The Theory of Opposites

by Scotch, Allison Winn

  “Look, Willa, I’m pretty sure I’ve made it clear how I feel, what I want. But…like…I don’t want to be caught in the in-between. I’m not an in-between type of guy. That’s just not who I am.”

  “Okay.” I nod, like this is good news.

  “You need to figure out who you are, too. What really matters to you. And when you do, and if it’s me, you’ll know how to find me.”

  “Facebook?” I try to play the joke again.

  “Here,” he replies back, touching his heart — the human heart that gives us life, and also so easily takes it away.

  And then he stands. And then he’s gone.

  —

  Text from: Shawn Golden

  To: Willa Chandler-Golden

  Almost done in Palo A. Back soon. Will b in touch.

  —

  I can’t sleep again so Ollie kicks me out of the room. I make myself a cup of tea and then wander into the den, flipping on the TV, pulling a blanket over my legs to ward off the chill of the air-conditioning.

  At this time of night, the pickings are slim — bad infomercials for juicers and cellulite reducers and mouth guards that promise to put an end to your husband’s snoring. There are old reruns of shows like CHiPs!, and Law and Order, and if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll catch a decent episode of Seinfeld. But I’m not that lucky.

  I keep flipping until I land on the Game Show Network, and discover that Dare You! has made it into syndication. I cradle my tea in my palms and tug the blanket closer.

  It’s the episode that Shawn and I watched the very last time we watched: the one with the vipers and the woman who simply couldn’t control her fear. Knowing what I know now — that she’ll tremble until the snakes attack — I want to reach through the television and save her. Stick my hands straight in, throw my entire body through, and rescue her. But I can’t. We all know that. There’s nothing to be done for those who can’t rescue themselves. So I sit, rapt, well aware of the doom that is careening toward her, and right at the point when Shawn let out a whoop and a “Holy shit!,” I start crying.

  Real, hard, purging, exhausting, swollen-eyed sort of tears.

  By the time I’m done, the episode is over. The woman is off to the medic, her wounds being treated, an antidote being served.

  I flip the television off and sit in the darkness, the silence cocooning me, offering peace.

  Why is it so hard to save myself? It’s not as if I couldn’t see incoming disaster, it’s not as if I didn’t know better.

  Some people, I think, are probably just lost causes. And then I have another thought too:

  Maybe it’s time to write my own map.

  29

  My key still works in our old apartment, which I almost wasn’t expecting. The latch turns easily, and the door gives way, and then I’m inside. It looks different now, barren, with no furniture, no artwork, none of Shawn’s computer crap or that looming TV in the living room or all of the egg splatter in the kitchen from when he made eggs all the time.

  The landlord, Mr. Dubrovsky, has given us a day’s notice. Eviction. Just like that, we’re out. Raina texted me this morning to let me know.

  When we moved in, I wasn’t sure about renting the place. Shawn wanted to upgrade from our homey one-bedroom into something with a spare room for a home office and a space for Nicky, but I was content to stay just as we were. There were plenty of reasons to move, to be sure: the heaters in our old apartment had two modes — not working and a thousand degrees; the bathroom was so small that you had to turn sideways to sit on the toilet; the reverberation from the subway shook the living room pretty much continuously during rush hour. (Vanessa once remarked that it felt like “she was sitting on a couch atop the world’s largest vibrator.”) But still. We’d leased it shortly after we’d married, and I’d grown to love it, flaws and all.

  Eventually, Shawn talked me into trading up, mostly by endlessly insisting that we trade up, so I said goodbye to our old home, and we packed up and left.

  And here we were again: packed up and gone from this home, too.

  Today, I step into the empty apartment, my flip-flops echoing and bouncing off the space. There are marks on the wall where we once hung paintings, faded planks on the floor around where rugs once lay. But mostly, it’s been stripped bare of everything that made this plain old place our own, other than my memories, of course, which pile atop each other. I run my fingers over the windowsills and head to the bedroom, where I find two boxes stacked on top of each other, marked “Stuff.”

  Stuff.

  That is so exactly Shawn and me. Non-specific, middle-ground, no idea what’s lurking below until you open it.

  Accept.

  Ignore.

  Deny.

  My phone buzzes just then.

  Facebook: Nancy Thomasson (friends with Minnie Chandler) has added you as a friend!

  I click onto my app but rather than accept Nancy’s request, I find myself back on Shawn’s page, lurking, trying to uncover the intricacies of my husband’s life on Facebook.

  I run my thumb over my screen, scrolling down, down, down. Then I quickly scroll up, up, up.

  And I see that Shawn’s no longer tagged in Erica Stoppard’s photos.

  I check his “Photos” folder to be sure.

  Indeed, he has erased (or she has erased?) any sign of her on his page. My pulse accelerates, and my stomach churns with something that I think is excitement but I’m no longer really sure these days. Either way, I let out a triumphant “ha!” and tuck my phone into my back pocket and smile.

  And then I remember the boxes.

  Stuff.

  Who knows what sort of stuff is shoved inside? It can’t be important, I decide, if we’d simply named it stuff. So rather than open it, I bend at the knees, put my weight behind the box and heave it over to the front door. I’m crouched over, my arms curled underneath the bottom of the second box, when I hear the lock unlatch behind me.

  “Hello?” I shout. “Mr. Dubrovsky? I’m here, taking the boxes. My sister texted me! I know that we have to be out today!”

  There are footsteps, and then there are sneakers, and jeans, and his Wired2Go graphic tee.

  “No, hey, it’s me,” he says. “Dubrovsky called me, too.”

  And then Shawn’s in front of me. Standing in our old bedroom in our old life though everything’s changed now.

  It’s me, he said. Like I should have been expecting him, like his text was warning enough that he’d be rewriting the rules all over again.

  He extends his arms and relieves me of the weight of the box, lifting it easily into his own, carrying the burden for both of us.

  “My flight was delayed,” he offers. “I would have been here sooner to help out. I hope I’m not too late.”

  —

  We walk to Hop Lee, just like we used to, and we order too much Chinese food and egg rolls, just like we used to, though we don’t kiss to get a freebie like we used to way back when. Instead, we sit in a booth by the window, and I try to think of how to start talking to my husband. Shawn fiddles with his phone and types something quickly, then deletes it, then types something else, then finally sets it aside and says:

  “So.”

  “So.” I laugh nervously, though it sounds more like a mule in labor. “I wasn’t exactly expecting you. Your text wasn’t exactly conclusive.”

  “No.” He pauses, as if I have any idea what he’s trying to convey. He opens up a pack of crispy noodles, the plastic crinkling to fill the dead air and dumps a mound in his hand. Finally: “I realized this is crazy. What we’re doing.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “I guess I don’t know.” He examines the noodles in his palm, not really eating them.

  “I thought that is what you wanted.”


  “It was,” he considers. “But I was being an idiot.”

  “Did Erica Stoppard dump you?” I say quickly, too quickly, until I realize what I’ve said and what it’s betrayed.

  “What?” He looks shocked, then kind of surprised, then delighted. “You kept tabs on me? On Facebook?”

  “Well, I mean…you’re still in my feed. I wasn’t exactly keeping tabs.”

  “It’s fine.” He waves his hand. “No biggie.” I open my own set of soup noodles and think: so he wasn’t keeping tabs on me? Then he notes: “No…Erica and I…we work together. It wasn’t anything.”

  Which is just ambiguous enough for me to feel stupid for asking anything else and not ambiguous enough for me to have any clue what he’s talking about. Erica Stoppard is exactly like our aforementioned box of stuff.

  “So you came back,” I say finally.

  “Here I am,” he says in response.

  “Because you wanted to or because Dubrovsky called?”

  He sighs. “Dubrovsky called, and I also wanted to. It was dumb what I suggested — this break.”

  Lucy brings over our egg rolls and some egg drop soup.

  “You two. Why the sad faces? You two always so in love. I want to see in love!” She gestures like we should kiss, so we both smile awkwardly and then I blow Shawn an air kiss, and he does some extremely weird thing where he pretends to catch it, and Lucy gets this really odd look on her face and says:

  “Moo shu coming in five minutes.” And she walks off.

  “So, what you’re saying is that we’re fine?” I ask when she leaves. “Because this seems very out-of-nowhere, and I’m a little caught off-guard.”

  “Look, Willa.” He stares at his egg roll for a beat and then dunks it in the duck sauce. “I was being a dick. I don’t know why I did what I did…but I did it. Sometimes, you do stupid things and you have no clue why, you know? Just that you wish that you hadn’t done them.”

  I said no to Seattle.

  “Anyway,” Shawn continues. “I guess I needed to get something out of my system. Like, I wasn’t sure if I was okay that ‘this was it.’” He makes air quotes (why does everyone I know make air quotes?) with one of the egg rolls still in his hand. “Like, you know. How a guy in his forties dumps his wife and buys a Porsche? This was my mini-version of that…I don’t know. I felt like I was suffocating.”

  “And you don’t anymore?”

  “I guess I just miss being married.” He stuffs the egg roll in his mouth, making the chipmunk face that I used to love so very much.

  I smile, though I can’t force a laugh.

  —

  Wired2Go has put Shawn up in a suite at the Tribeca Grand. He invites me down to the hotel and up to his room for a drink, and since he’s my husband, I say yes. His room is on the top floor and has views of the Hudson and the lights beyond. I stare out the picture window until I see his reflection behind me. He offers me a Reisling, which has always been my favorite.

  “They’re sending up some dessert,” he says.

  “So Wired2Go is treating you really well.”

  He pauses before answering. “They actually asked me to move there. To help launch their global initiative.”

  “Wow,” I say. “That’s amazing. You’re rewriting your master plan.”

  He cocks his head like he doesn’t get it, so I offer:

  “It’s the book we’re writing. Like…changing your fate, shifting the pieces around so maybe your entire life will shift with it.”

  He smiles at me, breaking my heart just a little, but opening it up a little, too. The familiarity of how his stubble hugs his jaw, of how his dimples pock his cheeks, of his genuine sense of absolution now. I can read it all over his face, and I wish that I didn’t have the past two months reminding me that the pieces have indeed shifted for me too, and that perhaps that’s not something you can shift back. In June, before his rules, before the implosion of everything, before the book and inertia and guts, and yes, also before Theo, this plain open plea of his face would have been enough.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in fate?” Shawn says now.

  “I never knew what to believe in.”

  He nods. “I guess that’s true. I guess maybe I didn’t either.”

  He sits on the couch, and I follow his lead, sinking in, careful not to spill the wine.

  “This is nice,” he says. “I’ve missed it. I was thinking….maybe I should do it.” He catches himself. “I mean, what I’m trying to say is that maybe we should do it. It could be a fresh start.”

  “A fresh start for us?”

  “Well, yeah,” he says. “We don’t have an apartment here, your family is a mess…why not leave? Why not make a break for it? Start over. It wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world. We’d still be us. We’d still be together. I guess, like you just said, we could ‘rewrite our master plan’ together.”

  “We could,” I say. And at that exact moment, though I’m not sure why, I think of Theo.

  “I made a list,” Shawn states, reaching for his laptop on the coffee table. “Of all the reasons you should come.”

  In the movies, you sometimes see the heroine press pause, freeze everyone around her, and break the third wall. This is what I do now in my mind. I press pause on Shawn and try to be still, try to talk to the camera and break my own third wall. I consider Vanessa’s theory of opposites. That sometimes, you need to run in the other direction of what you think is meant to be. That running — jumping — flying — can change everything.

  I slow my mental electricity, and I try to listen to what my inner heroine would tell me, but I can’t resolve anything conclusive.

  “It’s okay,” I say to Shawn, unpressing my pause button. “You don’t have to read it to me. You don’t need to give me a list.”

  He furrows his forehead. The old me, the old Shilla, would have very much preferred a list.

  “I just wanted to be prepared. Do the research. Convince you if you needed convincing.”

  Convince me to follow him. The opposite of Theo.

  —

  We fall asleep fully clothed in the king-sized bed with the 600-count Egyptian cotton sheets. He kisses my cheek goodnight, and I shift to the other side of the bed, already heavy, already dreaming.

  When I wake the next morning, the sun is streaming through the slivers of the blackout shades, and it takes me a few seconds to orient myself, to remember that suddenly, Shawn is here, and maybe I’ll still get everything I wanted.

  I rise and splash water on my face and find him pacing in the living room of the suite. He holds up a finger and gestures to his earpiece, then mouths, “Conference call.”

  I nod, and he waves toward the cart of room service that he’s ordered. He whispers, “Eat!”

  I pull off the silver lid of the serving dish to discover eggs. Shawn has ordered me scrambled eggs while I was sleeping.

  He covers the mouthpiece of his Bluetooth and kisses the top of my head.

  “It’s Sunday. We always have eggs on Sunday.”

  30

  Text from: Vanessa Pines

  To: Willa Chandler-Golden

  Hey. Call me tmrw. Finishing up draft of early chaps. Ready 4 final dare. R u?

  Email from: Shawn Golden

  To: Willa Chandler-Golden

  Subject: List

  W — I know you didn’t need to see this, but just in case. I’ve attached the list of reasons. I don’t want you to think I’m not serious about this. Working all night but talk tomorrow?

  (1 attachment)

  Voicemail from: Minnie Golden

  Willa, sweetheart, I must have missed you at Raina’s earlier. Nancy and I are heading back to Palm Beach today. Please check in on your father. I believe that his “
nurse” may be “on vacation.” I am concerned for his well-being but am done checking in on him. Raina is so busy, and Ollie can’t leave the house — ooh, did I tell you that I met Jennifer Aniston this morning, and now she is following me on Tweeter? — oh, that was exciting. Anyway. I love you, sweetheart. I know this is a growing period for you. I understand more than you know. You have such a full heart. Just make sure that it’s shining brightly.

  —

  My father is smoking a cigarette on his balcony when I arrive. The doorman has buzzed me up, but I use my key anyway, the same one I’ve had since childhood, to let myself in.

  “If your mother sent you to ensure that I haven’t keeled over just yet, you can go home,” he says, without even turning around, the smoke billowing around him on an exhale.

  “Smoking will kill you.”

  He flails his arm rather than state the obvious: everyone dies. Get with the program, Willa.

  I coax the sliding glass door over a few inches and join him on his post.

  “Mom did send me,” I say, batting my hand in front of my face, diffusing the smoke, suddenly feeling queasy at the thought of more confrontation. I swallow hard on my gag reflex, and mostly, it passes for now. “Can you put that out?”

  A muscle in his jaw flickers, but he stubs out the remaining nub and tosses it over the ledge, which I believe is technically littering, but you have to pick your battles.

  “Your mother has a new life now. With her lesbian friend. What’s her name, Nanette?”

  “Nancy. I’m pretty sure you know that her name is Nancy.” And then, because I’m my father’s daughter and feel just a twinge of pity for him, I add: “I think it’s just a phase.”

  “It’s her life.” He crams his hands into the pockets of his robe and shuffles back inside the apartment. “I just thought she could give me the common courtesy that forty years of marriage bring, that one expects when one’s heart fails! That she would show up. And help.”