Just the Way I Like it Shea Duffy

from 2020 Vibrato

I Mean You No Harm Honor Wood

JUST THE WAY I LIKE IT

Shea Duffy

The word ‘divorce’ always seemed so permanent. Sure, we fought a lot more than most. But it had never been out of anger. No, no, it had never been like that.

It’s not like I had any choice. If she wanted a divorce, she was getting a divorce, even if her life depended on it. She always got what she wanted, but I guess this kind of thing was different. This was not up for discussion. This was something I had to be okay with; losing her was something I had to be okay with.

My index finger traced the nearly invisible stitching on my navy slacks where the tailor had sewn up a tiny rip near my hip bone. I loved wearing suits. I loved the feeling of commanding the room’s attention when I walked in, knowing that my outfit, head to toe, was as much as my secretary’s monthly rent. A suit brings power to the weakest of men. I was certainly not weak, yet, still, a navy suit and brown shoes always made me the most powerful man in the room.

Strangely enough, we had met at a gas station in Hillsborough. I noticed her in my rearview mirror at the green light before the dirt road merged into the freeway. I almost crashed into the blue bumper in front of me, and, without thinking, I signaled left and switched lanes. Of course, I did this only to avoid love-tapping that tacky blue Suburban that braked as frequently as the school bus that peels out of my neighborhood each morning. North Carolina should really make drivers' tests more difficult to pass. Somehow, we ended up at the same gas station 36 miles from Charlotte, from home. I remember the way her eyes burned a hole in my navy suit as she pumped her gas. She was bold, always the one to make the first move or start the first fight; on the contrary, she was never the first to apologize. The night of our second date, three weeks after our gas station run-in, she told me she loved me. She was my obsession, but I was hers too. We just worked.

There is something so empty about wearing a suit when the only people you have to impress are a lawyer and a judge. She was so late, almost 25 minutes now, but that didn’t surprise me. Nothing about her ever surprised me. She was so unpredictable that I had grown to recognize her impulsive, spontaneous patterns, like when she leaves in the middle of the night to sleep at her sister’s house or how, bimonthly, she throws out all the food in the refrigerator so that she can finally make it past day four of the Whole30 diet. I scanned my surroundings. No one else in the courtroom seemed to notice she was absent, but, then again, everyone else was so focused on the papers in front of them that I’m sure they didn’t even notice me either. For someone so insistent on the divorce, she should have been on time. Deep down, I was hopeful that she had perhaps changed her mind, that perhaps the judge was about to get a call that canceled the entire procession. “Go home, Luke,” they would say, and minutes later, I would be home with her where I belonged.

I remember the night that I thought everything might be okay. It was a Saturday, two weeks after she hastily set the manila envelope on the tiny little table by the door that she had insisted on painting eggshell blue. I hated that table. I thought it was tacky and cheap, like her collectible snow globes that sat on the windowsill and the pink plastic hangers she used to hang her old sorority T-shirts on her side of the closet. She knew I hated that table, but like most things were with her, she got her way. Perhaps I was always too scared of losing her to challenge her authority. I guess, in the end, that didn’t matter.

It was a Saturday. As if nothing were out of the ordinary, she tautly sat on her chair, her head turned away from the door. That was her chair. She was a wooden puppet

missing its strings, stiffly arranged like a damaged marionette. Her face was emotionless but her eyes bright, perhaps from tears or perhaps because she had fallen in love with another man. I knew that the ivory dress she wore took 15 total minutes to zip up. She had recently gained weight but refused to acknowledge it. I often noticed her weight, but secretly, in my head, in moments when she rolled on top of me in her sleep and I instinctively reached for my inhaler, or when she had to trade in her racing ski boots from college for ones with a little more support. But I would never say anything. It had never been like that with us.

“You look beautiful,” I told her. “Do you like the dress?” No response. I wasn’t surprised. Petty and cruel, she was a master of the silent treatment. She found pleasure in this dance, this game that only she knew the rules to.

She did look beautiful. I had given her that dress as a gift not long ago. I loved her in that dress, and it seemed as though she had lost a little weight since the last time we spoke. There was a cold silence in the air, and it never crossed my mind that perhaps she was waiting for someone else, a businessman who had booked a hotel suite that overlooked Charlotte, perhaps, or a renowned chef who brought her roses that he had sprayed with cologne in the car and opened the door for her and pulled away when she tried to kiss him even though there was nothing more that he wanted. She didn’t love me anymore.

But on the other hand, maybe her game had developed a new set of rules. Maybe this was all for me. Maybe she was begging me to grab a match and torch the divorce papers into the cloudy atmosphere, and then light the candle that sat a little too close to the wrinkled charcoal duvet, a wedding gift from her controlling, possessive mother, (whom I despised, but she loved more than anyone) and make up the only way we knew how.

I imagined her slipping that dress over her pale, grey-toned skin and admiring herself in the mirror that separated her bathroom from mine. Perched at the vanity her father built her when she turned sixteen, she always applied her makeup using the tangerine light the sun broadcast across our room. Champagne eyeshadow came first, then powdered, tulip-scented blush, swept across bloated, shimmery cheeks. I could imagine her hand shaking as she painted her lips pink with the lipstick she wore every day—this was always the hardest part for her. An invisible two-week layer of dust coated the applicator, so she wet a Q-tip and wiped off the surface. Perfection. She looked just the way I liked her to, and it wasn’t even for me. After all, she didn’t love me anymore.

“You look beautiful,” I repeated. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I didn’t dare ask her to dinner. Our marriage was too far gone. There was nothing I could say or do to fix it.

“You look beautiful,” I now whispered, as though I were talking to myself. That’s how it felt, at least. Going from talking to someone every minute of every day to being masked by silence is a pain more excruciating than being choked to death, I can imagine.

If she had responded, maybe things would have been okay, but we both knew that they weren’t going to be okay. Sometimes things aren’t okay, and I would have to learn to deal with that. We may have lost our love and lust, our rage and passion, but that didn’t mean I had to lose her. I sighed. Why could she never just… cooperate with me? We fought more than most couples. We lacked the communication, the collaboration that might have quenched the thirst of our dying relationship. When we were not splayed across the sheets of our king-sized bed, we always seemed to be bitter with one another. More often than not, she was bitter with me. I couldn’t stay mad at her for more than an hour, but, deep within me, a fire broiled at the thought of her stepping out the door and never looking back. She always wanted to see the world, to run through the sand of the Outer Banks, singing with the seagulls, to fly through Costa Rica’s lush rain forests, to shout from the stands of the Plaza de Toros, to dance with a stranger in an Annecy marketplace, to stomp grapes at the Marchesi di Barolo and

wrap her legs around my shoulders as I galloped through hilly vineyard plains. I was within and without the realm of her love. I was simply not enough.

I moved closer to her, slowly, as though I was approaching an uncaged raven that, triggered by the slightest of movements, would soar towards the face of the sun, towards a blissful, unknown infinity.

“You look so beautiful…so, so beautiful,” I sang. “You are my beautiful angel, my perfect doll…just give me one more chance and I will paint the sky for you. Can’t you just give me one chance one more chance?”

Silence.

“Say something, please. I’m b-begging you to say something, anything.” My voice trembled. I was scared of myself, scared of the love I had for her, scared that the most enchanting thing in the world would slip through my fingers. “Say my name,” I said, and I noticed I was beginning to scream, a scream that might have rattled the foundations of this broken household if I had not been shackled by my devotion. “Say my name like you used to say my name, say my name like I’m yours and only yours. Say something… please. PLEASE!”

Silence. She was gone. I had lost her forever and there was nothing I could do about it. I had to pack up my things, I had to leave this place before my own obsession hunted me down.

Taking one last glance at the beautiful being that graced the living room, I walked towards the hall closet. I removed the wooden hanger on which a Neiman-Marcus garment bag hung alongside my winter coats, buttoned my jacket and put on my black gloves that rested on that eggshell blue table. ‘The Divorce Table,’ I would now call it.

Our eyes met, but I looked away. I couldn’t bear the thought of her looking at me and seeing only a holograph of the man she once loved. If I turned my head, he would disintegrate into a weak man in a navy suit, a Cinderella story with a not-so-magical ending. But this was okay. I wanted, needed her to love me and not the man I once was. We were not the same.

With caution, I unzipped that stubborn zipper and watched her dress fall down to the Persian carpet that blanketed the scratched brown wood. I hated this part, the part when my hard work went to waste. I didn’t spend hours learning to apply perfect, clump-free mascara the way she always did for nothing. I closed her eyes with my index finger and grunted. The fabric on my glove had started to pill. I would have to ask my secretary to buy me new ones. I retrieved a grapefruit-scented face wipe out of my pocket and erased her skin until her emaciated, naked flesh stared back at me. I loved when she didn’t wear makeup, but I loved it even more when she did. Now, I could apply it just the way I liked it, without the blue eyeliner she scraped across her waterline or the much too dark bronzer she packed into the crevices of her cheekbones. Perfect, just the way I liked it. Just the way I liked it.

“You look beautiful,” I muttered. Possibly out of habit but probably just out of pure temptation, my lips met hers, but she didn’t kiss me back. I guess that’s how it is when people don’t love you anymore, they stop kissing you back. She didn’t love me anymore. She didn’t love me anymore, not anymore.

It will be okay. It has to be okay. Everything is okay.

I carefully placed her in the black garment bag alongside her dress and zipped it close. She could only sleep when it was pitch black and the thermostat read 68 degrees. I checked the temperature. She would be sleeping well tonight.

I flipped off the lights in our house and stepped down the brick stairs leading up to the entrance, taking a long glance at the inviting closet door.

“Goodnight, honey,” I called after her as I locked the front door behind me. “I love you, forever and always. You are mine, forever and always. I love you.”