When a Door is Not a Door

She never blocked me. I search her name, and there she is, there’s her picture. A few clicks, and there’s her life. And in my dumb hope, I wonder if it’s her way of leaving the door open, as she used to do when we first married.

She’d say, “I’m too tired,” dealing that rejection tenderly. She’d want a shower before bed, and I’d watch her go. And what went with her?

Her ears, elvish and adorable, that received what I said and decoded my rants and bullshit so she could make sense of what was bothering me.

Her laugh that shook her shoulders and wrinkled her nose, a laugh triggered by a sensitive lever that released when she knew I needed an appreciative audience.

Her tenacity, the adrenaline that shifted her foot to foot at the kitchen counter as she highlighted transcripts and annotated legal precedents, the righteousness that marched with her into court to defend her court-appointed clients.

No, when she walked toward the shower, I didn’t see those things. I reduced everything she was to a single desire. Mine.

She’d turn the handle, and the pipes in the wall between the bathroom and bedroom vibrated, shaking the bed. I’d peek at the bathroom door and see the light fall onto the hall carpet in a white triangle. Lifting my body on the bed, I’d see her peeling off layers of clothes and fatigue. Just before she climbed into the steam, she’d look back at me over her bare shoulder and, not winking, invite me in, suggest without words the way husbands and wives kind of know, kind of feel rather than hear what the other person intends.

Then I’d strip in the bedroom and join her, and sometimes we’d make it back to the bed, but most times we drove up the water bill and reserved our bed for sleeping.

Maybe that’s why she never blocked me on Facebook. She’s leaving the door open, ever slightly, inviting me without the invitation to join her life. Perhaps, and I have to smile at the possibility, perhaps I can show up to her office one day with miso soup and California rolls and that tangy ginger salad dressing on the side because she thinks it makes the lettuce too soggy when they drown the salad.

And maybe, over an impromptu lunch, we could talk of meeting for dinner.

And maybe, at dinner, we could talk of taking a weekend together.

And maybe, over that weekend we could bring the divorce agreements with us and toss them in the motel’s gas fireplace and watch all of our mistakes singe and char and float the fuck away so we could wake up clean the next morning.

Why wouldn’t that work? She’s left the door open, hasn’t she?

And then I see him, him with the no name, him with the grin too sincere for my liking, the kind of grin where a few teeth reflect the sunlight. He squints in the picture, and I squint at him on my phone. He’s just a conglomerate of pixels to me, but he looks happier than I am, and from the looks of the pictures she’s uploaded the last three weeks, he has been making her happier than I ever could.

Especially toward the end.

“Do you wanna have sex tonight?”

I couldn’t see her reaction. My eyes were wandering the words Dan Brown had written on the page, eyes navigating the blank white spaces between words so they wouldn’t go chasing her marching around the house in her worn-to-thin-paper Beatles shirt and just-around-the-house shorts.

She was in a frenzy again, and had the bedroom not been carpeted, her thundering stomps would’ve echoed throughout the house. That’s what she did though. Rather than talking to me about the problem, she busied herself washing the dishes, mopping the kitchen, running the brush around the toilet bowl to clear out the week’s worth of gunk that clung beneath the rim.

This time she was transferring all her summer clothes out of her dresser and into a purple plastic bin, putting away a season nearly passed, taking out the fall clothes and deciding what to keep, what to donate, and what had seen its last season.

“Babe?” I asked when I got no response. I couldn’t see her reaction, but I sensed it. She shot upright like a fired catapult, and her jerky movement bumped into whatever it was in the air, into that weirdness above and around us.

She bumped it, and neither it nor she broke. It just pissed her off.

“It’s been a while, ya know, and I just thought, maybe.”

I didn’t turn the page.

She exhaled, throwing a handful of discards down the steps.

“I don’t think so,” she said, and continued folding and stacking clothes in the purple bin. “I had a lot of sitting time today, and my back’s still bothering me. Think I’m just going to shower and go to bed. I made some piles for you. Decide what you want to keep and donate and toss.”

That last word itself was tossed over her shoulder as she walked away from the bed.

“Okay.”

I watched her go, walk out from the right margin of my book, but at that point desire wasn’t drawing my eyes to her.

She treats me like a fucking child, I thought. If you wanted someone to boss about, then we should’ve had kids.

I eyed the stack of clothes on the recliner in the corner and fought the mounting urge to knock the stack to the floor.

The shower started. The walls hummed. And there she was, the shirt she wore like a second skin shed, her arms goose-pimpled. She pulled the waistband on her shorts, and they dropped.

There she stood, her hair freed from its wound-three-times ponytail, her shoulders brown and peeling, the last trace of our last beach trip falling off her in flecks. She crossed herself and scratched her left shoulder with her right hand. Pieces of her flaked off and drifted to the bathroom tile.

She arched forward, away from me, her palms pressed to her lower back, and she tried to knead out what the day had done to her.

Her legs above the knee hadn’t seen a razor for nearly two weeks, but I rubbed my thumbs against the pages before me knowing how badly I wanted to feel those prickles against my thighs.

The shower door slid shut, and I slid out of bed and dropped my shirt and jeans and underwear on the bedroom floor.

My anticipation led the way through the open door.

I reached toward the shower door handle, and in the steam, froze, unsure how to enter. The longer I stood, extended toward her, the more I felt in the wrong, as if I broke into a woman’s house and, like a perverted voyeur, robbed her of her privacy.

What could I say? Room for two in there?

My mouth opened and shut. Opened and shut. And when I became aware of time, of how many seconds I’d already waited (had it passed to minutes?), I withdrew.

The bedroom’s air conditioning dried the steam that coated the hairs all over my body.

In the shower, she moaned, and I slid on my underwear, pulled my shirt over my head, and went to sorting the laundry on the chair.

I flipped up the lid on the purple bin she hauled up from the basement and saw, aside from a few pockets where I could squeeze my shorter summer socks, she left no room for me.