Coda (Songs of Submission #9)(2)

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 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 for someone else, but she’d leave with distraction and indifference. 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.

chapter 2.

MONICA

I missed two things.

I missed my freedom, and I missed slavery.

I was 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 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, so I loved the man who’d replaced him. He was everything I’d almost lost in that f*cking 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?” Jonathan’s 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 copilot for the day took my rolling suitcase and stowed it underneath the plane.

“Really?” Jonathan sounded as awake as if he’d had 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’m 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 by the small sound of my own voice.

“I don’t give a f*ck 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’d promised myself I’d never forget what Jessica had done to him, yet there I was, serial-bailing and giving him attitude about it. “It’s the same place as always,” I said, backpedalling as I snapped my seat belt. “I’m fine.”

“Maybe you are,” he said, then his tone changed to sound more pensive. “Maybe you are.”

He hung up, and I was left with an oddly shaped emptiness.

Jonathan loved me. I never questioned that. His love was in everything he did. I heard it in his voice and felt it when he f*cked me. Even when he took me like a stranger and reveled in hurting me, there was love in his abandon.

I also didn’t question his commitment in what he’d thought were the last moments of his life. I was worthy of his love. I’d earned it, and he’d earned mine. We’d earned the easy part and the hard part. Most couples don’t face life-and-death tests of their love until they’re old and grey, or until they had children in middle school, but he and I had been put through the fire unprepared and come out stronger.

Yet we’d missed the basics, and they weighed on me. I constantly forgot that we loved each other because of the daily misunderstandings and confusions.

Like buying our house, which had been a series of misspoken desires, concessions, and bitter words left unspoken. Like water flowing downhill, it had been chosen via the path of least resistance. I didn’t even remember choosing our real estate agent. I just remembered her showing up.

“So,” she had said pertly. Her name was Wendy. It suited her. “I understand you want to get moving on this before Mrs. Drazen goes to Paris?”

I sat next to Jonathan on his couch, frozen in shock. “Paris? I didn’t say I was going.”

“You’re going. It’s a huge opportunity.” He’d turned back to the agent, who wore a decal of a smile. “She’s the opening act for—”

“Nobody,” I interrupted. “I’m not going. So anyway, no.”

Like any real estate agent in Los Angeles, Wendy had been perky, perfect coiffed, and blandly unthreatening. She’d come highly recommended for her discretion, her taste, and her ability to seamlessly manage massive amounts of money.

“What kind of house are you looking for?” she asked.

“Kind of house?” I asked, stalling.

Jonathan had been out of the hospital for a month, and we’d spent it managing a heart transplant. Appointments. Doctors. Medical procedures I didn’t understand. Big pills in little boxes. A diet and exercise regimen that made me shudder. And Jonathan himself, my husband, felt shaky and unsure. I woke up most mornings feeling unqualified to live my life.