The Promise

I stood in the dark parking lot, letting what I'd just heard sink in. Patrick was twenty feet away, saying goodnight to one of the people we'd just come from dinner with, white ash drifting from the end of his cigarette as he gestured. I looked at my girlfriend.

"My god," I said. "How awful."

She nodded. "I've heard he's already moved out and is living with the new woman."

"Jesus."

We kept our voices low, more out of solemnity than secrecy. If we were ten or fifteen years younger, such news would have been gossip. Pretty young things can go whistling past the graveyards of other women's marriages. At 38 and 40, we all but crossed ourselves.

My friend is a close enough friend that I don't have to pretend enlightenment when I'm not feeling it. "It's so unfair," I said. "Our time runs out, and theirs doesn't." For a rare instant, I missed having my own cigarette to blow smoke in the face of mortality. But I quit years ago for all the obvious reasons, not the least of which was how smoking ravages a woman's skin. Of all the arguments I've used to try to persuade Patrick to kick his nicotine addiction, that's one I've never bothered with. The lines around his eyes only seem to make the green of his irises all the more piercing. What makes women look haggard makes men look rugged. Bastards.

"Sometimes I feel like I should run out and have an affair just because," I said wryly. "Because what if I want to later and I can't, because nobody wants me? I mean, what if it turns out we squandered all of our youth on men who go and leave us later for younger women?"

My friend laughed. "I feel exactly the same."

We were being funny with each other, but relaying the conversation to Patrick on the ride home in the car, I lost my bluster. My voice was thick liquid, pooling in the back of my throat.

"You don't understand," I choked out. "You don't know how it feels." I was beginning to cry. I felt doubly vulnerable, because I am supposed to know better. I am supposed to know that beauty is skin deep, that youth is wasted on the young, that age is a state of mind, that the best is yet to come, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. What kind of a shallow twit does it make me to admit I am afraid of not recognizing myself in the mirror someday, of becoming invisible in a society where appearance is social currency, of wearing out a way of being in the world that's been so familiar and easy for so many years?

He let me carry on in the key of "you don't" for about half the drive. Then he spoke, in the low and quiet tone he uses only when he really needs me to shut up and hear something. It is only good for a finite number of uses, so he saves it for the big things.

I never want my husband to hesitate on the verge of such a moment, wondering how it will play out in the blog or in print later. So I'm not going to repeat what he said to me here, or anywhere. But he told me to listen, and to listen good, so I did, while he turned all my "you don'ts" back into "I Do".

I almost forgive him for wrinkling well. Bastard.