Jade Sharma: Problems

Somewhere along the way, there stopped being new days. Time progressed for sure: The rain tapered off through the night; near dawn, cars rumbled and then zoomed away. Sounds folded back into the world, moving on, light-years from the living room where I lay around, hardly living.

The soundtrack of the night looped every twelve hours: the hum of the refrigerator, the blare of a siren going by, the sound of someone turning on a faucet somewhere in the building. The Saturday night remix of the chatter of drunk guys, who smoked cigarettes in the courtyard and called each other “bro,” interspersed with the chorus of drunk girls’ high-pitched squeals every time a rat scurried out of the bushes.

Sometimes in the early morning, a man somewhere in the building would yell about the music being too loud. But I never heard any music. I only heard him yelling.

A buried alarm clock went off somewhere else in the building.

I puttered around my apartment in my fuzzy pink slippers, wearing purple boy shorts and a wifebeater. My husband, Peter, slept in the bedroom.

Peter. To the outside world, he was my nice, handsome husband who had to deal with me. When I cried, he held me and told me he loved me. Sometimes when I cried, he said, “Do you want some ice cream? I’ll get you some ice cream.” Sometimes when I cried, he said, “Have you run out of drugs?”

Sometimes in bed he held me as if he was a selfish little boy saying, “Mine, mine, mine,” to the world. Sometimes he took care of me because he took care of things that belonged to him.

I was the one who lost things. I was the one who wanted to talk when it was time for bed. I was the mess, and he was the one who rolled his eyes. I was the one who bought dope with the tips he brought home. He was the one who came home drunk. Who the fuck was I to tell him he’d had too much to drink when he had to deal with me? When he wasn’t being a saint, he was telling me what a saint he was to put up with me.

He was an idiot. A beautiful idiot who slept at night, woke up early, went for a run, went to work, came home drunk, passed out, and then did it all over again.

Whenever a man told me he loved me, I imagined how one day this same man would tell me I was a crazy bitch, because I am a crazy bitch.

An unlit cigarette between my lips, I looked for a light. On the coffee table: half a bottle of ginger ale, scratched-off lotto tickets, loose change, and a matchbook I kept forgetting was empty. I tried Peter’s Zippo. Spark. Nothing. Spark. Nothing. Dead. I tossed it on the couch and went to the kitchen to light the cigarette off the stove. I felt like one of those women on Intervention , smoking alone at some weird hour.

On the couch, I pressed my fingers along my rib cage, ran my hand down my belly to the crooks of my hips. I imagined my hand was Ogden’s. I stuck my hand in my underwear. I thought of how he would feel how smooth my pussy was. How his fingers would feel through the folds to my clit. How he would feel how wet he made me.

Ogden had been my professor when I was doing course work for my master’s degree in English. I had always wanted to fuck a professor, like it was the kind of fuck you could check off a list: celebrity, artist, European, fireman, another girl (check), threesome (check), etc.

I got wet when I listened to Ogden lecture. I loved his deep, masculine voice when he said feminine words like “beautiful” and “sonnet.” I watched the way he patted his chalky hand on his jeans and left a white smear like he didn’t give a fuck. I thought of his deep voice in my ear, saying, “Yeah, you like that?” The way the cuff of his shirt was unbuttoned. I saw the dullness of his eyes, as if he had spent a lifetime staring at the color gray. I wanted to see how different his eyes would look when I looked up while I blew him.

After the semester ended, we met for a cup of coffee and ordered drinks instead. I waited for him to come on to me, but he didn’t. He told stories that had the air of being told before. He ate bread like a caveman: gnawing at it, crumbs falling onto the wooden table. Why couldn’t he talk to me like a normal person? Ask me about my childhood, where I was from, or about Peter, and then tell me about his high school girlfriend. Volley the ball around instead of talking at me. Even when you are ready to put out for a guy, he has to go and fuck it up. I didn’t care about hooking up with him anymore. I wanted to go home.

It was his idea to share a cab. I climbed into the back, my hands on the leather seat. He told the cab driver where to go. I stared at him staring out the window. He was totally content with the prospect of sitting in silence for rest of the ride and then never seeing me again. There was something about a man not caring if he ever saw me again that made me want to suck his cock.

“So you don’t want to have sex with me?” I said, like it was a dare.

“It doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, so maybe that’s for the best,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said as I stared out the window. The way you could see all down the street between blocks. “But you know,” I said, “there is the conquest factor. This has been my objective for a semester. .”

He laughed. Then he said, “Come here.”

I got on top of him, and he shoved his tongue into my mouth. I am totally making out with Ogden Fitch , I thought as I made out with Ogden Fitch. He didn’t kiss how I imagined he would. His tongue greedily pushed into my mouth. The car pulled over in front of my building.

“I shaved my pussy for you,” I said into his ear.

“Aw, how sweet,” he said, looking genuinely flattered. I shoved my tongue back into his mouth.

I had been married to Peter for seven months.

It wasn’t because I didn’t love my husband that I had cheated on him.

Sometimes I didn’t know if I loved my husband.

I didn’t know. It was a marriage. Marriage is boring, and sometimes you want to kill the person, and sometimes you feel the truth of a million clichés about having one real partner to grow old with when the world is cold and full of strangers. But most of the time I didn’t feel anything.

Seeing the same person so much makes you not see them at all. Sometimes I awoke from the haze of the living-room-watching-television funk and that fuzzy figure next to me on the couch would come into focus: a real-life human being whose mind was as vivid and whole as mine. I would think to myself, Who in the fuck is this person? And I would ask, “Peter, what are you thinking?” And he would say, “Nothing, really.”

Lorrie Moore wrote, “For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all.”

Sometimes I tried to hold on to him, but I was always losing my grip, and he was always fading into the background.

I had cheated on every man I had ever been with. It was stupid to think there was something wrong with loving more than one person at a time. Sometimes the thought of who put their thing in whose thing seemed like the most absurd concern in the world. I thought I might as well fuck as many people as I could before my cunt dried up and nobody wanted me anyway.

You shouldn’t put out right away. That’s what I’ve heard. I have no idea because I’ve never not put out right away.

After I started having an affair, Peter and I fought less. Sometimes I thought we were closer than we’d ever been.

I never imagined any man would ask to marry me. I wanted to try it on: a grown-up’s life of grocery lists, laundry, and arguments about who was supposed to buy new lightbulbs. Peter was a badge I wore that said to the outside world, “How crazy can I be if this normal person has decided to spend the rest of his life with me?”