What the Bathroom Mirror Sees

    This man beside me is my fiancé. I would tell you his name, but I am sure he won’t be my fiancé much longer. That’s no fault of his, of course. Not really. He’s that disarming, self-effacing type that makes women swoon while watching romantic comedies as they berate the obtuse female lead. As always, she doesn’t realize that Mr. Right has been there all along in the form of her best friend/barista/neighbor/impossibly handsome advertising executive. Those women would berate me too, because even though I figured it out in the first act, I’ve already completely screwed it up.

 

     I cheated on him, and he knows it. I know he knows, but he won’t say anything about it, and that’s possibly the worst part. I deserve that.

 

     He’s sitting on the bed, shrugging his shoulders indifferently when I ask him why he’s so quiet. I try to add a little levity with a joke, but it falls flat and lands squarely on the already heaping pile of awkwardness between us. It strikes me that he looks so much older than he did yesterday, when he was blissfully unaware of my infidelity. I guess he really never believed that I would do it. I wanted to believe that he was right.

 

     He turns to me deliberately, searching my eyes, and I return his gaze even though I know I’m offering up all the evidence he needs. There is an interminable silence as he reads my expression, and when his face finally crumbles I expect his retreat, his disgust, his retribution… any one of those things would have made sense. Instead, I get his kiss. It is pain and confusion and silence, but it is a kiss, nonetheless.

 

     Is this forgiveness? I thought it would come after a torrent of screams and tears, if at all. Then, as his kiss turns from a query to a statement, I realize that forgiveness is not to be had tonight. He presses my shoulder downward as he moves to cover my body with his, and now I know: it’s a challenge.

 

     He doesn’t want to make love to me. He probably doesn’t even want to touch me, but he wants to implore me to tell him the truth. Or maybe he does want it, just one more time before he announces that he’s finished with me. In that case, am I supposed to interrupt him and take that away too?

 

     He lays me back and kisses me insistently, pulling my clothes off while looking me directly in the eye. I am suddenly illiterate in regard to his expression. We are naked now, and neither of us moves. He hovers over me, motionless, staring me down, waiting for me to confess or apologize or dissolve into tears, but I remain as stony as his eyes. I don’t know what he wants, but I figure it can’t hurt to extend the invitation. I open my thighs and lift my hips.

 

     This evidently pains him, causing him to grimace and tell me to turn over. I do, with no objection, and without a word he thrusts into me. I thought he might be rough, but he knows I like that. I can feel his anger, but there is no power in it. I finally begin to cry. Not for pain or pleasure, but something else. Something that has always been in his eyes, but wasn’t there anymore.

 

     His usual stamina is truncated tonight, although it seems trite to think that any of this is for my benefit. He withdraws and leaves me facing downward in the tangled bedclothes, and I wonder idly if it would have made a difference if I had washed the sheets.

 

     He is in the bathroom now. The shower is on, but I can still see the cast of his feet just behind the door. He is slumped there, as I have seen him do after final exams and his mother’s funeral. I know the shower is only on so that I don’t hear the kind of ragged breathing that wracks him in place of tears. He hates crying.

 

     I’m the one crying now, staring at the shadows of his feet and remembering his mother’s funeral; how his uncle had said that sister-in-law’s death was worse and both men left with fat lips and righteous indignation. That night he had faced the door, hugging the plush towel that hung there, and the tips of his toes protruded slightly beneath the white-painted pine. Steam from the shower crawled between his toes in feathery wisps. There had been no hot water until the next morning.

 

     The evening after the failed biochemistry final, he didn’t bother with the shower. He just locked the door and I watched those slivers of feet stomp in and out of view as he paced the bathroom, fuming and balling his hands into fists, but never using them. He would occasionally shout an expletive and, I imagined, grip his own hair, but the bathroom remained unscathed.

 

     The time I thought I was pregnant, I was in the bathroom too, watching his left foot tap impatiently on the bathmat as we waited for the digital test to signal that it had been three minutes. I had told him we could have bought the one-minute test, but he said it seemed too fast to be reliable. We were both relieved when the test was negative. Then he fell silent for two days. A month later, while cleaning the junk drawer in the kitchen, I found a pair of tiny shoes in a little bag. The receipt was from the day before we knew there was no baby.

 

     Now, as I sit naked and crying on the bed, staring at my fiancé’s feet at the bottom of the bathroom door, I feel everything he would never say out loud. Everything the bathroom mirror saw. Everything he had stonily suffered alone and I had quietly pretended away.

 

     I realized now that my tears are not for his pain or his inability to let me share it, or even the fact that I had never tried. They are for the fact that I had never wanted to. I admitted to myself then that the only thing I ever really worked on in our relationship was maintaining distance. His emotional unavailability suited me, because it allowed room for me to ruin everything, which in some way I always knew I would.

 

     His feet move suddenly, and I hear the shattering of something. The toothbrush holder, perhaps. I imagine the cold tiles littered with splinters of blue ceramic, and imagine that he will step on them, deliberately, just to feel something. I caught him drawing a blade across his inner thigh once. I pretended not to notice. We never discussed it.

 

     I realize now that I could kill this man. My apathy and his self-loathing are a molotov cocktail of dysfunction. He may be splaying his veins in the bathtub now, but I won’t stop him. He wants to isolate himself and I want to remain unattached. If I were to intervene I could never get away unblemished. His scars will be mine if I have to see them. I always let him bandage his own wounds.

 

     I can still see his feet though, so he is not splaying his veins in the bathtub. Perhaps the sink. Perhaps he is looking for pills. I think there is still some Vicodin left over from my oral surgery.

 

     I don’t think there is any sense in staying here. I usually slip into bed and pretend to be asleep when he emerges, freshly showered with a Bandaid applied somewhere. On these nights I usually sleep nude in case he decides the Bandaid he needs is me, but we never talk about what the bathroom mirror sees.

 

     Tonight I will not be waiting in the bed. He may only be waiting for me to leave. I can give him that. I silently slip into the nearest clothes, and in a gesture of good will, I change the sheets, removing the scent of both my lovers. I admit now, to myself, that I wanted him to know. I could not have brought another man to this bed if I didn’t.

 

     I take care in making up the bed. He has a habit of rolling and twisting up the sheets, so they must be tucked securely, or he will strip the bed in his sleep. I turn down the covers on his side and fluff his pillow. I slip the ring from my finger and place it where his head will rest.

 

     As I leave the room I cast one last look at his feet, lighted from behind in the harsh radiance of two incandescent bulbs. He is turning toward the door, his toes protruding underneath, and the door groans as his weight leans against it.

 

     He must be hugging the towel. Only the bathroom mirror sees.