I trusted his judgment and paid the man half, with hopes of finally ending this shit.
By the time Bridgitte arrives home for the night, I feel lighter, calmer almost. Just the effort of hiring someone to find Nora seems to have lessened my anxiety and distractibility.
“You made dinner?” she says as she walks through the front door of my condo, the place I purchased long before I met Bridgitte, but that has now become ours. I don’t even remember when it happened. It was slow and gradual and the next thing I knew, we were living together.
She smells the air with a huge grin on her face, her perfect white teeth showing and her eyes gleaming with happiness. It’s not like I don’t cook, I actually like cooking, but Bridgitte loves the restaurant scene in the city, she doesn’t cook, and she’s too particular about what she eats. Most of the time I give up trying to find something she likes.
Today, the fact that I cooked dinner is something she sees as a peace offering and maybe it is. Maybe I’m feeling guilty for being a dick at the cake tasting. Maybe I’m feeling guilty for going behind her back to try and find Nora. Whatever it is, dinner is made and it’s something Bridgitte will eat.
“I did,” I tell her as I stir the spaghetti sauce. It’s not like I made something time consuming and gourmet. Just homemade spaghetti sauce, pasta and garlic bread.
“It smells amazing in here,” she says, stopping to kiss me on the cheek as I step away from the sauce and pour us each a glass of wine.
She stops at the sink and washes her hands before grabbing her glass of wine and slumping down into one of the kitchen chairs.
A few seconds later I join her, but this time she’s the one distracted, with her phone in her hand, she barely notices I’ve set a plate down in front of her. I won’t point it out to her, because in her own passive aggressive way she’s doing this so I know what it feels like to be ignored. At least that’s what it feels like to me. And while she can be amazingly thoughtful, she can also be manipulative. She would never admit to that, but it’s something I’ve learned over the last few months. Basically since we got engaged.
“How was your day?” I ask her, her eyes drifting up briefly, but not with enough emphasis to show she’s paying attention.
“Fine,” she responds. “Same as always.” Her response is short and concise, and maybe I’m just reading into it too much because of the way our day started out and given the fact that I’ve set things in motion to find Nora.
I let it go and begin eating my dinner, the silence filling the room. An abnormal silence that isn’t common with Bridgitte, but I’ll take it.
Eventually she’s the first to speak and her question is something to fill the void of voices.
“How was your day?” she asks now, but still feigning interest.
“It was busy, as always. Still dealing with that company that wants us to buy them and it’s been a shit show. So many demands for a company that approached me.” I proceed to tell her about my day, but immediately notice her attention has drifted back to her phone. “What are you doing?” I ask, attempting to keep the annoyance out of my tone.
“I’m looking at this photographer’s website. I think this is the one we’re going to use,” she says, flashing the screen of her phone in my direction.
The best part of this statement is that she says “we’re”, like I have any fucking say in any of this. She makes the decisions and I go along with them. It’s the money end of it that makes me cringe. I’m footing the insane bill for this.
She begins to talk and just like my response to her about my day at work, I tune her out. I don’t want to hear about how this photographer just finished up a celebrity wedding or how he has been featured in some tabloid magazine. The more she speaks, the more I watch the money flying out the fucking window.
I interrupt her and she looks up with a confused look on her face, almost as if she’s shaming me for not listening fully. “Have you ever thought about scraping all this and just getting married on a beach?” I ask her, but I already know the answer to this.
“No, never,” she insists, appalled that I would even consider it. “This is what every girl wants. To get married in a huge ceremony with her family and friends, in a beautiful white dress…” She goes on, but I stop listening out of fucking annoyance and the fact that she never once mentions the main reason for the wedding: Marrying the person you love. I shouldn’t be so hypocritical.
I’m starting to second-guess the whole thing, and even if Bridgitte is just consumed with the idea of marriage, I’m not as interested in marrying her as I should be.
The night ends the way it always does, Bridgitte heads to bed and I’m left watching TV on the couch alone. With a beer in my hand, I flip through the nine hundred or so channels, but find nothing, eventually settling on a movie I’ve seen at least ten times.
I zone out as the movie plays quietly in the background. My mind is a fucking jumble of thoughts of finding Nora and marrying Bridgitte. What would I do if I found her? Leave Bridgitte? I’ve spent three years of my life with her. Enough time that I thought I wanted to marry her, but Nora has always been there in the back of my mind.
Nora is an idealized version of a girl I fell in love with, a fucking dream that has slowly warped into an obsession. She’s someone I can never have, so I want her more than anything.
I fall asleep on the couch with visions of both Bridgitte and Nora, and while I’ve dreamt of both before, this time it’s far more real. This time I’m forced to choose, and I’m not certain I can. I’m left with Bridgitte, my reality, and then there’s Nora, my dream.
At some point during the night, I made my way to the bedroom, because I’m waking up in bed and Bridgitte has already left for work. I can’t remember when she stopped waking me up to say goodbye. She doesn’t even kiss me as far as I can recall. She just leaves. It didn’t always used to be this way. There were mornings when she’d wake me and we’d have a quickie or I’d shower with her and it would be hard for her to leave, but that slowly died out. Maybe that’s just what happens in relationships. You become complacent, things become ritual and you just grow okay with having someone, but you never really care enough to change. I roll over, letting out a sigh and running my hands over my face. I slept like shit and I’m not surprised.
It’s only seven-thirty and I feel like I could sleep for another hour, but when I pick up my phone, my calendar reminders fill the screen. I have a conference call at eight-thirty and another at ten, and then I have to go into the office to sign off on some paperwork for an intern that was hired last week.
It’s all pointless shit, but part of my job, a job that affords me the luxury to live in the city and drive a nice car and give Bridgitte the wedding she so desperately wants, but there are moments when I’d give it all up. This is not where I thought I would end up when I graduated, but life wins out over dreams and I took the first job I was offered. I slowly worked my way up, starting in accounting and eventually moving into the role of financial manager for the investment firm who first hired me. It’s a sucky ass job and I spend more time finding profit losses and maximizing profit returns on mergers and acquisitions than I ever thought possible. There are times I would give anything to be working as a lifeguard on the beach in San Diego again because at least I felt like I was doing something that mattered.