Everything at home was all wrong. He and Melanie were dug deep in their separate trenches and fighting a quiet war of attrition. The house grew chill with words and accusations unspoken. Frosty weeks went by. Eggshells crunched underfoot. Gradually the air thawed and small overtures were attempted. The subject of adoption was raised. But by then they were emotionally exhausted and physically indifferent.
Occasionally they reached for each other in the night, but even their sex was tired. Melanie’s body was present but her head was elsewhere. They rarely laughed in bed anymore. They barely talked. Their connection was full of misunderstood static. Most nights they lay back to back, Melanie hard done by and misunderstood, Erik a useless testicular failure.
Night after night, they tossed and turned their covers to mush until Melanie caved, took a pill and slept. Only when she was breathing slow and deep did Erik put the pill that was Daisy on his tongue and swallow.
The best of you is stuck in Lancaster with that bitch.
True. And now the bitch had taken up quiet residence in the folds of his brain. He let her stay, a one-woman Greek chorus observing as he went about his day at work, willingly talking back to him whenever he silently talked to her. Asking questions. Helping work out a problem. At night, he imagined her voice softer, asking different kinds of questions. Listening and nodding thoughtfully as he talked out other problems. Her hands cupped for whatever he wanted to put in them.
All the same, even as he idled away the time in imaginary conversations, he never once envisioned the crucial confrontation he ought to have had with Daisy. He never went back in time to rearrange events. To imagine himself walking into the kitchen of her apartment and saying to David, “You need to leave.” Going upstairs and hearing what she had to say. Or even making his way to her as she smoked on the back steps. The next day at dawn. A week later. Even a year later.
No hypothetical do-over for the calls he didn’t return and the letters he didn’t answer. No yelling at her, cursing at her, telling her he hated her. He took only the best of the best and constructed an idealized castle in the air, suspended in present tense in a parallel universe. Just Daisy hanging around being Daisy.
He managed his thoughts with astounding discipline. He was almost smug about the rules. Casual mental musings were allowed. Wallowing would not be tolerated. Sexual horseplay was punishable by death.
It worked well for a couple weeks. Like a chaste Sir Galahad, he made do with the memory of their bond, their soulful friendship, their effortless support of one another and the comfort her presence always brought him. He kept alive her keen intelligence, her humor and wit, and her astonishing talents as a dancer. He consoled himself with his dumb, made-up conversations, and managed to keep the recollection of his physical relationship with Daisy locked away in a stone fortress. Every now and then he would stick an extra pillow behind him and pretend she was snugged up against his back. Her hip bone softly poking him. His heart calm under her palm.
It was all he allowed.
Until now.
At some point you just gotta start living the truth of who you are and what you feel.
Miles’s offhand remark was a bowling ball, sending his stringent rules skittering and spinning. The stone walls Erik so carefully built around the ardent memories were crumbling. Through a chink in the stones Daisy appeared and crooked her finger at him.