Thirty Six: Playing Games
It was a habit for me to find whatever place Gabrielle was in and to enter it pretending I had a reason to be there. If she was reading in the living room, I decided I wanted to watch television in there. If she was helping my mom cook in the kitchen, I was suddenly starving.
As soon as I saw Gabrielle, from my view through the kitchen windows, step outside in a bikini, I was running down to the bedroom I shared with my wife to tear through my drawers in search of a clean pair of swimming trunks.
I appeared next to her on the poolside with a towel tucked under my arm, sunglasses masking my stare, and wearing old red bathing suit. Gabrielle was already wet and laying on a beach chair with a stack full of books next to her. Her eyes were closed as she took in the warm, May sun.
“I was hoping to get some privacy,” I lied as I sat down on a chair next to her. I never wanted to make my stalking too obvious. “I didn’t realize you were out here.”
She sat up when she heard me and used her hand to block the sun from her eyes. I tried to focus on her face and not on her body.
“I came out to study,” she explained. “I was hoping for some peace and quiet too… but seeing as you’re out here, I’ve lost all hope.”
I snorted at her lame insult at my talkative nature (although I wasn’t really very talkative anymore) and reclined in my chair so I could attempt at a tan. Each and every year I tried to rid myself of my paleness, but most years I mostly burned.
“All you do is study,” I remarked. “If you ask me, you’re wasting your life away reading books and trying to impress teachers who probably don’t even give a damn.”
“This… coming from the guy who doesn’t do anything all day except for sleep and eat. Alright then.”
“Hey,” I defended, feeling hurt by her insult but not willing to give her the satisfaction of showing it. “I watch television too. I’d rather die knowing I spent my days memorizing Chris Farley skits than memorizing…” I glanced at her stack of books to read a title. ”The economic imbalance of America.”
“You have no ambition,” she sighed.
She was right. I really didn’t anymore. I was lazy and unproductive. While my brothers and I were supposed to be recording the album, Zac was so busy with wedding plans and I was so depressed in general that some days we didn’t even enter the studio. Some days we worked for 12 hours straight and got an entire track done… but those days were rare.
We sat there for awhile on the side of the pool- she reading one of her books and highlighting every other word, and me pretending I wasn’t staring at her through my dark sunglasses. She only set her books aside when her cell phone rang. I, of course, laid there listening to her half of the conversation.
“Hey there… oh, no, I went home for the weekend… yep, just spending quality time with the family and trying to study for my last final on Monday… a goodbye dinner? I don’t know… well that’s a nice offer, Nate, thanks but… I guess I don’t have a good reason… alright fine… I’ll reserve Monday night just for you, are you happy now?… alright, sounds amazing… I’ll talk to you then… bye Nate.”
She laughed into the phone before clicking it shut. I wanted to demand she tell me who exactly on the other line and then insist she cancel her Monday night dinner with this elusive Nate character, but instead I just casually asked, “Who was that?”
“This guy from school,” she replied as she took her book back into her lap and got right back into studying. Unless we were fighting, she never said more to me than absolutely necessary. I hated it.
“Got a date, huh?” I teased, trying not to let her see how much it bothered me.
“Sure do,” she said, flashing me a smile. It was strange. You see, Gabrielle never dates people. She avoids all men at all costs. Sometimes if a man at school was pursuing her, and they always did, my family would tease her about it and she would deny that anything was going on. But there she was grinning about a date to me? Was she actually rubbing it in my face? It didn’t seem right.
“Now you just have to hope he doesn’t spill his drink all over you,” I replied, trying to remind her of her date with me many years ago in order to help her remember that I was the man she loved first and most. I was trying to make her as nostalgic as I always felt.
“Oh no,” she said, standing up to gather her books and run away from me like she always did. “He’s quite smooth, Taylor.”
I rolled my eyes at her back as she scurried inside with her pile of books to leave me fuming in my jealousy. I sat out there for another ten minutes in order to make it seem like she wasn’t my sole reason for sunbathing before I threw in the towel, literally and figuratively, and went back inside.
“Isaac!” I screamed as I walked through the sliding glass doors in the kitchen looking for my older brother. I’d decided that since Isaac was closest with Gabrielle, other than my mother, I would tell him to advise her not to go on her date. As far as I knew, she hadn’t been on a date since she was with me and I was not ready for it yet.
“Isaac! Where are you! We need to talk!” I screamed as I threw my towel on a kitchen chair and sauntered into the kitchen to look for a snack. I watched out the kitchen window as I saw Gabrielle getting into her beat-up Blazer in nothing but a pair of jeans and a bathing suit top. My knees almost buckled beneath me at the sight and I cursed myself for being so fucking attracted to her. Did she have to do that? A chick in a bikini driving a truck… it didn’t get much hotter than that.
“What?” Isaac appeared, coming up from the basement stairs where our studio was. “Come downstairs. I have a melody that I think you’ll like. I’ll show you.”
I followed him down into the dark studio, opening a package of Ho-Hos, and flopped down on a couch. I tried to listen to the chorus he was singing and playing on the acoustic guitar, but I was too distracted with thoughts of Gabrielle and her mystery man. I don’t think I heard a note he played.
“What did you think?” he asked when he finished, setting his guitar aside.
“Great,” I nodded. “I like it. We’ll have to… work on it later.”
“Do you think that key is okay? Because if you don’t, we can move it to the key of E. I was thinking that might be better. What do you think?”
“Sounds fine to me but… whatever you think,” I bullshitted my way through the conversation. Usually I was very opinionated about our music, but lately I just didn’t really care.
Isaac shrugged. “What do we need to talk about?”
“Gabrielle,” I said casually, grabbing the guitar from next to him and plucking at the strings to tune it. The one thing I did notice while he was playing was that the strings were a bit off. I can proudly say that I have perfect pitch and things like that get under my skin.
“What about her?”
“She’s going on a date… on Monday night… and she actually admits that it’s a date, that’s what’s weird. She’s going with some guy from school… Nate or something. Basically, I think you should advise her not to go.”
Isaac frowned. “Why shouldn’t she?”
“Because!” I sighed. How did I explain without making my obsession with her far too obvious? “Isaac, she isn’t ready to date. It’s not the time in her life… what with graduating from school… she’ll probably never see him again now that she’s done with OSU. She’s only going to get hurt again… I can’t let that happen again. She can’t handle that.”
“Since when do you care about Gabrielle’s well being? You’ve spent the last year almost tearing her down,” Isaac said and arched an eyebrow. “She hasn’t gone on a date in four years… when do you suspect she will be ready to date, Taylor?”
“Not right now. I’m just worried about her, okay?” I lied. “You know how she is. I don’t want to see her getting attached to this guy and then never see him again and have her heart broken. It’s not healthy.”
“I think we should be glad that she’s ready to actually go on a date. It will be good for her, Tay.”
“Isaac!” I sighed, tossing the guitar down next to him and receiving an annoyed look from him since I was roughing around his instrument. “Can you just take my word on this? I just have a feeling that right now is not the right time… and you’re the only one she’d listen to besides Mom and you know how badly Mom wants her to date so I’m not even going to bother telling her to talk to Gabrielle about this…”
“So let me get this straight,” he cleared his throat and stood up from his chair to pace the studio as he spoke. “You are telling me that after four years of being alone, Gabrielle is not ready to go one date and she may get her heart broken because she won’t be going to school with this guy anymore… so why start something?”
“Precisely.”
“Why don’t you just admit that you can’t handle watching your beloved Gabrielle go on her first date without you?”
“Fuck you, Isaac,” I spat. The least he could do would be to pretend to believe me. Did he have to make it so damn clear that my love for Gabrielle was that obvious- that I was that jealous?
“She’s a twenty-two year old woman! It’s about time she dated, Taylor. I know you want her all for yourself, but that’s selfish and you just have to let go.”
“Fuck you… fine then. I’m done with this conversation,” I grumbled, getting up from the couch and stomping towards the basement stairs. I didn’t want to talk about my Gabrielle issues with him. He wouldn’t understand. No one understood.
“You’re going to cuss me out and storm off because I’m saying I think it’s unfair for you to act so territorial over Gabrielle? Alright then. Go ahead, Taylor. If you feel justified…”
“I don’t feel fucking justified, Ike,” I spat over my shoulder as I stomped up the stairs. “I know I’m not fucking justified… but that doesn’t mean I hate this any less.”
“You lost her a long time ago, Taylor!” Isaac shouted after me. “Stop waking up each morning and acting like it happened all over again! Spend one day without mourning losing her!”
That’s how things work with my family. Let’s look at this in technical terms, shall we? There are twelve members of my family- including Gabrielle and not including myself. Each of these members feels it is their duty to call me on my love for Gabrielle at least once a year. All year long they’re quiet about it… pretending to believe me- pretending to believe that I’ve moved on from Gabrielle and accepting my repression. But once a year each and every member confronts me about it- even my own wife. If you figure right, that means I deal with these conversations at least once a month. May was just Isaac’s month, I sighed as I slammed the studio door closed.
That evening Natalie flew out to Georgia to help Zac’s fiancée- Kate- put some final touches on the coming wedding. She set out outfits for my children for three days, gave Ezra kiss after kiss, and handed the baby off to me before my sister drove her to the airport. It was one of the only times that I was left with the children on my own. She’d left me with Ezra when he was younger, but I suppose I had gone downhill since then- mental health-wise.
I stood there in my kitchen with the children I’d never learned to care for on my own lost and overwhelmed. I loved my children, and I resented them. My children were what kept me from Gabrielle. Ezra was the reason I lost her, and they were the reason she refused to run away with me. They were the road block that I couldn’t help but resent.
“I’m hungry,” was the first thing Ezra said to me when the headlights of Jessica’s SUV disappeared down the driveway. “What are you making us for dinner?”
“I don’t cook. Mom cooks,” I replied. I used to cook… many years ago I loved to cook. But over the years I’d become reliant on a wife who loved to cook for her husband. I think she realized that I didn’t appreciate her love like she wanted me to, but I could appreciate her stuffed eggplant. Cooking was how she compensated. She was horrible when we first got married, but with my mom as her guide, she got pretty good.
“Well I need dinner!” Ezra whined as he pulled the fridge door open and looked inside. “You can’t just let us starve, you know.”
“Let’s go make Grandma cook,” I concluded as I dragged Ezra and Penelope from my kitchen, down the long hallway to my mother’s kitchen. She sat at the kitchen table helping Zoe with math homework.
“Mom, did you already cook dinner?” I asked. Usually my little family just ate with my large family and Natalie didn’t even have to worry about dinner, but sometimes things were so hectic everyone ate at different times.
“We had pizza like an hour ago, Tay,” my Mom said. “You missed it. It’s completely gone. I think Mackenzie had like five pieces.”
“He’s not a bottomless pit like I am, Mom. You really should teach that kid portion control,” I smirked.
“I’m hungry Grandma,” Ezra said, crawling into her lap.
“Can you cook them something?” I sighed. “Natalie didn’t have time to make dinner before she left.”
“Why can’t you? You know how to cook. Don’t you have spaghetti or something down in your kitchen?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t look. Can you just watch them for a bit and make them some dinner?” I asked, setting Penelope down in the middle of the kitchen and getting ready to flee. Pawning my children off on my family was usually the easiest thing to do. I didn’t have to feel guilty about how much I resented them if I couldn’t see them.
Usually my mom was happy to help me out, so it surprised me when she put Ezra down from her lap and shook her head. She cleared her throat and replied, “My therapist told me that I shouldn’t always take your responsibilities away from you. She said I’m disabling you. You need to make them dinner yourself.”
My mother had everyone in the family seeing therapists. She was worried about everyone’s mental health. She sees her own therapist once a week and each time she comes home from the therapist’s office she always has these crazy new ways to treat us.
“Well my therapist told me when I get overwhelmed to pawn my children off on my mother,” I lied, smirking at her.
“You’re a liar, Taylor Hanson,” she shook her head. “Take your children. Go cook them something. Be their father, Taylor.”
I sighed and stood there for a second hoping she’d change her mind and take pity on me. Eventually I have no choice but to gather my hungry children, walk back down the airy hallway to my little house, and boil a pot of water. I was not looking forward to playing Mr. Mom for three days. I halfway wondered if Natalie hadn’t just left to help Kate, but if it had been some ingenious plan to teach me to take care of my kids as well. I wondered if her therapist had been giving her crazy ideas too.
Once I found everything I needed for dinner, things started going smoothly and I was pretty impressed with myself. I gave Ezra some spaghetti with sauce and then set Penelope in her high chair and cut the spaghetti up really small for her like Natalie always did. Then I sat back to enjoy a celebratory beer at a job well done.
“I don’t want anymore…” Ezra said after he took only a few bites of his pasta.
“Yeah right. I just spent half an hour making that for you and picking the tomato chunks out of your sauce. You’re going to eat more than that,” I told him and prayed he wouldn’t throw a tantrum. The thing is, I always try to escape the room when one of my children starts crying or throwing a fit and so I had absolutely no clue as to how to deal with temper tantrums.
“My tummy hurts…” he complained.
“I don’t want to hear it,” I sighed. My wife spoiled my children and I was going to prove that I, unlike her, could lay down the law. “You have to eat everything on that plate and then you can be done.”
“I don’t want to…” Ezra whined as tears formed in his eyes. Tears turned into crying which turned into three-year-old shrieking. “My tummy hurts! I’m all done!”
“I don’t care. No you’re not. You’re not getting up until you finish,” I said, pushing his chair into the table a little more so he could reach his bowl better. I knew a faking child when I saw one and I was certain he was playing games with me. I would not be manipulated by a three-year-old.
“No!” he screamed and then slid out of his chair and under the table. I stood there trying to figure out what to do. Did parents still spank their children anyway? I felt pathetic realizing I had no clue how raise my children on my own. I hardly even knew what discipline methods worked for my children or what their rules were. How had I let myself become so disconnected from the children I had once fallen in love with the day they were born? Did I really resent them so much that I had become completely inactive in their lives?
“Ezra…” I spoke calmly, squatting and looking at him under the table. “You need to crawl out now, sit back at the table, and finish your dinner. Then you can watch a movie before bed, but only if you finish your dinner,” I bribed.
“I have a tummy ache,” he moaned as he sobbed.
Before I could yell at him again to stop bullshitting me and start obeying, I heard a voice behind me.
“Taylor, what is your problem?” Gabrielle’s voice filled the room and I turned to see her standing there with her hands on her hips. She stood in a long, maroon skirt and a simple white tank top. She looked like some sort of beautiful, hippy princess.
“What…” I started to reply but was distracted by the sounds of my son vomiting underneath the kitchen table- all over the tile floor.
“What the hell is going on in here…?” she muttered as she squatted next to me and looked under the table at a crying Ezra.
“Oh shit…” I muttered.
“What the hell, Taylor?”
“I thought he was just lying about his stomach hurting! I was trying to be firm!” I began to argue although in retrospect I guess I should have been soothing my sick child.
“Damnit, Taylor…” Gabrielle sighed and reached her arms out to Ezra. “C’mere, Ez… come over here and lets get you upstairs to a bathroom… it’s okay hunnie.”
I felt terribly foolish standing there as Gabrielle took Ezra into her arms and rubbed his back, rushing him up the stairs to the bathroom. Penelope sat at her high chair with a confused expression- watching me as I sat down on the floor and put my face into my knees.
“Fuck!” I suddenly screamed, trying to release the surge of emotion that took over me. “Fuck it… I fuck everything up,” I moaned quietly into my knees. I was trying to do the right thing with Ezra, trying to raise him right, trying to make good parenting decisions and I just fucked it all up. I let my sick son crawl under the table to throw up… didn’t take him in my arms and soothe him like I should have… like Natalie would have. I was slowly but surely fucking up parenthood completely.
After I sat there listening to Ezra upchucking into the toilet upstairs and wallowing in my self-pity, I finally got up and put on a pair of rubber gloves. There was nothing left to do but clean up vomit. I began to wonder if that was all I could offer my little family anymore.
Gabrielle put Ezra to bed for me. She put him in clean pajamas, put a trash bin next to his bed in case he got sick in the middle of the night, and turned the fan to gently blow on him. Somehow I managed to get Penelope to bed without messing that up too. I collapsed on my couch downstairs once she was in her crib.
“We need to talk,” Gabrielle said, walking down the stairs and sitting down on the couch next to me. I noticed that she glanced into the kitchen to see if everything was cleaned up, which it was. “First of all… totally off topic from why I came over here, what happened with Ezra?”
“I fucked up,” I shrugged, staring at the rain dripping down the windows outside.
“Can you elaborate?”
“What is else is there to say? He was telling me he felt sick, I disregarded his complaints thinking he was just trying to get out of dinner, and he ended up throwing up just as you walked in. I fucked up.”
“You fucked up because you don’t know your children well enough to know that Ezra loves spaghetti… it’s his favorite food. If he was complaining about feeling sick, he must have really felt sick. Even I know that,” she said smugly but then I noticed she softened a bit after she said it. “I’m just saying… you’ve been so distant from your children for so long now, Taylor.”
“Don’t you think I know that…? You’re not my therapist, you know,” I grumbled, getting up and walking into the kitchen. I needed a cigarette, but seeing as smoking is off limits inside my house, I grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge instead. I needed something to ease my nerves.
“Of course you’re going to screw up the first time you have your children all by yourself… you’re only human. That doesn’t mean you’re always going to fuck up. It takes time,” she coached as I popped the cap off of my beer and wandered back into the living room again.
“Whatever. You’re also not my own personal motivational speaker,” I growled. I knew she was trying to be nice, but she didn’t understand what battles I was fighting inside myself about my family. She couldn’t possibly understand how I was feeling about my children. She didn’t realize how hard it was for me to be around them.
“You drink so much these days…” she sighed as I sat down next to her and took a long sip of my Corona.
“Nor are you my AA counselor.”
“Can you please remove the metal rod from your ass and treat me with some respect, Taylor?” she snapped and rested her head against the couch, making eye contact with me for the first time in a long time. “I feel like I’m tiptoeing around you when I talk to you- trying not to set you off.”
I laughed arrogantly and replied, “When you do talk to me that is. You don’t even give me the time of day unless I piss you off, Gabrielle. Why are you over here, anyway? What do you want?”
“I want to know why you told Isaac to tell me not to go out to dinner with this guy, Nate,” she stated boldly. “I want to know why you have to cause drama just because I want to go on one single date.”
“I’m not trying to cause drama!” I gasped.
“Yes you are…” she shook her head angrily. “You’re trying to stir things up. I know you. I know that you are…”
“I’m not trying to stir things up, Gabrielle,” I spat, truly believing that I wasn’t. I knew that I was jealous of this Nate fellow, but I didn’t think that I was trying to cause drama just for the sake of causing drama. I said what I said to Isaac not to hurt or help Gabrielle, but because I couldn’t imagine anyone else having her but me.
“Then what are you trying to do? Because this evening I get home and Isaac tells me that you don’t want me to go out with Nate because you love me too much to stand it. How fucking hard is it, Taylor, to keep your emotions to yourself? Why can’t you just leave things be! Why do you have to go throwing the love word around and chasing me and-”
Isaac had some fucking nerve telling her that. He knew quite well that I hadn’t admitted to feeling jealous and protective of Gabrielle. He had called me out on it, but I never admitted to it and so telling Gabrielle that I felt that way was completely wrong. Prick…
“I didn’t say that, Gab,” I sighed. “I told Isaac that I didn’t want you to go on a date because I didn’t want to see you get hurt. That’s what I said. Ask him yourself. He’s the one who brought up me loving you… I didn’t speak a word about that to him. I’m not trying to start anything.”
“You’re worried about me?” she cried incredulously. “Taylor, you’re an asshole to me! A complete asshole. Don’t you act like a fucking saint.”
“I’m not actually worried about you,” I rolled my eyes. “I spoke to Isaac because I love you and refuse to share you. But I didn’t tell Isaac that was the reason so you can’t act like I brought it up. I was trying to keep the whole loving you thing on the DL like you’ve asked me to.”
“Taylor…”
“I’m willing to stop talking about how much I love you, Gabrielle, but it’s impossible for me to just stop loving you completely. I can’t control that.”
“Stop telling me you love me. Why can’t we just go back to how it used to be for all those years… can’t you just go back to pretending you’re okay?”
I figured I had nothing to lose. I really had nothing left to lose. So what if I lost the marriage I hated- the children I resented? Gabrielle knew how much I loved her. Why continue hiding it? I promised her the previous August that no matter how many times she refused me or how many years passed, I would always love her. It would never change.
“You know I’m sick of pretending,” I asserted. “You know I love you. I didn’t bring it up to Isaac, I didn’t bring it up to you, I’m only telling you because you walked in here and wanted to talk. You want to know the real fucking reason I don’t want you to go out with that guy- even if it’s just something as simple as dinner? Because I still want you more than anything I’ve ever wanted before. I still love you completely.”
“Stop!” she yelled, standing up and glaring down at me. She looked a mixture of scared and angry all at once. I wanted to apologize, to tell her that I wasn’t really the asshole I was starting to seem like. But professing your love time and time again for someone who refused to return it was frustrating and I didn’t have it in me to act sensitive.
“Taylor, can you just stop? I don’t want to hear this! I just want you to move on! Why can’t you just move on… and let me move on!”
“Because we’ll never be happy! We’ll never be completely happy unless we’re together. Tell me that you know I’m right.”
“You’re not right!”
“We’re going around in fucking circles here, Gabrielle! For awhile I stay quiet about how much I love you… I eventually profess my love and you act surprised to hear it. You deny your love for me despite the fact that I know how much you love me too. Won’t you end this fucking cycle?”
“Won’t you? Listen, stay out of my personal life Taylor. Don’t talk about how you feel about me to this family, don’t tell me about it, just… let me move on and forget about you,” she countered, getting up from the couch and standing before me.
“I. Love. You,” was all I could say in reply. It was the only truth I knew. Nothing else in my life seemed to make any sense anymore. The only thing I was absolutely sure about was that I loved Gabrielle Carter with every inch of my soul and so it was all I could say.
“Don’t do this…” she said, her voice quaking.
“I don’t know what else to do…” I said quietly, looking down at the beer in my hands and squeezing my eyes closed for a moment to try and collect my scattered thoughts. “I love you. That’s all I know anymore.”
“You don’t love me…”
“You might be able to get away with convincing me that you don’t love me anymore… you might be able to pull that off, Gab. But you can’t convince me that I don’t love you. It’s the only thing I’m sure of. I know how much I love you.”
“Then I don’t want to hear it. Keep the words to yourself again, Taylor. I don’t want your love, okay?” she stood there trying to seem so strong but to me she seemed so fragile- like she was seconds away from breaking completely. Maybe that’s what I needed her to do the most- to break and let me fix her.
“I love you,” I repeated, rising to my feet.
“Taylor, stop…” her voice was quiet and vulnerable.
“I love you.”
We stood there feet away from each other just staring at each other with mixed emotions filling each of us. I’d imagine we both felt resentful. She was angry at me for complicating things and making it so hard for us to move on. I was angry at her for wanting to move on in the first place. And at the same time, I’d like to think we both felt immense longing for each other- a longing she had convinced even herself didn’t exist. The moment was broken by the crying of Ezra- standing at the top of the stairs looking down on us and holding his stomach.
“I still feel sick, Daddy…”
I glanced back at Gabrielle and she nodded at me to go take care of him.
“Right now you need to go take care of your son,” she said quietly.
I nodded and for the first time in a long time, put him before everything else. I dashed up the stairs and carried him into the bathroom. Once he was back in bed, I drowned my pain in alcohol and the Comedy channel.