Marriage is a useless piece of paper, he said, and he said it the way you’d recite something you had said many times before, in your own head if nowhere else. It changes absolutely nothing. If you need a legal contract to feel secure, Sarah, that’s your problem, not mine.
I looked at him. Not the quick, forgiving look I had given him a thousand times, the look that slid over the surface of him and found only the man I loved. This time I really looked, and I let myself see him, the contempt sitting easily on his face, the impatience, the total absence of anything that resembled love or even regret. And the strange thing, the thing I did not expect, was that the contempt hurt more than the refusal. I could have survived a man who was afraid of marriage. What I was looking at was a man who found my wanting it beneath him.
I thought I might cry. I felt the pressure of it behind my eyes, the whole ten years of it gathering. But I didn’t cry. Something colder and clearer moved in instead, some quiet mechanism at the very center of me clicking over into a new position, and in that moment, looking at him across the wreckage of a dessert we had been fighting over playfully ten minutes before, I made a decision. It didn’t feel like a decision so much as a recognition, the way you don’t decide the sun has set, you just notice that it has.
I nodded. Okay, I said.
That was all. Okay.
He mistook it. I would understand that much later, but I understood it fully then. He heard my okay as surrender, as the sound of a woman folding, giving up the argument, agreeing to go back to the comfortable arrangement where he got everything he wanted and I got to keep hoping. He relaxed again. The rest of dinner passed in a kind of unreal calm. He talked about the wine, about whether we should get the check, and on the drive home he complained about the parking situation downtown as though nothing at all had happened, as though he had not just told me, plainly and cruelly, the truth about the last ten years of my life.
