Her Secondhand Smoke
My grandmamma always tells me that a sigh is the sound your soul makes when a little piece of it dies. My grandmamma is a chain-smoker, and I always thought that her wheezing sounded more like death, but now I think I know what she was getting at.
I used to play this game with myself. I called it, “The Sighing Game,” or I guess, that’s what I would’ve called it if I’d ever talked about it. Technically, it wasn’t only my game; Jess was a part of it, too. I just didn’t tell her she was playing.
So, Jessica and I have been married, or technically we’ve been “civilly unified,” for a year and a half now. I remember when the bill passed, we were at the Clubhouse, and everyone was kissing. People were pulling out rings and going down on one knee. I pulled my Jess close to me. I wrapped my arms around her skinny body and nuzzled up to her. Her hair was stiff with gel, and it prickled my temple. I can’t explain it, just something about that moment. I just felt filled up with love. I can’t make you understand if you haven’t felt it, but everything at that moment was completely right.
Suddenly I was overcome with an overwhelming need to preserve that feeling. Without even giving it much thought, I whispered in her ear, “Jessy Bessy—” I call her that sometimes—Jessy Bessy. It sounds stupid when I say it now, but I think she liked it at the time. Anyway, I said, “Jessy Bessy, we have to do it. I want to be officially yours.”
Jess grinned. “We better get to it, then, Little Red. Don’t want anybody changing their mind. This thing could be overturned any day now.” She ruffled my hair as she kissed me.
We did it that week. When we signed the papers, I wore a white sundress, and she wore one of those t-shirts that look like tuxedos. Our friends chipped in and bought us a fondue set as a wedding present. For our honeymoon, we laid in bed and fed each other things dipped in chocolate. It was bliss.
Did that sound sarcastic? Jess says I come off as sarcastic a lot and that it makes it hard to take me seriously. But I swear, I mean it. I was really, truly happy.
I didn’t tell my family immediately. Honestly, I sort of forgot about them with all of the excitement. When I called grandmamma, she said she was happy for me, but I didn’t believe her.
She mused, “I wonder if it’s the same with you gays as it is with everyone else.”
I didn’t know what she was getting at.
“I know marriage just seems like a big cake and a piece of paper from the government, but it changes things.” She had to pause to light another cigarette before she continued, “Just watch out, baby. Everything that you love about Jessica right now, you’re gonna hate her for just a little while down the road. That’s what marriage is all about.”
I could tell that she was feeling like playing the part of the sage elder. And when I sighed, she reminded me that a piece of my soul was now gone forever.
Maybe the conversation with Grandmamma just made me paranoid, but over the next few months, I did notice the teeniest hint of a change in my Jessy. So, maybe that’s what made me start with the game. Just, mostly she started sighing a lot.
I set the thermostat to 65 instead of 70; Jessy would sigh when she noticed. I left my dirty clothes on the bathroom floor; she’d see it and sigh. I left the hall light on, sigh. My sleep talking woke her up last night, sigh. I turned the TV up too loud, sigh.
Had she always been this prone to sighing or was this a new development—a tell-tale sign that all lovers harbor this seed in some secret compartment of their chest, this seed that is germinated by marriage, that has the potential to grow into something nasty and unstoppable, something poisonous that will eventually kill them? A sigh would escape from her soft lips, and I’d spend the next hour agonizing over whether or not it was caused by something she would have sighed over before the union. Worse yet, I could not figure out if the sighing was the direct result of something that I was doing wrong or if it was more of a general gloom that wasn’t completely my fault.
This is where the game started. First, I was just counting her sighs, just to try and get an idea of whether or not the sighing thing was getting worse. I’d carry around half an index card and a safety pin, and for every glum huff I’d poke a tiny hole in the index card. I started a new index card every week. After a couple of months, I had carefully documented proof that she was getting worse.
I know that Jess thought the index card thing was weird. I didn’t want to explain what I was doing, so I mostly tried to avoid letting her see me with it. This led to me do things that she probably thought were even stranger. For example, at dinner I’d regularly sacrifice my silverware, throwing it on the floor, just to have an excuse to duck under the table for a second. I’d send myself text messages, toss my phone into my over-sized black hole of a purse, and when it rang, I’d rummage through my purse with both hands, as if I were looking for it really intently, when, of course, I’d really be punching holes.
Sometimes Jess would see me doing these things, and she’d sigh again. But those weren’t the ones that bothered me. The ones that really got to me were the ones that happened after I did or said something that I sincerely believed would make her smile. And maybe a year and a half ago, they would have made her smile, but they don’t anymore, and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. Nothing seems that different. If anything, I should be doing more things right because I’m so attuned to her every single unhappy breath.
Like, maybe four or five months ago, I was dying my hair in our bathroom when I heard Jess’s car pull up. She’d gotten off work later than usual. I met her at the door. My hair was piled on top of my head, saturated with red goo. I leaned in, and she let me kiss her.
“You smell terrible,” she said, wincing.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “It’s the dye. It can’t be helped. If you want a hot redheaded wife, you’ll just have to deal with it.”
She headed silently to the kitchen and began rummaging for food. I went back to the bathroom to tend to my hair.
When I got done, Jessica was already in bed. I crawled in beside her, wrapping my body around hers. I kissed her face, her neck, her shoulders. I lightly bit her earlobe, the way that she used to say gave her shivers. As lovably as I possibly could, I whispered, “Wake up, Jessy Bessy.”
She pulled away suddenly, turning on her side and curling up so that her boney ass was jammed into my torso, trapping me against the cold wall. And then it came. It was so small that I wouldn’t have heard it, had I not been listening for it, that little muffled exhalation that uprooted our sex life so effortlessly, blowing it away like a sapling in a hurricane. I was waiting for it, but that doesn’t mean I was ready for it.
I picked my bathrobe up off of the floor and fished the safety pin out of the pocket. I drove the safety pin into my thigh until I felt it start to bleed. It wasn’t even like I was doing it. It was like I was watching someone else do it to me, watching Jessy do it.
I guess that was when the second phase of the game started, and her sighs turned into my scabs.
Jessy barely noticed the marks. She barely looked at my body at all anymore. I could jab the pin into my hip with my left hand and scratch her back with my right. She wouldn’t think twice. She’d just go on sighing my skin off without a care.
More than anything, I wanted Grandmamma to be wrong about me and my Jessy. And in a way, Grandmamma was wrong. I still love everything about her that I’ve always loved, maybe even more intensely than I did before. I even have scars to prove it. But Jess did hate me. Even when she wasn’t sighing, I could feel the resentment. It was there even when she was nice to me, when she let me touch her. When she said, “I love you,” the words made my eyes water like she’d blown smoke in my face. Yet, I existed to taste her bitterness. It kept me going. I woke up each morning, thinking maybe today she’ll be sweet. She never was, but that wasn’t what really mattered. She was sour, but she still filled me up. I told myself I’d rather be filled up with her sour than dried up and empty.
Last night, though, things were different. I was dying my hair again. Jessy got home late, which had become normal. She clattered around for a while in the kitchen. It wasn’t until I’d rinsed my hair that Jessy came into the bathroom. She must have been coming in to pee or to brush her teeth or something. I was bent over, naked, drying my hair with a towel. It had been awhile since I’d really been undressed in front of her. She came up behind me and gingerly brushed her fingertips up and down my back. I was startled, and I backed away.
“Come here, my Little Red,” Jessy said, taking a step toward me. I didn’t have to move because she pulled me toward her and began planting kisses along the nape of my neck. “I missed this,” she whispered. I could feel her warm breath on my ear.
I let her kiss me and touch me like she wanted to. I even reciprocated. But it was another one of those moments that I didn’t even feel like I was part of. I felt like a sick spectator, like I couldn’t bear to watch it, but I couldn’t force myself to look away. She grabbed my hand and led me to our bed. I put my lips on her earlobe and watched a smile spread across her face as she shuddered. She got on top of me and started to kissing my body in a line starting at my mouth and moving downwards. When she made it to my thighs, I couldn’t help but recoil. They were tender. I had at least nine fresh puncture wounds just from that morning.
Jessy opened her eyes and saw my game written right there on my skin. She looked disgusted. She stopped touching me. I wanted to explain the game and all of its rules and to tell her how she filled me up and how the tally marks were really just proof of how much I loved her, but it just didn’t happen that way. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t control it. I felt it swell up in my chest until it got so big that it just shot through my throat and out of my lips. It was heavy, and it hung in the air like the smell of something dead.
I wanted to look her in the face, but I just didn’t. Instead I curled up into a ball and closed my eyes. I felt like I was choking. I’d been inhaling every one of her sighs like secondhand smoke. It was like our home was made of asbestos and leaking carbon monoxide. I couldn’t breathe anymore, but I wasn’t even trying to get out. I was ready to suffocate beside her, when I should’ve been holding my breath from the beginning.
