“And you know the light is fading all too soon,

You’re just two umbrellas one late afternoon

You don’t know the next thing you will say

This is your favorite kind of day -

It has no walls.

The beauty of the rain

Is how it falls.”

-The Beauty of the Rain- Dar Williams

She had no raincoat and no real reason.

Her only explanation, if she’d been asked, was that she felt like going home early. She was tired. She’d barely slept the night before. At the time, she hadn’t realized why sleep had evaded her, but now she thought maybe it was actually a strange female form of sixth sense that had her worried twenty-four hours in advance. She hadn’t realized that maybe she hadn’t slept because her world was about to change, like a deer leaping into traffic during rush hour - her world was about to freeze and hit metal. She didn’t know. She didn’t realize it was raining. She didn’t realize things were bad.

But her key was loud in the lock of their apartment and her sneakers squeaked slickly against the hardwood floor, because it was raining.

She had no raincoat and no real reason.

Her only explanation, if she’d been asked, was that the office had exhausted her. She needed rest. She’d wanted to lay her head down and take a quick nap before Roy had come home. At the time, she hadn’t noticed that his truck had been gone from the parking lot at work. She hadn’t noticed that it was sitting in their driveway, because the rain had been dripping at her eyelashes and her shoulders had been hunched with the quickness of her step up the sidewalk. She had no idea until she pushed open their bedroom door and he was lying there, pale and grossly unclothed, asleep and covered by the slim limbs of a woman she vaguely remembered being introduced to once. Someone with a common and wholesome sounding name like Julie or Sarah. She remembered being introduced to her.

She had no raincoat.

She backed out of the doorway and pressed her hand to her forehead in confusion because things like this weren‘t supposed to happen on Tuesdays, and even if she‘d thought before that sometimes he might have cheated on her she had never had the evidence lying in her bed in the middle of the afternoon. She suddenly felt trapped in a Michael Douglas movie or in the lines of a poem by Walt Whitman. She suddenly felt like this wasn’t her life at all, and she found herself wondering how people responded to these sorts of things, because she wasn’t sure storming back into the bedroom and waking them up was necessary…or was possible…or was anywhere inside of her.

She was mortified.

She felt responsible, somehow, in that way that women do.

She had no raincoat.

But that didn’t really matter as she closed the front door behind her and took the sidewalk at a slow kind of thoughtful pace, because she could barely feel her fingers and her clothes were already soaked. It was only rain, she reasoned as the water from the sky meshed and collided with the water from her eyes.

She would be fine.

*** The beauty of the rain is how it falls. ***

The next day she worried that he could tell.

It was almost sick, and it made her stomach twist in that certain way it always did when she was aware of how mixed up and confused she was on a day to day basis.

The next day she worried that Jim could tell.

Not Roy.

No, she had simply stared at Roy for a moment the night before, when she finally got home from the walk she‘d taken around block after block and through raindrop after raindrop. She’d simply met his strange glances and comments about her rain-soaked clothes with silence and blankness, her damp but drying eyes searching for some sign of remorse in him, some sign of nervousness or discomfort that would tell her this unfaithfulness had never happened before and was a one-time mistake he had made in a moment of weakness. But he’d had none of those things and was calm and plain and easy, and her stomach had dropped down low with every passing second that he didn‘t mutter a confession or glance at her in guilt.

Around 8 o’clock, she’d climbed into the shower and had let water continue to fall down on her because it was the only thing that seemed like it could camouflage her emotion. By the time she’d emerged he’d been drinking a beer calm and watching T.V plain and dozing off during commercials easy.

She’d gone to bed and ignored the way that she felt like maybe she could read a wholesome and common looking name like Julie or Sarah spelled out in sweat between the sheets, and in the morning she had maneuvered her way around him and set a plate of eggs in front of him without comment. She’d hoped he didn‘t notice the tinge of red in her cheeks and the way her jaw was set with anger, because she wasn‘t sure she could discuss this betrayal just yet and she wasn‘t sure she even wanted to face it at all.  She thought maybe if she didn't look it wouldn't be there.

The rain had stopped outside but it didn’t matter.

She worried that Jim could tell.

He told her about a trip he’d planned on taking to a cottage that had been his uncle’s and how he was looking forward to spending time away from Scranton on his own and maybe just reading or fishing or doing whatever it was people did in cottages by themselves.

Her responses were minimal because her thoughts were rich and frantic with Roy has been cheating on me and it’s probably my own fault and Roy’s not in love with me and it’s probably my own fault and Roy makes me hate my life in a way that runs long and thick down the drain in my moldy, off-white shower. Her thoughts were rich and frantic and she barely commented on his uncle’s cabin until he cocked his head at her and muttered her name.

She worried that he could tell.

So she shook her head and chuckled and said she hadn’t been sleeping well and that the cabin sounded great and she hoped he’d have fun. But her eyes slid away from him and her hands returned to her keyboard because it seemed like this lying to Jim was more painful than the smell of someone else on her pillow. It seemed like this lying to Jim was worse.

Because for as much as Roy was apparently full of disrespect for her, she was all too well aware that this silence that she was practicing…this quiet vigil that she kept was evidence enough that she had at least as little respect for herself as he did. And she was ashamed of that. She was sorry and she was embarrassed and she wanted so badly to stand up for herself, or to at least breathe a confession to Jim, but something had taught her not to because she wasn’t about to prove him right, with his shaking head and his pitying eyes and the way that he questioned her choices and her life.

She was terrified of proving him right.

So she chewed on her lower lip and she typed up reports and she answered the phone with a flat sounding “Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam,” and she ignored the way that his eyes lingered on her because it was easier.

And she worried that he could tell.

The thing with Jim was that it was like he could prove something to her. She had convinced herself without even realizing it that Jim was her proof, her unyielding evidence that not all men were like Roy and that maybe Roy could be better if he really tried…if she did the right thing and said the right words he would love her just enough to stop doing this. If she just…did something right…

Jim was proof to her and she took great stock in the way that he held the door open and the way that he listened when she spoke and he smiled when she laughed and he offered her half of his coke and some of his carrot sticks. Jim was kind and thoughtful and she thought that if she could just be patient and wait for Roy to grow into himself, the way that Jim had, her life would be so much better.

But thinking too long and hard about it made her feel uneasy, so she simply accepted the vague idea that Jim was proof and Roy would mature if she just waited long enough. That was her plan, her strategy, her quiet hope for salvation.

She watched Jim from reception on Thursday and she wondered if he had had a girlfriend like Katy in high school. She wondered if he’d dated a cheerleader who grinned at him from across the bleachers at basketball games and held his hand on their walk from Spanish to Algebra. She wondered if he had ever cheated on this Katy-like person she’d imagined, and she thought probably not.

She reasoned, though, that Roy was her fiancée, not Jim. She loved Roy and Roy loved her and she could forgive Roy these indiscretions because she guessed she wasn’t perfect either, and she hated the way that Jim made her think she was wrong…weak…the helpless victim of some kind of burly lumberjack who drank and smoked and hit her when she was late with dinner. It wasn’t like Roy ever actually did any of those things. He just sometimes got careless…he sometimes took afternoons off, and Pam figured turning a blind eye was the best idea because announcing to the world that she hadn't been enough for him seemed much too painful, and much too much like proving Jim right.

She was terrified of proving Jim right. 

So hers was the silent sort of suffering, labored only when nobody was looking and only when she allowed herself the luxury of feeling sorry for herself. And  those certain sometimes, the times when she couldn‘t help but recall the memory of him stretched out in the arms of another woman, the times when he told her he was going over to his brothers but wouldn’t look her in the eye, the times when his truck disappeared from the parking lot for two hours during the afternoon without an explanation, those were the times she told herself that everyone had problems and most people survived. She promised herself that people survived.

But as a week went by, and then two, and then a month or so she became more and more haunted by Roy’s indiscretions. She became acutely aware of the hours when she figured he was somewhere else and unfaithful, and acutely aware of just how pathetic she seemed in those hours and just how ashamed she felt afterwards for not saying anything, for staying hushed and quiet like a woman without a tongue. Sometimes she would lick her lips just to be sure her mouth was still there. Sometimes she would pick fights with Jim just to make sure she still knew how to stand up for herself. While at home she stayed silent.

She had no raincoat and no real reason and she worried that Jim could tell because she was terrified of proving him right.

She thought some psychologist somewhere would probably want to write a book about her if she ever finally found the energy to open up her mouth and speak.

She felt strange. Isolated. Responsible, which always made her tilt her head at her reflection in confusion. Why was it that the woman, who’d been faithful, felt so ashamed when the man was caught with someone else? She didn’t like to think about any of it and so she simply accepted her emotions, acted blindly without thinking things through, smiled at Roy and laughed at his jokes but then refused to touch him once they’d slipped under the covers. She wasn’t really what he wanted. He’d be thinking of someone else, and it made her cheeks burn in self-consciousness.

Eventually she was haunted enough that she got to a point where she had to do something, because twice she had almost cut open the skin of her arm to let out some of this unspoken anxiety that rolled around inside of her. She was restless with immobility but still too ashamed to toss out accusations and let the world know that she knew things she wasn’t supposed to know, things she'd been pretending not to know. She had willingly played the fool for around a month and two weeks, but she found that her pride was subtly rebuilding itself inside of her stomach, bubbling there and wanting some kind of release.  So she would sit and stare for clumps of minutes at the silver of her nail scissors and she would sit and stare for chunks of hours at the window in her bedroom that hung so deliciously three stories up, until one day she decided to trade in this lack of movement for movement, she decided to trade in this lack of action for action.

She got to a point where she had to do something, but jumping out a window seemed extreme, and slicing at her forearm seemed overdramatic. She got to a point where she had to do something.

So when everybody decided to go to Poor Richard's after work she told Roy she was going and she’d see him later, and she ignored the look of thinly veiled excitement on his face at the thought of a free evening. She rode in a car with Kelly and Meredith and sat in a booth nursing a grossly light beer, and she glanced at Jim and she silently begged him to prove something to her about men and about herself.  She sat there without speaking and she sipped her beer without really drinking and she felt an unmistakable kind of restlessness rising up inside of her and she thought for just a second of the scissors in the pocket of her purse, until Jim announced that he was going to the bathroom and asked her to save his seat.

Instead she followed him.

Instead she cornered him in the back hallway and she shook her head when he asked if she was ok.

Instead she pushed him up against the wall, and instead she kissed him and she nodded when he moaned and kissed her back.

And relief rained down upon her, even though her tears slipped into his mouth with her tongue, and even though silence was still her fat and unfair king.