Pamela’s

So you’ve taken her to Pamela’s, and that hurts more than I want to admit. It’s nothing fancy; just another booth lined diner along the strip, one with neon lights and shiny chequered tiles and a waiting staff made up entirely of haggard waxy women too old and too fed up for the skimpy uniforms and the general clientele the place tends to drag in (especially after 11pm). Pamela’s is probably nobody’s go to venue of choice, bar my bookclub who like it for midweek cocktails, but it’s always been a staple in the history of us. Our third date was at Pamela’s- a shitstorm of a night, caught in torrential rain and entered out of desperation more than anything else. The milkshakes had been surprisingly good. The bathroom surprisingly clean. We had gone back. More breakfasts than I could count, and far too many lazy friday night dinners. Too many tipsy desserts- our first shy words of shared emotions (“I love you.” “I love you too- I think”), had been here. And so had our first fight (over the apple pie no less). 

The point was Pamela’s was special, and out of all the places you could have taken her, here you are, sitting perfectly at ease, in our booth, sharing what looked like a corndog and a dish of loaded fries with this girl who laughs too easily. 

She isn’t particularly pretty and that somehow makes it worse. If she was this beautiful, visually arresting thing then I could maybe understand- not forgive, never forgive but understand, maybe. But she is just so...bland. She has dark hair and a thin mouth, a small nose and nondescript eyes. Thin but not in a desirable way. Her clothing fitted, probably tailored, but dark and dull. So dull. Everything about her is dull, and it feels almost insulting that you could be in our home, eating dinner I’ve made, in my soft company but had instead you chose to lie and be here. With this dull thing. You chose this. 

She laughs a lot, I’ll give her that, and you do love to be funny; to be the funny guy in a room. You lap up the laughs of others like a kitten drinking milk from the floor. But as I watch her awkwardly laugh and look away and laugh again; and even this is mildly irritating. So shy. She’s so shy about it. Such a shy little homewrecker. I’d known something was up, of course, you always know, don’t you. You feel it in your gut that something’s changed. That he’s spending a little too much time at work, moving just a little too quickly when his phone vibrates, eyes glazed a little too coolly during sex. Something in your dynamic has changed, and you, sweetie, well you haven’t changed in years. So. 

So. You check his phone when he’s sleeping and whilst you’re a little taken aback that your thumbprint is no longer registered, you know your husband, and he is unimaginative with his passwords. The code is his birthday. He’s either arrogant or lazy because the messages are there. Streams of them. Months of words. A narrative is formed. 

You met at work. She’s not in your department, and you’re technically part of her management team but as it’s not direct, it’s not so controversial. The first messages- it’s a long scroll up- are from May. They’re project related. Bland. She is so timid in her requests, I bet she must ask you permission to breathe. This annoying shyness is evident in her use of grammar, in her refusal to be direct. You probably think she’s treating you with respect but I think she’s just weak. She has no backbone and you see it how you like. And you do like it, Johnny, because you string her along. There’s a good month of it. You make her worry about approaching deadlines and then push them back at the last minute. She floods you with her relief and her thanks and you get to play God, for a few moments, before the cycle repeats. 

There’s a brief pause in the messages mid July, when you went for the office Summer party in Chicago. God how I knew you’d fucked up, even then. You came home in a worse mood than when you left. Wouldn’t let me wash your clothes, said they reeked of smoke and you’d handle them yourself. The first time in four years of marriage I’d seen you do laundry. 

When the messages kick off again the tone has shifted. She’s still endlessly pathetic but you are less polite. You end sentences with bleak fullstops and you don’t apologise to her anymore, for anything. You are, at times, rude, and I almost forget what I’m reading and feel sympathy for her. Then, of course, I remember that you are a whore and that she is a whore, and I feel nothing but dark pleasure at knowing that if I must hurt, at least she has been hurt too. 

It becomes apparent that you start sleeping together regularly in some part of August. The entire thread takes me hours to complete, whilst you sleep gently beside me, expression placid. You always look so fucking gentle when you sleep, nobody could ever think you capable of so many cruel things, Johnny.

After I find out, the new challenge is not how to make my husband love me again when he’s been acting so distant but how to lie. Every second of my day becomes this fun roleplay in which I am not a woman scorned, but the same loving wife I have always been. I give myself points, score myself well when I don’t repulse away from your touch, when I don’t throw hot bubbling sauce all over your lap, when I don’t shatter into a thousand pieces of hard glass at your affectionate murmurs into my neck. I hate you and yet my smile never falters, not for a second, because this is a special kind of hate which I keep to myself. 

It’s tricky when I don’t have something to focus on. During the day you’re at work and I can do anything I want to keep my mind intact. I clean. I cook. I work out extensively. I work out so much I inadvertently get into the best shape of my life and naturally you notice. 

For a short burst you’re particularly handsy, vigour renewed with this new desire fuelled by my flat stomach and thinner legs. I don’t see the attraction; it’s all sinew and varicose but maybe it makes you feel like I’m a little more of a trophy wife than I was a few pounds heavier. 

 When you’re home, I try to be in any other room than the one you just happen to be in. I don’t want to look at you. I cannot stomach it. 

Nights are hard. I just don’t seem to sleep anymore and my thoughts are not kind. I wonder who Katie is. What Katie looks like. How Katie speaks. How does she say your name Johnny? How does she speak to you? What do you talk about? Do you talk about me? She must know you’re married, but do you talk about me? You don’t spend nights together, you’ve never had the balls to simply not come home, but do you cuddle? After the sex is over. After you’re done fucking her, do you still touch? The touching after has always been more intimate than the sex itself, to us, hasn’t it. Was that something you kept for me, or is it something Katie gets to feel too? Does she get all of you? 

It makes me sick, the nausea a very real thing lining my gut. I can’t take in the dishes I spend hours making, after dicing and chopping everything with precision. I can’t eat a thing. I don’t want to eat. Or smile. Or move. I don’t want. It’s all been taken out of me. And at night I just don’t have the fight to keep up my role anymore. 

So it’s lucky really, that you’re a sound sleeper. You don’t see the blank mask my face becomes- and by the time your alarm rings in the morning, the mask is always gone.

Replaced once again by me, your beloved, athletic wife who looks great- as long as you don’t look too closely. 

And you don’t. You don’t look at me anymore, not in the way you used to. We spent hours, once, lost in one another, wrapped so closely it was hard to tell if the gentle thrumming heartbeat breaking the quiet was yours or mine. We would strip completely naked and just hold one another; it wasn’t a sexual thing, although that would inevitably come later. But the intent was always more than that; was always gripped in this raw desire to simply be close. 

We loved each other then. But now you sleepwalk through life and you sleepwalk past me and when you look, your look is just a glance. A glance and then a glance away. I get myself tested, at my GP, and I feel ashamed. As though I am the one who’s been dishonest. I feel foolish because you have made a fool out of me. I hate how every moment of my waking day is underlined by this endless, endless ache. 

And now, Johnny, I see that Katie has a face- finally. And honestly, I’m kind of disappointed. You have poor taste. 

I’m frozen, even though it’s actually quite mild for this time of year. I didn’t really have a plan when I left the house three minutes after you left the house. My mind was actually pretty blank whilst I was trailing you first to her, and then you both to here. 

I’d just had enough, you know? I wanted to see her. There was no way the reality of her could have been worse than the Katie I’d spent all these months creating in my mind. In my mind she was a decade younger, skinnier, trendier, funnier, sharper, kinder, prettier, irresistible. She was not drab, so, this hasn’t exactly gone as I’d envisioned. 

I don’t have any desire to storm into Pamela’s and confront this wisp of a girl. To cause a scene. 

I mean you would hate that, as you are that beautifully noxious mixture of cowardly, easily embarrassed and averse to confrontation. I’m a little curious, wondering if you’d surprise me. If you’d even fight for me. 

But I don’t think I really want you to. 

Johnny you have a way with words when there’s something you want, you know just how to wrap those pretty words around my head until there’s nothing left but your voice

slipping into my ear and telling me what I want to hear. You are so very good at it, I don’t want to give you the chance. 

So I stand, for a long time, watching you through the window, and watching myself in the glass. And I feel surprisingly little. 

When you’re done with your fries (she barely touches them, shocker), and your drinks, you grab the bill and pay it. That’s annoying, because you’re forever pinching the bills with me, never keen to pay for anything. When you get up and go, you slip out the exit without so much of a backward glance. You leave me, and I carry on staring at the empty booth like you might reappear, alone, and I’ll join you, and we’ll touch shoes under the table and talk about the future we shyly, hopefully, wistfully want to have together. 

But of course you don’t come back, and I’m not the girl I was when we met, I gave you my youth and now what’s left is something less naive and more tired than what that girl deserved. 

I’m sorry for her.