The Forgiveable Journey Of The Cheated

19. All Aboard the Troubled Train

Everyone is broken.

Eve is broken. 

Something has broken. She can’t quite put her finger on what it is that is broken, though she knows it’s inside of her. It’s not something dynamic and evolving. It’s something that is broken. And she doesn't know how to fix it.

At first she had thought it was her heart. Well maybe that too is broken, but her heart seems to be mending. After days, after weeks and even months, it seems to be OK, her heart. That pinch she felt in those first weeks, that loss of appetite, is mostly gone. Her heart feels more like it has an irritated scar, a throbbing bruise, a longing, a phantom limb and its inexplicable pain. There is no broken heart here. 

The brokenness relates to the way she experiences her life. Each experience filtered through a twisted lens. A sunset, a song, a sentence, a gesture, a look at herself in the mirror, a simple exchange with another, the taste of coffee, a touch, a decision, sex…

Take for example, going to the movies. This is supposed to be a moment of hand holding, the movie a future conversation topic. Because she is doing nothing but waiting in line, her mind wanders onto a now well-worn path of thinking. “Did he go to the movies with her?”  But really, what does it matter in the overall scheme of things if he had? Movies are a small thing when you consider the trysts, the likely exchange of love letters and the making of plans. A three year closet relationship that almost ended up being the real deal is huge next to such a miniscule event as going to the movies on a date. 

But it is important for Eve. Movie going was a significant brick in Eve’s relationship with Dan, a brick she hopes he didn’t share with someone else. Before the kids, the rhythm of their weeks was punctuated by movies. The movies are where they talked to each other for the first time. She remembers on several occasions deciding last minute to go to the movies, running hand in hand, sometimes through torrential rain, to get there on schedule, laughing heartily at their spontaneity and willingness to challenge time. These were hours where their hands sought out each other’s hands and knees. 

If Charlotte and Dan had gone to the movies together, then this special thing is no longer special. The grief of such a loss is hard to bear, so she tries reassuring herself “He told me he didn’t dare go out with her for fear of being seen together.” There is some relief with this thought, which is then followed by an anxiety provoking notion that they may have transformed the word date to the expression of “meeting up” (or something similar). She begins the familiar process of reviewing her memories of the past years. Dan "went to the movies" a few times without her. She first wonders if he even went to the movies on those occasions. Probably not every time once Liam had moved out. “Going to the movies” is a great excuse for leaving the house for a few hours. If (actually, the more appropriate word here is when) he did, he and another person could go independently to a pre-determined film, scan the room for people they know, find the person they are actually looking for, pretend to be surprised to see each other, then sit next to each other and grope each other in the dark. Voila. Double life!! How easy it could be!! How easy it was.

Now that she has thought the movie issue over, the question remains as to whether she should actually ask him the related questions. She tries so hard to space them out, yet she wants to get some of these preoccupations out of the way. Did he lie to her about going to the movies? He had said “No" months earlier. "I never went to the movies with her or on a date”. But tricky wording can be used to avoid answering the real question. Her question should have been at that time, "where did you meet up and how often outside of work?"

Silently Eve asks herself the question that Lisa has been coaching her to ask during these moments. "And what does the answer change?" Nothing. 

She is just a sad person who is inside her head again. Dan notices this time and asks “You OK?”