I May Leave
Mum says that Don’s womanizing killed him, along with the smoking and the drinking. Fucking is good cardio, I tell her. I have a soft spot for infidelity.
Dad tells the story of a family Christmas Eve party he attended when he was a child. My grandfather Don was the life of any party. Deep into a night of drinking, Don complimented his brother’s wife on her handsome son. She responded by saying: “He should be, Don. He’s yours.”
Dad likes the story because of her record-scratch delivery, an off-hand admission that betrayed so much about the dynamics of our family. When pressed, Dad admits to my grandmother’s anger and her embarrassment when they returned home that night. I ask if she threatened to leave, but these details seem, for Dad, to live outside of the story.
*
I’m not immune to the pain of betrayal, I’ve watched the boundaries of a relationship crumble from all angles. At twenty-one, I bore out my girlfriend’s reproach in silence, packing my bags to leave her for an alluring stranger. At twenty-four, I fucked wherever I could while my boyfriend did the same, an impossible competition. At thirty, I left my partner of many years because my new girlfriend asked me to. At thirty-five, she left me the same way. The feeling of being cheated, of learning the rules and then being shocked at how they bend, is too painful to bear. But I can’t help but revel in the decadence of it: the duplicity, the heat.
*
I negotiate, with partner and friend alike, the natural state of love, of intimacy, and of commitment. We draw lines around gender and age and neurotype and astrological sign. Fidelity slips and changes shape, vulnerable to reinterpretation and willful misunderstanding, and to midlife reclamations, and to mixed drinks.
I talk about it with Dad. “We went to Hawaii for our honeymoon,” he tells me, “but mum spent a few days in Seattle with a friend before joining me. I don’t think they slept together, but I never asked.” I can’t tell if it just occurred to him, or if he has wondered about it every week for the last forty-two years. If he has, it has only made him more gentle.
Long ago my parents agreed on a loose set of rules; their lives are at once independent and deeply connected. My dad takes trips to Australia every year, walks around in the jungle and sleeps in dorms at the youth hostel, his sleep apnea mask whirring to the room.
*
A therapist told me that there are forces that draw people together, and forces that bind people together. I fight the urge to apologize for my love life, once slutty and uncontained, now predictable and mild. My partner brings me coffee in bed in the morning, I take his children to the library. Like the mess once did, it draws me in.
But I still rubberneck around the chaos of love. I want my coworkers to have affairs with each other, slipping across the hall between offices. I dream up a secret family for my grandmother, the ultimate clapback at that Christmas party. My takeaway from the serenity prayer is all wrong: Why fight it? There is a world full of things we cannot change.
*
On a trip to Paris, Don booked his family a room in the Red-Light district, where hotels were cheap. As he walked down the street with my young father, a woman in the doorway of a brothel called out to Don by name.
I imagine a graph, fidelity on one axis, desire on the other, and wonder if there is a world where my grandparents could both have been happy—if there could have been a meeting point for each other’s desire. Maybe they found it, in their fifty years of marriage; it wouldn’t preclude Nan’s anger, Don’s regret.
*
My stepdaughter throws mud into the wading pool, handfuls of dried grass and sticks that swirl in the shallow water. Her older sister stands guard with a broken butterfly net, trying to skim the weeds off the surface. She is near tears as she repeats her rules for keeping the water clean, tucking a towel around the curve of the plastic pool, begging her sister to wipe her feet and hands. Nobody is listening. I’m fixated on the rusty wire coming out of the butterfly net, waiting for her temper to turn it into a weapon. The little one is fixated on the dirt.
- I May Leave - November 13, 2025
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
