Violeta Noir

She used to tell me to know my place.

That always confused me.

Not because I didn't know it.

Because I did.

I was the lover.

Hard R.

I had never asked him to be my man. I had never waited for him to choose me. I never wanted her title, her house, her marriage, or the life that came attached to him.

He was the one who kept trying to make the role bigger.

Boyfriend.

Mine.

My love.

Forever.

Even near the end, he told me he was going to ask me every day to be his because he wanted me forever.

“That’s sweet, lova lova.”

He would call me my love.

“Hard R.”

Lover.

Finish the word.

He kept behaving as though I was waiting for a promotion I had never applied for.

Years ago, sitting across from him at his favorite sticky little soup restaurant while he ate the most boring tomato soup imaginable, he told me he wanted to be my boyfriend.

I told him we should make lists.

On one side, the qualities our future spouses would possess.

On the other, the deal breakers.

I knew what kind of man could stand beside the woman I intended to become.

He mostly listed looks.

I read his list once.

Then twice.

Then a third time.

I remember looking up at him, appalled.

How could somebody be that vain?

He laughed.

“Read it again.”

“I read it three times.”

He was describing me.

That should have been romantic.

Instead, it told me something.

He knew what he wanted to look at.

I knew what I needed to live beside.

Those were never the same thing.

Some of my deal breakers were things he had already done.

Others were things he would continue doing for years.

One of them was simple.

No other woman’s name tattooed on you.

He told me he put hers beneath his heart partly to spite me because I had left him and chosen my family.

He was hurt that she wouldn't get a matching one.

I remember thinking how strange people were about permanence.

Tattooing names onto bodies while relationships shifted underneath them.

The shoes of my future were always too big for him.

The funny thing is, I never asked him to put them on.

He kept trying anyway.

At one point, we were equals.

I mean that.

I respected his mind. I liked talking to him. I showed him places. Ideas. Experiences.

I told him about physics, about teaching it to my son. Years earlier, when my son was still little, my son was the one who told me to take an IQ test after listening to me talk.

Now my minor is in physics.

Guess what his minor is this coming up semester?

People leave fingerprints on each other after four years.

But somewhere along the way, he decided to sit down.

And I kept moving.

I did not judge him for sitting.

I told him that.

That’s okay.

That’s just not who I am.

I had warned him years before that I grew exponentially.

I warned my husband too.

Exponential growth is deceptive.

For a while, the line barely moves.

Then the curve turns upward.

I was going back to school.

Going to the gym.

Going out with friends.

Traveling.

Scheduling things simply because I wanted to experience them.

Getting Brazilian waxes.

Dressing how I wanted.

Dating.

My dates were becoming rocket scientists, college professors, pilots, CEOs and men with lives that had nothing to do with the small world her husband kept trying to contain me inside.

I had my house.

My sports car.

My children were getting older.

My degree was getting closer.

My world was opening.

Once he said something about how he had met my husband during the worst time in my life.

I looked at him.

“You too.”

He hadn't met my final form either.

For a long time, her husband had been a supplement to my husband.

That is the part people will probably understand least.

Together, they were the perfect man for a married woman.

My husband gave me stability, history, family, the house on the hill, vehicles bought new off the lot, bills paid, the infrastructure of a life.

He still does.

Even now, he will tell me the electric is handled and ask if I need help with school supplies after paying child support and spousal support.

Her husband filled other spaces.

And I filled spaces in his life too.

We were both unhappier in our marriages without each other.

For a while, we made our marriages bearable.

Maybe that is one of the uglier truths.

We may not have been destroying our marriages.

For a time, we may have been helping them survive.

The pressure had somewhere else to go.

The loneliness had somewhere else to go.

The hunger had somewhere else to go.

The parts that didn't fit at home had somewhere else to breathe.

I chose her husband partly because he was married.

I was married too.

That was supposed to be the boundary.

Before we got into the thick of anything, we agreed we would tell our spouses.

I told mine.

He did not tell his.

That wasn't my marriage to manage.

Too bad for her, she had chosen an untrustworthy spouse.

No judgment there.

I wouldn't have trusted him with that either.

She knew for half her marriage that he yearned for someone else.

That the yearning had a name, a body, a history.

And still, somehow, she seemed convinced that I wanted to occupy her position.

I didn't.

I had my tubes tied.

When he talked about us having a baby, I told him:

You have a wife at home who wants a baby.

Go have one with her.

I already had my children.

I also told him I would not even consider leaving my husband until my son was eighteen.

What I did not tell him was why.

That was mine.

I was giving my husband that long to heal.

That long to find his way home.

That long for us to find out whether the man I had built a life with could return to the marriage we had lost.

Her husband did not know that.

He had lost the privilege of knowing my true motives long before.

He was need-to-know.

And eventually, he needed to know very little.

He used to accuse me of talking in circles.

I did.

Always deliberately.

There was never confusion in the circle.

There was a center.

I knew exactly where it was.

He just wasn't allowed to stand in it.

If he interrogated too much, sometimes I gave him something to chase.

One inconsistency.

One unfinished possibility.

One thread he couldn't quite pull loose.

I knew how his mind worked.

I knew he would ruminate.

Sometimes I sent him chasing his own tail on purpose.

I am not going to clean that up for the reader.

I drew the circles.

He thought he was solving me.

I was designing the maze.

Maybe that is why “know your place” always sounded so ridiculous coming from her.

I knew mine.

Why was she in my space?

She lived in a townhouse her husband repeatedly invited me into.

Their bedroom.

Their furniture.

Their home.

The windows open.

The neighbors already knew who I was.

I was not some mysterious woman hidden behind tinted glass.

When I stopped going there, it wasn't because he withdrew the invitation.

It wasn't because she ran me off.

I stopped because I no longer wanted to go.

Her husband still wanted me there.

That distinction mattered to me.

She could shout about territory all she wanted.

He was the one moving the walls.

And I never looked at what they had and thought, I wish that were mine.

He bought her an old car he eventually drove himself and complained that when he bought his own, she wanted to drive that too.

My husband had bought me an entire house on a hill.

My truck had been brand new off the lot.

My sports car had been brand new.

The bills were paid.

So when she talked about place, I never understood what hierarchy she imagined I was trying to climb.

I did not envy her position.

I told her husband that often.

I would always rather have been the lover.

Lovers get to close the door.

He told me stories about his family, his marriage, his friendships, the things that made him feel smothered.

He complained that she copied him.

That she sat in the same place on the couch.

That he couldn't have an individual thought.

And I would look at him sideways.

The irony.

This was a man who was constantly touching me.

Always holding me.

Always trying to mark his territory around other men.

He hated when men were simply nice to me.

He made them uncomfortable.

He told me he wanted people to know I was his.

He tried to get me to stop wearing revealing clothes.

Turtlenecks.

He wanted me in turtlenecks.

He accused me of using men at work.

Eventually he even suggested I had somehow asked for rape.

I knew what he was doing.

I was becoming visible again.

Not just to him.

To the world.

I was no longer the desperate housewife he had met.

I was single.

I was going places.

Men noticed me in front of him.

Men bought me gifts.

Men offered to buy me things simply from seeing my picture online.

He knew how the world treated me.

He knew I had pretty privilege.

And he also showed me the underside of it.

People can love your beauty when it makes them feel chosen.

They can resent it when it reminds them you still have choices.

He loved my magnetism when it reflected back on him.

He hated it when it illuminated an exit.

Years earlier, he thought he had ruined a date for me.

He knew I was meeting another man later, so before the date he kept me all day.

Town Center.

A pizza place I had never been to.

Hands on me.

Holding me.

Loving on me.

Making sure everybody could see.

For years afterward, he believed he had successfully sabotaged my evening.

He hadn't.

I just didn't like the man.

The date gave me a snake plant with a little yarn snake wrapped around the pot.

Her husband was furious about that planter.

He mentioned it every time he saw it.

So I put it in my bathroom.

Eventually her husband hand-painted me his own planter.

A snake on one side.

A butterfly on the other.

I still have it outside.

Another little permanent object born from his need to replace something another man had given me.

He thought he was the prize in a competition I had never entered.

I told him once:

You are not the prize you think you are.

He never understood how literally I meant it.

Years later, I planned another day for myself.

Coffee first.

Then an upscale oyster bar I loved.

I was dressed for myself.

He had finally corrected his attitude, so I allowed him to come.

Allowed.

That word matters.

I had been hoping I might run into an old writer flame I had later realized I rejected too soon.

Instead, her husband joined me.

I met him at the oyster bar.

I walked up and kissed him deeply.

I didn't care what he had to say about whatever fight we'd been having.

I wanted all that energy redirected between the sheets later.

Before we went inside, I warned him about the chef.

There had once been something between us.

Nothing had happened.

But something had been there.

It had been a long time.

I told her husband the chef probably wouldn't even remember me.

He looks a little like Channing Tatum.

Her husband wasn't concerned.

Then the doors opened.

Huge, two-story doors.

I walked through first.

Heels.

Her husband was already about an inch shorter than me without them.

And I could feel myself filling that enormous room before anybody said a word.

Then:

“VIOLETA!”

We’ve missed you.

The chef remembered me.

Of course he did.

He lit up when he saw me.

Then her husband walked in behind me.

And I watched the chef slump.

My regular seat was front and center.

The whole restaurant seemed to open around me.

I didn't need to show much skin.

I didn't need to perform for anybody.

I was the performance.

The chef kept coming back.

Stumbling over his words.

Looking at me.

I looked back.

I flirted.

“I’ll do whatever you tell me.”

“I don't know what I want. Tell me what I want.”

Her husband sat beside me getting smaller.

At some point I asked him whether this was a date or whether I needed to pay for myself.

“And if I say no?”

“Then you'll see how I am when you're not around.”

After that, his hands stayed on me.

His mouth stayed close to mine.

When he went to the bathroom, I told him to hurry back.

He looked darkly toward the chef.

“I better, or you'll fly away.”

There it was.

Not you'll cheat.

Not you'll disrespect me.

Not even he wants you.

You'll fly away.

He knew.

He had always known.

His fear was never simply that another man might take me.

His fear was that eventually I would remember nobody had to.

I could simply leave.

That was the thing about her husband.

He wanted a woman with wings as long as everybody could see she had chosen to perch beside him.

But he wanted to clip them the moment he realized she could still fly.

And I kept growing anyway.

She told me to know my place.

I knew it.

She was the wife.

I was the lover.

He was the supplement to a husband I was still quietly giving time to find his way back home.

She wanted the baby.

I told him to give it to her.

She wanted the marriage.

I did not.

She wanted her husband.

I wanted the portions of him that made my own life more pleasurable and, for a time, more bearable.

Her feelings were never the center of my decisions.

Neither was she.

I had my own consequences.

My own family.

My own fallout.

My own husband.

My own children.

My own future.

I was not competing for her chair.

I had already examined it.

I didn't want to sit there.

If anything, everyone else kept trying to renegotiate a role I had understood from the beginning.

Her husband kept trying to become more.

She kept insisting I should become less.

And I kept moving.

Maybe that was the part neither of them understood.

They thought the scene was happening around them.

They thought they were the players.

They thought the wife, the husband, the lover, the jealousy, the marriage, the dates, the gifts, the houses, the cars, the restaurants, the arguments, the questions, the circles...those things were the story.

They weren't.

By then, I had learned something about myself.

I could choose the room.

I could choose the lighting.

I could choose what truth entered and what truth stayed outside.

I could choose who received access.

I could choose the clothes, the setting, the tension, the audience, the invitation, the exit.

He thought he was reacting to my world.

He never understood how much of the world he experienced around me had been deliberately constructed.

The smells.

The colors.

The players.

The desire.

The uncertainty.

The maze.

The exits.

Everything he saw.

The entire scene.

I was the architect.