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LEAVING HER IN INCREMENTS
The third Friday of every month, Corey leaves the apartment he shares with Topanga and spends with weekend with Shawn. Topanga doesn’t like to think about how they spend that time, but she knows—they fuck, have sex, make love—whatever you want to call it. She knows that the proper phrase is that last one, but she wishes it were one of the first two. It would be easy to resent Corey for fucking Shawn; it’s not easy to resent them for making love to each other.
They do other things too, of course, but she doesn’t like
to think about what those other things are. She knows that their days together
are probably much like her own days with Corey, familiar and domestic—favorite
shows watched together, washing dishes while their hands touch. Reading so
close that they can feel each other breathe. She doesn’t like to think about
that part of their lives, the part that makes them a couple, so when she
pictures them—and she can’t help but picture them—they’re always naked, fucking
with single-minded intent, fixated on their own orgasm.
She knows it’s not like that, but the deceit helps her.
The rest of the month, she and Corey and Shawn hang out together, casual and
friendly, but that one weekend always echoes back, flavors the other time they
spend together. Corey will keep his arm around Topanga’s shoulders, but his
eyes won’t leave Shawn’s for the entire night. When Shawn laughs, it’s for
Corey’s ears alone.
Those nights when the three of them get together, after
Shawn leaves, Corey is always more passionate with her than the nights when
they don’t see Shawn at all.
* * *
When they first moved to New York, they all shared an
apartment. What she knows about Corey and Shawn’s domestic habits come from
that time. In the morning, Shawn read the editorials, but he always left the
comics on Corey’s side of the table. Corey made the eggs because Shawn can’t
cook at all, and then Shawn did the dishes because he was too considerate to
leave them for Topanga.
At that time, everything in New York was so new and scary
that they all had had to huddle together like children, just to keep from
running back home. She’s glad that they had Shawn then, because without him
Corey would have pulled away so far into himself, she never would have found
him again. Shawn kept Corey present, even if sometimes he was only present for
Shawn. She’d come home to find the two of them playing some intricate card game
of their own devising, and they’d barely look up at her to say hello.
When they moved into the new apartment three years ago,
Shawn moved into the same building, but three floors down. “To give you guys
some privacy,” he’d said at the time, but she wonders. Right before the move,
Shawn had gotten quiet, more so than usual, and she wonders if that was the
beginning of all this. Not the beginning of Corey and Shawn, of course, because
that began way back in Philadelphia, before she and Corey even met. But maybe
just the beginning of Shawn looking at Corey the way he does now, not as
something he can lose, but with the future in his eyes.
Besides, there’s so such thing as privacy in an apartment
building. One day, on a Shawn weekend, she came down to the lobby and saw Corey
and Shawn by the elevator. They were loaded down with groceries, eggs and
coffee and loaves of bread falling out of the bags, but they were smiling at
each other. Their bodies were touching in small ways, hips kissing, elbows
knocking, Corey’s shoulder sliding against Shawn’s chest. She stood there on
the stairs, feeling caught by the sight of them. Like a stranger, watching two
people in love do what lovers do, talk and buy groceries and touch casually, in
the way of people familiar with each other’s bodies. She wondered if this was
how Shawn felt, watching her and Corey hug outside of a bar or brush against
each other as they make dinner.
Watching someone else’s hands on his lover’s body.
* * *
She knows how the people in their building look at her.
Contemptuous middle-aged women and bitchy gay men laugh at her in the halls,
but even worse are the pitying old women, who lay gentle hands on her shoulder
and tell her that men will do as they must. Women who married gay men in the
fifties and watched them walk out the door with their lovers on Friday nights.
Corey isn’t gay. Somehow it would be easier if he were.
But she knows that he enjoys her body; her hips, her breasts, the soft curve of
her belly. The expression on his face when he looks at Shawn is less about lust
and more about love.
Jack and Rachel know, of course, and they’ve tried to talk
to her about it. When they try to bring it up, she always ends the
conversation, or moves on to a new topic, looking at the easy way Jack rests
his hand on Rachel’s knee, envying it. They don’t talk to her about it anymore,
but Rachel always suggests that she and Corey get away from the city for a
while, have some time to themselves. Topanga knows what Rachel really means is
‘get away from Shawn,’ but that wouldn’t work now. Not anymore.
Jack just sticks to glaring at Corey and Shawn darkly,
whenever they touch, or talk, or look at each other. Once, though, during a
gathering with the old gang, she’d seen Shawn, backed into a corner in the
hall, arguing with Jack in a muffled voice. Shawn had looked up and caught her
eye, then turned back to Jack with a sorrowful gleam in those puppy eyes of
his.
Eric, as always, seems happily oblivious.
Angela knows, though, maybe better than anyone. When
Angela’s in town, she and Topanga have a girl’s night out and get pleasantly
drunk together. Men who aren’t her husband buy Topanga drinks, and though she’s
never gone home with any of them, its nice to know she has the option. Most of
all, its just nice to be able to talk to someone about Corey and Shawn, someone
who understands.
“I always knew Shawn was in love with Corey,” Angela slurs
one night. “That poem he wrote…all the poems I saw later…they weren’t about me.
They were never about me.”
Topanga would like to think that, for Corey, it wasn’t
always about Shawn. But she thinks that maybe it was.
* * *
The first time Corey slept with Shawn, they were
twenty-three. Topanga stayed up all that night, till five in the morning when
Corey finally walked through the door. It wasn’t unusual for Corey and Shawn to
stay up till the wee hours of the morning, talking or drinking or watching bad
late-night movies on cable, but Corey usually came home before the sun was up.
Topanga liked to wait up for him, so they could brush their teeth together and
put on the same pair of pajamas, her in the top and him in the bottoms, and so
she could watch sleep gradually relax his habitually-tense body.
So before he even walked through the door, she was pretty
sure something was wrong. After he walked through the door, she knew something
was wrong. Just the look on his face, empty and shattered, and the stumbling
way that he’d walked… At the time, she thought someone had died.
She’d reached out to him and said, “Oh my god. What
happened?” and his face crumbled like a sheet of paper.
Before she could stop him, he’d already told her the whole
story. Or rather, snatches of it, little photographs she still has stored in
her memory. Shawn, drunk, crying in Corey’s arms about another lost love,
another women who left him behind. Corey, holding Shawn tight and not knowing
what to say, even after all this time of bandaging his wounds. And then they’re
kissing, neither of them knowing who started it but neither of them wanting to
stop. Both of them too drunk to care that they didn’t know what they were
doing. They’d fucked on Shawn’s living room floor, lips wet with whiskey, hands
desperate on each other’s flesh.
That night, Corey slept on the couch. Not at her request,
but because he felt he needed to be repentant. There was a week of quiet
breakfasts, requests to pass the toast and the butter, and when he got up for
coffee he always refilled her cup. Usually when Corey does something wrong he
wants to talk about it, right away, even when Topanga doesn’t. This time,
though, he let her have her space, let her come to terms with it on her own
time.
He didn’t talk to Shawn that whole week, and she loves
Shawn enough to think about how much that must have hurt him.
* * *
Topanga’s thought about having a baby. She wants one, and
Corey loves kids. She knows that a baby would tie him to her, but she doesn’t
want him tied. She wants him to stay with her of his own free will, wants this
desperate love between Corey and Shawn to burn out and fade to comfortable
friendship.
She knows it won’t happen, though. It is she and Corey who
will burn out, their limbs no longer tangling comfortably in bed, their bodies
no longer fitting together like puzzle pieces. She will move out of their
apartment and live somewhere else, some other man kissing her goodnight and
waking up hard against her in the morning.
Everyone who knows thinks that she is losing Corey, but
really she’s keeping him, if only for now. If after that night she’d forbidden
him to kiss Shawn ever again, to touch him, to fuck him, Corey would have left
her, not that night but soon after, and all at once. Now he is leaving her in
increments, bits of him departing from her piece by piece. He keeps some of his
clothing in Shawn’s apartment, an electric razor, a few of his favorite books.
He always leaves Shawn’s apartment at night, and she knows
that he has waited until Shawn is already asleep, unable to look up at Corey
with those pain-filled eyes and implore him to stay. Those nights, he always
folds his body around hers and holds on tight, as though he will never let go.
She knows, though, that he’s just trying to find a way to say goodbye.
She is always awake when he comes back, even though as the
months go by he’s always later and later. She holds him tightly, too, hands
grasping at his shirt and the hot, kiss-bruised skin of his back, because she
needs to keep him just a little while longer.
No, not baby anymore
If I need you I’ll just use your simple name
No more kisses on the cheek from now on
And in a little while, we’ll only have to wave…
Fiona Apple, “Love Ridden”
END
