Jill (revised 3/12)

Jill

I am standing in the hallway outside our hotel room while Jack takes a dump because he has never been able to go with anyone in earshot. Under the enormous white robe the hotel has supplied I have on a whisper of a nightgown. Shivering, I look down at my big, bare, ugly feet and decide to wander.
This is our last trip together but Jack doesn’t know that yet. He put it together with his accounts partner, William, at the holiday work party back in December, before Maite and before the abortion. Before the need for the abortion.
I follow the royal green and maroon carpet patterns down the stairs and keep going until they curve into the bar, which is still open and fairly empty.
“Margarita, por favor”. To the bartenders credit he does not note my attire. Or lack of it.
“Salt?”
“No, gracias.”
Funny part, well, funny to me; Maite was the RN helping with the “procedure”. When I turned my head to the side and began to weep, she, with her lovely black, black eyes, laid her palm on my forehead, hot and soft, and shushed me saying “captas la ondas ”, which I looked up later and found to mean, “to capture the sound of the wave/ to understand”. The tenderness in her voice was like finely etched glass and it made me suddenly feel thirsty, not in a body way, but deeper.
Still bleeding, I went home to Jack who was leaving for his basketball game. I kissed him goodbye and sat down on the sofa, punching on the TV. He said, “I love you” and waited for a long moment at the open door looking a little stricken. I understand now that “I love you” means so many different things. With Jack and I it has come to mean, “Don’t leave me”, or “We’re okay, right?”
When Maite said, “I love you”, right there for the entire world to hear in a Target, it meant something like “I think you are beautiful.” Now, even I know I’m not beautiful. I look like Jodie Foster, and not the young precocious one. I didn’t reply, but watched her pick out soap and though of how I said it first, to Jack, when we were sparkly and new. It was understood then as “I want you; I need you”.
I wave on another limey margarita and look down to see that my weight is fully propped on the bar via my elbows. The guy two stools down from me nods and smiles blearily.
Jack and I argued earlier in the day about bringing Spot along. (Spot is my pet ferret; I’ve had him since high school.) There was really no need for me to schlep him along but lately I am full of blood lust for a fight. I hold the big“ I'm leaving you” like a line of aces, waiting for the perfect moment to flatten them out on the table and crush him. It has made me deliriously powerful; when we fuck, which is exactly what you can call it now, I find ways to come quick and easy, and leave Jack to finish himself off while I go shower. I’m a jerk, I know, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
Exiting the bar, I wobble into the lobby and get panicky for a second because suddenly I don’t know at all where I am. On the plane, Jack turned, handsome and bright, to do the ritual “safe flight” kiss. A sharp, instant image crossed me- Jill without Jack, and my life’s footing dropped out below me. I threw up in the airline bag.
When I stride into room #215, trying to appear mysterious and mostly sober, Jack is under the covers watching CNN. I check on Spot, curled into a tight ball in the shoebox, and feel my way up the bed, and lumber belly up onto the satiny duvet.
“I was worried you’d hooked up with some hot Latino,” Jack says unconvincingly.
I stifle a burp, “Latina.”
Jack raises one of his, I will tell you, waxed eyebrows, pauses dramatically and replies dryly, “Alrighty then.”
I watch the TV’s blue light wane and wax on the ceiling and I argue to an imagined third party why I need to quit something that is not awful, not even BAD actually. I come to this: there are what I would call inner landscapes, these uniquely lonely, echoing caves and valleys inside each of us. And what makes you okay, what makes you not despair, is that there is someone who knows that landscape, who develops an affection for it that even you could never, ever muster up. What I tell this third party before I fall asleep is that I don’t know Jacks landscape, and he doesn’t know mine.