He falls in love with her laugh first.
“Is that so?” She replies, gray eyes sparkling, blond hair wavy. It looks like silk against her pale complexion, and Harge wants to trek his hands through it.
It startles him, the thought. He’s always been the most polite, collected, gentlemanly of his peers. He’s never had a thought so disrespectful, so scandalous, about a stranger before.
He replies in the affirmative, and she laughs. The sound isn’t twinkling, or like silver bells, the way books describe the way a woman’s laugh should be like. Instead, it’s round, a bit rough on the edges, elegant but free, and uninhibited. She laughs with her entire face, her body moving accordingly, and he suddenly wants nothing more than to draw it out of her over and over and over.
When they say goodbye that evening, they don’t get to speak much either way in order to maintain propriety, Harge asks her, as politely as he can, if he can take her out for dinner sometime. She looks at him, eyes sparkling, smiles wide, and says, “Of course. I would love that.”
He arrives to pick her up from her home on the dot and she makes him wait, rushing down with her hair half-curled to tell him, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I woke up too late. Will you wait for me?” And it’s so endearing that he ignores the voice in his head telling him that this is not polite nor is it right to say, “Of course.”
Their dinner together is perfect. She’s smart, attentive, beautiful and kind. She’s also different from the other women he encounters all the time. She’s not afraid to contradict him, her statements bold and unafraid. She’s open, laughs easily, and is a bright spot in a world of bland neutrals.
He loves it.
He signs the letters he sends her with, ‘Regards, Harge.’ In the beginning, she signs them back with, ‘The Blonde, Carol.’ Then, they go out on more dates, they eat more food and laugh some more (he’s even more in love with the sound of her laugh than he was in the beginning), and Harge meets her parents and she meets his. Then she starts signing her letters with ‘Love, Carol,’ and he starts signing them with ‘Yours, Harge.’
His mother pulls her aside after he introduces her to them. “She is very outspoken, isn’t she, Hargess?”
He is too in love to hear the subtext, and agrees wholeheartedly.
On their marriage day, her best friend Abby cries, she laughs, and Harge smiles so much he thinks his features will forever be contorted. He carries her into his- their bedroom, now, and he beams at the thought- and she is his, completely, utterly, body and soul.
“I love you,” she whispers to him. Three small words, and suddenly every molecule of his is hers and she is every universe he is.
Happiness tastes like milk in the middle of the night (she likes to get up sometimes, and sometimes she’ll call her friend Abby before coming to bed with a glass of milk that Harge will steal because he always wakes up when she leaves the bed). Content feels like silky blond hair, cut short soon after their wedding night, raked through his fingers. He is so happy he thinks he might burst when Carol turns to him one night and says, “Your mother wants us to have children.”
He is too happy to see the boiling water under the cauldron lid. “So let’s have children.” He strokes her waist, the feeling of her skin under his fingertips only making his happiness grow. “We’ll have to at some point, anyway. Why not now?”
Carol is silent for a moment (he’ll look back at this moment and wonder what she knew then, what he missed then, if this is where it started going all wrong) before turning to him. “Abby and I have been speaking about opening a furniture house.”
He scoffs playfully. “Is my salary not enough for you anymore?”
She shakes her head, serious enough that he is put out of his happy stupor for a moment. “I don’t want to be a housewife, Harge.”
He frowns. “But we don’t need the extra money, sweetheart. And besides, who will take care of our child if you’re always working?” He nudges her playfully, hoping she’ll see the reason in his voice.
She falls silent. She doesn’t mention the furniture house again, and three months later, she’s pregnant.
She’s a moody pregnant lady, he finds, and they fight more than they ever did before. She screams profanities at him, tells him that he doesn’t care at all about her when he comes back home late because of business functions, doesn’t listen when he tells her that he is about to be promoted and he’s doing this all for her, can’t she see? His mother just sighs and gives him a look that spells something like ‘I told you so’, and Abby glares at him with enough hatred in her eyes that he wonders what he ever did to her.
“I think Abby hates me.”
Carol gets up, tightens her robe around herself, and walks out of the room.
The next day, Harge asks why, and Carol tells him that Abby is her friend and if he can’t deal with it then he needs to keep it to himself. He tries to explain that he didn’t mean to insult Abby, and Carol just sneers and tells him that, “Oh please, Harge. I’m not stupid. Who do you think told your mother that Abby is a bad influence?” And true, Harge did say that, but he was only concerned about Carol, and he didn’t mean any harm by it.
But then the child is born, and suddenly Harge is almost breathless with his happiness. “She’s perfect,” he whispers, in awe at the tiny fingers and tiny chest heaving with the first breaths of life. “She’s beautiful, Carol.”
Carol’s smile is tinged with exhaustion and tenderness. “Dorinda.”
“Pardon?”
“I want to call her Dorinda.”
Harge glances down at the child. He wants to say something else, but one look into Carol’s eyes and he knows he will lose that battle. So instead, he nods. “Rindy,” he croons at brown eyes that are barely open, and Carol closes her own with a small huff of relief.
Harge was wrong, though. He thought that with the hormones gone and the baby, they would stop fighting. He thought that the serendipity he felt with his daughter would last, not a brief reprieve from a longer battle but the peace at the end of a war.
It wasn’t.
“What do you mean, go to a function, Harge?” Carol is almost yelling at him.
“I mean, it’s New Year. Come on, Carol, you know this. Every New Year Mr. Robinson holds this party and every year we attend. You can’t seriously be questioning this now.”
Carol looks at him like he’s speaking Mandarin. “I can, actually. This is Rindy’s first New Years, Harge. Don’t you think she should be spending it with us? Instead of here, alone, with a nanny?”
“She won’t remember it anyway.”
“Yes, but I will!” Carol all but screams at him. He stares at her, and she takes a deep breath. When she speaks again, it is calm. “I’m not going. I’m going to stay here, with our daughter, on New Years. You can do whatever you like.”
“Don’t be unreasonable, Carol, come on.”
“No. I’m not going, and you wouldn’t be either, if you cared at all about family.”
He goes. He cares about his family, but Rindy won’t remember anything anyway, and Carol is overreacting. He goes every year after that, and every year Carol doesn’t go (looking back, he wants to shove stakes through his own feet to staple himself to the ground at the house so that he doesn’t leave, so that he doesn’t push Carol away, but he can’t and he left).
They have a particularly nasty fight one night, four New Years later. He tells her no one will love her but him, and she tells him that he is wrong and Abby does.
He isn’t so idiotic not to hear the undertones this time.
He is horrified. He is disgusted. For weeks he can’t look at Carol without wanting to puke. A deviant, his wife? He married a deviant? Hargess Aird married a deviant? He can't control the nausea whenever the thought of Carol, her beautiful skin underneath slender, long, distinctly female fingers, appears unbidden in his mind.
But then he sits up in the morning, after never having slept in the first place, and sees her blond hair fanned out around her beautiful face and still his heart betrays him and beats for her and only for her. He thinks of her legs entwined with another woman’s and wants to cry. Out of all the people in the world, why her? Why his Carol? Why must she be one of them?
He forbids her from seeing Abby anymore (she doesn’t listen, damn her) and then, three months later, she sits him down and tells him she wants a divorce.
He always used to wonder what heartbreak feels like. He doesn’t have to anymore.
It feels like stubbing your toe on sharp shards of glass that dig into your skin and burrow deep within your bones. It feels like waking up with strep throat and trying to drink or eat but then realizing that you have knives for vocal chords.
He chokes on something, air, his beating heart, and he cries, as embarrassing and unbecoming as it is, he cries and he begs and he is so pathetic that she takes pity on him.
Two months later, she brings it up again.
He swallows hot coals this time, thinks every cell that makes him is now undergoing plastic surgery to remove her name tattooed on their surface. But she tells it to him and he sees, through his tears and the fog that clouds his mind with so much pain that he cannot speak, that she is suffering, too. She is no longer the burning wildfire he fell in love with, even though he would love even an ember of that fire. He snuffed her out little by little, and he recognizes the dying flame inside her eyes.
So he offers her his only act of selflessness, and nods.
He isn’t a saint, though. He is selfish and he knows it, because when he hears that Carol is going out with a girl, a girl who was in his house with her at night without him, he sees red. He is burning with fury. He is fury itself, and he is vengeance and he is revenge and he will take back every single tear she made him shed and every single heart break she made him feel because she is a deviant, a disgusting queer, and she should have nothing, no hold over him.
“Find them,” he nearly growls into the phone. “Find them.”
He hangs up and calls his lawyer. “I want to take her for everything she has.”
His lawyer doesn’t question why he’s suddenly changed his mind about shared custody. In fact, Harge thinks that he is secretly glad for a more exciting case.
When he receives the tapes, he goes into the bathroom and throws up over and over. He recognizes Carol in the tapes, hears her breathing and her moans and her laugh. He hears her ecstasy, and his traitorous body reacts, even as he is disgusted because God, how long has it been since he has been able to touch her, to feel her, to make her his.
God. Her laugh. He finds more tears inside of himself. Her laugh. God, her laugh. How he misses her laugh. He thinks that if he uses Rindy, if she comes back for Rindy (and he knows she will, knows that even now she, like him, will give up everything for Rindy, even though he is more selfish and doesn’t shy away from using his own daughter), he might be able to one day hear that laugh again.
He is wrong. When she comes back, she is defeated, and he is desperate because for the first time, he thinks he can see the fire dying completely.
It terrifies him.
Not enough that he relinquishes his control.
But when she stands in front of him, her voice shaking, breaking, her colors muted and her entire being dull, none of the vibrancy that he loved, loves still, and makes her final plea towards him, he breaks, one last time.
(“We’re not ugly people, Harge.”)
“Half custody,” he rasps to Fred, Carol’s lawyer. “I agree.” He hangs his head, ignores his lawyer’s indignant cries. “Put it on the record. I agree.”
He feels like a piece of paper fed to the paper shredder.
He washes his hands of the divorce, agrees to all of Carol's requests. He avoids Carol as much as he can, hides when she comes to pick Rindy up for her time with her. His mother asks him, once, why he is hiding when just months ago he bound Carol to his table with chains and Rindy. He doesn't answer. What is he supposed to say, that he married a, a queer? That he is still irrevocably, desperately, in love with a woman who warms her bed with the heat of another woman? His mother must sense the line drawn. She doesn't bring Carol up again.
One day, months later, he sees her again, still with that girl, shopping at the corner store. He turns and leaves. He feels no shame in running. He feels only emptiness, regret, guilt. He lost her, once, twice, thrice, and again and again so that he forced her to, as proud as she is, beg him in front of strangers. He is not so foolish as to not be able to recognize that he has lost any last bit of her that he still possessed.
(“I love her, Abby.”
“I can’t help you with that.”)