’

The question halted him but a moment, ‘because you fucked my wife.’

He could have sworn the volume of the whole room reduced, probably imagined. But every head in hearing distance turn, involuntary reaction. He could hear the people behind him, his company, their spines straighten. He hadn’t noticed scott, another name and face from a youth that seemed all too far away, behind john, but he could have sworn he heard his teeth set, molars over molars.

He set his drink down and squared his shoulders to him, they weren’t the same height but they were close. ‘if memory serves me, you’d moved out of your house- left your wife and infant daughter- and moved in with some intern from work’. He blocked out the people, he didn’t want this spectacle, but he wasn’t about to go down as the only guilty party, even if he was guilty.

John’s eyes narrowed, that brief moment where to an onlooker it is almost impossible to tell the difference between whether he would scream or cry. The voice that came out was neither, ‘we grew up together, played football together, why would you do it, you knew we were married still’

He couldn’t imagine a universe where any of that shit mattered, or living a life where the temporary comraderie of a playing field lays the chains of some eternal obligation. Then again he couldn’t have imagined this moment, before it happened, and under the haze of some bars buzzing light something that should have receded quietly into nothingness was dredged back.

‘I saw her by chance you know, I wasn’t in atlanta long, a few months, and I saw her in a bar. And we talked for a bit, she was a shell of herself. A ghost man. As any girl would be when left from someone ten years younger. The post partum depression didn’t help, but you being across town in some other girls bed. She was a mess. So I took her out, tried to remind her who she was, still fun. Still sexy. Still a wonder.’

It had started like that, talks and casual drinks and the occasional stories about high school, and sharing songs, or bands or making idle conversation, and then outside that highlands bar through a taxi window it was a kiss, and maybe it had been all the bourbon, or maybe it was the residue of the romance of their youth, or maybe it was just her vicious need to be again, and nights that turned into weeks without thinking it was making out at every red light, and concerts with his fingers strumming against her thighs, and her car, and that alley, and enough dark to keep all the realities at bay and for just a while be, to be again.

‘fuck you man, you don’t know anything about her’.

That wasn’t true. He shrugged. After he suspected it wasn’t about that. John was reasonable enough to understand his complicitness in that moment, drunk and fool, but reasonable, at least he remember him as such. No, he realized this was about something different, this was about January some time later, when the girls in the bar he worked at told him that there was some girl here, and it was about that the near sheer slip under the black crocheted dress, and the fingers that lingered at the stem of the martini glass she had propped herself up on, and the freckles and the curls of her hair, she had worn when she was young. And it was about the silence afterwards, when he never heard from her again.

‘fuck you man,’ john repeated, ‘you had no right’

‘John, you think I didn’t know she was going to go back to you? That you wouldn’t get back together? You’re her husband. You’re a family. She was never going to be with me. I knew that.  Let it go.’

‘Then why’d you do it?’

Without thinking he responded, ‘you might have loved her best, but I loved her first’.

John swung and he batted it away, john was drunker than even his gait had let on, he had him by the front of the shirt, and with a push put him against the wall.

He wasn’t angry, in that moment he felt again the acuteness of that silence. You can’t fill someone up without emptying youself, and that there was going to be a part of him, always in that grey space with her, on top of the sheets, entwined in her quiet breathing and the smooth brown lengths of her skin, caught up in the fragile moment, twittering at the most fragile part, the end, moments before the collapse. He was suddenly tired. And he let john’s shirt go.

‘Go home to your wife john. She loves you, which is more than you deserve, so it needs to be enough.’ For the briefest moments he could taste her again in his mouth ‘it has to be enough.’