I’d felt like a foreigner in my own skin, dragging around a sack of muscle and bone held together with medicine. Even after the doctor appointments dwindled and life returned to something that looked like normal, I still hadn’t adjusted to being two people in one body, and my wife knew it. She was drifting away like a bottle bobbing in the surf, tide by tide. She wasn’t Jessica. She’d never leave, at least not for someone else. But she’d leave with distraction and indifference. And at the thought of the lost intimacy, I felt a blade of ice cold rage so thick I had no room for a reaction or an emotion. My head was clear. The anger had pushed out all the clutter. She was mine to lose, but she was mine.
Three days.
MONICA
I missed two things.
I missed freedom, and I missed slavery.
I'd gotten myself caught in a nether region where I couldn’t come and go as I pleased, and I didn’t feel protected.
I was being unfair and I knew it. What man could be expected to keep up Jonathan’s intensity for any length of time? No human could continue to be a raging lion after having their heart ripped out.
So, though we burdened each other with many things, I never burdened him with my longing for my dominant Jonathan. That man was gone. I loved the man who replaced him. He was everything I almost lost in that f**king nightmare of a hospital. He was funny and thoughtful. Gracious and wise. He was still the best lover I’d ever laid my hands on.
“Hello?” His voice was thick with sleep. The sun was just coming up over Caracas, tainting the sky brown.
“I’m coming back early,” I said as I walked across the tarmac toward the Gulfstream. Jacques waved. His temp copilot for the day took my rolling suitcase and stowed it underneath.
“Really?” Jonathan sounded as awake as a gallon of coffee. “I have something for you.”
“But I have to go right into the studio,” I said. “Jerry wants me to work on Forever for this sampler idea he’s—“
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ll walk in the door the same time as if I’d stayed here. I just wanted you to know what I was doing with your plane.”
“Well, thank you.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“Goddess,” he said, and I heard something in his voice I hadn’t heard in half a year. It stopped me on the steps up to the fuselage door.
“Yes.” I was shocked at the small sound of my own voice.
“I don’t give a f**k about the plane.”
“It’ll be fast. I’ll be home by lunch.”
“Text me where you’re going to be.”
“Why?”
“What?”
Fuck. I promised myself I’d never forget what Jessica did to him, yet here I was, serial-bailing on him and giving attitude about it.
“It’s the same studio as always,” I said, backpedalling as I snapped my seatbelt on.
***
I ate a lunch of chicken fingers and a half a radicchio salad in the engineering room. I shot the shit with Jerry and Deshawn. We talked about promoting the sampler, getting beer thrown at me in Caracas as a sign of respect, the roaches in the hotel, the excellent food. Half an hour later, we were back to work. Executives drifted in and out to hear me. Eddie even showed up for fifteen minutes.
The phone had been face down on the baby grand piano; the sheen of it let me know when the glass lit up with a call or text. But I wouldn’t pick it up. I was in the middle of something. Only when I was done did I check it.
—I want to see you—
The text had come ten minutes earlier, when I was in the middle of recording Forever. It was based on a poem I’d written while Jonathan was in the hospital, and I was so angry I imagined myself in an eternal, raging battle with death.
I couldn’t take a text. We were trying to get the last two words right. Forever f**k. It had to sound like a powerful curse, but be muddled, and on key, and gravelly and transcendent, all at the same time. My feet hurt and the foam egg carton pattern on the walls seemed inverted, my brain and eyes were so exhausted.
I couldn’t possibly take a text, even from my husband.
—Where are you?—
Ten minutes later.
—You were supposed to be out two hours ago—
I scrolled through his texts. Jerry and the sound team packed up. I was going to have to deal with this. I had my career. Jonathan knew what it entailed. He didn’t have the right to harass me while I was recording.
I took a deep breath and called him from outside.
“Hi,” I said. The parking lot behind the studio smelled like sweaty ass**le and stale cigarettes.
“You’re out?” Jonathan asked.