Strange(r) Compliment
I wondered if I should get back into my car and go home. Instead I continued to wait for him outside the restaurant. There is still enough of a nighttime breeze in early October to make wearing long sleeves comfortable. Flounced at the collar and adorned with lace the blush colored pink shirt was more feminine than I usually wore. To offset the girlishness I paired it with an olive green knit mini skirt, dark tights and knee high boots the same color as the skirt which added three inches to my height.
I had arrived first but didn’t want to call anyone while I was waiting because I didn’t want anyone to know that I was standing in the middle of a bad decision. I didn’t call my sister, or my other sister or any friends. I just waited.
And then I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was later than we had agreed upon so I thought he must have had trouble finding the restaurant located inside this particular outdoor pseudo upscale mall, which looks like every other outdoor mall in South Florida. Friday night, maybe he couldn’t find parking, or maybe he knew, as I did that we shouldn’t be meeting at all. Regardless of how legitimate we made the reason for this dinner seem.
When I turned around instead of my shadowed companion there was a man in a dark suit standing inches away from me. He was wearing a white shirt which looked as if he had just loosened the collar and abandoned his tie after a long work week. His shoes were polished; his pale skin looked as if he didn’t ever go out in the blistering sun, and his hair was the color of a terra cotta pot you could find in any home improvement store. He was taller than six feet, and very handsome. Not any older than thirty two or three.
From behind you could think that I’m in my twenties but he wasn’t looking at me from behind, and I haven’t been in my twenties for decades. In a booming voice absent any sort of regional accent he looked directly at me and said that I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and that my husband was a very lucky man. He turned and swiftly walked away, not wanting any sort of interaction or response. He just wanted to say that to me.
Immediately tears began streaming down my face. My husband. My husband imprisoned me in a decade plus materially privileged sexless marriage where his relentless recriminations wore away at my soul and left me believing everything he said, ultimately drowning in self hatred. I don’t think he felt the least bit lucky being married to me.
Almost every unmarried woman I knew wanted to meet a man like my husband, or they sometimes wanted to meet him. The exquisite façade of our domesticity was enviable, but only if you weren’t the one living it. They wanted in, and I wanted out. I didn’t want to be married to my husband, but the welfare of our three young children made divorce unthinkable for me.
He had stopped thinking of me as beautiful long ago, and the only thing we shared was the measured distance between us. We pacified our sense of failure with objects, but the sanctity of comfort had leaked out of this marriage much like a brittle balloon faded by the sun, and drained of helium. The kind that limply hangs upside down from a utility pole that you think will be up there forever, and then one day you drive by and it’s just gone.
Moments later my dinner companion arrived, albeit over twenty minutes late. I had wiped away my tears before he came, and never told him what happened. A week or so later he emailed me to say that he, his wife and daughter were going away on holiday. That was October. It’s April and getting to the tail end of the season when wearing anything with sleeves makes you want to plunge your head into a bucket of ice water here in South Florida.
And this is what I know:
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