THE NIGHT WAITING
“In ideality alone, there is no repetition.” Søren Kierkegaard
It had happened to me before and she knew it. Yet when she didn’t come home at night, the first time, my worry was still mixed with pain. People cheat on each other more often than they die in car accidents, I tried telling myself. On paper, each of these two hypotheticals entailed relief from the other, and accordingly pain and worry alternated in my mind and heart with increased frequency as the hours passed and the night remained still, the street silent outside our house. My hard-fought composure gradually crumbled but I held on, as faithfully as I could, to the crescively dubious notion that I preferred, all else being equal, that she be currently cheating on me rather than dead.
That she knew what had happened with my ex made it difficult to imagine: her willingly subjecting me to the same anguish, had she now decided to cheat on me or leave me. A phone call, a lie or the truth, is it that much to ask? No news at all, when a couple is settled in a decade-long quotidian of caring for each other’s well-being and, within consensual boundaries, periodically ascertaining each other’s whereabouts, no news at all carries a lot of weight. As she was fully informed about my past ordeals, her silence tipped the scale of probabilities toward the more tragic option, the one in which she was unable to communicate and therefore gravely injured or dead.
Dead.
With my ex, fifteen years earlier, it had started with a New Year’s party that I had declined to attend. I do sometimes display unsociable tendencies, yet have learned to tolerate the gregarious needs of others: when she insisted on going, I was fine with it, expecting her to come back some time during the wee hours, not bothering to stay up and wait, so young was I and confident in the continuity of love and life. When I woke up the next morning and she wasn’t in bed next to me, I did wonder a bit why. But she probably had drunk too much, as we were both prone to do any day of the year, and crashed at a friend’s place. No big deal.
When the whole day went by and I still remained without any news of her, I began to worry somewhat.
Incidentally, this was before the era of cellphones, when you couldn’t just message someone a bunch of times, and if they didn’t reply or you couldn’t see in the app that they had received your texts but were ignoring you, quickly and logically deduce that the situation warranted alerting emergency services. When a person left, either you knew where to call them and when, or you waited by your own earthbound telephone for them to contact you, and there were well-defined lapses of time before you could convince any public agent to make your individual concern an official affair. As it was, having recently joined her in the town where she lived, far from my place of birth, I only had the number of her friend Julia: I dialed it repeatedly without getting an answer, which made sense if they were both out together, as I was obviously calling Julia’s apartment, not a device in her pocket. Having no idea who they may have partied with nor where, all I could do was wait.
Wait and wonder when would be time to worry like, for real.
As the sun was setting on the evening of January 1st, she telephoned. Yes, she had partied all night, just woke up. Where was she? At some guy’s place, out of town. Her and Julia. Was she alright? Sure. She sounded strange. Had anything happened? Well, they had both kissed the guy, her and Julia. They were just drinking and smoking pot, and you know, things got a bit out of hand. She was sorry. Truly sorry. But nothing more. It was Julia who ended up having sex with him. She’d left the two of them to it and slept on the couch, she said. Truly, that guy was gross, anyway. Right now, Julia was showering and they were going to head back soon. Not to worry. She was sorry. Truly sorry. Would see me soon.
And then I waited the whole night and she didn’t come home, nor call again.
Waited endless, sleepless hours of bouncing between worry, jealousy, doubt and back again, replaying in my head that phone call that was supposed to release me from all of it, and had done so for a time, fear progressively creeping back in until the pale light of winter dawn seeping through the blinds asserted with ruthless certainty that something was seriously wrong.
In the late morning of January 2nd, I was contemplating reaching out, remaining unsure to whom, yet at least needing to hear myself explain the situation to someone, maybe not a cop, a neighbor?—when I heard a knock on the door.
Relieved for her safety, but still deeply concerned for the future of our relationship, I leaped to let her in, heart beating fast. As soon as I glimpsed her face, wrecked and smudged with makeup, the recognizable black waves of mascara of one who has cried, black hair almost comically disheveled, I felt a rush of sympathy and forgiveness, a caring and protective impulse which instantly replaced the petty pangs of possessiveness. I loved her, I LOVED HER, only wanted to hold and comfort her, erase in an embrace all of her pain and mine, but then, as her image stabilized in the fever of this long-awaited reappearance, something came off, like a layer peeled from the sky in a flash of purple thunder, changing everything.
Familiar as she seemed in her devastation, this was another woman.
It took me some slow, groggy seconds to recognize Julia, and an endless vacillation ensued, her tear-filled eyes reflecting my stupor like patches of deadly blue ice, until she said, bursting into loud sobs: “There… Uh… there was… Uh… an accident.”
So when my second life partner, upon showing up at 2 a.m., told me that she had gone to dinner with a man, that afterward they had kissed in his car, that it had been awkward and unpleasant, and that she regretted it (she also said that he was not nearly as good-looking as I am, which made everything else sound true to me, since I am nothing if not convinced of my good looks—check me out online, I’m not blind, just not falsely humble), I reminded her that these events with my ex had been rather traumatic, obviously, and that just answering her cellphone to let me know that she was safe (I had called and left probably a dozen messages, with accelerating frequency, as the night went on) would have been an appreciated mark of consideration.
As to the quasi-cheating, in a long-term relationship, temptations conceivably arise and if it didn’t mean anything more, I would make do with it. I would just prefer not to be tortured a whole night through by the compounded fears of her death and of my being abandoned, every time that she felt like exercising her well-respected right to individual agency. I trusted that she understood. She said she did.
It happened again two nights later. Although it took another week for her to explicitly break up with me, and over eighteen months and counting for me to quit having nightmares about it, I knew during that second night alone, when her cellphone repeatedly went to voice mail, when the noise of a car driving down our street was not that of a car stopping, when the possibility of an accident had become ridiculously unlikely, I knew that no matter what else might be said or done, no matter what precisely was or was not unfolding between her and that man, no matter what lies could be made up, nor how much hope I retained of us somehow still having a chance as a couple, I knew, with all rational certainty now, that our love was dead.