Chapter Text
It was only when I got tenure that I noticed it: Francis didn’t eat. Before then, I was much the same, surviving on the bare minimum and too exhausted to notice how little of our shared meals he actually ate. But once I got paid enough to eat real food and could pretty much do whatever I wanted with my time, it was clear. How his day went seemed normal enough, but when I started doing the math, throughout the day he was only eating what I would call a decent lunch. Between his lack of solid breakfast and barely existent lunch, he must have been starving by dinner, but even considering that, he never ate the whole plate. (I thought, when we had first met, that it was elegant, a sign that food was so plentiful for him that he could deny it without even a second thought. I was wrong about a lot of things back then.) He was clever about all this, of course. Pushing food around to make it look eaten, coming home from work saying he’d had a late lunch with so-and-so, feigning stomach troubles whenever food was offered.
Listing it all out like this makes it seem more obvious than it was. But before he left Priscilla, even before the marriage, I had assumed it was the stress of his family making him like this, and in the years before I noticed that it was a problem innate to him, it had seemed like he was getting happier. Out of that godforsaken marriage, adjusting to this new, completely different life, with a daughter he adored. He looked happy. But he remained feeling like a baby bird under my hands at night, and there were points where I was scared I’d break him with an errant touch.
It was one such night that I decided to bring it up. Sophia was asleep, and we were on the sofa, half watching some trite straight-to-TV movie, a bowl of popcorn between us. Maybe it was because I felt guilty for being the only one to eat anything, I don’t know. I offered the bowl, and he refused, again, and I could’ve let it go. I should’ve brought it up later. But I didn’t.
“God, don’t you ever eat?”
He stiffened under me, the movement digging his collarbone into where my neck rested, but his voice was bright. Dismissive. “I’m not hungry,”
“But you’re never hungry.” I sat up.
“Richard…”
“I’m not blind, you know.”
“I’m fine.” His tone was quiet, but simmering. A warning.
“Are you? You can’t expect me to believe that you’re just naturally never hungry.”
“Richard, really, I’m–”
“Stop saying you’re fine! I thought you were done with all that– all that trying to kill yourself stuff.”
His face tightened, his gaze terrifying in its intensity. “You have no right to comment on what I eat. I said I’m fine, and I’m not trying to kill myself. I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you? Because to me it seems like you’d rather starve to death than–” I faltered. What was I even trying to say? “Than–”
“Than what?” He was starting to crack now, “Gorge myself every day until I get diabetes or die of heart failure? I’m not like you, Richard, I can’t just eat whatever and not worry about it.”
“So what, I have diabetes now? No, because that’s not something that happens when you eat normally.”
He scoffed, “It’s none of your business–”
“Actually, it is. It’s not just you that needs to worry about this. You think Sophia hasn’t noticed either?” I hadn’t yet relayed to him what Priscilla had said when we did handover last Friday, about how her six year old child (who could barely conceive of three-digit numbers) was talking about calories, and she sure as hell wasn’t saying that kind of stuff around her, so who was? “She’s copying you, don’t you see it?”
He was silent for a moment, his whole body trembling while his mouth opened and closed in hesitation. Then, abruptly, he stood up, eyes starting to water. “I’m going to bed. Good night, Richard.”
And then I was alone, wishing I hadn’t said anything.
—
The next few days were awkward, and he seemed to be getting worse. Whereas before, he would at least try to eat dinner, now he just sat at the table without a plate at his place. He claimed it was because he had been snacking while he cooked, but he knew he wasn’t fooling anyone. Sophia, bless her soul, offered him bites of her food, but he would brush her off with a lighthearted, “You wouldn’t happen to be offering your broccoli because you don’t want to eat it, would you?”, and she would giggle out a no, and he would remind her to eat her greens.
When we slept, I held him like nothing had happened, but there was still a tension that hadn’t been there before. I was too proud and thought myself too correct to apologise for my part, and Francis considered himself the attacked party so didn’t either. We just pretended everything was fine, and on the evening of the fourth day, he turned around to face me in my arms and kissed me. By the time I was inside him, we were back to our typical exchanges of ‘I love you’ and ‘you’re so beautiful’ and ‘yes, please, just like that, fuck’. And despite my concern, he really was pretty like this. In the relative dark it was easy to ignore how pale he was, or how his eyes had become sunken-looking with fatigue, or anything that wasn’t him bouncing on me, his mouth a perfect O, his eyes screwed shut.
And then, all of a sudden, it was very difficult to ignore, because he had stopped and was swaying, dazed, slowly tipping to one side.
I put a hand up to his shoulder to steady him. “Francis?”
The “Hmm?” that followed was barely audible, and when his eyes opened at my touch they were glazed over. Not with pleasure, as they sometimes had been before, but in a way that made my rising panic bubble over.
“Francis,” I flipped us over to pull out of him, cupping his cheek. “Baby, are you okay?”
He regained a little colour at the postural change and seemed to understand that something was wrong. “Um… No.” His faint voice seemed, in that moment, almost childlike.
We waited like this for a while. For him to improve, for him to say it was okay, anything. What felt like 15 minutes in, I asked, hoping for a no, “Do you need to go get help?”
And that’s how we ended up in the ER, Francis wearing only what we, together, had managed to pull onto his weak body, which shook with effort whenever he clumsily lifted a limb. Despite our efforts, it was too little for early December. He shivered in the waiting room, his full weight on my right shoulder, mumbling to himself about how ‘it’s okay, just keep going, everything’s fine’, until we were called back.
Tests were done, heated blankets piled on while I answered as best I could for him. I don't know why I remember this so clearly, but one of the nurses mentioned testing for HIV, quietly, but not quietly enough. Had he been more alert, it would’ve sent him spiraling, but as it stood it just made me increasingly worried and effectively alone. That was, until there was a flurry of medical professionals coming in with bags hanging from poles, talking to me about blood sugar and electrolytes and ‘when has he last eaten?’
Francis snapped to attention then, glaring at me in warning, as if it were somehow my fault if the doctors found out the truth. I wish I could’ve told it to them, but as it turned out, I didn’t know. I knew what he’d been telling me, but of course that wasn’t correct, and I could only give my best estimate: that besides black coffee, the last thing I’d seen him eat was a single cookie, on Sunday at lunchtime.
The attending called in a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist called for a meal. Francis called him all sorts of things. And I called Priscilla, asking if she could please take Sophia off our neighbours’ hands, since it didn’t look like things would be going back to normal anytime soon, or maybe at all.
—
We lived in the hospital for the next 10 days. It took half that time for Francis to realise that refusing food was just extending his stay, and when they threatened to tube feed him, he relented. That first meal was brutal on him, and subsequent ones weren’t any better. To the psychiatrist’s credit, he ensured that anything packaged had the nutrition label scribbled over, so there was no fixating on the calories he was consuming. But he still hyperventilated between bites, tears streaming down the familiar, week-old stains on his cheeks. I did my best to soothe him, but no amount of reassurance could fix whatever was going on inside his head. Still, I perched on the edge of the bed where he reclined, cradling his head to my chest and whispering anything I could think of that would stand a chance of making him feel better. And he clung to me like I might disappear at any moment, like he would slip into nothing if he let go. Later, he would keep relaying to me how terrifying it was, convinced that a fate worse than death would befall him if he let himself eat, but knowing that he couldn’t go home until he did. Having no control.
What else to say? That oftentimes, he would turn away from me, begging in near-hysterics for me not to look at how ugly he’d become? How he pinched his bloated stomach; examined his hands which, though they looked the same to me, he insisted were getting grotesquely misshapen; touched his own shoulders down to his sternum as if to make sure his bones were still there? That he became a shell of himself when he wasn’t crying, staring into nothing when they weighed him and refusing to talk to anyone, even me?
That’s not to say he didn’t improve, at least to my view. On day eight, he managed a whole meal without much issue, mechanically feeding himself until everything was gone. But when the psychiatrist congratulated him on his achievement, his blank eyes blinked into panic. It was the violent sobbing that followed, not some kind of desire to rid himself of it, that made him throw up half the food, but they made him eat more anyway. And when I told him what an improvement it was, that I was proud of him for trying regardless of what the doctors said, he glared at me. “Stop talking about me like that. I’m not a toddler.” I swear, I’ve never been happier, before or since, to hear him snap at someone, even if it was me.
From then on, he started to come back. He was still compliant, at least technically, but everything became an argument. The way people talked to him, if he could skip the bananas on his oatmeal (he had once gotten sick after eating one and hated them ever since), whether he was ‘being watched,’ as he put it, while he ate. Two days later, I made an ill advised joke about this being the cause for his release, and he actually laughed. This brief fit of joviality was gone, however, when we were in the parked car, my fingers drumming nervously on the steering wheel and him still pinching at his now-tight shirt brought from home. It felt so weird, the silence. Nobody to decide if, what, or how much he ate. Well, nobody but me.
I started the car.