Husbands & Lovers

by Beatriz Williams

Who filled an old jam jar with fireflies the night before he left for camp and told me he figured the lights came from all your ancestors in heaven, keeping watch over you.

A spectator to my own life.

Those eyes, she remembered thinking. The color of hope.

I wish I could remember every word we ever said to each other, like those people who can recall their entire lives like a gigantic library of video clips.

Maybe he was the kind of boy you dreamed about, the unicorn boy, the boy who peered beneath your surface to marvel at the weirdness roiling within.

“You men,” she said. “You’re so quick to judge a woman who marries for money. But men are the same. A different kind of treasure, that’s all.”

“Men fall over themselves for a beautiful woman, women fall over themselves for a rich man. So who’s the more greedy? At least money is useful. And it doesn’t fade with time.”

“You need someone to worship you.” He leaned forward to rest his hands on either side of her head. “Someone to remind you of the joys of love.”

Every exchange between human beings is a bargain of some kind. Actual treasure or moral treasure, it’s all the same. You agree on your price and make the transaction.”

“I do whatever you want. I meet you whenever you ask, on whatever terms. I’ll protect this stupid husband of yours from his own idiocy. But don’t think for one moment I do these things because of some fucking respectful, bloodless, spiritual regard for you. I’m in love with you. This is the truth. This is all I think about. How I want to kiss you. How I want to take you to bed until we’re both dead together in each other’s arms. Is that serious enough for you?”

“I can’t bring you back to life, Hannah,” he said. “You can choose to live again, or not. But I can make you remember what it was like to be alive.”

I couldn’t believe he never knew, all this time, that he was the sun to my earth.

I suppose, when your parents fail you, you either go to pieces or you become the grown-up you require.

For a while we just sat there on the wall, side by side, paying tribute to the people we could have loved, if we hadn’t belonged to each other.

I remember thinking how strange it was to feel sad in the middle of so much happiness, how you couldn’t just experience joy all by itself without feeling as if you had somehow stolen it from somewhere else. That there was only so much joy in the world.

What else can one do, when one falls desperately in love?

A man is seldom lucky enough to fight for what he believes in. He just fights to stay alive.”

Money isn’t the object of life. Life is the object of life. But the unmentionable fact is, money is what sustains that life. Our life.

This isn’t really happening. But it did. It happened. It happens to a lot of women, more women than you think. Women who never imagine it could happen to them, women who trusted the wrong person, women who dropped their guard at the wrong moment. Women who think it was maybe their fault. Women who are too ashamed to talk about it afterward. Women who try to forget, to move on with their lives, to block the whole thing out, to stuff it in a box and close the lid. Go on living and loving, don’t let it define you. Don’t let it beat you. But it did happen. That night, it happened to me.

“It’s important to know where you came from,” she says. “It’s a part of you. But it doesn’t have to define you. They give you the paper and ink, but you write the story yourself.”

“Life’s supposed to be hard. You have to fight for what you love. And I would have fought for you and Sam. I would have fought so hard for this.”

You’re the sun. I’m just here soaking you up, Pinks. So yes, I would have fought for us. I would have fought like hell. Because I happen to know how dark and basically fucked up my world is when you’re not in it.”