Settlement

I think when he told me to “take a step back” was when I lost it completely. Went ballistic, as his lawyer said the other day — stupidly, I thought, “went ballistic” being in my opinion a rather vague, unlawyerly term. It was the stupidest thing he could have said in that moment — Sid, not the lawyer — because really all I ever do is take steps back. He’s mister always stepping forward, I’m the stepper back, I’m the one who considers things, whereas he just barges ahead, and it’s been that way, was that way throughout the whole of our relationship. So for him to tell me to take a step back was just so exquisitely backwards, so fucking moronic, that I just sort of flipped.

And well, here we are.

I think that’s such a stupid cliché, don’t you agree? Take a step back. Like, that’s some business-speak bullshit imported into personal life where it really doesn’t belong. I get the idea: stepping back, you get a clearer view, you set aside your emotions for the moment, but in that case shouldn’t it be step left or something? Turn and look at yourself in profile, or go stand in the middle and off to the side, which in this case would have been roughly in the refrigerator, as I recall. That would at least make sense. But stepping back, to me, just sounds like stepping down. Or backing off. Being cowed by this asshole making overtures to reason. And you know men do that, that’s what men do, that’s the hill they die on: rationality. “Let’s take a step back” — yeah, off a fucking cliff, right?

I hate his eyebrows now. More than anything else, I don’t even care about him, it’s the fucking eyebrows that kill me. It’s like I’d never even looked at them before. Very prop-like, fake-looking. That whole night he had them hoisted up practically to his hairline, and another thing was he had his eyes open so wide I could see the whites all the way around the irises. I’ve always hated that, it’s a terrible look, creepy and like dead-looking, reminds me of those cadavers in the Body exhibits, remember those? The plastinated ones, the Chinese chain-smoker death row ones. Maybe they didn’t have eyes though.

I think you should be able to argue and fight without your face turning into this entirely different face. Maybe that’s too much to ask, I didn’t see my face at the time, I probably looked like a total psycho myself and, yeah, I guess I am the one who started, you know, throwing things. But still. I’m actually offended he lets his face get that ugly. It’s a bad look for me. I mean, you’re in a fight, you got fucking caught. Still. Have some self respect.

Maybe that’s unfair of me. I don’t think anyone can control that. There are so many tiny little muscles in the face, it’s like it war-paints itself, or the limbic system takes over or something. But it’s so disfiguring it’s just absolutely awful, truly another person, and I feel like once you’ve seen someone like that you can’t unsee it. I think once the pendulum swings all the way over to hate it’s maybe hard to see how it can ever swing back. I still see it when I see him, it’s like a flash burn, even though he’s mister cucumber now. Shaved, got his haircut. Whole new man.

What’s sick is I think there’s a different sort of settlement where I win ten times out of ten. It’s not the factual account, maybe, but it’s the real one. If you could see how he was then compared to how he was before I found out everything — so, you know, literally overnight. Like I think if it were a movie version and you went quickly from the previous night scene, the innocuousness of it, him so innocent and me so oblivious and thinking he’s sweet because he ran out last minute to get dressing for the salad, to then the next night, and if you filmed it so that it was real close-up on our faces, toggling between, you’d see him. Really see him.

The cognitive dissonance of it. The no acknowledgment whatsoever. Like he can’t even see me. Not even sorry, just already thinking through his next moves. Like a light switch.

He looked like Jared Kushner, actually.