Forty: Ralph
I woke up after my drunken episode without even the slightest headache. Hangovers don’t exist for me. It was 9 o’clock and Gabrielle was still sleeping, so I wandered into her kitchen. When she finally got out of bed about half an hour later, I had a plate of French toast cooked for her.
“What… are you doing?” she asked hesitantly.
“Making breakfast?”
“I know but…”
She wanted to ask me why. She wanted to ask me why I had come to her house the night before, why I hadn’t come on to her before I passed out, why I had woken up and cooked a plate of French toast. But she didn’t. She just sat down at her small kitchen table and gratefully accepted the cup of tea I set in front of her. Gabrielle doesn’t like coffee.
“You should probably head home after we eat,” she finally said. “Your wife-”
“My wife is not my top priority right now,” I cut her off, setting the plate of French toast in the center of the table and sitting down next to her to eat. “Take some.”
We were quiet for a moment as we both served ourselves breakfast and smothered our toast in thick maple syrup. And then our eyes locked in a way that told me we were so sick of being so lost.
“I’m sorry,” I spoke quietly.
“It’s okay.”
“I never meant to… I never meant to drive you away from home, Gab. I never meant to let it get that bad… I know I promised to you a long, long time ago that I would let you move on and that I would be okay without you. And I broke that promise. I’m sorry that I drifted so far from that this past year… especially lately. It kills me to know that I made you uncomfortable in your own house and it makes me even angrier at myself that I caused our relationship to become… so negative.”
The speech wasn’t planned. In fact, I don’t think I ever meant to say sorry at all. I had no motives or desire to manipulate. The words just fell out of my mouth with ease.
She released a sigh that sounded like relief and took a long sip of her tea. “You don’t know how good it feels to hear that. It’s like I’m talking to… the Taylor I knew a long time ago.”
I stared at my pile of sugary toast in front of me and nodded understandingly, “I don’t know what has happened to me. Sometimes it’s so easy to act fine… to scoop my kids up in front of crowds and strut around like Dad of the year. It comes naturally for me to act like I’m happy to my fans and tells friends that married life is good. But, in reality, I just feel so shitty all the time.”
“I think… we all feel sort of shitty a lot of the time.”
I raised my eyes to her curiously. “Are you happy?”
“Taylor…”
“Are you happy?” I demanded, although my voice was not much louder than a whisper.
And then I saw something, something I hadn’t seen in four years. I saw Gabrielle cry. It was only a few tears that fell from her eyes down her cheeks, which she hastily wiped away. But seeing her cry made it all make so much more sense. Of course she wasn’t happy. Neither of us were.
“Don’t cry…” I whispered because I didn’t know what else to say. But truthfully, I wanted her to cry. I wanted her to cry because it let me know she wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be- that she still cared just as much as me.
“I’m not crying,” she shook her head stubbornly and tried to dry her face.
“Gab… I never wanted things to turn out like this. I never wanted to marry Natalie, to grow apart from you, for both of us to be… miserable.”
“I’m not miserable,” she defended, but tears fell faster in a way that told me she was.
“If we both can’t let go, then maybe we should stop trying to,” I told her because I was so sick of fighting love.
“Tay, I think you should go. Thank you for breakfast, but I’m sure your wife is worried and… I have stuff to do,” she stood up from the table and found my car keys that I had left on the floor by the couch the night before. She stood next to me and held them out to me, trying to stay strong for the both of us.
Instead of protesting, I got up and accepted the keys with a respectful nod.
“Thanks for letting me spend the night,” I told her as I headed to the door and picked up my humiliating bag of clothes.
“Anytime,” she said not expecting the implication it would have.
I arrived at her house two nights later in a similar fashion, drunk but not so trashed that I had pissed myself. I stood at her doorstep with a sloppy grin and outstretched arms.
“Gab,” I said, hugging her when she swung the door open and looked at me with confused eyes. “I came to see you.”
“Are you drunk again?”
“Drunk? Drunk schmunk,” I laughed and pushed past her into her house. I was sober enough that I could manage to keep up a reasonable conversation with her as I rooted through her cabinets looking for something that wasn’t natural. The best I could find was corn chips, and so I sat down with a bag of those between my legs as I munched away.
“Why are you here again?” she finally asked after we’d finished a ten minute conversation about a family trip my mother was planning to Florida.
“Because I didn’t think I could drive all the way home, and I was in the area,” I responded, my head becoming clearer and the words coming to me easier. The alcohol was wearing off, but I didn’t want her to know that, so I added, “And I miiiiissed you,” in a ridiculously sloppy voice.
“You shouldn’t be here…” she said quietly.
“Do you want me to go home?” I asked, picking my keys up off her coffee table, knowing quite well she wouldn’t.
“No!” she said quickly. “It was already stupid if you to drink and drive at all… just… I’ll get you some blankets.”
And that’s how it started. Technically, I wasn’t cheating on my wife. I wasn’t only not cheating on my wife because I was a good person. I’d thrown my morals and God out the window years before, I wasn’t cheating on my wife because I knew Gabrielle wasn’t willing to, because she never let me sit too close to her or be too affectionate when I showed up at her apartment.
I came every few nights during the month of June. I wanted to go every night, but that would have gotten too obvious. She stopped making me call my wife, and so each evening when I left for the bar, I told my wife I was going to sleep at my old house.
“Taylor, don’t go out. Where are you going?” she’d ask me when I primped in the mirror with the sole purpose of looking nice for Gabrielle.
“Out with old friends,” I’d tell her before giving her an artificial kiss and running out the door. Then I’d proceed to one of the couple bars I’d learned to frequent in downtown Tulsa before making my nightly arrival on Gabrielle’s steps.
For awhile Gabrielle and I just pretended that it was an accident, a coincidence really, that I kept getting myself intoxicated only blocks away from her apartment. It was easier to just make small talk for awhile before passing out on opposites of her apartment than to get into discussions about how I felt about her or how she felt about me.
I stopped telling her I loved her. I stopped telling her anything about how I felt about her because it only made things uncomfortable between the two of us. I was drowning without her around me, drowning the mundane, predictable wretchedness of my ordinary life. I needed my evenings with her and I wasn’t willing to risk losing them.
“You need to stop getting yourself so drunk,” Gabrielle said on the fifth night I arrived at her apartment. My nightly visits had been going on for almost two weeks.
“Just let me in,” I mumbled, pushing by her and relishing in the warmth of her apartment that I’d come to crave.
“I’m not drunk. I drove here didn’t I?” I retorted, going straight to her kitchen and looking in her cabinets for some food. I had gotten in a fight with my family that particular night and had skipped dinner. I had no choice but to settle for a bag of crunchy potato chip-like snacks- Veggie Sticks.
“I can’t believe you haven’t killed yourself yet,” she grumbled, wandering after me into the kitchen.
“You sound so concerned,” I spat back, aware that I wasn’t sounding quite as drunk as I probably should. Truth be told, I didn’t like to be drunk with Gabrielle. I said stupid, awkward things when I was drunk, things that I usually reflected on in the morning and regretted. The less I drank, the more I could take her in while I sat across from her on the couch. So each night, I drank just enough at the bar that I stumbled a bit when I walked and relaxed some. I had to make sure she believed I was too drunk to drove home, but sober enough not to piss in my pants again. It was a hard balance to find, and when I didn’t drink quite enough, I had to fake it sometimes.
“You need to leave,” she said adamantly, taking the bag of Veggie Sticks from my hand and shoving them back into the cabinet.
I munched on a final few chips before frowning at her and asking with a mouth full of what tasted like cardboard, “Why are you kicking me out?”
“I’m serious, Tay,” she said with her arms crossed over her chest.
“I can tell!” I laughed, sitting down in one of her kitchen chairs and making myself comfortable. Either I wasn’t taking her very seriously or I was trying to deny that she was asking me to leave.
“Taylor… you need to leave. Natalie thinks you’re having an affair,” she sighed.
I stared at her for a moment as I let the information digest.
“An affair?”
“Your Mom called me today. Natalie talked to her about how you don’t come home half the time lately… Natalie told your mom that she thinks you’re sleeping here every night and you’re cheating on her. Where have you been telling her you’ve been sleeping?”
I shrugged. “I just… don’t.”
“She asks and you just don’t answer?”
“I tell her that I slept over at friends house, at the old house, wherever,” I shrugged. “Sometimes I tell her it’s none of her business where I sleep.”
“Do you hear yourself? You sound like a child, Taylor. She’s your wife. Of course it’s her business. Now you’ve got your wife thinking I’m some man-stealing whore-”
“If anyone stole me it was Natalie!”
I guess neither of us could believe I’d said it. I wouldn’t have said it if it weren’t for my good friend Jack Daniels. I guess I never really placed blame on Natalie out loud. Sure, sometimes I believed Natalie and her faulty birth control in my own mind, but I always confessed to people that it had been a joint mistake. It had been years since I admitted out loud that my wife had stolen me from the woman I loved more than anything, even if it was never meant to be malicious.
“You know I’m not having an affair, I know I’m not having an affair,” I said, rising to my feet and staggering back over to the cabinets in search of my snack. “Now where are those disgusting Veggie Sticks? I was actually starting to get addicted to them in some bizarre way.”
“This still feels wrong,” she stated.
I discarded my snack search and turned to her, looked her in the eye and commanded my eyes to stop wandering away from hers. I wanted her to hear me… to hear my loud and clear.
“We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re catching up on times we wasted either feeling too awkward around each other or too pissed off at each other. We’re reviving a suffering friendship,” I assured her.
And that’s how we let it continue. That’s what made us feel like it was okay that I show up every night- that she let me in every night. We never meant for the visits to turn into anymore than conversations. The conversations started off short. In June, we didn’t talk for longer than 15 minutes before we each passed out. Sometimes I could barely talk to her at all- depending on how many drinks I’d had each particular night.
By July we were sitting for hours on her couch with glasses of wine laughing about our ridiculously dysfunctional family and our even more dysfunctional selves. I eventually stopped showing up to her apartment drunk, which was a relief for me because I didn’t like the smutty, cigarette-filled bars with the women in halter tops too small for them- women who ran their hands along my thighs until I gave in and bought them drinks. It was a relief to begin to show up to her house without stumbling up her stairs. She stopped asking if I was drunk. It didn’t matter. Tipsy was good enough for the both of us. She didn’t want to send me home anymore than I wanted her to send me home.
“How’s Ezra?” Gabrielle asked the weekend after Independence Day. She’d seen Ezra only nights before at my family’s Fourth of July Barbeque where I’d almost managed to blow off my hand while lighting a firecracker. My hand was still covered in band aids as Gabrielle and I sat there on the couch together.
“He’s well,” I shrugged, desperately trying to find something to say about him.
She probably kept in as much touch with my son as I did. I usually saw him in the afternoon as I was eating breakfast and he was working on his lunch. He went down for a nap minutes after I woke up. Sometimes I saw him at dinner if I decided to eat with the whole family. Occasionally I tried to force myself to play with him or take him swimming in the afternoon, but usually I found other things to do. Sometimes I would just lay in Natalie and my bedroom listening to music and trying to drown out the sound of my screaming children below. Natalie usually forced me to get up eventually in which I found any excuse to be by myself. I went out to Starbucks to read by myself, I went into the studio and pretended to be working, or sometimes if I was desperate enough, I’d go out and spend nearly three sweaty hours mowing the grass on my family’s property. My father never believed in professional landscaping.
“Avie told me she was trying to teach him to read,” she smiled, taking a delicate sip from her glass of wine. “How’s that going?”
I had no clue my three and a half year old son was being taught to read.
“It’s going… really well,” I nodded, completely making it all up. “He’s… he can read those easy reader books already and everything.”
“Really?” she didn’t completely believe me.
“Yeah… keeps reading this one about… a boy,” I was grasping for anything that sounded like I was an involved parent. I wanted to impress Gabrielle.
“A boy?”
“And his dog… Ralph. Ralph the cocker spaniel…”
“Avery was teaching him his letters last week and now he’s already reading complete books?” she said, making it entirely too obvious that she knew I was bullshitting her.
“Well you know…” I tried to recover. “They’re… really easy books. And he is still pretty rusty…”
I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head in an attempt to hide from her accusing eyes. Sunk. No one spoke for a moment.
“That’s what I don’t get about you, Taylor,” she finally sighed.
“What?”
“That’s what I don’t get about you. I always… I remember when…” she stumbled over words awkwardly until she finally just came out and said, “I remember when we were together… I remember thinking about how I wanted to marry you and start a family with you… I remember telling your Mom right after I moved in with you that you were going to be an amazing father. Remember that day at church that I stood helplessly next to Mackenzie as he didn’t listen to a word I said? I remember thinking you’d be the perfect father… involved, guiding…”
“Gabrielle…”
She was saying the things my entire family implied with concerned looks in my direction. She was voicing the same frustration I had with myself. But hearing it from her… knowing that I had disappointed the one person I loved more than anything in the world… god, it hurt.
“I just… do you even like your kids, Tay?”
“Of course!” I yelled, glaring at her for even asking such a thing. “I love them completely.”
“I know that you love them. I remember your face when you held both of them in your arms when they were born. But do you like them?”
I guess it was a valid question, a question I wasn’t sure I ever contemplated before. I loved my kids, but did I like them? Was it possible that a father couldn’t even like his own children? Oh, I know there were times in my life that my own father didn’t like me. In fact, I don’t think he liked me much anymore at that point. I was moody and antisocial and angry all the time. I’m sure he wanted to slap my most of the time. But was it possible to dislike children so young- children who hadn’t done anything wrong?
“I…”
“Because you don’t act like it,” she sighed. “I just… I guess everyone expected you to be father of the year, superdad, you know. When Ezra was born and you were only mildly interested in him, I remember thinking that you’d probably need some time to come around and truly learn how to enjoy him. But you’ve only drifted farther away from your kids since then.”
“I’m sorry.” My voice was husky and quiet. I felt so demoralized about what a failure I’d become as a father. I couldn’t believe that Gabrielle was right- that I downright resented my two innocent children.
“Don’t apologize to me… I’m not the person you need to fix this with.”
“I don’t know how to fix it with my family,” I said quietly, setting my empty wine glass on the coffee table and pulling my legs up to my chest. Suddenly I felt so small and selfish and… well, stupid.
“You have to stop alienating yourself, Tay. You know I talk to your mom almost everyday. She tells me how you’re doing. She says you’re always by yourself and you’re never happy and…”
“It’s hard… you don’t know how hard it is to pretend to be happy when you’re not. I tried to pretend to be happy for years… I tried to convince Natalie I really loved her and make everyone else think I was really happy about my little family… about my life. But it’s become so hard to force these days. It’s not as easy as you make it sound…”
“But it’s not impossible either. You’ve never been the type to throw in the towel. You can still fix things for yourself and for your kids and for-”
“Don’t say it,” I interrupted her, holding out my hand and looking her in the eyes from the depths of my hood. “Don’t say I can still fix things with Natalie, because we all it’s too late for that.”
I never meant to cry. It’d been years since I’d cried in front of Gabrielle. In fact, in the past years I’d hardly cried at all. I had forced all my emotions to stay inside of me. Being cold was easier than breaking down in front of my family all of the time. I’d broken down in tears once during a therapy session and even shed a tear or two in front of my mother when I just felt too overwhelmed with my career. But I couldn’t remember crying in front of Gabrielle since… well, since the day I married Natalie.
The tears came so suddenly in hot waves of pain. She instinctively crawled over to me upon hearing my voice crack.
“Tay…” she said, wrapping her arms around my crumpled body and trying to hug me despite the nuisance of my knees.
“It’s all too much. I’ve fucked everything up too much… it’s too overwhelming,” I whimpered hating the pathetic tone of my voice.
“You thought you fucked things up with us for good, but look. We’re friends again… we’re sitting right here talking aren’t we?” she coaxed, running a patient hand along in my shoulder.
I rose from the couch, completely humiliated by the whole situation. Every emotion was going through my body for what felt like the first time. I’d been angry about my life for years, but suddenly my body was brimming with anger. I’d always been frustrated about how much I hurt people, but suddenly the shame of it all was overwhelming. It all hit so hard- too hard.
“God fucking damnit!” I shouted out into the small apartment.
“Tay…”
“God damnit! Why does everything have to be so complicated and why do I have to be so fucking selfish and why the fuck did it all have to go this way…” I paced in her living room, trying to gather control but feeling more and more irate by the second. “It could have been so easy! I could have fixed this years ago! I’m a fucking failure as a father, I hurt my wife after day… my children hate me! They hate me!”
“They don’t hate you,” she stood too. “They don’t hate you at all, Tay…”
“I hate me!” my voice cracked and before I knew I was kicking her wall. “I fucking hate me! No wonder everyone else fucking hates me when I fucking hate myself more!”
I guess the next moment could be considered a complete blur. I mean, I do remember throwing myself at her drywall with all my force- punching it, kicking it, attacking it in general. I remember Gabrielle pulling me away and trying to hold me still. I remember screaming and crying.
“Taylor! I don’t hate you, okay? And no one else does!” I remember her yelling at me and pinning my back against the wall. She stood there, eight inches shorter than me, holding my arms to my chest and restraining me from moving.
“No one hates you,” she spoke again, calmer the second time as she looked into my eyes.
I tried to nod, tried to believe her but I just couldn’t do it. I deserved to be hated. I had turned into this detestable person… a person I hardly recognized, a person I didn’t even want to be around myself. I remained stoic, pressed against the wall, until I did something I never meant to do.
Leaning in, I pressed my lips against Gabrielle’s. I think I was waiting for her to push me away immediately, but she just stood there and let me kiss her. After a moment, she even kissed me back- hungrily, desperately.
She did push me away, eventually, as I figured. After a few moments of the most passionate kiss of my life, she pushed me back into the wall and stepped away from me. I stared at her back, running my fingers through my hair and trying to make sense of it all.
“Everything in my life makes sense… but you,” she finally spoke, still refusing to turn back to me. “You make the least sense, but you’re the only thing that really feels right.”
I guess to anyone else, the statement didn’t really seem to be coherent. But to me, I understand exactly what she meant. Loving Gabrielle was the hardest thing I ever had to deal with. It was draining, excruciating, and completely hounding. But at the same time, Gabrielle was the only woman I was capable of really, passionately loving.
“Gabrielle, that’s what I love about us,” I said quietly, wiping sticky tears off my face and taking a deep breath of courage. “We’ve never made sense. We don’t need to.”
Gabrielle was full of surprises that night. In a moment, she was throwing her arms around me and burying her face into my shoulder, squeezing my neck with all of her might.
“I don’t know what to do…” she said, now breaking down into tears too.
It was strange. If my wife had cried into my arms, I would have cringed and walked away. But with Gabrielle, it was so easy to be my old self again. Gabrielle breathed happiness into me, happiness that I hadn’t experienced in so long. All I needed to be content was a little bit of Gabrielle. The more Gabrielle, the happier I was. The happier I was, the more I was my true self.
“I don’t either, I don’t either…” I muttered against her ear, wrapping my arms around her body and holding her close to me. The feeling… god… nothing compares to how it feels to hold Gabrielle in my arms. “I’m just as confused as you…”
“How long can someone pretend to be happy?” she cried into my sweatshirt.
“It depends…” I spoke calmly. “I could keep it up for about a year… until last summer. You… you’re stronger than me. But even you can’t do it for forever.”
“I want to be happy without you, Taylor. I want to date,” she let out a heavy sob. “I want to find someone to love and marry and have my own babies with… I really want to…”
“I wanted you to… I wanted us both to,” I murmured, rubbing her back in comforting circles.
“Why does it have to be so hard…?”
“Because love is drowning… and you can only tread in the ocean for so long.”