You Love Me(You #3)(63)
Phil huffs and he puffs. Literally, he’s lighting a cigarette. “It’s always the same,” he says. “You wanna hide from life and I wanna live it.”
You gawk at him as well you fucking should. “Oh, that’s rich, Phil. Really, really rich. So I suppose you’re the hero because you’re the writer. You humiliated me with your fucking songs and you fuck my best friend and somehow that’s okay because oh right! Phil is an artist!”
This is it, the end of your marriage, and I pump my fist in the air. “You tell him, Mary Kay!”
“And as we all know, artists are gifted. And they need things to write about so I guess I should just bow my head and stock the fridge because music comes first in this house! Never mind me, never mind oh I don’t know… never mind loyalty.” You are trembling now. “She was my best friend. She was like my sister. She was Nomi’s aunt… and you wrecked it. All of it.”
He flicks ashes on a dirty plate. “Yeah,” he says. “Well, that’s one thing the three of us have in common. We deal with you, Emmy. And being in it with you… well, that’s the loneliest kinda lonely there is. Ask Melanda. Ask Nomi. They’ll back me up all night long, babe.”
You march up to him and slap his face and I want to give this show a thousand stars and Phil just shakes his big fat head. He reaches for your hand. You let him hold it and he starts to cry—fake news, fake tears—and he’s groping you and he’s all apologies and he says he didn’t mean it—yes he did—and he’s begging you to forgive him and over and over he says the same thing: “I never wrote a song about her, Em. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
That’s a lie—he sent me the song—and you know that sorry doesn’t cut it but the man is a performer. He’s a good crier. You rub your forehead. You know this man doesn’t understand you and how could he? You’re staring through your glass doors and you’ve wasted the bulk of your life with this artist. You want a new life. A life with me. You said it at Hitchcocks. I didn’t think someone like you existed. I am your fresh start. Me.
Tell him, Mary Kay. Tell him you love me.
Tell him you would be happier in the Nirvana meadow in the tall grass with the one you love, being innocent with me, forever young, forever old, feeding our hungry souls with words, with stories. Tell him you’ve outgrown him and that you can’t go on pretending that any of this fits. Tell him that you wanted it to work for Nomi’s sake, but now you have this friendless unfiltered daughter who wants to read about teenage serial killers and you see the light.
You walk away from him. It’s a step. Literally, metaphorically. You are even closer to the window.
Tell him, Mary Kay. Tell him that he was the love of your young life, that you don’t hate him. You wanted to be on a pedestal and tell him that what hurts the most isn’t that he cheated with Melanda, but that deep down you don’t really care because of how you feel about me, the partner you want, the lover you deserve. Me.
Phil walks to the CD player—you live in the nineties, in the past—and he digs around and he finds what he wants and he plays what he wants and it’s Jeff Fucking Buckley’s voice and it’s Leonard Cohen’s words.
“Hallelujah.”
This is not where we were headed and he cups your face in his hands. “I need you.”
“Phil…”
“I miss you.”
This is why we should have had a full-on fucking affair. He’s getting to you. You want me but I’m here and he’s there. His hands move along your body and you close your eyes and from your lips he draws a kiss and you don’t really care for your rat, do ya? He habitually abuses you with his own lyrics and now he seduces you with Cohen’s, whispering in your ear about faith and there you are, letting him croon a better man’s words as he slides his hand under your skirt.
I clench the bag of popcorn. He is a boa and he unzips your slutty skirt and tightens his grip on your neck and he tells you that you’re a bad girl and he bites your ear and he shreds your tights and somehow he has six hands, eight hands. Your shirt is off and his jeans hit the floor and he’s inside of you—he breaks your throne and pulls your hair—and you moan as if you want that, as if you like that. You pretend to finish—there is no way you liked that—and he lifts you up like the pipe-smoking captain to your legless mermaid. That was our Normal Norman Rockwell painting at the pub and now you’re in it with him, in the cage of his arms, your marriage. He lights another cigarette and he spoons you on the sofa and his ashes hit your tits. You wince and he kisses the places where he burnt you and you do not go together. We do. He puts his butt out in your half-empty cup of coffee and he strokes your Murakami with his nicotine-stained hand, callused fingers. “All right,” he says. “Are you gonna call Layla or do you want me to?”
You laugh like that was funny and you sigh. “Oh come on, Phil. We both know that you’re not gonna call. Can you do tomorrow at one?”
He squeezes you in a way I never have, with his arms and his legs. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Emmy. You’re my girl. I’d die without you. You know that, right?”
You’re gonna let him fuck you again—you’re the second set of teeth—and I turn off my TV but I still see him—the thorns hide in the wreath—and spicy kernels tickle my throat. I choke and up comes all that indigestible popcorn, shooting out of my mouth, and I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I just die underneath.