The Night Waiting 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. As either of these two hypotheticals being confirmed meant, theoretically, a relief from the other, and as pain and worry alternated wildly within each passing hour, I still held on as much as I could to the notion that I preferred, all other things being equal, that she cheat on me rather than die. But the fact that she knew what had happened with my ex-wife, years earlier, made it hard to believe that she would decide to make me endure the same thing, had she now decided to cheat on me or leave me. A phone call, a lie or the truth, it’s not that difficult. No news at all, when a couple is settled in a decade-long quotidian of checking in on each other and caring for each other’s well-being and, within reasonable boundaries, each other’s whereabouts, no news at all carries a lot of weight. Knowing what she knew about my past, her silence tipped the scale of probabilities toward my least favorite option, the one in which she was unable to call, and therefore dead or gravely injured. With my ex-wife, fifteen years prior, it had been about a New Year’s party that I had refused to go to. I sometimes harbor antisocial behavior, but I am tolerant of other people’s social needs and when she insisted on going, I was fine with it, expecting her to come back some time during the wee hours. When I woke up the next morning and she wasn’t in bed next to me, I wondered. But she probably had overdrunk and crashed at a friend’s place, no big deal. When the whole day went by and I was still without news, I began to worry. Which was nothing compared to what I felt during the entire next night, when she still didn’t come home, nor call. Coincidentally, this was before the era of cellphones, and we lived in her hometown, far from mine, so I had only one land line number of friends of hers to call, which I did toward the evening of January 1st. There was no answer. What else was I supposed to do? I wasn’t sure if the situation warranted calling emergency services. So I just waited, suffered the alternate pangs of worry and jealousy, and she finally showed up at the front door of our apartment, in the early afternoon of January 2nd. She rang the bell and waited for me to come answer the door. The second that I saw her face, devastated and make-up smudged, she was forgiven. Inwardly, I mean, my heart broke for her and I felt protective of her, wanting to take care of her, which was the root feeling of future acceptance and forgiveness. Outwardly, it took a little bit more of a conversation to make things right between us. She admitted going to a man’s place, after the main New Year’s party, but with a girlfriend of hers coming along also. And that she had made out with the man, sure, but on that first night it was her girlfriend who ended up having sex with him. And on the second night, after the girlfriend left in the evening and she stayed over for more “partying”, he did try to have sex with her, and she was somewhat resisting, but the phone rang just as it was about to happen, so they were interrupted and then never quite got to it. I was 22 and believed her explanation. I am 38 now and believe that she lied. The “just the tip” type of lie which is supposed to make things morally OK, and often does, strangely enough, although everyone knows or should know that it doesn’t mean anything factual, only expresses a form of remorse that knows not to admit to anything unforgivable. With my second wife, I was 37 and upon showing up at 2 am., she told me that she had gone to dinner with a man, that afterwards 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 sound more truthful, since I am nothing if not convinced of my good looks. Check me out online, I’m not blind, just also not humble. So I believed her. Yet I reminded her that the episode with my first wife had been traumatic for me, and that just answering her cellphone to let me know that she was safe (I had called and left probably 14 messages, with accelerating frequency, as the night went by), would have been an appreciated mark of consideration. As to the quasi-cheating, in a ten-year-long relationship, temptations arise and if it didn’t mean anything more, I would make do with it. I would just like 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 hoped that she understood. So when it happened again two nights later, I knew that it was over between us. Although it took another week for her to explicitly break-up with me, and over eighteen months and counting for me to stop 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 up the country road where we lived was not that of a car stopping, when the possibility of an accident was now ridiculously unlikely, I knew that no matter what else might be said or happen between us, no matter what precisely was or was not happening between her and that man, no matter what lies could be made up, nor how much hope I still felt of us somehow still having a future as a couple, I knew, with all rational certainty now, that it was over. Bio: Antoine Bargel is a bilingual writer and literary translator working in English and French, poetry and fiction. Began writing poetry at 10, is now 34. Married and divorced twice, like in the story, but that could just be a coincidence. Other stories can be found on his website www.antoinebargel.com
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