Robert, Her Billionaire Widower

“Calm down?” said Marie. Her voice was dangerously quiet. “I am not going to calm down, Robert. I am not going to have my anger invalidated by someone that lied to me about something so important. I’m not going to have myself subjected to this kind of mental torture ever again. I was in an abusive relationship once and after that I promised myself that I would never allow my feelings to be invalidated. You lied to me about having kids, Robert. About something that is so very important to me. How could you do that? I thought you loved me. I really did.”

“I do love you,” said Robert, starting to panic. “I swear I do! I… I just need time to think about it is all.”

Marie was crying now. “I need to be alone for a while,” she said. “I’m going to go out for a bit. We can talk when we get back.”

Robert tried to call out to Marie as she left but she ignored him. He was left in his bedroom, standing at the edge of his bed, utterly shocked at what had just happened and desperate for this to be a bad dream that he would wake up from any second.

He felt like he had just lost his wife. He didn’t want to think about it but it was very possible that she might want to divorce him now. The thought of that made him feel nauseous. He couldn’t lose her, not now, not so soon in their marriage. He would do whatever it took to get her back. He would do whatever it took to assure her that he did love her, and that he would do anything for her.

*****

Robert paused, looking morosely at the fireplace. “What happened next?” asked Vanessa, anxious to hear about how Robert won his wife back.

“I didn’t run after her,” said Robert. “She would have hated that. She had needed alone time and I was not going to stop her from getting it. She went out and drove around for a bit, maybe she talked to some friends, then she came home and talked to me. We talked for a while, about a lot of different things. Eventually we talked about having kids. I told her that I wasn’t ready right now, and that I was sorry about keeping it from her. I told her that it was a despicable thing to do. I had done it because I was afraid of losing her, but what I did not realize was that love is essentially about compromise. I did not want kids, she did. One of us had to compromise. That’s how love works. That’s how marriage works. Two people that are together think about each other more than they think about themselves.”

Vanessa was entranced by this remarkably romantic concept of marriage. She wanted to hear more about it, but she was distracted for a moment by a fantasy. She fantasized about Robert thinking of her in this way. She fantasized about him thinking about her while he was outside, while he was at work. She fantasized about him thinking about her more than he thought about himself.

This was not right. She had to stop. She decided to continue the story or to ask a question, do something, anything at all, to stop herself from thinking this way.

“So what did you guys decide in the end?” asked Vanessa. “Did you compromise? You never had kids so I can’t really tell what happened afterwards, because I don’t think you would have been so heartless as to say that you never wanted kids with her.”

Robert looked extremely morose. He hadn’t looked away from the fire yet. He looked lost in his thoughts, far and away in the vast expanse of his mind. He looked like he didn’t know where he was, almost as if the world no longer mattered to him. Vanessa wondered what he was thinking of in this moment. She knew that it had something to do with his wife, she just didn’t know exactly what that would be. She wondered what about his wife was making him so utterly morose. This was not the grief that came with loss that he was displaying, this was the kind of look that came out of deep regret.

“What’s wrong?” asked Vanessa.

Robert continued to be non-responsive. He was fidgeting. He looked almost like someone who wanted to get out of their own skin, who wanted to feel normal but could not feel normal because the inertia of their history was forcing them into territory that was most definitely abnormal.

“Robert?” she asked again. She was starting to get concerned. Robert had a very strange look on his face. He looked almost… agonized. He looked as if he couldn’t deal with himself, as if he couldn’t bear to be in this place right now.

“I don’t want to talk about that right now,” said Robert. “About what we decided about kids, I mean. It… it’s a lot more painful than anything else I remember about my wife. I don’t think I’ll be able to talk about it without breaking down completely, and that is something that I would rather not do right now. I’ve tried so hard for so long to forget about it but it just keeps coming up, it keeps popping into my head like some kind of earworm that refuses to leave and I am sick of it. Is it alright if I don’t tell you about that right now? We can save that for last. Most people save the best for last, but I think it is fitting that I am saving the worst. It goes with my personality, with the pathetic nature of my behavior towards my wife.”

Vanessa didn’t quite know what to say. She told Robert that it was perfectly fine if he did not want to discuss it, that he would never have to discuss anything that he did not want to talk about. She wondered what had happened, however. There was tragedy behind this, immense tragedy, and Vanessa, for the first time, was not quite sure whether she wanted to know what Robert was talking about or not. She was not quite sure if she wanted to know the story behind that look, because she had a feeling that she would not be able to handle such grief.