Rod lifted his shoulder ever so slightly and shifted his eyes down the escalator.
I looked around and saw it. A lovely scarf in swirling brilliant jewel-toned hues of blue and turquoise, colors I adore. It looked almost untouched and in perfect condition as I remembered. My scarf. I thought I had left it behind but here it sat between a man and a woman at a bar in the Bethesda Landmark Theater neatly folded as a lover’s gift.
“That looks a lot like a scarf I once owned,” I said it more to myself than to Rod. “I thought I left that scarf along with all my furniture and everything else when I separated from my husband. Maybe not. Maybe it’s a popular style.”
“Well, honey, look again,” Rod said as the escalator to the movie theater hit mid-level.
At the bar, leaning back in the stool in a rather kingly pose, as if awaiting the minions to serve him, sat my ex-husband, Andy. A woman about his age was with him. I found that odd since his last preferential infidelity was a female contractor that he supervised more than 14 years my junior. She leaned towards Andy as if she was hanging on to his every word, needing to convince him of her worthiness as a date. A little too eager, I thought, but I was, after all, an ex myself.
I had left him 5 years earlier. Divorced almost 4 years ago, and yet I had never seen him at any of the many venues we had shared. It was a shock to see him, as if I was in the wrong place at the wrong time with nowhere to escape.
Rod escorted me past the ticket taker and around the backside of the chairs where the dating couple sat. I was having a hard time thinking of the dating man as an ex after 40 years of marriage. He was, after all, just my husband who was out on yet another date. Nothing new in that, I thought. He had many dates during those 40 years, most of them younger, of course, true to stereotypes, but not always. At least this one was my age. But that scarf? It sure looked like my scarf. Despite the multiple deceptions, gas lightings, and manipulations, Andy would inevitably feel some guilt and reward me with a silk blouse or dress or in this case a perfectly lovely scarf. A few indulgences in sapphires and white diamonds would alert me that it was far more than the normal breakup with yet another woman at a conference. Many of these “nice things” I left in my closet untouched. The scarf with thin fringe of silk threads and sapphire and aquamarine blues, my favorite colors, served as a reminder of what I had left behind in my final divorce.
Rod and I sat at the far end of the bar with my ex-husband’s back to us. Watching him as I had so many times in his flirtations, what once had caused heartache now suddenly seemed absurdly arrogant and cartoonish. Rod must have had the same thought because suddenly he began a fictional dialogue of what he assumed may have been heard between my ex and his date.
“I’m hot stuff, baby, you gotta’ come to me. I don’t come to the woman,” he imitated my former husband’s voice in a rather eerie tone, especially odd since Rod is from Chile and Andy from Arizona. “Oh, you are so incredible,” Rod mimicked a woman’s voice. He pronounced “incre-ee-ble” in the Spanish way – a slip of his tongue or a part of the joke, I wasn’t sure.
Rod continued the conversation based upon the body language what he knew of Andy. Decades ago, while at MIT, they knew each other—my husband and my lover. They became rivals in their attention for me on occasion. Andy, though, was generally too busy with other women he was courting to notice Rod until it was too late.
“That scarf,” I said, “I think that’s my scarf.”
“The woman looks a bit like you,” Rod said as he took a closer look.
I was insulted. She looked ok, but I thought I was at least a bit sexier. Then again, we were both in our 60s so maybe I was under an illusion. “Hey, you, I’m sexier and don’t you forget it, Don Rodrigo,” I said, pronouncing the honorific “Don” that the construction workers used for the architect boss among them. I also needed Don Rodrigo to assuage my bruised ego. I knew it would be easy for my ex to move on. He had experience. He knew how to open a door for a lady, pull the chair out, gently help her take off her coat, and all the gentlemanly arts now almost forgotten in our era. Women fell for it every time. Every. Single. Time.
“You are definitely far sexier in every way,” Rod returned his attention towards me ignoring my ex and his date.
“That’s better,” I said, “Please don’t forget it.” “Nunca, mi gringita,” he replied dutifully with a smirk. It was an old joke between us. He would introduce me in Spanish at every McDonald’s and Mexican food restaurant as ‘mi gringita’ as if every successful Latino should have one. Another woman may have been insulted, but I had built decades of friendship and light bantering with Rod. A friendship built on desire and compatibility to withstand a strong cultural divide from opposite ends of the earth.
Rod glanced over his back to check the marquee. “It’s almost time for the movie.” He got up and turned one more time to the dating ex. “I’m curious though. You said it looked like your scarf? Is it?”
“I believe so,” I said. “It reminds me of the time only a few years into our marriage when I found a poem that I thought he wrote to me.” The poem that had given me the spontaneous urge to propose and ask him to ‘marry’ me.
“What do you mean?” Rod asked, curious.
I took one more look at the scarf. “I realized years later that Andy had written the poem that won me over first to another woman and then he had rather stupidly, or maybe nostalgically, saved it. Only the salutation, Dearest Heather, had been revised to my name, Dearest Sue. In other words, I was a second thought in his life—his used poem. True to form, it kind of looks like he is offering this woman my used scarf.”
Rod shook his head. “At least the arrogant asshole is consistent in his laziness.” With that he took my arm in a gentlemanly way to lead me to see the movie entitled, “The Marriage Story,” about the downhill slide of a couple to divorce.
It was a perfect movie at a perfect moment in a perfect space. As I looked back, I thought, despite the heartache it may have once represented, that it was still a lovely scarf.
