Oliver Benjamin
“So who was he?” I said, breaking the silence. We were back in our
room, not one word uttered between us since we left the beach.
“He was a guy,” she said coolly. “Just a guy.”
“But why? I mean, how?…” like a smashed jelly donut, I bled
slowly and heavily, wallowing in the sickening taste of my own
thickened blood.
“Jake, I didn’t love him,” she finally said. “I was just so lonely…”
“I was lonely,” I said pitifully.
“Do you want to know why I started hanging around with him in
the first place?” she said. “Do you? It’s silly, but it was because he had
a pair of boots just like yours. He made me think of you. He was a lot
like you in some ways.”
“I guess that’s supposed to make me feel better. Did he make me
think of you when you were fuckinghim?”
“Jake…”
“What do you want me to say? That it’s alright? That I’m O.K.
with this? Well, I’m not O.K. with this. Got it? I’m really not… I’m
not…”
“Jake, come here,” she said tenderly. I looked at her soft arms
beckoning me to come down from the arctic pole of my self-pity. In
my mind I knew that this was an eminently forgivable transgression.
I knew that this was what happened when couples are separated by
thousands of miles and months of empty beds. I myself had engaged
in a few meaningless encounters during her absence. But in my icy
heart at that moment a totally absurd perspective was asserting its
infantile ideology. This was not the girl I loved any longer. This was
a five-foot-five medieval bitch, scraping the very flesh from my
shattered bones. This was the goddess of betrayal, the high priestess
of lies.
“I will not come there,” I answered. Then I ran out and away
from our idyllic cottage beside a perfect Hellenic beach. I stood there
on the shore with grinding molars and watched the sun go down,
cursing Homer for inventing such an incredible paragon of fidelity as
Penelope; her fabulous virtue made me feel all the more like an
outrageous loser.
By the time I returned, my mind was already made up.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“You’re what?”
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