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When Daphne pulls back her hair to show the match of the earrings you’ve just tried to give her, you’re grateful to be sitting down. Shame at your foolishness rushes over you with enough force to make your knees give out. It’s a familiar sensation, if not one you’ve quite learned to take in stride. How many times have you sat by Daphne on this couch, sweating through your shirt after you’d fumbled a compliment or let a look linger? Sometimes you thought she had to know how you felt, that she only maintained her blithe demeanor because she wasn’t sure how to politely reject advances you never quite made.
You know now that she never knew, not until Frasier let it slip – and now of course she does know, and you don’t need to hide it anymore. But the freedom from concealment has made you rash. You’ve shown all the restraint of a child in a candy store when it comes to gifts for Daphne, jewelry especially. Yes, you’ll while away pleasant hours trying to pick the best piece from a newfound jeweler’s cases, but you’ll also dash into any store off the street to snatch up something in the window whose shine you can picture against her skin. This will look so beautiful on her, you rationalize to yourself every time, as though anything could do otherwise.
You’ve never been able to give a lover jewels so freely before. When you began courting Maris, she said the pieces you gave her didn’t fit, or made her look sallow, or scraped harshly against her skin – one diamond pendant apparently had ‘so cheap’ a texture she was convinced you’d been conned into buying cubic zirconia. You couldn’t feel a real difference between your gifts and the pieces she bought for herself, but of course you didn’t argue with her over it. If they were wrong, then they were wrong.
You had hoped it might be different with Mel, though. That first Christmas you shared, you gave her a pair of earrings from Beady & Sons. When shopping, you’d set aside several hours just to look, and planned a preliminary route that would take you through six separate stores; but it took you only a breezy fifty-three minutes to spot that lovely pair. They had a delightful Rococo look to them, Mel’s favorite of the Renaissance art periods. After she opened the box, she embraced you and kissed your cheek; then, with her arms still around your neck, she asked if you’d kept the receipt.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, darling,” she murmured, her breath warming your cheeks. “But I just don’t think they’ll go with any of my clothes. You understand, don’t you?”
You did understand, really, but something to the contrary must have shown on your face. When Mel spoke again, it was tinged with laughter – that same gentle mirth you’d hear whenever she leaned against you in the opera box, pointing her program at all the operagoers who’d gotten facelifts and nose jobs at her hands.
“If you’re so attached to these, sweetheart, why not wear them yourself?” She flicked a nail against one of your earlobes. “We could take you to get pierced.” The laugh after that was less gentle, a chime like a fork on the rim of a wine glass; pay attention, or maybe be warned.
You still thank God Frasier wasn’t there to hear your next mistake – the way your “M” after “no, thank you” nearly rounded into the wrong vowel. After the way you held the Mia debacle over his fat Freudian head, he’d never let you live it down if you called your girlfriend ‘mom.’ But your mother had spent years offering you that precise thing – we could take you to get pierced – every time she caught you staring at a pair of earrings, either in a store window or in another girl’s ears. She couldn’t understand how you could want something so clearly without wanting it for yourself. Then again, neither did you, back then.
Even without her laugh ringing sharp in your ears, you would’ve been wise enough not to suggest you give away the earrings to Daphne. But you did think of it; thought, too, Daphne wouldn’t turn down gifts that didn’t match her clothes, a mean-spirited thought that both condemned Mel as too selective and damned Daphne as undiscerning in comparison.
It's true that Daphne has never turned away anything you gave her, until now. She not only takes your gifts with murmurs of pleasure, she wears them, and often. The first time you saw her wearing one – a silver and sapphire bracelet you’d given her the day before – you went so dizzy with delight that you promptly tripped and cracked your head against the kitchen counter. You could barely unglue your eyes from her wrist to tell her how many fingers she was holding up.
After that, you told yourself you’d stop buying her jewelry soon when the thrill of sights like that began to fade, before she could become disappointed in your offerings. But her shows of happiness are still vivid each time, and though you haven’t taken another tumble like the first one, that bracelet (and every other piece in your receipts) still make warmth bloom in your chest. It’s better than the lipstick her mouth leaves on your collars or the marks your mouth leaves on her skin – when you see her jewelry glitter, you’re reminded that you gave her something good enough to put where the whole world can see. She could remove it whenever she wishes, and so it feels like she’s choosing you anew in every second she lets your gifts remain against her skin.
You’d never breathe a word of that self-aggrandizement to her, though. Really, you might never have dared to give her precious things at all, scared of how much you wanted to – if not for what Frasier once said to you, when you belittled him for lying to Daphne about the drugstore sapphires he bought. She was so excited by them, Niles, she said she’d never had real jewelry in her life. If Daphne had already had what she wanted, you could have constrained yourself – but for her to go without was unbearable. It seemed worth the risk of disappointing her, if there was even a chance you could give her something like what she deserved.
Of course, now you’ve finally blown it, in the most foolish way possible; re-giving her a previous gift, as if you put no thought into gifts for her at all. You’re centimeters from becoming one of those despicable straight men who call into Frasier’s show, the ones who forget their anniversaries or call their wives by their mistresses’ names. After all that time spent worrying you’d ruin your friendship by accidently revealing how much you cared for Daphne, at last you’ll ruin things by looking like you don’t care at all.
You apologize, of course, or rather begin to. Maris would have expected you to explain yourself hoarse after a mishap like this one, but Daphne responds after just one sentence, saying with seeming earnestness, “It was bound to happen sometime after all the nice presents you give me.” And then she mentions the possibility of piercings elsewhere, and you have to wrangle your brain into some semblance of human cognition as your father enters.
You help Daphne tease Dad about his new amour, but all the while you steal glances at the earrings she still wears and run her words over in your mind. She spoke as though your mistake was inevitable, yes – but not as though it meant you didn’t love her, or even as though she wanted you to stop bringing her gifts. To Daphne, it seems, this isn’t even a transgression severe enough to need forgiveness. The realization has its own kind of dizziness.
(Of course, none of that excuses your behavior. You vow internally to spend today’s spa session brainstorming ways to definitively make this up to Daphne. Until you’ve made progress on that, it’s best for you to put aside all thoughts of jewelry for a while. Even the dream you’ve only just now realized is taking shape within you – the dream of the ring that someday, in a kinder world, you might be able to put on Daphne’s finger.)