Most women – at least based on what I’ve read online and in talking to my girlfriends – equate breakfast in bed with utter decadence and sensuality. The very idea of their man working away in the kitchen and their own waking to the smell of coffee and frying bacon is enough to send these other women into paroxysms of ecstatic cooing and moaning.
Eric’s cooking could never be described as anything other than mouth-watering. His cinnamon buns (still fondly remembered from the first time he shuffled in, great smile on his face, a tray balanced on one hand, and a carafe of coffee in the other) could be described without much hyperbole as amongst the best ever made. No, the food was wonderful, and any woman would be so lucky as to have it delivered to her bed.
It just makes me want to throw up. It’s always the same. First the call from down the hall, ‘darling, are you awake?’. And of course I am. Then the little drumroll as he comes into view. He’s always smiling, his hair still damp, a little bounce in his walk. He presents a flower with a flourish, doing a little bow while still holding the tray at shoulder height. Then, with a laugh a little too high-pitched for him, he sets the tray down.
This morning: eggs benedict, hashbrowns with mushrooms and butter, dry cured bacon with cracked pepper, and a fluffy biscuit that I know he made – to precise spec – in accordance with his grandmother’s recipe. Taking careful inventory of what’s laid out on the little wooden tray we bought together in Montreal during our honeymoon, I can calculate – run the numbers as my uncle used to say (cliche as that is).
This morning something was different. In the split second it took for me to understand what I was seeing, everything changed for me.
Years of smiling, of pretending my tears were anything other than joy at his thoughtfulness and love for me seemed – suddenly – to be unworthy; the days we’d spend after such breakfasts, at the park, the museum, the movies, horrible mistakes. Watching the hollandaise drip off the poached egg, the warm butter slowly congealing under the potatoes, I gave up.
He saw it. Felt it.
I watched him – eyes as hard as I could make them, like the bad guys in the old westerns. Watched as he struggled, considered, and then finally turned and walked out wordlessly. Moments later I heard the front door shut and then the sound of his motorcycle growing faintingly meaningless in the distance.
I wanted to laugh, really laugh out loud until I couldn’t breathe, until my face hurt, but it came out instead as a tight, irritated-sounding sigh as I put the tray aside and got up. The house was the quietest it had ever been, the sun – still low – outlined the oak leaves, blowing in the wind off the Pacific, the white muslin drapes whispering against the floorboards.
The kitchen was full of light, the windows open wide, the cast-iron fry pan laying on a dishtowel on the sill. I poured a cup of coffee, sat down, found myself staring at the front door. Feeling nothing. No relief, no sadness, just nothing. It wasn’t what I’d imagined on those hundreds of times I’d imagined how a morning like this morning might play out. Some while later, the coffee gone, and the very beginnings of a smile finding its way out, I grabbed a bowl out of the drainer and made my way across the kitchen.
They always say that its hard to connect the dots if you don’t know what the end picture is supposed to be. It had taken me some years – almost five – to connect the breakfast dots to the other women dots. Of course, once I’d made that leap it wasn’t hard to figure out the basics of his life without me based entirely on what he ended up bringing me for breakfast on the morning after. Eggs benedict meant that he’d pushed the limit of even what he thought acceptable. The very idea – now, at least – is so foolish.
Only now, listening to the sound of the Cheerios hitting the bottom of the bowl, and the feel of the cold carton of milk in my hand, can I laugh. A perfect Sunday breakfast.
