by Harper Bliss
It infuriated Sheryl when Kirstin used the work excuse, as if it was the be-all and end-all. As if nothing, not even a ten-year anniversary, was more important than work.
“I guess that leaves me with nothing to say as well.”
Kristin, though tired, still looked so well put together. “Here’s a crazy idea. How about I use up some air miles and book an extra ticket. You can come with me.”
“Go with you while you teach people all about how to drink.”
They’d had the discussion on the ethics of Kristin’s job before, and Sheryl really didn’t want to go down that road again.
“You can lounge by the pool, read a bunch of books that you never get round to. Just relax.” Kristin tried a smile—no doubt to try and derail the conversation from the route it was about to take.
“I can’t just take time off.”
“You could come for the weekend.” Kristin took a step closer. “You could, if you really wanted to.”
“You know I want to be with you, but not as a fifth wheel while you wine and dine hotel managers. If I’m going away with you, I want your undivided attention.”
Kristin sighed. “You know how much this job means to me.”
That shut Sheryl up, because she did know. It was impossible not to. In the past ten years, Kristin had worked her butt off to be where she was now.
“I can’t help myself,” she’d said to Sheryl in the beginning. “It’s my Korean work ethic.”
Sheryl had laughed at it then but had soon seen the truth in it because, it had to be said, all Kristin’s parents ever did was work and whenever they visited, talk about work.
They had discussed at length the consequences of Kristin taking a job that would take her away from home for almost fifty percent of the time. They had, jointly or at least so it seemed, concluded that if it was the right career move, Kristin should accept the promotion. Not doing so would be career suicide. Kristin would either stagnate in her current position or have to start from a rung lower in another company. So it was unanimously decided that all promotions were good things, even though, and this baffled Sheryl most, Kristin’s parents were doctors so they must notice the toll it took on their daughter’s health. Though the outward signs of stress could easily be hidden underneath the excitement that comes with being offered a promotion.
Sheryl wasn’t so sure of that joint decision any more now.
“Look, babe, I know this is a last-minute thing. And I truly am sorry about the timing, but I have to go. I have no choice.”
Sheryl swallowed the question that had already made it to the tip of her tongue—“What would actually happen if you didn’t go?”—and tried to shift her mindset into reconciliatory mode. She didn’t want Kristin to leave in an atmosphere of reproach like this. Moreover, she didn’t want to be this person whining for her partner to not go on a business trip. Kristin was right. Sheryl was not usually like this. Then again, she’d never needed to be before.
Kristin threw her arms around Sheryl’s neck, and it still, always, sent a frisson of excitement down Sheryl’s spine when she did. “Remember when it was the other way around?” Kristin said, her voice smooth as silk. “When we just met and you always had one meeting or another to attend in the evening?”
That was entirely different, Sheryl wanted to say. I was fighting for our human rights, not selling alcohol all over the world.
What bothered Sheryl most was that, despite having a long-term partner, she felt more alone now than before she and Kristin had met. She had always been busy then. Her life was filled to the brim with social activities, which had slowly dwindled away. Sheryl didn’t have meetings with a bunch of like-minded women to look forward to anymore. She attended plenty of faculty activities, but in another capacity now: as Professor Johnson.
More than anything, Sheryl hated feeling alone, and that’s exactly how Kristin’s upgraded position at Sterling Wines made her feel.
Kristin put down her Blackberry for a few minutes. She hated missing their anniversary. She hated how her travel made Sheryl feel. So wasn’t the conclusion obvious? Her Blackberry chimed—a noise that had started to make Sheryl flinch—but she ignored it. She’d have plenty of time to check her messages at the airport. Besides, she knew it was her boss asking the same question he’d been asking her for the past two weeks: have you made a decision yet?
She looked out of the taxi window. Night was falling. She had a seven-hour flight to look forward to. After taking the promotion almost a year ago, she had soon learned that business travel wasn’t as glamorous as it was cracked up to be. Especially if your target market was Asia and you lived in Sydney. An issue her boss had pointed out not long ago and which had resulted in a subsequent question Kristin didn’t know the answer to: would she be willing to relocate to Hong Kong? Settle there and have much easier access to the markets she was responsible for? Her flight times would be cut in half. It would be an adventure. It would be great for the company and for her career.
Kristin had been asked the question almost two weeks ago but hadn’t brought it up to Sheryl yet. Before she did, she wanted to have a firm list of pros at the ready, along with a proposal of how all practicalities would be handled. She’d done some research on life as an expat and she was trying to put all of that together into a package to present to Sheryl, much like giving a presentation to a client. But, if she was really honest with herself, the real reason Kristin hadn’t told Sheryl about this new opportunity yet, was because she knew that it wouldn’t go down well.
She was afraid of Sheryl’s reaction and of how it would crush Kristin’s dream immediately. Sheryl had only been a professor at the University of Sydney for three years. She had finally reached her destination after long years of work and doing all the crappy jobs professors didn’t want to do. Kristin could simply not imagine Sheryl putting her career on hold for hers. Because it was always silently implied that what Sheryl did for a living was so much more important than what Kristin did—even though Kristin’s job paid a hell of a lot more than Sheryl’s.
Perhaps it was fitting for their relationship that they would spend their tenth anniversary apart. Kristin had heard of the seven-year itch, but she’d never heard of the ten-year one. She knew they were going through something serious enough for her to not be openly happy about being given another amazing opportunity at work. If she couldn’t share that with her partner, no matter what they would decide to do, that was quite the itch. Kristin was afraid to tell Sheryl about the Hong Kong opportunity, and it said all there was to say about the current state of their relationship.
Chapter Twelve
Sheryl desperately needed to get out of the house. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she didn’t. Well, she did, and it was that very thing she wanted to avoid. All this time she had to find a way of spending. So many people she knew were always going on about the luxury of time and how having time on your hands is just so great and blah blah blah. Time to be enjoyed with your loved ones, perhaps. Time to hang out with friends. Time to discuss the future. Time to learn a foreign language, to go for a hike, to unwind. Sure, that kind of time was more valuable than any money the jobs that ate away at time were worth. But the kind of time she faced then, the two hours before bed on nights when Kristin was away, seemed to open a void inside of her that could only be filled with one thing. The one thing that Sheryl despised the most, though despise was not the right word. She feared it, but she had also grown to crave it. And it was the very thing Kristin was away from home to promote.
Sheryl flicked through some channels. She should have accepted the dinner invitation at Aimee’s, her former boss and now her colleague, but when she’d been invited, Sheryl had still been under the wrong impression she and Kristin would celebrate their anniversary together. It was a little late to call Aimee now. Perhaps she should go to a bar, on her own. Not in this neighbourhood, though, which was always teeming with students. She’d need to take a taxi. It was too much of a hassle. Sheryl didn’t even want to go
out, even though she didn’t want to stay at home either. She couldn’t decide. It was this exact sort of restlessness that drove her insane, that drove her to pace to the fridge and look at what it offered.
Sheryl pushed the door shut, applying pressure with her arms, as though it could possibly make a difference when she tried to open it again later. But this was the stage she hated. That sliver of time between still being fully present and giving in. Was this what it felt like to her father? Did he have to make daily, conscious decisions on whether he was choosing his daughter or the bottle? No, there was no excuse for what her father had done. Some days, Sheryl had to actively remind herself that he was still alive; that he, somehow, managed to take care of himself in a way that kept his heart beating. And for what?
She berated herself instantly for that question. But it was exactly to block out questions like this that very soon, within a few seconds, she already knew, she would remove her hands from the refrigerator door, open it, and take out a bottle of wine. She was the daughter of a woman who had committed suicide and a man who was a drunk. The depressive gene and the alcoholic one combined in one person, if such a thing existed. Hadn’t she already proved enough? She would be forty soon. An age her mother had never reached. Hadn’t she already beat all the odds? Research was a big part of Sheryl’s job, yet there were certain things she couldn’t even bring herself to look up online, not even after all these years. Could you inherit the inclination to become depressed? Did alcoholism run in families? She didn’t want to know because she was afraid of the answer. Because it stared right back at her when she opened a bottle of wine, poured its contents into a glass. She didn’t need scientific backup for that.
It wasn’t as if she drank a lot. Just one or two glasses. Just enough to feel that mild buzz, to take the edge off everything she missed. Removing the cork from a bottle of wine had come to feel like a relief. Like the opposite of giving up.
It had started innocently enough, on a night when Kristin had been home. Kristin didn’t have the habit of drinking at home, unless she was feeling really stressed. That day Sterling Wines had lost a client and Kristin felt responsible, the way she always did. She’d come home, walked straight to the fridge, and poured herself a big glass of wine. She’d drunk it quite swiftly, then poured herself another, and it was as though Sheryl could witness the change inside of her just by looking at her face. Her features relaxed, her shoulders unhunched, the tightness of her lips loosened into a small smile.
Sheryl had had a difficult conversation with one of her TAs, one she had misjudged and shouldn’t have given the job in the first place, and she had not managed to circumvent all the usual reasons that stopped her from drinking. She just wanted her own lips to draw into a little smile. Wanted the tension to drain from her muscles just a bit. She wanted to experience what Kristin was experiencing. And while she had, it hadn’t been a big aha moment. Sheryl had partaken in small amounts of alcohol before. She knew how it would make her feel, and it had been a conscious decision to seek out that very sensation at that very moment. She was in control. But then the arguments had begun and it had all been a matter of timing.
Their first fight about Kristin’s schedule had mainly taken place inside Sheryl’s head because she hadn’t wanted to say all the things she felt roar inside of her out loud to Kristin. She wanted to be supportive. But by holding most of it in, and giving Kristin the impression that everything would work itself out, she had gone against her very nature. Or at least against her much-honed instinct of talking about everything until there was nothing left to say. She’d poured herself a glass of wine. But that first time of drinking on her own, it hadn’t been relief washing over her. It had been a blend of guilt and euphoria, most of the guilt washing away as she drank more, making everything, not just how she felt about Kristin and her work situation, more bearable.
But before she drank, there was always a seal of tension to be broken. Because of her history. Because of how her father had ended up and how Sheryl had, from a young age, witnessed how it could destroy people. Then the rationalizing had begun. She wasn’t a widow. She had Kristin, with whom she was, thus far, in a loving, committed relationship. She had her shit together. And it was only one glass—nothing compared to the amounts of strong liquor her father could put away in one sitting. Unlike her father, Sheryl was very much in control. And it wasn’t as if she had any children who could lose respect for her because she had a glass of wine.
So there she stood—drinking was a standing activity—leaning against the kitchen counter. The cool wine made its way down her throat and almost immediately, a new sense of calm washed over her. Instead of an evening of agony over unresolved issues with her partner, the night transformed into one of possibility. Because the way a drink changed her perception about everything made all the difference.
Kristin had quirked up an eyebrow that time when Sheryl had drunk a full glass of wine with her. “Are you sure?” she had asked.
“It’s just one glass,” Sheryl said. After which Kristin had not asked any further questions. Looking back now, it had been so exemplary of how they’d been growing apart. A few promotions back, Kristin would not have just shrugged it off. She would have interrogated Sheryl about the reason she suddenly wanted a full glass of wine instead of the occasional half one at social gatherings. She would have taken an interest. But it seemed that Kristin’s interest had shifted much more into the field of wine and how to sell it, and away from her partner.
Once Sheryl had finished the first glass, she caught her reflection in the oven window. She cracked a smile at herself, then shook her head. She knew the reason she poured herself the next drink, one she might even go sit outside on the deck with and savor, would be because of the question she had been trying to ignore: would she and Kristin be okay? Could they keep up with this new life that had come with Kristin’s promotion? Was more money really worth it? Why did they need more money, anyway?
“It’s a Korean thing,” Kristin sometimes said, apparently unaware of how offensive that was to Koreans.
Sheryl had plenty more money than she’d ever had. She had Kristin. She had a great job and a bunch of nice friends. Maybe she needed a hobby, something to occupy herself with on lonely nights. Kristin had been right when she’d said that there used to be a time when Sheryl was always busy, always fighting for some cause, organizing fundraising parties while raising awareness to their plight. Activism was her hobby, and there was still so much to fight for. But most of her former pals had settled down, just the way she had done. They’d left the remaining battles for the new generation to fight. Besides, it wasn’t as though Sheryl couldn’t actually find things to do with her time if she wanted to. It was the fact that she didn’t want to. She liked sitting around, thinking and talking, just laying it all out there, like they used to do.
Sheryl poured herself another glass of wine and walked outside. She looked at it, contemplating that she still had a choice: to drink or not to drink. As she slowly brought the glass to her mouth, she decided that, as soon as Kristin came back, they would have a real conversation about all the things that bothered her and where their relationship had gone. It was time to go into rescue mode.
Chapter Thirteen
“Hong Kong?” Sheryl was reacting in the exact way Kristin had predicted. “You must be joking.”
“And you should calm down.” Kristin could count the times she’d raised her voice in her life on the fingers of one hand. She was about to cross over to the second hand if Sheryl kept this up.
“No, you have to realize that I’m getting sick of playing second fiddle to your job.”
“Sheryl, please, let’s talk about this in a calm manner.” Kristin almost said like adults but managed to keep that comment to herself.
Sheryl shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re even considering this.” Sheryl was pacing up and down the room, her stride heavy, her face drawn. “So you can travel even more and I can sit around at home in a forei
gn country all day long.” Sheryl stopped strutting around. “Don’t you see we’re already in so much trouble now?”
“It could be a new start.” Kristin could try to make her arguments now, and she would, but she already knew Sheryl wouldn’t be hearing them. “I asked around and there’s a Gender Studies department at Hong Kong University. Things could be arranged.”
“Things?” Sheryl stood with her hands on her waist.
“You could teach there. Imagine the difference you could make in people’s lives.” Truth be told, Kristin was going out on a limb here. After trying for a long time, she had finally managed to get someone from said department on the line, but the person’s voice had been so demure and quiet, Kristin had not been able to understand much of what she’d said.
“It’s not even about me being able to teach there. I don’t want to teach anywhere else. I love it here. I’ve only been a professor for three years. I have ongoing research projects. Students who rely on me for their thesis. I have commitments.”
“I just wanted you to know that this opportunity was offered to me. I’ve known for a while, but I didn’t tell you because I could so easily predict this. Let’s not discuss it for a few days while you mull things over. Talk to me when you’re ready and when you’ve calmed down.” Kristin briefly considered not adding the next part, but ignored her instinct. “But please keep in mind that this could be very lucrative for us.”
Sheryl stood there, looking at Kristin for a while longer. Not for the first time, a sense of loss swept through Kristin. Like they were taking a step back in their relationship instead of forward. Would this proposition make or break them? Kristin recognized that they had, pretty rapidly, been reaching that breaking point. After ten years, and an anniversary spent apart, were they still going in the right direction?
Kristin watched Sheryl deflate in front of her. She sat down at the other edge of the sofa Kristin was perched on. “I just want you to choose me again. That’s truly all I want.”