The air that night was colder than Thomas had accounted for when leaving the apartment. It had been such a hasty departure that his coat was left hanging forlornly on the hook by the door, subject to the sounds of Marilyn's over-exaggerated anguish as Thomas pulled the door closed in between them.
He was not leaving her to her sorrows. It did look a lot like running away from her pain, but he knew that wasn't the case. She had asked--told him to leave in between dramatic sobs, dabbing at damp, glassy eyes with a tissue, careful of her makeup. Every time, it was the same. She would pose the question with such unassuming sweetness, as though she didn't know she was provoking a fight, as though the same damn argument didn't erupt every time she tried to broach the subject, and it always ended this way. She would be in tears, and he would be out the door.
"Thomas," she would begin. This time he had been sitting at the dining room table, still in his work clothes and attempting to pick through the paper's crossword. His tie was loosened and his blazer was draped across the back of the chair, and she'd slid her arms around him from behind. She smelled like lilies, vanilla--soft, chemical fragrances in her hair and sprinkled across her throat. "Don't you think it's time we started a family?"
The words filled him with a cold dread every time. She wanted children. She needed to be a mother, she said. She was destined for it. She dreamt about it. But it was a matter on which she and Thomas vehemently disagreed. Perhaps it was her destiny. She would probably make a very good mother, but Thomas had no desire to be a father. The idea terrified him--the two of them going to ultrasound appointments together. Lamaze classes. Taking turns swinging stumbling, tired feet on to a cold floor in the small hours of the morning to answer the desperate wail of a tiny, incompetent other.
The situation inevitably blew up. When they got to the miscarriage (for they always did get to the miscarriage), the tears began to stream, and it was only a matter of time before she wanted him to leave so she could heave herself across the sofa and phone her mother. He was always fully frustrated by that point. On the verge of some real anger over the way she always tried to heap that undeserved guilt on him, but he never raised his voice to her. This time, as he had several times before, he grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, took his keys from the bowl beside the door, and left.
The bar was not his usual destination. Typically, he got into his clean little Ford Focus and drove around town for a couple of hours. Marilyn would always ring his cell before the 180 minute mark, and he would drive home again. Crisis over. But that night, he needed a drink. A nice Jack and Coke, and he couldn't have said when he left the place how long he had been there in the low lights and the thin tendrils of cigarette smoke that crept like lazy spectres through the air. Long enough that the smoke and the cheap beer had woven their respective scents into his clothes. Long enough that things were bleary and muffled and the keys in his pocket would only get him in trouble.
It was then, walking out into the dark February chill, that Thomas began to regret leaving his coat on the hook. Watching his breath blow out in great, frosty gusts, he was quite sure the night was colder than it felt with the insulating ersatz warmth of whiskey. It should have bothered him, probably, as he moved away from the bar, but his mind was wandering like a drowsy bee through the humid air of a summer day. He thought not of Marilyn (who had called once already to find, to her dismay, Thomas's phone ringing futilely in the pocket of his coat), pouring her feminine frustrations out to her prejudiced mother, but of a park on the other side of town. Of breakfast. Fantastic pancakes. A strong hand arched beneath his own and the warm, genial face of one Parker Reed.
That's right. Even then, even with the haze between his ears, he remembered the meeting clearly. It had seemed silly initially, as all of Parker's plans did. Parker was a silly man, after all. It had once struck him as odd that they even got along. Thomas had no real interest in silliness, and he knew with a comfortable certainty that he was as dull as televised golf. He enjoyed filing and alphabetizing and reading back issues of National Geographic, and still Parker desired his company.
The visits, Thomas had realized, should have been impositions and were not. Every brief instance of Parker dropping by the office to talk should have grated on his nerves--they were distracting from his work!--but did not. He found he liked seeing the other man, even for just a little while, even if nothing more than an amusing anecdote passed between them. It was different. It was nice. But it was also unsettling.
The night before their breakfast, while setting the table, he'd been compelled to tell Marilyn of his plans for the following morning.
"Oh, it's so good to hear you're finally making some friends," she'd said to him, placing a fork to the right of her plate.
"Please, dear," Thomas remembered answering. He had barely glanced at her. "That's very--condescending."
"Oh!" Her exclamation of feigned shame at her words, her hand across her mouth to emphasize it. But Thomas had seen the wrinkles to either side that indicated her hidden smile. "Sorry, sorry. I'm just happy for you, that's all."
Happy. It was strange. Marilyn was a middle-class socialite. She liked dinner parties and dancing and brunch, and she wanted to shape Thomas until he did the same. Of course she would be happy that he had finally connected with someone in this small town, because he certainly didn't appreciate any of her friends. But Parker was not so simple as that. There was something wholly inexplicable about him--the crooked smile and the way he coaxed laughter from the chest up through the throat with little more than the spark of amusement in his eyes. And hadn't Thomas, against his very character, laid his hand over Parker's across their breakfast table? Felt the thick cords, the large knuckles, the warmth that was such a part of Parker?
Thomas had never devoted much time to the subject of his romantic interests. He had never sat down to puzzle out why he liked women, or if he even did like them all that much. But as his father's son, his heterosexuality was politely assumed, and he never felt the need to challenge it. He had always been too busy with his education, dutifully preparing to take up his father's white collar when the proper time came, to bother about it. He could not have found the time for a sexual identity crisis.
In the same fashion, he had always known he would marry. He had never really had time to decide if he wanted to, and if he did, he was never given the chance to look forward to it before it happened--but he expected it. The only real surprise had come in how quickly it had been heaped upon him, in the unfortunate circumstances that had prompted his marriage.
He could not say he was unhappy with Marilyn.
He would not say he was unhappy with Marilyn.
At no point did he decide consciously to head in the right direction or to take the right streets. The signs he barely saw, dark green blotches with smeared white lettering under the glare of the occasional street light. It was several blocks from the bar. He recalled the address with surprising clarity--they had planned to meet at Parker's apartment for--something. It didn't seem to matter what, only that he had the right names and numbers floating through his head.
The cold had finally seeped through his blazer when he entered the building. When he reached Parker's door, the tips of his nose and ears and fingers were all pink with it, but he didn't care. He didn't hesitate on account of the hour--not that he was certain what the hour was--but lifted a loosely curled fist to the door and knocked.
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