Originally published in Gothic.Net, October 2001

The Man She Loves

by Stephen Dorato

I watch her as she sculpts, seeing him unfold from the stone, seeing him in all her touches. Sarah gives me a faint, distracted smile when I enter the garage, and as I wrap my arms around her from behind I can almost kid myself that I'm who she wants; perhaps, not seeing my face, she can think the same.

The stone has no shape to me yet except for those faint hints of him: the beginning of an eyeridge, the shadow of a brow. "Who is it?"

"Not who, Jeffrey," she says. "What. It's a sphinx."

"Secrets and answers and such."

"Something like that."

She's distracted, and I sense her annoyance that this is the highest level we can share with her art: simpleton banter about nothing. The house is full of Sarah's art, the walls full of her books, her ceremonial masks watching me. My contributions are a computer and a shelf of technical manuals in the second bedroom, a Frank Lloyd Wright print in the hall. I understand her frustration. I see only the surface of things; she sees beneath it. Beneath my surface, too; sometimes I see in her eyes that she doesn't see enough there to keep her interest.

Maybe she had caught a glimpse of something she had wanted to reveal, once, before she'd known me better. Before she'd uncovered my true shape. Not anymore.

"I have to work," she says, smiling, but her eyes are hard and I don't smile back. "Oh, don't be mad."

"I'm not. I have a little work to do, too."

She nods, already back with the sphinx, scoring the beginnings of wings, setting the chisel against the stone; tap, tap. The sound resonates with a headache I realize has been flowering inside me all day.

I have been seeing a psychiatrist. I tell her everything, about Sarah's long nights in the garage, the sphinx, the strange disquiet whenever I see it. She tells me, in her usual oblique way, that I'm insecure and projecting my own insecurities on Sarah. "You're trying to compete with her work." The word "stress" figures prominently in our discussions.

She doesn't understand. I expected a psychiatrist to be perceptive, but like me she's another surface-skater, seeing only what I tell her.

"I'm not the person she loves," I say, "not the person she thought I was."

She completes a note or a crossword entry, then gives the standard response, too bored to really engage herself: "Who did she think you were?" I don't reply; I'm only half-listening, my mind whirring. I realize I started going to a woman because I thought she could help me understand what Sarah wants. What she needs.

As I leave, I realize I know the answer to that one question.

Not me.

Back at work, I trace safe, dull lines on the workstation: violet ellipses and artificially perfect, sterile horizons Sarah would sneer at. Once I thought there would be a kind of kinship between a sculptress and a draftsman, both shapers and creators, but eventually I understood I was just a hack to her. Not even an architect. She has never mocked me, of course, not outright.

The light feels wrong suddenly. Nausea washes over me; the CAD screen glows sickly, the blueprints a clutter of lines. When I wipe my eyes the thick smell of graphite from my fingertips makes my throat tighten.

I shakily untangle my legs from the stool and stumble to the bathroom. In the mirror is someone who doesn't look enough like me: eyes bloodshot, face chalk-white, white as stone. One of my coworkers comes in and wonders if he should say anything, decides against it. I hide in a stall and wait for my head to stop spinning, listening to hear him leave. When he finally does, I stand and the sickness rises up my throat like something desperate to escape me; I turn just quickly enough to vomit all over the toilet, and when I'm done my stomach still hurts, the nausea is just as strong.

Wondering how I'm going to clean the mess, I leave it and the building instead, feeling like a thief.

The house is dark when I return, but the garage windows glow with candlelight. Sarah and her sculpture. I'm relieved, really, not to have to face her, them; I'm not up to sex or even conversation, and the thought of food makes my stomach tighten.

The nausea swims before my eyes as I cross the dark living room, and I flee into the bedroom to fall asleep in the pitch black, the room swaying around me and the red unreadable numbers of the digital clock doing a migraine jig.

I wake in the dark, unsure whether I've slept hours or minutes. Her side of the bed is cold. The clock numbers are steady and tell me it's just after eight. I stand carefully, my head clearer, my stomach empty but quiet.

I pad quietly through the kitchen to listen by the garage door. No light underneath, no sounds of metal on stone from the other side. Hungry, I take a baguette from the bread box and gnaw on its end, then return to the garage and hold it before me like a sword as I open the door. The fluorescent refuses to go on at first, the tube crawling with dim blue light like glowing insects, but finally it clicks on fully, showing me the sphinx encircled in a crescent of bright black candle wax. The cement floor is covered with the chalk scrawls of a demented hopscotch grid.

Whatever sex a sphinx was normally, this torso is decidedly male, ribs distinct and stretching back to the swell of wings, down to powerful tearing claws. The face is the least finished, but it bothers me most; even blank, it seems familiar. His face. The person she's with right now. I feel certain she's with him; I touch the stone and the smooth hard line of the jaw tells me I'm right. She usually talks about her projects, who they're for, how client so-and-so wants something totally absurd. Not this time. I know only that this is a sphinx and she's been working on it every night for a week.

And that she's leaving me. I know it in my bones, without a word exchanged, without any argument. Since this was her place before we married, maybe I'm leaving.

I return the sphinx to its darkness, and go back into the house to wait for her.

The answering machine is blinking. I press the red dot in the dark to hear my mother's voice: "Jeffrey? This is your mother," as if I would think it was someone else, "I wanted to congratulate you again on the contract. That's wonderful! It's about time you had your own firm. You've worked so hard. See you and Sarah tomorrow night." Her voice is animated and warm, but her words make no sense.

I sit in the dark kitchen and feel it begin to spin around me again. I have no idea what she's talking about. My own firm. I am about as far as I can possibly be from having my own firm—from having even an office with walls and a door. One of my mother's pipe dreams. It had been one of my pipe dreams, long ago, but college went bad, I had to work, things just didn't happen that way.

And Sarah and I have no plans to see her tomorrow; in fact, I haven't spoken to my mother in—

How long? How long has it been?

I can't remember.

Shaking, I pick up the receiver and begin to dial, so nervous I can barely remember the number, and then I hear her voice.

"Hi, Mom," I say, trying to sound animated and casual, "Did we have plans with you tomorrow night?" Thinking, we'll get around to that your own firm thing in a minute.

She asks me for my name.

"Jeffrey. This is Jeffrey."

"You're not Jeffrey," she says, anger and a touch of fear in her voice. "Don't call here again."

"Wait—," I begin, but she's already gone. The line thrums with static and my head feels wrong somehow, everything feels wrong, like I'm not sitting here at all—

Darkness, just a moment, just an eyeblink.

A voice is telling me to hang up and try my call again and I have been sitting there for god knows how long when I see the shaft of light from the garage and realize that Sarah's home again. Good. I stand on wooden legs to go to the garage and talk to her—

Darkness again.

She is nestled against me, it is late at night, after three by the clock, her head is against my chest as we lay spooned together. I've never been able to sleep on my side, not comfortably, but for the moment I'm comfortable, and calm. I close my eyes, smell her hair against my face—

Again.

I'm in work, writing something on a pad of paper—but this is not my desk, even though the room around it is littered with familiar things, the picture of Sarah and me we took on Martha's Vineyard so many years ago, my college degree hanging on the wall.

But there are other degrees. Degrees I don't remember having. I sit at a rosewood desk in an expensively spacious corner office with a window overlooking the city. None of it mine.

I sit very still, my eyes very wide.

Someone enters the office behind me. A woman's voice—"Mr. Knowles, here are those documents"—followed by a slender, red-nailed hand, holding a stack of legal papers. Letterhead with J. G. Knowles & Co. Architects in careful Copperplate type.

I turn smoothly around in my chair, feel my face smile, and as I speak I realize I'm not the one speaking—it's someone else, someone else who is me.

And then everything is black, black and nothingness, not even thought for a long, long time.

After that moment of blackness there are no real moments, only glimpses, disconnected bits of time. Pieces cut out of my life, or something like my life. At first they are brief—the smell of eucalyptus, the sensation of rising in an elevator, the stroke of a tennis racket—and I can hardly think while they're happening I'm so caught up in trying to hold onto the moment.

The sphinx, though, I see it and Sarah more and more often, I work on it beside her. I can sculpt now. Of course.

Slowly, in the moments that I can watch, I begin to understand.

I am him. I am the man Sarah loves.

But I'm not me anymore.

As we refine the sphinx I see my face in the features we create, and realize that somehow this sculpture, this dream of Sarah's, has ruined my life. Sarah wanted me gone. Wanted me changed. Somehow, this did it.

But I realize something else, as I sit and eat with my parents and see them smile at me with an expression I hardly recognize—until I see that they are looking at me with pride.

I realize that I have done this, too.

I have given up my life too easily.

"I love you," she says, and I look into her eyes and see that she does love me and see a tiny reflection of myself in there. When we make love by the sphinx it is perfect, our orgasms perfectly timed; she and I joined, dreamer and dream.

The whole time I shout obscenities soundlessly into her ear, though my lips do not move.

I ride with the Mayor in the glass-walled elevator of my new building, holding the scissors with which he has just cut the ribbon. "I told you we wouldn't screw it up," I say, my voice strong and sure. We give each other a fraternal look. I recall that we attended the same college together, though I know that I did not.

Again I scream obscenities but they go unheard.

Sphinx again, I am working on the sphinx, I know now that Sarah does not plan ever to sell it, or ever let it leave the garage. It is the same garage, but the house is not the same house, and I have a maid who does not hear me as I shout to her and a garden out back where I sit and barbecue when my parents come for the Fourth of July. Sarah dreams prosaic dreams.

The sphinx smiles a toothless grin—its teeth will be perfect, like mine are now, this Me never forgets to floss—and I wonder if it will ever be done. To complete it would be to admit satisfaction, and I doubt Sarah is ever satisfied. Worrying away at it with the finest blade, I imagine that I am grating my own bone against the stone, that my wrist is broken and the bone pokes through the skin and chips off as I scrape it against the sphinx. I imagine the pain clearly, hold onto it so that the moment will not be taken from me, I will not see the blackness again.

And I feel it.

We feel it.

We are making love again by the sphinx, but by now I've given up the obscenities.

You're useless, I whisper. She's bored. You can see it in her eyes. She's moved on. Next thing you know she'll be working on a griffin.

I realize that it is not so difficult to think up these insults; I have been using them all my life.

You're a worthless piece of trash, your skyscrapers just add to that big empty ego, you're nothing. I repeat it again and again: You're nothing.

I recall my old life, but remember it a hundred times worse: working at a dark, gray desk, smearing lines into grimy parchment, the boss glaring at me through slatted blinds. I think of Mr. Gibson, my first boss, firing me. I think of high school, the times in gym class with bullies twice my size slamming me down on the football field. Women laughing at me. All the things I wish I'd never said, and all the things I'd failed to do.

I feel Sarah's orgasm, but not Our own.

As I look into her eyes, I can feel Us wondering what it would be like if she were different.

In the washroom at work—half of the City Council waiting outside to approve the bid for the new building—I feel the weariness setting in, the fatigue from doing so much that even the swimming and aerobics three times a week can't keep it at bay. Sarah is not easily pleased.

We look into the mirror, and in his face I see the uncertainty, the lines of age, the beginnings of pain, and as he grimaces I feel the smile inside me begin to bloom.

It doesn't matter what I'm winning—but I'm winning.