by Mike Steeves
JAMES AND MARY
The only light in the apartment is the bluish illumination coming from the computer screen at the end of the hall. He doesn’t turn the lights on because he doesn’t want Mary to know that he’s home, at least not until he has had time to compose himself, but after taking off his shoes he ends up tripping over the broom. The broom is totally unexpected and completely invisible to him, something about its place in the hallway is incongruous and even disturbing. Still, his reaction as it clatters to the floor is a bit over the top, as if he’s been surprised by something much more perilous. ‘Motherfuck!’ he says. ‘Jesus motherfucking Christ on the fucking cross. I’m going to have a fucking aneurysm. What is this?’ he picks up the broom. ‘A fucking broom?’ Mary, sitting at the computer, waits for his little fit to pass. As it happens, by not saying anything to him she actually hastens the process. He eventually calms down, takes a seat on the couch, places the broom across his lap, and asks in his best imitation of a casual tone whether she was doing some light cleaning while he was out. But she doesn’t respond and he wonders if maybe she’s looking at something disturbing or reading an email with some bad news about a close friend or family member, her parents even. A look at the screen confirms that she’s just doing what she usually does when she’s bored or tired, which is look at her friends’ profiles on Facebook. She asks him if he had a nice break and he says that he did and that he’s feeling refreshed and ready to get back to work. Sometimes that’s all he needs, just to get away for a bit and clear his head, because when he's down there for too long it’s like he gets too close to what he’s working on and he can’t see it anymore, like his face is pressed up to the TV screen, or to the pages of a book, so just by getting out and seeing other people he is able to get a little distance and put ‘the work’ back in the right perspective. She wants to know if other people were out walking around at midnight on a Tuesday. She wonders why it takes two hours to get some distance and regain his perspective. When he had said ‘seeing other people,’ he explains, it didn’t mean that he’d been walking around and staring at strangers, it was a figure of speech, and he doesn’t normally go for two-hour walks, but it’s a nice night and he was feeling cramped down there in the basement so he ended up staying out longer than usual. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘a cat came into the apartment while you were gone.’ He asks her what she means when she says that a cat came into the apartment. The look that she gives him before he’s even done asking this question shows that while this is exactly what she's been expecting him to ask, she is still disappointed to hear him say it, since she thinks that this sort of thing is beneath him. Why, she wonders, does he pretend that he doesn’t understand what she meant when she said that a cat came into the apartment, when he actually knows exactly what she is talking about? Why does he act like he’s not intensely aware of everything that’s going on around him when she knows for a fact that he is extremely sensitive and notices the most insignificant details and is basically the most perceptive person she’s ever met? What is the point of making her explain herself when he already knows what she is going to say? But he insists that he honestly doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and even if he is as perceptive as she says, which he doesn’t think is the case, then all this means is that he’d noticed she is obviously upset about something (a complete stranger would’ve picked up on it), and that when she said that a cat came into the apartment he could tell she was holding something back, something much worse than a cat coming into the apartment. There’s literally no way he could know what she had meant because no matter how observant he might be or how well they know each other after all these years, he isn’t Sherlock fucking Holmes, not even close, so at the end of the day the only way he could know was if she told him, which she hadn’t, not yet. She gives him the same look as before and says that he’s still pretending to misunderstand her, which at this point is just kind of mean. She knows that it is impossible for him to know exactly what happened. But he knew that something had happened, so why did she feel like if she hadn’t said anything that he would’ve never asked her what was wrong? Why does he make her feel like he is doing her a favour by listening to her? And why does he ask her what she means when she tells him that a cat came into the apartment, when he should really be asking her if she was all right? Had Mary chased it out, or had she run into their bedroom and waited for it to leave on its own? This is, of course, what he’d meant by his question, he explains. It’s a figure of speech. ‘Everything that comes out of your mouth is a figure of speech,’ she says. It seems to him more than a little ironic that at the same time as she’s accusing him of playing dumb this is more or less exactly what she’s doing. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry about the way I phrased my question. What I meant to say was how did the cat get in, and were you able to chase it out, and, if not, where is it now?’ ‘Well,’ she says, ‘he came in through the front window.’ ‘How?’ he wonders. ‘Wasn’t the screen closed?’ ‘It was, but she pushed through it.’ Now it is his turn to get frustrated. Something had obviously happened while he’d been on his break and he doesn’t understand why she won’t just tell him. In response to this little outburst she stands up and turns on the lights so he can see the blood that is smeared all over the floor. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he says. ‘What the hell happened in here?’ She starts to explain what had happened and he tries to listen to her patiently but she is very upset, the sight of the blood is disturbing and she keeps checking behind her as if she’s worried the cat is going to come back somehow, and instead of just starting her story at the moment the cat came through the window, she begins at the moment he left for his break, so he has to listen as she describes how she wasted two hours fucking around on Facebook. She has a hard time getting her story out because she keeps on interrupting herself in order to insert completely extraneous details that mean absolutely nothing to him, but that are clearly very significant to her. It never occurs to her that what she is saying is irrelevant and even distracting because for her these details are crucial to understanding what happened. If she had just said, ‘A cat broke through the screen in the front window and, before I realized that what I thought was a mouse hanging out of her mouth was probably blood and maybe even its brains, I had already chased her out the kitchen door with the broom,’ then he wouldn’t have been able to appreciate her experience of the cat incident. He understands that the experience isn’t confined to the time the cat was actually in the apartment, that it extends to what was going on before, and what came afterwards, but all he wants to hear about right now is the cat. ‘I can tell you’re upset, and I know it must’ve been crazy to turn around and see something like that in the apartment,’ he says, after he’s interrupted her in the midst of describing her best friend’s Facebook photos, ‘and I don’t want you to think that I’m cutting you off. I want to hear everything. But it’s just that you are so clearly shaken up, and there’s blood all over the place. I need to know what happened. Can we please just skip to the part about the cat, and then you can go back and fill everything else in?’ She’s irritated and embarrassed by his interruption. He said that she was upset, but what he means is that she is losing control. She’s rambling. She’s hysterical. She can’t see that what is important right now is to tell him about the cat incident so he can make a calm, rational decision about what they should do next. Her experience of the cat incident – how she felt and what she was thinking at the time – is not important. At least not now. Not yet. It is of secondary importance. But since she is so upset she is confusing these secondary issues with the primary ones, which were, in order of importance – did something happen to her? to the apartment? and, finally, to the cat? Once the primary issues were out of the way, he meant to say, they could focus on the lesser issues (i.e. her experience of the cat incident). And she’s embarrassed because she suspects that he’s right, that she should just get to the point, and that including all the extraneous detail about wasting her night on Facebook is betrayi
ng all sorts of things that really have nothing to do with the cat incident. So she pauses for a second, and then starts again at the moment that she saw the cat in the hallway. But now she’s having a hard time getting through her story because James keeps interrupting her with questions that seem to her to be completely beside the point. He wants to know the colour of the cat and its size, whether it hissed at her or if the hair on its back was sticking up. This is extremely irritating, and with each interruption she tells him that if he will just let her finish then he can ask her anything afterwards, but he explains that he can’t help himself. He starts asking the question before he can remember that she had already asked him to ‘save his questions to the end.’ ‘Besides,’ he continues, ‘they just occur to me, and if I didn’t ask then I’d probably forget what they were.’ She suggests that if he forgets what they were then they probably weren’t worth asking in the first place. He replies that he didn’t think it works that way. ‘Just because a question isn’t asked, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be answered,’ he says. And because she finds this sort of sententious horseshit even more irritating than having to answer his irritating questions, she tries to keep her temper in check and refrain from arguing the point any further, and instead just answers with as few words as possible. She had heard the cat before she saw it but she didn’t know what it was at first. She noticed the thing hanging from its mouth right away. She had thought it was a mouse, but knew that it wasn’t, if that makes any sense. It hit the kitchen table with its side, not its head. ‘It must’ve only been grazed if it still had the strength to tear through the screen,’ he says. She isn’t stupid. She knows what he is implying – that maybe the cat wasn’t seriously injured when it came into the apartment and that she’d only messed it up more with the broom. ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this,’ she says. ‘The whole point to my story was that I should’ve noticed that the cat was all messed up the moment I saw it, but since I was still in a fucking Facebook trance I didn’t realize what I was seeing.’ She went on to say that he habitually misses the point of everything she tries to tell him, and on top of that he typically doubts her version of events. He always suspects that she is keeping something from him, or even more often that she simply doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. ‘You must have a pretty low opinion of me,’ she says, ‘if you think that I’m that stupid or delusional.’ He says that she’s exaggerating when she says that he always doubts what she tells him, and it isn’t true that he thinks she is stupid or delusional, but under the circumstances it would’ve been perfectly understandable if she didn’t remember things exactly the way they happened. ‘With all the lights off it’s pretty dark in here,’ he says, ‘especially if you’ve been staring at a computer screen. Your vision is going to be pretty fucked,’ he lowers his voice, ‘and you may not realize it but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this worked up before.’ He realizes that he is standing up while she is still sitting at the computer desk, so he’s literally talking down to her. He takes a seat on the couch. ‘I’m not saying you’re delusional, but you even said that you were freaked out and weren’t really thinking straight. I’m just trying to think things through and consider all the possibilities.’ He pauses, and then they both stand and walk slowly to the kitchen door. She stays inside while he goes onto the patio and checks out the alley. ‘Nothing,’ he says, and comes back inside. ‘Listen,’ she says, ‘you’re not making sense. There’s no way a healthy cat tore through our screen and injured itself in the process. And that doesn’t matter anyway because I did see it, I just didn’t know what I was looking at until it was too late.’ She sits at the kitchen table and starts reciting the events of the cat incident as though she is working out a difficult problem in front of an audience – an audience that she’s not really aware of anymore because she’s so involved in what she’s trying to figure out, but then she loses her focus and can feel herself being watched and falters and gives up. ‘This is ridiculous,’ she says, ‘I don’t even know why I’m even considering this for a second. I know what I saw. I know what happened. I was there. And I don’t know why this is so important to you anyway. Why does it matter that it got hit by a car or tore itself open on our screen? Which, by the way, doesn’t even seem possible – to cut itself up on a screen so badly that it pours blood all over the floor? But who cares? What does it matter what caused it to bleed all over the place?’ She keeps looking out the window, and so does James, who is leaning against the door and basically staring outside while Mary asks him these questions in a genuinely bewildered tone of voice. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I guess if he just cut himself on our screen then he probably isn’t seriously injured. But if he got hit by a car, that would probably mean that he’s really fucked up.’ She seems to consider one last time whether there might be something to what he is saying and then answers, ‘No, there was definitely something wrong with it. Its head was a weird shape and its fucking brain was coming out of its mouth.’ He turns off the outdoor light but continues to stare out the window. ‘It is possible he’s down in the alley,’ he says. ‘I should maybe go check.’ This is unquestionably the right thing to do, but she almost tells him not to go. It probably is out there, curled up under the patio, trying to breathe, maybe drowning in its own blood, but if James finds it what is he going to do? Bring it inside? Take it to a vet? Save its life? ‘What’s the point?’ she thinks, but immediately regrets it and feels ashamed because she knows that finding the cat is the right thing to do. ‘James always does the right thing,’ she says to herself. ‘That’s his thing. More than anything else, he’s obsessed with doing the right thing,’ she thinks. Or maybe it isn’t that he always does the right thing, but that he never willingly does the wrong thing. If he suspects there is even a slight chance of doing the wrong thing then he can’t go through with it. So since it’s a compulsive form of behaviour, and he’s helpless to do anything other than the right thing, it’s pretty hard to give him full credit for it. If anything, it’s a deficiency. Like the time they found a wallet on the beach and it felt like it would’ve been fun to take the cash since they were still young and broke, but not only would he have nothing to do with her suggestion, he wouldn’t simply leave it where it was so that its owner, once he realized he’d lost it, could return to retrieve it, or, what was more likely, so that someone else less obsessed with doing the right thing could find it and steal it. Instead he literally combed the beach in search of the owner. They could never just drive by a car if it looked like it was stranded on the highway. He always pulled over to see if they could help, even if it meant postponing or even cancelling their own plans. At first she thought he was doing this out of a perverse sense of pride, a sort of minor martyrdom, and that eventually he’d find some other way to satisfy this misplaced belief in his superiority, maybe even by doing the exact opposite and only ever acting in his own self-interest. Then she thought maybe he was acting out of a sense of inferiority, and by never doing the wrong thing he was fulfilling his need to deny himself, and to punish himself for every time he put himself before someone else, especially if that someone was a complete stranger. If either of these scenarios were true, however, then in the same way that his sense of superiority and inferiority fluctuated wildly from day to day (and even within each day), this obsession with doing the right thing should be more unbalanced. And if this were true, when the opportunity came where he had a clear choice between right and wrong, he might not feel the need to prove himself one way or another, and whether he did the right thing or not would be left to more pressing concerns, so that he might end up doing the wrong thing for the sake of convenience. But this never happened, which led her to suspect that there’s no coherent psychological explanation for his behaviour and that it is likely just a habit, or ingrained familial superstition, like the way two sisters insist on sleeping against the wall because this was the position they fought for when they were young and were forced to share a bed, and even though they are now all grown up and the people they share
their beds with are indifferent to what side they sleep on, they still get nervous when asking respective partners if they mind sleeping on the far side of the bed. James, unsurprisingly, was oblivious to this unfailing compulsion to do the right thing, since, unlike Mary, he didn’t view his behaviour from the same God-like perspective from which all the discrete actions he took throughout his life could be seen at a glance, the way that a city can be taken in from an airplane so that all the individual features cohere and all that you can see is the vast structure or system always at work governing the life of the city, yet remaining hidden or invisible to the people on the ground. Instead, to James, every choice is unique, and he would’ve been offended if Mary told him that she knew what he was going to decide before he did. He felt like he struggled with his decision every time he made one. The cat is probably a block away right now, or, if it is under the patio, is James really going to crawl under there and get it? And it may not even be injured, or at least not as bad as Mary thought it was. But if it is as bad as she thinks it is, then he is going to have to bring an extremely traumatized and broken animal to a clinic (if there is even one open at this time of night) just so they can kill it ‘humanely,’ which no doubt is going to cost him a couple hundred dollars. Not only would his night of working be completely shot, but all the excitement and subsequent exhaustion would prevent him from working tomorrow as well. ‘I’ll just go outside and take a quick look,’ he says, ‘just to make sure he’s not laying out there suffering or anything like that.’ He couldn’t help adding that little dig at the end because even though it makes absolutely no sense, he blames Mary for this infuriating distraction from his life’s work. ‘First the con man, now the cat,’ he says to himself, as if these two incidents perfectly express the condition of their lives at that moment, even though they are in fact unrelated, but putting them into a single phrase, and uttering it silently, illuminates a shared quality, an offbeat affinity that has nothing to do with reason, like the rhymes in a nonsense poem that seem ridiculous on the page but make a strange sort of sense when you read them out loud. He goes out onto the patio and stands at the railing and pretends to search for the cat. Even though Mary hadn’t done anything to bring the cat incident about, and even if it was a total fluke that the cat had chosen their apartment over someone else’s, he couldn’t shake the feeling that she is somehow responsible. It isn’t something he’d ever utter out loud, or even allow to the surface of his thoughts, but somewhere below in the grim basement of his mind he keeps hidden the suspicion that her carelessness is to blame for a lot of the things that go wrong in their lives. The irony being that it is precisely this quality that had attracted him to her in the first place. Instead of endlessly scrutinizing every detail, each possible outcome, the countless interpretations of each aspect of daily life, she threw herself into things and simply trusted that they would fall into place. ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen?’ she would say. If she was picking something up at the store, she left the car running outside, and she might strike up a conversation with the cashier and end up leaving it running for half an hour. One day, on his way home from work, James saw her car idling outside their local coffee shop and, in order to teach her a lesson, he hopped in and drove home. But when she got home a few minutes later she didn’t even make a remark. ‘Weren’t you afraid someone stole the car,’ he asked. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I just assumed you took it as a lame joke in order to teach me a lesson or something like that.’ ‘But somebody could have stolen it,’ he insisted. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but they didn’t.’ He couldn’t help but admire how utterly unconcerned she was with the fundamentals, the sort of life skills that everyone needs to be able to make it through the day. Because not only did she make it through the day – she thrived. Let’s say they’re going out to eat but they get to the restaurant just as it's closing – James would suggest they go somewhere else, whereas Mary would plead with the hostess, who’d initially be hostile but eventually warm to her, so that by the end of the night they would be sitting at the bar with the rest of the staff, eating and drinking for free. It’s obvious why James would find this attractive, but there’s a less romantic side to this sort of character. She is never surprised when everything works out, but if something goes wrong, she is outraged. He’d noticed this early on but it wasn’t until she bought a couch on a whim and then fell to pieces when it turned out to be too big to fit through their doorway that he started to keep score. She developed a bitter impatience with their apartment after that, and within a few more months she told him she couldn’t ‘live in this shithole any longer’ and they had to move. And then, after she tried to flush a bag of potting soil down the toilet, they had to move from that apartment too. So even though she insists that the cat came through the front window he can’t help but suspect that there’s something more to her story. ‘She doesn’t mean to distract me from my life’s work,’ he thinks, ‘but whether she means to or not, and whether she’s responsible or not, this sort of thing happens all the time.’ He is constantly being distracted by trivial incidents that end up getting completely out of hand and swallowing up all the time and energy he puts aside every day in order to bring the seemingly endless project a little closer to completion. He looks over the railing and stares into the darkness. Mary is supposed to be the practical one, level-headed, so he is freshly disappointed whenever something like the cat incident happens, because he realizes that she is just as ill-prepared for the demands that reality is constantly making as he is. He stares into the alley and listens for the sounds of an injured cat, whatever that is supposed to sound like, but it’s quiet. Usually their neighbours stay up late drinking and playing loud music, or have people over for large dinner parties, talking and laughing until one of the other neighbours yells at them to keep it down. And when they first moved in, he had been so sure of himself and his life’s work (that he’d only just started) that instead of interfering with his progress, all this street noise and the sounds of the other people living in the building served as a form of accompaniment. But all that is over now, and even the slightest noise from outside is enough to cause irritation, which then quickly grows into full-blown anger, and finally, obsession. He is no longer sure of himself and what he is doing. It’s all so precarious and uncertain. He is terrified of failing, of never finishing his life’s work, and when he is sequestered in the basement, trying to get something done, and the bullying sound of an action movie or the mewling of a distressed cat comes pouring in through the basement window and works its way into his thoughts, so that he ends up sitting and staring in a distracted stupor, he worries that he doesn’t have the talent for concentration that he needs if he is ever going to accomplish anything. In the same way that he is distracted by the very background noise that used to accompany him, he is also irritated by the household sounds that used to cheer him up and sustain him throughout the drudgery of his life’s work. Not that long ago, he liked to think about what Mary was up to while he was down in the basement. ‘Here I am,’ he would think, ‘working away at my life’s work while she goes about the work of living.’ The sounds she made as she moved around upstairs complimented the virtual silence of his sedentary work in the basement. It was a sort of symbiosis, the way they both kept to their respective spaces in the apartment and simultaneously worked away at their respective tasks, with the shared goal of living a fulfilled and contented life. Of course, neither of them had ever gone so far as to say this goal out loud, but it was understood, and he felt like they had the same unspoken agreement with respect to his life’s work. They were both committed to its completion, and even though she never directly involved herself in it, there was never a question that everything she did upstairs was in service of the work he was doing below. He would imagine what a biographer might write about them if he ever finished his work and his genius was finally recognized. They would point out that he would’ve never been able to accomplish something so monumental without the tireless and practical assistanc
e of his wife, Mary. Without her, they would say, it’s unlikely that James would’ve ever started out on such an ambitious endeavour, let alone have finished it. James would sit for hours in the basement absorbed in his demanding work but he could always be sure that once he tore himself away he would emerge into domestic calm. Her work was as particular and short-term as his was abstract and unending. Together they sustained and inspired one another, because, just as Mary’s activities upstairs served as an ongoing endorsement for the complete shambles he referred to as his life’s work, so James’s time in the basement elevated the sense of significance and purpose in the work that kept Mary busy throughout the day. Listening to Mary getting supper ready in the kitchen spurned him on to get a little more work done before it was time to eat. When she started watching TV after dinner he knew that he only had a couple of hours before she would call down to him to come join her for the tea that they drank together every night before she went to bed, leaving him with another two hours to unwind by half-reading a book or screwing around online. He set his routines by hers. Whenever she was gone for the night and he had the place to himself he found it impossible to get any work done. Because he had started his life’s work before he met Mary he never considered that one day she might become integral to it. In the beginning, when they moved in together and he’d been obliged to establish a new set of work habits in order to accommodate his radically new living situation, he worried that he’d been naive about what was involved with sharing a space – maybe living together would become a distraction, or even a full-on obstruction to getting any work done. Now that they had established the routines which have been in place for years, he no longer saw her as impeding his work, although he didn’t exactly credit her with assisting him either, instead he congratulated himself for being able to work in spite of her presence. Of course, since he’s more or less convinced that he is a failure, he’s fallen into thinking she is somehow preventing him from getting anything done. Before, when the floor creaked under her feet, or the muffled waterworks ran overhead as she washed the dishes, he’d reflect on how well they shared their living space, or how perfectly their arrangement was working. But now the sounds of her banging around in the kitchen puts him in a rage. It is as if she waits for the precise moment that he finally buckles down and starts getting some work done, after he’s wasted the first few hours in the basement avoiding this very thing – work – while she spends the lead-up to this moment in perfect silence, reading a book on the couch or flipping through a magazine or messing around online, and then, once he’s finally got himself into a state where he’s capable of taking another crack at his life’s work, she gets up from whatever it is she’s been doing, and starts making a racket right over his head. He used to think, ‘This is how it should be. While I’m working towards the completion of my life’s work, she sustains our life together, she fills up all the empty hours I spend down in the basement with the business of ordinary life. We have worked out the ideal conditions,’ he used to think, ‘for accomplishing something of lasting importance.’ Once he started to worry, however, that he may never actually achieve his goal, he began to notice the ways that their domestic arrangement fell short of fulfilling this supposedly symbiotic system. He suspected that there was, in fact, no unspoken agreement or domestic truce, and that their home life was made up of a random clutch of mindless activities and last-minute solutions that barely maintained the illusion of order. Mary is just as focussed on impractical, abstract, and unlikely goals as he is. Just as James spends his time in the basement consumed by a project that has no basis in reality, so Mary spends hours upstairs planning their future – a future that has just as much to do with the present as James’s hoped-for success has to do with what he’s accomplished so far. It’s also not entirely true that Mary concerns herself with the day-to-day necessities while James works on his grandly unnecessary and abstract life’s work, because he actually pitches in quite a bit. It is James who cleans the house, deals with the landlord, handles the bills, runs most of the errands, and all the other things that Mary is unwilling to do or feels are more appropriate for him. Her role and duties aren’t as clearly defined, but while it’s never been stated outright, and even though James takes care of the lion’s share, it is clearly through Mary’s guidance and supervision that the order of their lives is maintained, and until now James had always been happy with this arrangement, but he’s starting to resent it, so when he is down in the basement trying to get some work done and Mary starts banging around in the kitchen, no doubt making banana bread or something equally superfluous, instead of cleaning out the fridge (like she’s been promising to do for weeks) or getting dinner ready (her only regular task – and one she often put off or neglects until they’re both so hungry that James ends up going to pick up some takeout at the Indian place down the street), he tells himself that she’s the reason that he’ll never finish his life’s work. It’s not lost on Mary that he blames her for distracting him. She can tell by the way he’s standing out there on the balcony that he’s furious over the cat incident. He’s pretending to look for it but all he’s really doing is getting worked up and pissed off at her for keeping him away from the basement. He comes in after wandering around for the last two hours, and when he finds out that while he was gone an injured cat broke into the apartment and that she’d had to literally sweep it out the back door, all he can think about is how long he has to act like he gives a shit before he can go back downstairs. James only wants to be down in the basement. He resents most of the time he spends upstairs, and he clearly believes that Mary is forever oppressing him with things like the cat incident. But it isn’t James who is being oppressed by living with Mary, it's Mary who is being oppressed by James. He thinks that living with Mary distracts him from his life’s work, when it is actually Mary who is literally suffocated by their living arrangement. And maybe the biggest joke of all is that James thinks that Mary is constantly making demands of him and his precious time when it is James who insists that every moment of their day be devoted in one way or another to his basement work. Mary is ashamed by how much of her life revolves around his ridiculous schedule. Especially now that they have to keep up such a regular sex routine. It bothers her the way she has to monitor his moods, waiting for the moment when he’s least likely to be annoyed to suggest they go to the bedroom. ‘If there was a way,’ she would say, ‘I’d be happy to leave you out of it.’ And she meant it. The way he carried on made her feel almost guilty, as if she should feel grateful that he was willing to do his part. She hates herself for it, but she’s even got into the habit of saying ‘thank you.’ And what’s worse is that he smiles and nods, as if to say, ‘You’re welcome.’ Why is it, if he wants a child as much as she does, that she feels like she is asking him for a favour? Why does he make it so she has to ask every time? He knows the schedule. They might have even talked about it earlier in the day or the night before, since it is increasingly common for her to give him a few gentle reminders so he won’t feel like she is springing it on him out of the blue. ‘Don’t forget that we have to do it later,’ she says. And then later on she might say something like, ‘Is now a good time?’ And he would nod and smile and basically carry on in the same way that her dad used to when doling out money during family trips to the amusement park, peeling off a couple bills with a lordly flourish but never enough that she wouldn’t have to come back in an hour asking for more. So here she is at the kitchen table, staring at his back as he leans over the railing, the cat’s blood drying out on the floor, while all she can think about is whether or not they’ll be having sex tonight. Much like when they first started seeing each other, she obsesses a lot about when the next time will be, but the difference now of course is the total absence of desire. ‘It’s weird,’ she thinks, ‘to really want to have sex, without really wanting to have sex.’ But this is what has happened to a lot of things in their life together – where they seem to be going through all the old motions with none of the o
ld feeling. She really wants to buy their own place, not because she has strong opinions about handling their finances, or because she is eager to control her own property, but because this is what many of her friends are doing and she is anxious that they are falling behind. She worries that this approach even applies to wanting a family, that she doesn’t want a child for the right reasons. ‘What if I’m doing this out of a sense of obligation or duty,’ she thinks, ‘when maybe I don’t even really want to have a family?’ How can she even tell the difference between what she wants and what she thinks she wants? For instance, when dinnertime rolls around there’s always a part of her that wants to scrap the home-cooked meal and just pick up some sushi. But whenever she does go through with it she never ends up enjoying it. She wishes she had stuck with the home-cooked meal because – she realizes, only after eating the cold and tasteless fish – that she actually doesn’t like sushi, she just thinks she does. Mary sits at the kitchen table and watches James as he leans over the railing and pretends to look for the cat. Not only is he putting on an act so he can have a moment to himself, but he’s also going through the motions so he can prove to himself and to her that he’s done the right thing. Ridiculous. She gets up from the kitchen table and goes out to join him at the railing, both of them now staring into the gloomy alleyway, pretending to look for the cat. So much of their time is spent pretending for each other. She knows that when James is in the basement, he isn’t really working away on one of his little projects. He is just hanging out downstairs so she’ll think he’s doing something meaningful and important. When James comes up and asks her what she’s been up to she doesn’t tell him she’s been reading about infertility online. Instead she says something along the lines of ‘not much’ or ‘nothing.’ What’s truly depressing is that none of this pretending actually works, or at least not the way it’s supposed to, because neither of them is able to pull it off. ‘But,’ Mary thinks, ‘that isn’t really the point, is it?’ When James asked her what she was up to after she’d just spent hours poring over medical websites, and she said, ‘nothing,’ she didn’t expect that he’d take what she said literally. By pretending, she was telling him she didn’t want to talk about it, it wasn’t any of his business, and since there’s so much these days that fit into these two categories she spends a lot of time pretending. ‘What’s the point?’ Mary would think. ‘It’s not like there’s anything we can do about it. So why bother talking about it?’ The thought of talking about it makes her cringe. If, when James asked her ‘what’s up?’ she were to tell him what was bothering her, why she spent so much time online looking at pictures of her friends, or reading up on infertility statistics, then he would try to comfort her, tell her to relax, be patient, try to live in the moment, and she knew that she wouldn’t be able to stand it. She doesn’t want to be comforted, to look on the bright side, count her blessings, and anything that would remind her, in ways that make her crazy, that she doesn’t care about all the stuff she should be thankful for, she only cares about the thing she can’t be thankful for. Who gives a fuck about blessings when the only thing you really want is never going to happen for you? She looks at James and guesses at what he might be thinking, probably wondering how long he has to pretend to care about the cat before he can go back down to the basement. Or maybe he really is bothered by the thought of the poor little thing suffering somewhere down there in the alley. It is impossible to tell. She considers asking him. All of a sudden she feels a profound need to know, as if their future depends on it. But just then the doorbell rings. For some reason, which, when she recalls it days later makes her wince with embarrassment, her initial thought is that it must be the police. ‘Maybe they were close by when it happened?’ she thinks. ‘Maybe they heard something. . . .’ A sickening feeling comes over her as she gradually realizes what a strange thought this is. What does she mean by ‘when it happened’? Is she referring to when the cat was hit by the car? Or when she flung it against the kitchen table with the broom? In either case, just how stupid do you have to be to think that the police would investigate an injured cat? ‘I don’t really believe the police are at the door,’ she thinks. But, just like when she saw the thing in the cat’s jaws and thought it was a mouse, it was just the first thing that came to mind. James is also frozen in place because he is afraid of who might be at the door, but in his case he is almost certain that it is the con man. Horrified, he realizes that he must’ve been followed. Once he’d handed over the four hundred bucks the shame and humiliation had overcome him with such wearying force that he wandered the streets aimlessly while muttering ‘You fucking idiot’ over and over to himself, at first with disgust, then mellowing to anguished hopelessness. ‘How is it possible,’ he eventually asked himself, once he finally broke off from the fucking idiot mantra, ‘when you knew right away that he wasn’t for real, that you could even think for one second that he was telling the truth? And if you knew he was lying, why did you go to the bank machine?’ As he asked himself these questions he kept replaying what had just happened, but it was as though it had already been obscured, or covered up, as if he’d managed to repress something that had taken place only moments ago. Yet he still saw enough to feel ashamed, since it seemed to him that instead of the naive faith he’d initially assumed had been the reason he was taken in by the con man, he’d actually just been scared. There was nothing quixotic behind the con, no foolish yet noble impulse inspired his willing blindness, it wasn’t even that he’d been afraid that the con man was going to beat him up, nothing so specific, there was just a vague fear that somehow it wasn’t going to turn out well, it was this, and nothing else, that made him hand over the four hundred dollars. ‘You’re a coward,’ he said to himself, ‘simple as that.’ The elaborate rationale he’d gone through while he was getting conned was just that, an elaboration, the real truth was much simpler. ‘You invent all this complex bullshit in order to hide the fact that everything you do, you do out of fear,’ he thought. Adrift in his neighborhood he felt that he finally understood himself. He saw all his actions through the lens of this devastating realization. ‘How could I have missed this before,’ he asked himself, ‘when it’s so painfully obvious?’ The horror of his behaviour spread out before him like an enormous tapestry or mural, where he could take his time and examine every instance of weakness in his past, and the scenes of the most abject fear and cowardice took place in the basement. He saw himself down there, alone, and in almost every sense of the word, lost. He’d thought that his life’s work, however futile, had been an act of courage, when all along he’d been acting from the most banal and everyday anxieties. But just as he was punishing himself with these thoughts he experienced a sense of exhilarating possibility. ‘It’s not too late to change,’ he thought. ‘It’s good that this happened. Otherwise I may have gone on like this indefinitely. Now I know what I need to do. Now I know what has been standing in my way.’ He’d hurried home, hoping to put his epiphany to work right away, but Mary’s cat incident had distracted him, so it was only now, as he is standing on the balcony after the doorbell had just rung, that all of this came back to him. ‘You’re afraid,’ he says to himself. Although maybe he’s right to be afraid? He’d been so distracted with his own thoughts while he was out wandering the streets that it had never occurred to him to check if he was being followed. He’d been so ashamed, once he’d handed over the four hundred dollars, that he’d wanted to put as much distance between himself and the con man as possible, short of breaking into a full sprint. Once he knew which way the con man was going, James told him that he lived in the opposite direction, but he hadn’t waited to see which way the con man went. There was more than a little superstition to this behaviour, like the way a child runs away from a dark basement, terrified that if they turn around all the wild phantasms of their imagination will come to life – ‘so,’ he thinks as he stands next to Mary on the patio, with the faint reverberations of the doorbell still sounding through the apartment, ‘it’s more than p
ossible that as he fled down the street the con man decided to wait and see where I went. And once I went far enough,’ he thinks, ‘he probably decided to follow me to see where I lived.’ James had already revealed himself to be gullible and cowardly, so the con man probably figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to find out where he lived in case he wanted to hit him up later on. The entire time that James was wandering the neighborhood, lost in thought, the con man had been keeping a safe distance. James had thought that handing over the four hundred dollars was a stupid and reckless thing to do, but it turns out that he’d done something much much worse. Instead of putting distance between himself and the con man he has brought him even closer. In fact, it was this precise behaviour – to get as far away as he could and never look back – that turned what had been an embarrassing and inconvenient incident into something truly dangerous for himself and Mary. The entire time he’d been with the con man he never thought that the incident might end violently. Of all the possible scenarios that ran through his head as he tried to decide whether the stranger was for real or not, he never considered that he might be capable of the horrific sort of crimes that James had only ever read or heard about. It just wasn’t on his radar. For all his introspection and deep thinking, he actually had a limited imagination. Far from being a free thinker, he was constrained by a host of blind spots and prejudices that reduced his realm of possibility down to a little set of expected outcomes, and anything that lay outside of this was almost impossible for him to see. He knows that, in principle, and in reality, all sorts of strange and wonderful things happen every day, and that it is technically possible for something unusual to happen to him, but as far as he knows, nothing ever has, and while he knew it is entirely possible that some day he could be surprised by an event so horrific and shocking that people might even read or hear about it, he felt it was just as likely that he’d become rich and famous, or discover that he has a long-lost twin brother. These things could technically happen, but they won’t, at least not to him, so when he’s walking with a stranger who he doesn’t trust and may even be trying to con him out of four hundred dollars, he never suspects that the man has something much worse in mind, though it’s completely feasible that the stranger’s attempt to rip him off was only the first move in a more elaborate and sinister plot. The trick was to get James thinking that the worst possible scenario was that the stranger was lying to him about getting his car towed, when what the stranger might actually have been doing was sizing James up, figuring out whether he was a suitable victim or not. While James was distracted by the issue of four hundred dollars the stranger was thinking about how he was going to follow him back to his apartment and then torture and kill him and his wife. ‘That’s crazy,’ James thinks as he stands completely still against the wall. And besides, that sort of thing doesn’t happen nearly as much as we think it does. It’s only because it’s so gruesome and terrifying that we end up reading about this sort of thing. The proportion of people who die from being tortured by a total stranger is so tiny that you’re probably more likely to get hit by a falling piano. We read about a couple who, while hiking across a foreign country, is slaughtered in their tent, the wife gang-raped and the husband brutally disfigured, and we think to ourselves, ‘Good God! How awful. . . .’ Then we read about someone who came from obscurity and became so rich and famous that they changed the shape of the world we live in, and we think to ourselves. ‘Jesus Christ. That’s amazing!’ But we never think as we’re reading about these horrible crimes that something similar might be in store for us. We never think, ‘I suppose it’s only a matter of time before my wife and I are murdered in the most extreme and unspeakable way.’ But plenty of people say to themselves, ‘Well, it’s only a matter of time before I’m so rich and famous that I won’t even be recognizable to myself.’ The belief that if he kept going down to the basement (even if while he was down there he never got any work done, and on the rare occasion that he did occupy himself it was to undo the work of preceding weeks and months) and just put enough time in, regardless of his deficiencies of natural ability or acquired skill, he would eventually finish his life’s work and create something of lasting value, somehow existed side by side with the belief that as long as he never did anything out of the ordinary he didn’t have to worry about being one of those people you read or hear about and say to yourself, ‘That’s awful.’ Except that, in the first case, he didn’t actually believe that he had enough talent and skill to accomplish his goal, and that even if he had all the time in the world there was no way he’d ever complete his life’s work, and despite all of this, he still has faith that somehow he will pull off something extraordinary and literally one of a kind, the sort of thing that only happens once every couple of centuries. Whereas, in the second case, he knows that even though it is statistically rare for someone to be tortured and killed, or to win the lottery, it is nevertheless something that happens all the time, and that these sorts of things (unlike creating or accomplishing a work of lasting value) are completely random and by definition can happen to anyone – it doesn’t matter if you are normal because that is who these things happen to, someone has to be terrorized and killed, someone has to win the jackpot, these things have happened before, they will happen again, and they will continue to happen as long as there are people around to be tortured and killed, and even if you try to lower the odds by staying home or avoiding public transit, etc., it’s still entirely possible that you will be tortured and killed in your own home. Even though it should have, it never crossed his mind (until now) that he might not have been dealing with a con man at all (at least not in the popular sense of the term), that he may in fact be a cold-blooded murderer, and that he was only pretending to con him out of four hundred dollars in order to keep him off balance and size him up. In the same way that someone who dies suddenly one night from a brain aneurysm comes home from work thinking they’ve got a stress headache, takes a couple Tylenol and goes to sleep, oblivious to what’s coming (even though in hindsight it should have been obvious that instead of suffering from an ordinary headache they were dying from an extraordinary and statistically rare, but in another sense altogether ordinary brain aneurysm, and if they had only recognized what was really happening they may have gotten to the hospital in time to save their life, but instead condemned themselves to death by taking Tylenol and going to sleep) – in the same way, James did everything possible to make himself the ideal murder candidate. When the stranger first hailed him in the street James should have looked the other way and kept walking, and when the stranger started talking to him he should have pretended that he couldn’t hear him. If he’d only indicated that he wasn’t open to being approached or spoken to by a stranger – that, like most people, he was hostile to this sort of encounter – then the stranger would’ve decided that to try to open him up and gain his trust and then follow him home to murder him and his wife would be much too difficult, if not impossible. James could have said, ‘No thanks,’ or ‘Not interested,’ or even ‘Go fuck yourself,’ or he could have shook his head ‘no’ and kept on walking. His first reaction is always to say ‘no,’ to turn things down, to deny. If a friend asks him out for a drink, or invites Mary and him over for dinner, he has to fight the initial reflex of making up an excuse. An opportunity at work comes up and he has to force himself to apply, and if they ever did offer him a promotion he’d probably pass on it. All of this is a way of saying ‘no’ to life, of shutting things down so he’s only doing the bare minimum, this way nothing can touch him, and because he has to devote so much of his life to his life’s work, this saying ‘no’ to life is a way of making sure he’ll have the time and energy to accomplish his goal. But every once in a while he is overcome with a desire to say ‘yes’ to life, and this, he thinks, is why he’d been open to the approach of a stranger, even though everything about the way that he was approached told James that the stranger wanted something and that he might be dangerous, or at least annoying. Because he is always t
urning things down or shutting them out he can sometimes become suddenly desperate to say ‘yes’ to life, and for life to say ‘yes’ back. This is what made him reckless, and it was why he was willing to hear what the stranger had to say. ‘Maybe he really needs my help?’ he had thought. This was how he ended up distracted by what he considered to be the problem of these sorts of encounters, which was whether to believe what the stranger was telling him, and not by the possibility that the con man might be a serious threat to his life, and not just the metaphorical life that James wanted to say ‘yes’ to. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied with his own response then he may have had a completely different take on the encounter, he may have noticed something about the way the stranger was acting that would’ve indicated that he was actually a violent murderer, but instead he interpreted everything the stranger did or said only in the context of whether he was telling the truth about the money order. He had been in despair over whether the stranger was a con man when he should have been in despair over whether the stranger was a homicidal maniac, and even though these forms of despair were in some ways equal, the second form was much much worse, and he felt ashamed for only experiencing it once the doorbell started ringing. When he looks over at Mary he sees that her eyes are wide and he wonders if the reason she looks so apprehensive and frightened is because she can somehow sense what he’s thinking. ‘Who could it be?’ she says, but before he can think of something to say she asks, ‘Do you think it’s the cops?’ This question stuns him, because initially he sees it as confirmation that she knows everything that happened with the con man. Her fear that the police were at the door is similar to his fear that the con man followed him home, and so even though it is completely insane for him to think it, there is a moment when he feels like Mary is reading his mind. But then he realizes that she’s talking about the cat incident. ‘I know it’s completely insane,’ she whispers, ‘but just when the doorbell rang I had a vision that it was the police here about the cat.’ And just as she says this, the doorbell rings again. They stare at each other with the same bulging eyes and for a moment they stand there, hardly breathing. James is having a mild panic attack as he desperately tries to convince himself that he wasn’t followed, while Mary, although certain that she is being completely irrational, is convinced that somehow everybody knows what happened, and that whoever it is on the other side of the door has come to tell her that they saw what she did. She mouths the words ‘what do we do?’ and James holds his finger to his lips, shushing her when she hasn’t even made a sound. He motions for her to follow him into the kitchen and then pulls her up next to him where he is standing in front of the sink. They stare at the light from the hallway that is reaching across the kitchen floor, waiting to see if a shadow will pass over it and start to stretch across the threshold, as if the person (or persons) on the other side of the door might let themselves in and make their way towards them. The doorbell rings again and James flinches and grabs hold of Mary’s arm, obviously afraid that she’ll lose her nerve and decide to answer the door. He pulls her closer to him and shuffles along the counter so that eventually they are huddled in the space between the wall and the fridge. Mary pulls free and shoots him a look to let him know that he has nothing to worry about, that she is just as determined as he is to wait out this doorbell onslaught, no matter how long it takes. Despite how terrified he is that the stranger has come for them and that in a few moments they might be murdered in the same gruesome fashion that often captures the popular imagination and makes the rounds with all the major news media, he is moved by their silent pact and the way that they are hiding like a couple of fugitives waiting for the secret police to pass them by, or like a couple of kids who wander too far from home and get stuck in a storm, forced to wait it out, clutching each other and shuddering in the corner of an abandoned barn or under the wind-lashed branches of a massive tree. All of a sudden he wants to tell her about the stranger but the doorbell sounds again. Immediately the giddiness they were feeling is swept away and they stare intensely at each other, and wait for the echo of the chime to fade. While Mary is still terrified, a creeping sense of annoyance starts to come over her. ‘If it was the police,’ she thinks, ‘they would’ve knocked by now, or something.’ Whoever is at the door, however insistent they are being, they’re also being polite, allowing for a long interval before pressing the doorbell each time. They clearly know we’re home,’ she thinks, ‘or they think we’re home – why else would they keep ringing? – but they’re still being respectful about how late it is.’ The doorbell sounds reticent, as if the person ringing it isn’t sure of the address, or of what they are going to say if someone answers the door. Mary’s annoyance turns to anger as she thinks about this shy, polite person ringing their doorbell at midnight on a Thursday. ‘What the fuck do they want?’ she says to herself. ‘Can’t they tell that even if we’re home, we’re not going to answer the door?’ She no longer thinks that the person at the front door has anything to do with the cat incident. ‘It’s just some drunk idiot,’ she thinks, ‘who got lost and thinks they’re at their friend’s place, or their girlfriend’s.’ It occasionally happens in their neighborhood. There’s a university nearby, so sometimes one of the drunk students will get confused, knocking on the doors of apartments that they mistakenly believe to be those of their friends, or friends of friends, or their boyfriends, or maybe someone they met earlier in the evening who played a mean trick and gave them a bogus address. ‘I can’t fucking believe these kids,’ she thinks, and then, all at once she decides to answer the door and confront the drunk student or students who were ringing their doorbell in the middle of the night. As she turns towards the hallway, James grabs her so fiercely that she is overcome with fear all over again. He looks at her with total panic in his eyes and she wonders if he knows something she doesn’t. ‘What is it?’ she mouths silently, but he holds his finger to his lips and shoots her a look as if she’s been shouting at the top of her voice. They hold this position – Mary staring at James questioningly while he looks back with a crazed and panicked look in his eyes – but after what must’ve been at least five minutes of complete silence it is obvious that whoever has been ringing the doorbell has stopped. Mary asks, sarcastically, if it’s safe to talk, but James holds up his hand to silence her and then disappears down the hallway. He comes back and nods and tells her it’s safe and she rolls her eyes and then asks him if he’s going to tell her what’s going on. ‘What do you mean?’ he says. ‘You were being paranoid too. Just as much as me.’ ‘Yeah, but I know why I’m freaked out. I just bounced a cat off our kitchen table, that then ran out of our apartment, probably with its brains leaking out of its nose,’ she is whisper-yelling (more yell than whisper), ‘so I know why I’m freaking out, and even though it doesn’t make any sense, and is probably only ’cause I feel guilty, I thought that maybe it was someone who saw the cat come though our window. Oh, God,’ she gasps and grabs James’s hand. ‘What if it was the owner?’ It is suddenly so clear to her that she is literally amazed that it wasn’t the first thing she thought of. Obviously the cat escaped, or maybe it’s just that he never stays out for long or strays very far from his home, so the owner is going around the neighborhood looking for it. Why else would somebody be ringing people’s doorbells in the middle of the night? ‘We should have answered the door,’ she says. ‘Why didn’t we answer the door?’ she looks at James with suspicion. ‘What is going on?’ ‘Nothing,’ James says. ‘Nothing is going on. I was just thinking about what you said about it being the owner, which, no offense, is even more unlikely than the cops coming to our door. Even if it wasn’t a stray, and chances are that it was, then it’s not like the owner is going around ringing people’s doorbells after the cat’s only been gone for a short while. In fact,’ he says, ‘chances are they don’t even know it’s missing. If there even is an owner, that is.’ But he can tell that he’s not being very convincing, and even if he were, Mary was past the point of being convinced. Besides, he w
ould feel so much better if he just told her about the stranger. He is always keeping things from her, holding back, hiding and dissembling, and it would be such an enormous relief to just let go, like one of those movie villains who is hanging on for dear life to the ledge of a tall building, or the hook of a towering construction crane. Maybe the hero is there too, holding onto the villain’s sleeve (which is coming apart at the seam) or is slowly losing a grip on his hand, but at some point the villain realizes that it’s useless, he is definitely going to fall, and the effort to keep dangling from the skyscraper or the construction crane is actually prolonging his agony – in fact, were he to resign himself to his fate and simply give in (i.e. to gravity/fate), then he may even find a sense of peace before hitting the ground. Just like this villain, who may have been a friend of the hero earlier in the movie and only now, at the precipice, is revealed to be an evil person, James is ready to let go. So he sighs and says, ‘I’m worried that somebody followed me home.’ As soon as he says this he regrets it. There’s a swirl of emotions happening on Mary’s face. Worry over what he may have done. Fear of what may still happen. Resignation that what’s done is done and whatever may have happened, there’s probably nothing she can do about it. Disgust, obviously, and love, which comes across like tender, if a little irritated, concern. But most of all there is a desperate need to know. When he kept things from her, it was as if he kept her in a state of sensory deprivation. When he lied to her, it always felt, when she eventually found out, like she’d been watching a movie or reading a book, and had fallen asleep or dropped into a lucid state, so the film or book got mixed up and blended into her thoughts and at some point, her memories as well, to the extent that years later, or maybe only days, she may recount a scene from that movie or book and tell it as if she were the hero of the story, without realizing that the story she was telling wasn’t real. When she finds out he’s been hiding something, or when he admits he’s been lying to her, it’s like realizing that certain memories you thought were yours are in fact made up and what you thought had happened hadn’t actually happened at all. This is why she’s so desperate to know – to know immediately what had happened – because now she knows that every memory is possibly tainted and until she knows which ones are real and which are made up, she can’t be sure how to respond. But why does she need to wait and find out the specifics when she already knows the basics? It won’t matter what James tells her, whether it is an enormous deception or only a minor incident, because what is revealed every time he admits to keeping something from her or deliberately misleading her, and in essence lying right to her face, is that she can’t believe a word he says. There are practical considerations, of course. For example if, when they started seeing each other, James had concealed the full extent of his sexual history (which he had), and even exaggerated by a number of years when he’d last been checked for sexually transmitted infections (ditto), only to reveal the truth later on, in a guilty and irritatingly coy manner, clearly more apprehensive about how angry she would be than whether or not he’d passed on an STI, then she would be obliged to get tested and to insist that he get tested as well (which she did) and maybe even to insist that they get in the habit of getting tested regularly (which she didn’t) since he obviously didn’t take the whole STI thing very seriously, and if he did end up cheating on her some day (that is, if he hadn’t already, or wasn’t currently) then she couldn’t rely on him to have the courtesy to use protection, or the balls to tell her if he hadn’t. So even though, in the most general sense, it doesn’t matter what James tells her, in another, more particular sense, so long as she continues to live with him, and love him, and try to have a baby with him, everything that he says, and all that he doesn’t, may be immediately and even disastrously significant. She can’t afford to be philosophical about his pathological dishonesty. It isn’t an option for her to say to herself, ‘Everything he says or doesn’t say is misleading, so by definition I can’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth. All I can do is trust my instincts. He lies about some things so all things are potentially lies, and there is no way for me to know what is legit.’ It would have been convenient to adopt this radical philosophical position, but the reality of the situation – the real reality – was that even though she couldn’t, she had to trust him when he told her something, and if he was silent she had to trust that this was because he didn’t have anything to say. Her dilemma is exacerbated by the fact that, from what she can tell, there is no method or rationale behind what he decides to be dishonest about. About a year ago, as an experiment, she decided to test how often he lied to her about what he looked at online. She didn’t pick this as a test because of any concern on her part over his online behaviour, but it occurred to her that because the computer kept a record of every website he visited it would be easy to confirm the truth of what he told her. She started off with something easy. She knew he jerked off to porn. It wasn’t an issue for them. They didn’t fight about it. And for the most part he was discreet about it, so she didn’t have to suffer the indignity of catching him in the act. But every once in a while he would get sloppy and leave a window open on a porn site. This had only happened a couple of times, and after she brought it up with him, it never happened again. The first time he slipped up was a turn-off, but she tried to overlook it. She’d seen porn before, but even though the internet was supposedly drowning in it, she never really noticed it, and definitely didn’t seek it out. Not because she had anything against it, it simply had no appeal for her. The one time she actually made an attempt to watch it and masturbate, she had to shut it off because she kept rolling her eyes, it was all so embarrassing, so ridiculously fake, and she didn’t find it sexy at all. But when she woke up one Saturday morning after they had been drinking with Tim and Ellen (she went to bed the second they got in, while he stayed up to 'have a snack'), she found the browser open to a paused clip of a girl getting fucked in the back of a cab by two guys. In this new context (watching the porn that James had been jerking off to the night before), she was much more troubled by what she saw. The girl was so tiny. She couldn’t have been older than twenty, and the guys that were fucking her were so big, literally covered in muscles, with gigantic cocks, and they were fucking her so hard, in a kind of frenzy, and the fact that they were in the back of a moving cab, instead of seeming erotic and risqué, struck her as extremely bizarre. The video was like a form of insanity, but still she wasn’t offended so much as disturbed by how incongruous the onscreen scene was with what she and James did when they fucked, or made love, or whatever. ‘If this is what he likes to watch on his own,’ she thought, ‘then what is going on in his head when we’re doing it?’ These thoughts bothered her for a couple of days, but eventually the memory of the scene in the taxi lost its visceral and disturbing quality, and she even felt a bit foolish for getting worked up over something that was completely harmless and probably just a way of blowing off steam. Besides, literally millions of people watched porn, so how could there be something wrong with it? The next time he forgot to close the browser after he’d been jerking off the night before, she wasn’t disturbed like the first time, only disgusted, the way she got when he forgot to flush after taking a shit, so she didn’t think anything of asking him when they were on the couch together later that morning if he could try to remember to close down his porn sites when he was done with them. He didn’t reply and looked so terrified that she felt as though she needed to reassure him. ‘I don’t mind,’ she explained. ‘I get it. Well, I don’t really get it. But I know it’s natural, or at least it’s pretty fucking common, so I don’t think it’s weird. Although, do you always watch that extreme shit?’ James was about to reply but she cut him off. ‘Never mind, watch whatever you like, I mean, how often do you look at it?’ ‘Hardly ever,’ he said. ‘Just, you know, once in a while, when I feel like blowing off some steam.’ She couldn’t help making a face at this, ‘How can you blow off steam watching two steroid junkies fucking some teenager into
oblivion?’ But she cut him off again before he could reply, ‘Never mind. Sorry. I really don’t care. You don’t have to defend yourself. Just please try to remember to close it down when you’re done.’ He promised that he would and they never talked about it again, except for when they got into a slump and she’d get suspicious that he was bingeing on porn, but even then all she would do is make a remark like, ‘You’re probably too tired from watching anorexic teenagers getting pounded by hairless Neanderthals.’ And he’d make some lame attempt at a joke, like, ‘That’s racist.’ But she knew that he was ashamed of his porn habit, so it was ideal for her test because he would almost certainly lie when she asked him about it. So one morning she woke up and snuck out to the computer to check its history. Sure enough, James had an epic jerk-off session the night before. From 1:43 a.m. to 2:27 a.m. he went through close to a dozen videos. She clicked on a few links to get a flavour for what he’d been watching, and was surprised to see that the first couple were fairly tame – a woman fingering herself poolside and another using a vibrator in the shower (why the shower?) – but a couple of the other links were more hardcore – a girl wearing a ball gag riding some sort of machine, and a Czech woman with gigantic tits getting fucked next to a dumpster while the man who was fucking her filmed it from his point of view with a cheap camcorder. Once again, she was disturbed by how the images onscreen were so utterly foreign to the sort of sex that she and James had. And now that she was actually tracking the specifics of his behaviour she wasn’t able to dismiss it so easily. Forty-four minutes. That’s how long he sat in front of the computer screen last night. How many nights every week? Every month? How many hundreds or thousands of minutes of this shit did he watch every year while she was asleep in their bed, or out doing groceries, or having drinks with her friends? Of course he would lie about watching all this porn. It was obscene. She crawled back into bed and lay there thinking, careful not to touch him, until he woke up. ‘Were you watching porn last night?’ she said, as soon as he opened his eyes. ‘Well good morning to you too,’ he said, with a sleepy grin on his face. ‘Well, were you?’ He draped his arm over her and she rolled it off. ‘Um, did I leave something open?’ he frowned, apologetically. ‘What do you think?’ He raised himself on his elbow, ‘I think that you’re upset that I look at porn, which I totally understand. It’s just something I like to do to blow off steam after working in the basement. But if it bothers you I’ll stop.’ She’d expected him to lie, but she realized that she’d come on too strong and gave herself away. Now she was curious to see if he would come clean, or whether he’d try to hide the extent of his habit. ‘So what? Like five minutes at the end of the night? A clip or two and then you come to bed?’ ‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘I’m not some sort of depraved pervert.’ ‘So last night you watched what? Five or ten minutes?’ He lay back on the pillows and sighed, as if she’d already been questioning him for an hour and he’d answered this question many times, ‘Yeah, something like that.’ ‘And what were you watching?’ She was sitting straight up and studying him closely, trying to spot any tics or ‘tells’ so she could watch out for them during the next test. ‘Jesus, Mary, I don’t know. It’s pretty normal stuff. Girls fingering themselves. That sort of thing.’ ‘So,’ she leaned back, almost relaxed, ‘you didn’t watch videos of gagged women getting fucked by machines for forty-five minutes?’ James got dressed in a rage, throwing the sort of tantrum that usually would’ve come off as comical, but, all things considered, was just kind of sad. They made up later that night, but Mary knew that from then on he would always be careful to wipe the computer’s history. ‘Or maybe,’ she had thought, ‘he might give it up.’ Either way, she let it drop. She couldn’t blame him for watching porn, or if she did there would be millions of other people she’d have to include in her blame, and she certainly couldn’t blame him for lying about it when she had questioned him in a way that encouraged him to lie. For the next test she would pick something so banal that there would be no good reason to lie about it. Lying about watching porn – the type he watched, and how much – was predictable. These sorts of lies weren’t the problem because she could anticipate them, which is to say that whether he lied or told the truth she’d be able to guess at what he was up to, and plan accordingly (like get tested for STIs, or make enough noise when she woke up to go to the bathroom that she wouldn’t catch him masturbating). The bigger problem was that he might be lying about the most random details and events of his life, and that this randomness made it impossible to predict with any degree of certainty what was actually going on in their lives. What he ate for lunch? The last time he spoke with his parents? Whether he got any work done when he was down in the basement? There was nothing that he didn’t try to distort. ‘Did you get that link I sent you?’ she would ask. ‘I haven’t checked my email yet today.’ But when he’d go to the bathroom she would check the browser history and see that he’d already checked his email three times. Why would he lie about something that was so inconsequential? In what way could it matter to him whether or not she knew if he’d checked his email and seen the link that she had sent him? What exactly was it that he was concealing? It had just been a link to an article about a restaurant they had eaten at recently, one they didn't like. The reviewer praised the restaurant extravagantly, slavishly, and – in Mary’s opinion – was clearly in awe of the celebrity chef and the ostentatious décor and pretentious menu. This was typical of the reviewer’s previous articles, which had all been displays of cultural illiteracy. If a restaurant was a sham, an incoherent mishmash of styles and influences, then it would be praised for its originality, whereas a beautiful restaurant serving an eloquent cuisine composed with masterful simplicity would get panned for being uninspired or unoriginal, or both. So whenever they wanted to go out to eat she would check to see if this reviewer had written about the restaurant and she and James could tear the review apart. They would talk over dinner, or later as they sat on the couch, about the crass and inept similes, the overwrought and often incomprehensible prose, and they would both get so worked up and exasperated over what they perceived as an offense against good taste that they might even plan on starting a blog of their own to take revenge by posting comments made in the privacy of their living room that would be devastating to the reputation of the reviewer if they were ever made public. She liked how worked up James would get, though at times they got so worked up that they would start to argue, even when they were in complete agreement. She got excited at the idea that they might somehow develop these bitch sessions into something that other couples might read and talk about over dinner, or while they hung out with friends. But she wasn’t delusional, she knew that they would never start a blog, that these high-strung responses to the reviewer were simply a way for them to sort out the confusion and envy they felt whenever their opinions were contradicted or refuted in the media, that it was a harmless pastime but in other ways crucial to their fragile intimacy, so even though it was bewildering for James to lie about checking his email, it was hurtful all the same, and she was determined to find out what it was he thought he was hiding. ‘I did sign in,’ he explained when she confronted him later over dinner, ‘but I was waiting to hear back from Dale about next weekend. I saw that you had sent me something, but I didn’t look at it.’ ‘But that’s not what you said,’ she said, thrown by this lawyerly horseshit. ‘You said you hadn’t checked your email when you’d already checked it three times.’ ‘Well, first of all,’ he was speaking with the same tone of barely contained rage that he used whenever she challenged one of his lies, ‘I’m still trying to understand why you’re spying on my online activity. But I don’t even know if I want to talk about that right now. Frankly, I don’t know whether I should be offended, or concerned. But I guess I said it that way because I hadn’t checked the email you sent me yet and I didn’t want to have to explain to you that I was only checking to see if Dale had got back to me. I knew that if you knew that I had checked my email that you would want to kn
ow why I didn’t check out the link that you sent me, and that you wouldn’t leave me alone until I did, and I just didn’t feel like reading a fucking review and then getting into one of our bitch sessions about how much of an idiot the reviewer is.’ ‘So it’s my fault you lied?’ she exclaimed, hurt by the way he described their conversations about the restaurant reviewer. ‘Kind of,’ he said. After this fight she noticed that he got into the habit of clearing the history on the laptop every time he used it. If she wanted to catch him in a lie after that she had to wait for him to slip up. As it happened, an opportunity came up only a few days later when Mary was emptying the recycling bin under the sink. She noticed a balled-up plastic bag as she was transferring the recycling into the blue bags. ‘I use these for my lunches,’ she said to herself (pissed at James for carelessly throwing out the bags that he knew she used for lunches). Besides, she thought to herself, were you even allowed to get rid of plastic bags like that (putting them in the recycling bin that is), even if the only alternative, which struck her as perverse, would be to throw them out? As she was putting the bag into the drawer full of plastic bags, she felt a piece of paper through the plastic – a receipt for takeout food from a restaurant that they had often talked about going to, but whenever the opportunity came up they bailed at the last minute, worried that the food wasn’t going to be as good as what they had been led to expect from the reviews and their friends. ‘People go crazy for that shit,’ she would say, ‘and it never ends up being as good as they make it out to be.’ ‘It’s true,’ James would agree, ‘I don’t know what it is about places like that but the moment people get inside they lose the ability to taste the difference between good food and total garbage.’ It was the conviction in his voice that would convince her to play it safe and order from one of the takeout places that they trusted and had been using for years. Now, here he was, going to this new restaurant that all their friends had been talking about, and doing it behind her back. She stood at the kitchen sink, stunned with hurt, and tried to understand why he would want to go to the takeout place without her, why he preferred to have the experience all by himself even though trying out new restaurants was something they always did together, and, more importantly, why he wanted to hide it from her and keep her believing that this was still a place that they would try out one night when they finally stopped worrying over whether it was overrated? It was hurtful that he chose to go on his own but it was disturbing that he intended to keep her in the dark after the fact. What was he going to do when they eventually went there together? Was he going to pretend that it was his first time? She saw herself sitting there waiting for their order, talking about the menus, criticizing the counter setup, and there he would be, going along with it, agreeing with her suggestions and even saying that it might be a good idea to use one of those pagers that beeped when your table was ready so they wouldn’t have to stay crammed in the doorway blocking the entrance. She experienced a falling feeling. Not as drastic as the horrific free fall in her dreams – more muted, but surprising, like missing the first step on a staircase. So she called down into the basement, something she was supposed to do only when it absolutely couldn’t wait, and he came up the stairs with that look on his face. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘Did you go to that new takeout place without me?’ She immediately regretted putting it to him like that. She should’ve been more casual about it. He might’ve slipped up and revealed the real reason for the cover-up, instead of spitting out the first lie that came into his head. ‘Yeah,’ he said, as if she’d just asked him something trivial that hardly justified breaking the rule about yelling down into the basement, ‘I went to try it out that night you met Veronica for drinks.’ She thought back to their conversation from that night. She was certain that she’d asked him what he’d had for dinner, but she couldn’t remember what he’d said. ‘Didn’t I ask you what you ate when I got home?’ ‘If you had,’ he said, ‘then I would’ve told you that I got takeout.’ ‘But I thought we were going to go there together,’ she was thrown off by her memory lapse and felt like she had to accept his reply, even though she had the feeling that he was full of shit. ‘We always go to new places together. We had just been talking about going there last week. . . . Jesus,’ she said after a sudden thought, ‘have you gone there before? Or was this your first time?’ ‘Holy shit,’ he yelled. ‘This is fucking ridiculous. It was my first time there. You were out. I felt like treating myself and I was bored with our usual places, so I went there. I’m sorry. We can order from there tomorrow if you want. Okay? Is the interrogation over now?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Fine.’ But once he was back in the basement she obsessed over the night that she’d gone out for drinks with Veronica, and in particular what she had talked about with James when she got home. Maybe he wasn’t lying. It’s possible she hadn’t asked him what he had for dinner, even though it is usually one of the first things she asked whenever they spent the night apart. She should’ve been more careful. Instead of asking up front if he’d been to the restaurant she could’ve worked up to it by mentioning that she was talking with a co-worker who’d gone the night before and wouldn’t shut up about it all day, and then suggesting that they go there this weekend to finally see what everyone was talking about. She could’ve withheld the receipt and if he’d admitted to going a few nights ago then he’d never know that she had known. But if, worst-case scenario, he pretended at the restaurant that weekend that it was his first time there, she could bring it out, even though it made her sick that this is what she’d come to, catching him in a lie like some fucking TV lawyer. So because she forgot to be sneakier, he was able to get away with acting as if his trip to the new takeout place was of no significance, when in fact it signified everything that was wrong in their lives together. ‘Next time,’ she said to herself, ‘I’ll set things up so there will be none of this he said/she said horseshit. Either he’ll be lying or telling the truth. None of this grey-area garbage.’ Of course by now she knows that everything he says is a potential lie. If he went through the trouble of concealing something that was (in a certain sense) as insignificant and inconsequential as his trip to the new takeout restaurant (even though it was in another sense of major significance and dire consequence) then he must be lying and concealing all sorts of other banal facts about his life and events and people and basically everything that makes up a person’s existence. It isn’t the first time she has caught him lying about or trying to hide something that, when she found out what it was, struck her as so meaningless that she was at a complete loss as to why he would bother hiding it in the first place. At first, she saw these incidents the same way she did his occasional drinking binges (which came on without any warning and only happened once every year or so, when, out of the blue, he would get suddenly and spectacularly drunk for days, sometimes longer). The way that he would shift from having a good time with a few close friends over a couple of drinks to chugging back full glasses of whiskey and making a fool of himself was so out of character for him that she saw it as an aberration, like a freak storm, the sort of thing that is so rare and random that it’s remembered for years afterwards as an alien event, the sort of thing that never happens around here, even though it did, and does. But as the number of lying incidents increased it became impossible to see his deceptions over petty events and details as something random, or outside his normal behaviour, when it was more than likely – this thought filled her with an intense anxiety – that this behaviour was systemic and deeply rooted. She used to think all this lying was maybe a temporary thing, that he’d eventually give it up and just be himself, but now she knows that the lying is his true self. And it isn’t even the systemic lying that causes her creeping unease and even horror – what is really disturbing about all of this is that he is trying to conceal things about himself that she is perfectly aware of. No matter how many times he lies or withholds something, he never actually succeeds in hiding what it is he doesn’t want her to see. In fact, it’s the opposite, he reveals thin
gs about himself that she is aware of but that don’t really bother her. Why go through so much trouble to keep things from her that were so ordinary? It was like a murderer who tries to defend himself by saying that he only meant to scare his victim. By trying to come up with an excuse, he makes everything worse. He is so worried that she might be upset with him for going behind her back and trying the new takeout restaurant without her that he doesn’t even consider the implications of lying to her about something like that. ‘I don’t want you to know me,’ he is saying to her. ‘I don’t want you to see me for who I really am. I want you to think I am something that I am not. Because what I am is someone who doesn’t want to be what they really are. And what I really am is something much worse than what I appear to be.’ Which is just a convoluted way of saying that all he really is, at the bottom of his heart, or at the end of the day, is what he doesn’t want to be. And this, Mary suspects, is why he spends all his free time down in the basement pretending to work on something that both of them know he will never finish. He doesn’t want to be who he really is, which is a mostly decent, sympathetic and altogether ordinary guy. He is terrified of the ordinary fate in store for him, the same fate that awaits millions of other people like him who lead quietly desperate lives that are by and large pleasantly uneventful. He is determined to escape the trap that he feels has been set for him since the moment he was born – to have just enough awareness to understand what he would never be capable of. The moment he set out on his life’s work he knew that the whole thing was a sham. ‘Here I am,’ he thinks to himself more or less every time he has a glimmer of clarity, ‘pretending to have faith in what I’m doing, when what I really believe I’m doing – instead of making incremental progress on my life’s work – is ruining any chance of enjoying the normal life that is my true fate.’ This is what his life’s work really is, an elaborate denial of what he really is. So when he tells her that he thinks someone may have followed him home, what he’s actually saying to her is, ‘I don’t want to pretend anymore. I don’t want to hide. From this moment on I’ll never lie or conceal anything from you ever again.’ And he really believes this – that it’s possible, after years of distorting every aspect of his character, to make a complete break from this behaviour and become the sort of person who is at peace with who he is, who claims to be nothing else, who manages to somehow be at once of the world and completely out of it, entirely oneself and at the same time no one at all, instead of continuing as someone who – to justify (or at least excuse) his life – tries to set himself apart by pursuing his life's work, but only ends up pretending to work toward this life-affirming goal, which, instead of setting him apart, confirms his place in the undistinguished mass of people who never make anything of themselves, and live their lives in regret. Maybe, until now, the only reason that he hasn’t given up these ridiculous pretentions is on account of a persistent and by now borderline superstitious faith that even though it is clearly impossible to escape his perfectly ordinary, and therefore terrifying fate, he still believes it might happen somehow. So maybe instead of always trying to keep some distance from what he is, and what Mary thinks he is, he gives up on trying to control her perspective. ‘I’ll tell her everything that happened between me and the stranger, leave nothing out,’ and just the thought of finally giving up so totally on the farce of the last decade of his life is so exhilarating that he starts to shake. So he tells her what happened when he took a break from his so-called life’s work and went for a walk around the block. Even though he is only telling her about the encounter with the stranger, he feels as though he is confessing his innermost secrets, exposing everything that up until now he has kept hidden, basically because he was afraid of what they signified (i.e. the person he really is, instead of the person he thought he was). ‘That’s all over with now,’ he thinks, ‘Now I’m finally coming clean.’ After keeping a distance from Mary for the last ten years – estranging himself – and refusing to acknowledge the very basis of their shared reality, he is all of a sudden in a hurry to close this gap, to obliterate this distance, so there would be nothing between them any longer, no obstruction between who he is and who she thought he was. He wants to tell her everything, not just about the stranger, but about his life’s work and how he’s been steadily destroying the little he has managed to accomplish, and about how he is relieved that she hasn’t been able to get pregnant, even though he feels extremely guilty because he knows how devastating it is for her. He wants to tell her about the porn, his crazy money issues, all the lies, etc. He wants to tell her about the anguish he feels every day he goes to work, and how he’s just been coasting along for years, but is starting to worry that he isn’t going to be able to keep the act up for much longer. Most of all, he wants to confess to the absolute despair he feels whenever he is down in the basement and he stops to consider the mess that he’s made of his life, how he has gradually and inexorably closed off every possibility until he’s reduced himself to the singular goal of succeeding or failing at his life’s work. He put off having a family because he thought it might distract him. He never seriously pursued a career since it would have got in the way of his true calling. He no longer has close friends and merely keeps up a few acquaintances to help fill out the scattered milestones he still bothers to commemorate. Family relations have dwindled down to holidays, a few tentative telephone conversations, and the odd, grudging visit. He has no other hobbies or enthusiasms, or even habits really, because every moment of his waking life is infected by his life’s work. He’d made a bet, a colossal gamble. He’d gone all in. And increasingly he is convinced that it was a bad bet. He no longer believes in himself and his life’s work and he is certain that instead of being the sort of person who struggles heroically in the face of ceaseless opposition, ignoring the pleas of their family and friends to listen to reason and give up their reckless and destructive pursuit, conquering the darkest moments of self-doubt, suffering through the most soul-sucking adversity and near-unbearable deprivations, only to ultimately triumph and prove everyone wrong by creating a work of enormous and lasting significance, he is actually the sort of person you never hear about or read about, who ends up wasting years of his life stubbornly ignoring the sensible advice of concerned loved ones, repressing the mounting suspicions that he has made a crucial mistake, that he should never have put any faith in his ability or talent, that instead of ultimately triumphing and proving everyone (including himself) wrong, all of his effort and sacrifice will amount to nothing, and he will end up disgraced and alone, tormented to the end of his days by thoughts of what he could have and should have done instead of devoting his life to a lost cause. All of this is racing through his mind as he tells Mary about his encounter with the con man, but instead of confessing these thoughts to her, he is giving an exhaustive account of the previous hour, describing the stranger’s appearance (dishevelled and good-looking) and the street that they met on, what the stranger said and how he said it, what James said and what he was thinking about throughout the encounter. ‘In order for her to understand why I did what I did,’ he thinks, as he’s describing the con man’s facial hair, ‘she has to know what was going through my mind.’ He worries that she’ll get hung up on the fact that he’d given away four hundred dollars to a complete stranger, and draw all sorts of misguided and cynical conclusions about why he fell for such an obvious and clichéd routine, the sort of scam that nobody, not even kids or old people, would fall for anymore. It’s extremely important for him that she understand the full context behind what happened. He totally sympathizes with her. If he was in her place he’d have an equally hard time understanding how she could be so naive, and he might end up suspecting that she was keeping something from him, that she had been attracted to the stranger, maybe that she even went into an alley with him and in a moment of insane recklessness fucked him while hanging onto a chain-link fence, or leaning up against a red brick wall – why else would she hand over four hundred dollars to someone she just me
t unless she was hoping to profit in some way, whether it was an explicit exchange (i.e. money for sex) or something more ephemeral, such as the erotic charge from giving over such a large sum of money to a good-looking man who was potentially dangerous, but more likely just desperate and dishonest? It is simply inconceivable that she could be taken in by such a glaringly obvious con, so the only way she would fall for something like that is because she hoped to gain something, and that what she was hoping for was illicit, a betrayal that would no doubt be of a sexual nature. There is no way, if it had been Mary instead of James who had been so easily duped, that he wouldn’t end up suspecting her of some form of infidelity, either actual or only potential. So he knew that the only way to deal with the suspicions that Mary would most certainly have was to make an exhaustive confession. If he explained his exact frame of mind leading up to his encounter with the con man, as well as his precise train of thought right up to the moment he handed over the four hundred dollars, then there would be no room for her doubts or anxieties or paranoid thoughts because she would be able to see that he had left nothing out. Even the most trivial and tangential digression would be included. This is the only way he could prevent her from getting the wrong idea. Only the most complete accounting of every thought that passed through his mind, every utterance, the tiniest gesture, would succeed in depicting what actually happened between James and the stranger, anything less than that would be a distortion, a misrepresentation, and a lie. ‘Everything is relevant,’ he thinks. ‘Everything is significant.’ There is no other way for Mary to understand what happened out there unless she has all the facts. People think they can get the gist of a situation if they are furnished with the outline of an event. ‘Just give me the broad strokes,’ they say, ‘I can fill in the rest.’ We think that we know what happened because we’ve seen it all before. One situation resembles the next, and there’s nothing that can’t be compared, and equated, with something that came before. ‘The same thing happened to me,’ we say in order to be spared the trouble of listening to a story or an excuse that we feel as though we’ve already heard a million times before. ‘I know what happens next,’ we say, because even as we claim to believe that each event is different, that every situation is unique, the reality is that there’s nothing anybody can tell us that we haven’t already heard in one version or another, at least a million times before. Mary sits there and listens impatiently as James recounts, in the most exhaustive detail possible, an anecdote that, although in literal terms is unique, and technically has never happened before, is nonetheless painfully familiar. She already knows, the moment he starts telling his story, what he is going to say and how it is going to end. His precise train of thought, the exact details of what he said and what he did, while absolutely fascinating to him, are so predictable that she would wince when she saw them building into a long, drawn-out story. What does it matter to her how he was feeling or what he was thinking when he handed over four hundred dollars to a complete stranger, if it’s all the same in the end? The moment she hears him say, ‘A really good-looking guy approached me on the street and asked me to cash a money order for him,’ she immediately knows that the story will end with him falling for this obvious scam, so that everything else he says, all the details he thinks are so important, are, for her, beside the point. She doesn’t see his confession in the same way he does. He thinks he is shining a bright light onto his life, but all she sees is an embarrassing attempt to cast a shadow over the central truth of his story. ‘He’s stalling,’ she thinks. Instead of just coming out with it, he is trying to bury the truth under this endless preamble where he just keeps piling on the details, which, among friends, at parties, can sometimes be amusing, but at home, in a tense situation like this one, after she has just told him about the cat incident, is the sort of thing that would make her furiously impatient. But she knows if she tries to cut him off and force him to skip to the end, to get to the point and stop trying to conceal what it is he did behind some complex rationale that’s impossible to understand anyway and does nothing to change the fact that he probably got conned out of four hundred dollars, she would only be prolonging his little act and he’d end up heaping on even more needless detail, because, in his words, he got the ‘impression that she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her.’ ‘No,’ he would say, ‘it’s not like that at all,’ and then he would go off on some weird tangent that wouldn’t change her impression of the situation in the least, except to piss her off for being forced to sit and listen to even more horseshit. But once James has started on one of his explanations, it is impossible to convince him that he is wasting his time, that nothing he says will make a difference and that, if anything, instead of giving her a more nuanced and sympathetic perspective on what happened, it will end up making her more upset than if he had laid everything out at the start. Why couldn’t he face up to the reality of the situation? Why did he think that he could somehow end up with an alternate reality, as if he could talk his way into another world? She is sitting and listening to James as he is going on about forging triplicate forms, when a feeling of hopelessness starts to take over. How many times have they sat on that couch, just as they were doing now, while James tried to explain the world away? If he forgot to pick up groceries after he promised he would, then she would be forced to listen to him explain why, instead of being thoughtless and annoying, he was actually too thoughtful, and by overthinking what he should pick up for dinner he ended up getting distracted, and before he realized what had happened he was back at the apartment, empty-handed. Or, when James made a bizarre and hurtful remark about Mary’s body during a dinner with Veronica and her new boyfriend, once they got back home and Mary confronted him, she would have to sit and listen as he told her that what she thought was criticism was in fact a type of ironic praise. Far from trying to humiliate her in front of her friends, he had wanted to put her at ease, since he knew that she was sensitive about the little bit of weight she’d put on in the last year. Nothing is what she thinks it is, everything is the opposite of what it appears to be. He never let her have her own thoughts and constantly forces her to adopt his. It doesn’t matter what her perspective is, he won’t leave her alone until she sees things the way he sees them. By now she is so used to this that she’s got in to the habit of keeping her thoughts to herself so he doesn’t try to change them. This is why she doesn’t interrupt him while he tells the story of his encounter with the stranger, because if he suspects that she doesn’t wholeheartedly believe everything he tells her, then he’ll keep heaping on more and more examples and excuses until he’s satisfied that she’s given up her own opinions and taken on his instead. ‘Even though I knew he was full of shit,’ James says, ‘part of me was almost desperate to believe what he was telling me. Do you know what I mean?’ She nods, yes, she knows exactly what he means, while she thinks to herself, ‘What the fuck is he talking about? Why the hell would he want to believe the story of some sketchy guy off the street? What did it matter to him if the guy was lying?’ It seems to her that it would’ve been better if the guy had been full of shit, because then it would’ve been easier to refuse to help him out. If it had been her, and she’d thought the guy was telling the truth, then she may have felt bad about it, but she still wouldn’t have handed over four hundred dollars. From what she can tell, James is saying he never really doubted that the guy was a con artist. ‘I thought that maybe he just seemed like a con man because that was the most obvious possibility,’ he explains. ‘Like it was such a cliché – from out of town, car trouble, a money order that he can’t cash, if I could spare a couple minutes I’d be a hundred dollars richer for my trouble – everything about it was so pathetically obvious that I started to think he must be telling the truth. Otherwise he would’ve come up with something more plausible. Does that make any sense?’ ‘Of course it does,’ she says, even though she is thinking that he must be out of his mind. This is the man she is trying to have a baby with? This naive and reckless fo
ol? How could she have ever thought that this was the right thing to do? How had she missed so much about him? His impracticality? His profound gullibility? This destructive insecurity? Maybe he hadn’t always been like this? Maybe he used to be stronger, clear-sighted, level-headed, simple. But this isn’t the case. It had all been there at the beginning, she just hadn’t seen it for what it was. She used to listen to him talk for hours about his life’s work, happy to sit there as he explained what he was working on and hoping to finish before too long – it had been early in their relationship, and she was secretly proud to be going out with someone who had a calling and devoted his life to accomplishing something grandiose. Without thinking about what actually lay in store for her, she would even fantasize about what it would be like to be famous one day. Even if he wasn’t very successful, she would think, eventually he was bound to be recognized. It wasn’t that he seemed particularly brilliant that made her think this – she could tell that he was smart, but there were loads of smart people out there. It was that he was so obsessed with the goal of accomplishing something original and relevant and significant that he ended up convincing her he was capable of it. Somebody has to devote themselves to great works, she would say to herself, why not him? ‘Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,’ her dad used to say. If James is willing to devote himself to working non-stop on some monumental project that most people don’t even bother attempting, let alone actually pull off, then he must have that one percent of inspiration that her dad was so dismissive of, and as long as he was willing to do the perspiration thing then he might even succeed. She had never been with someone who talked so much about some far-off and likely fanciful day in the future when he will have done something truly great and all that work will have finally paid off and he’ll be recognized for his singular genius. It’s undeniably exciting, when you’re young, to sit and listen to someone talk about how, through the force of their own will, they will shape the world around them. ‘Don’t worry about how things look right now,’ they say, ‘because once I’m finished everything will have changed for the better. We may be struggling to pay our rent and bills while our friends are getting rich and moving into luxury condos and nice suburban homes, and we may spend most of our time fighting over the most mundane crap, something in the news, or the exact itinerary of a trip to France we took five years ago, there may be nothing about me that would lead you to believe that I’m destined for great things – in fact, everything you know about me would discourage great expectations of any kind – but if you just hang on and put all your trust in me, if you invest everything you have to give, then I promise you that one day all of this will change,’ they say. ‘Your faith in me will be redeemed and I promise that you’ll even be rewarded for your loyalty. We will have a life that is the exact opposite of the one we are presently living. Instead of aimlessly wandering through each day and blindly going through the motions our lives will be filled with purpose and meaning. Instead of obligations, you will have goals. In fact,’ they claim, ‘it may not feel like it, but everything you are doing right now is infused with this higher purpose. When you do the groceries it only feels like a chore, but what you are actually doing is fulfilling an essential role in the great pursuit of my life’s work. It may seem like getting into a desperate argument over how to spend the tax return is just another trial in the unending drudgery of our monotonous lives, but what you are actually doing is supporting an essential aspect of the process that will result in a monumental accomplishment.’ It’s with this sort of talk that James would try to convince Mary that, although their friends were better off in the form of really nice apartments and houses, as well as frequent vacations and nights out to nice restaurants, their lives were in many ways much less rewarding than they actually seemed. And sometimes she even believed him. But she eventually developed a bunch of nagging doubts that she couldn’t reconcile with this vision of some glorious future. For starters, James’s day job is completely unrelated to his life’s work. At first this hadn’t bothered her, it even reassured her, since, according to James’s reverse logic, it confirmed his outsider status. ‘Outsiders,’ he would say, ‘always find a way in. That’s what makes them outsiders.’ When he talked like that it did bother her, because without any outside confirmation of the validity of his life’s work, all she had to go on was his ability to convince her, and that seemed to be weakening over the years. She also got the impression that he had given up, and in some ways that’s what bothered her the most. It felt like a betrayal, or at least a mean trick. She felt the same sort of swelling anger she experienced whenever he got them lost on one of their vacations or camping trips. He always wanted to find the route that nobody else took, or the place that nobody went to see, the hard-to-find, out-of-the-way, exclusive spots he felt would distinguish them from the endless stream of tourists that passed through these locales. ‘We don’t want to go there,’ he would say, ‘that’s where everyone goes,’ as if this fact were enough to discredit the destination. ‘I was doing some research online,’ he would say, basically telling her that he was planning on ruining what she had hoped was going to be a relaxing and uneventful trip, ‘and apparently there’s this beach. . . .’ So instead of going to the famous place that everyone they knew had been to, they would go on an unpredictable quest in search of a hidden gem that was supposedly better than anything the more popular spots had to offer. But all of this wouldn’t have bothered her if it weren’t for the fact that more often than not they never even ended up at this alleged paradise that hardly anyone else knew about, and even if they did manage to get there it was always a huge disappointment. They might spend the night walking along a deserted country road, no shoulder to protect them whenever a car drove by every couple of hours, so they’d jump down into the roadside ditch and then crawl back out once the car had passed. Maybe James had heard or read about a restaurant that was extremely authentic, the sort of place that tourists were always trying to get to but could never find, where the customs and food had been preserved. Unlike the tourist traps that they were constantly trying to avoid but invariably ended up visiting, these authentic restaurants and hotels did not offer themselves up. They refused to meet you halfway. Everything was on their terms. Instead of trying to make themselves understood and translating their customs into terms a tourist could understand, these authentic places carried on in the same way they always had, and it was up to you to figure it out. An authentic place didn’t need tourists, in fact tourists eventually ruin authentic places, which is why James was so obsessed with these restaurants and hotels, or beaches and lookouts – they hadn’t been ruined yet, they were still unique and peculiar to their time and place, they hadn’t been transformed into one of the placeless and timeless cultural voids that people refer to as tourist traps. He was so determined to find these authentic hideouts that he was willing to charge blindly into the most precarious and unfavourable circumstances. Up to her knees in ditchwater, Mary would break down and start screaming that she would never let him do this to her again. This was the last time his deranged infatuation with authenticity would lead them to an obscure Spanish town that nobody had heard of, not even the Spanish people they had spoken with in cafés and on buses as they passed through the equally obscure towns they had to go through to get there and to a cantina that James had read about in a travel magazine, where you could apparently watch one of the last great masters of Flamenco perform. What did it matter if she was the greatest living Flamenco dancer when they knew absolutely nothing about Flamenco and had never even seen it performed? Why couldn’t they have stayed in the city and caught one of the dozen excellent dancers featured nightly? She just wanted to have a nice relaxing vacation but instead they were stranded on a stretch of country road, diving into the fucking ditch every time one of these maniacs flew by, the only sign of life being the sounds of howling dogs (especially frightening because they hadn’t seen a house for miles). So when they finally came across a house w
ith a light on, she forced James to knock on the door and ask if they could use their phone to call a cab. But the man that came to the door was clearly confused and James couldn’t make himself understood, so after a flurry of pointing and nodding and saying ‘si, si’ about a thousand times they found themselves sitting in the back of the man’s truck as he drove them to the bus station that they had set out from about four hours before. This was how James’s little quests usually turned out. They would reach some sort of crisis and he would admit that he wasn’t sure they were headed the right way so they ended up giving up on reaching the authentic restaurant, or waterfall, or whatever, and on their way back Mary would point out that they could have just gone to the inauthentic tourist trap where they wouldn’t even have noticed how inauthentic it actually was, and they may have even had a good time. Because, in her experience, when James actually did pull it off and locate one of these authentic places, they ended up being run-down (if it was a restaurant or hotel) or underwhelming (if it was a beach or waterfall) and she couldn’t help thinking that the reason that the other places, the ones they avoided, were so popular and overrun with tourists was because they were better. Sitting and listening to James drag out the story of his encounter with the sketchy drug addict, she is suddenly overcome by the same sinking feeling she gets once she realizes that James has tricked her into one of his stupid quests for authenticity. She no longer has the patience to listen to him talk about whether he ended up handing over the four hundred dollars (as though there was ever any question). ‘The definition of insanity,’ her dad used to say, ‘is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.’ This annoying maxim, which her dad would trot out whenever he stood over Mary and watched as she tried and failed at a task he was eager to demonstrate, and which she’s since discovered is ridiculously common, precisely described James’s behaviour. Here he is telling her about getting tricked by a maniac as though it was completely unheard of, when in actual fact it happened all the time. James doesn’t say, ‘I did it again.’ He says, ‘I can’t believe what I just did.’ He doesn’t come right out and tell her that he gave away more of their money to a good-looking street person, even though he does this so often that the reason he is so nervous and is dragging out the story for so long is because he wants to convince her that this time it was different. ‘Why the fuck would you believe some horseshit story about a fucking money order?’ she asks, interrupting him before he’s actually admitted to giving the stranger the money. ‘That’s my point,’ he says, ‘I didn’t believe him. I knew the whole thing was a scam. He wouldn’t even let me see the form. And just the way he was acting was a dead giveaway, he was all shifty and either he wouldn’t look me in the eyes, or he stared at me so intensely I thought he was going to confess to a murder or something like that.’ ‘So I don’t understand then,’ she says, ‘if it was so obvious that the guy was a junkie, why the fuck did you give him the money?’ James looks a bit surprised, ‘How do you know I gave him the money?’ he asks. ‘Because it’s fucking obvious,’ she screams. He signals frantically for her to keep her voice down. ‘Jesus,’ he says, ‘you’ll wake the fucking neighbours.’ ‘I don’t care about the fucking neighbours,’ she continues to scream. ‘What is wrong with you? Seriously? It’s distressing. I know you’re not an idiot. You’re actually pretty smart. So what is it then? Are you crazy? Is that it? Are you crazy and just really good at hiding it?’ She is no longer sitting, and has been pacing the floor in front of the couch, waving her arms in the air like a cartoon depiction of a hysterical wife. James is cowering on the corner of the couch and when Mary pauses to catch her breath he speaks up, ‘You’re not understanding me,’ he explains, ‘I know that giving four hundred dollars to a stranger is completely insane. I’m not crazy. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you, if you’d just let me finish.’ James is more than a little hurt that Mary expects the worst from him, and that she assumed he gave the stranger four hundred dollars (even though this is technically what happened). He begins to despair. It isn’t that he can’t understand why Mary would be angry that he’d once again done something seemingly naive and detrimental to their finances, but he thought she still believed in him enough to listen to his reason for doing something so stupid and maybe even insane. He’d been certain, as he made his way home after the encounter with the con man, that if she would hear him out then he’d be able to make her understand why he gave away four hundred dollars in full knowledge that he was being scammed. But now that he is sitting on the couch as Mary paces the floor in front of him, screaming at him and waving her arms, he isn’t even sure if his explanation makes any sense. What had been so reasonable, and even a little comical, now struck him as nonsense, so after begging for her to hear him out he found himself at a loss for what to say next. ‘What could you possibly say,’ Mary seethes, ‘that would explain why you would give someone four hundred dollars except that you’re a fucking idiot? Seriously,’ she stops in front of him and glares, ‘what sort of twisted logic are you going to use to try to convince me that somehow this wasn’t your fault? Unless you’re going to tell me that I’m wrong and you didn’t give this guy four hundred dollars, or that you’re lying about the whole thing as some kind of sick fucking joke. Aside from that there’s nothing you can say that will convince me that you’re not fucking crazy.’ James stands up to face her, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ he screams. ‘Crazy? Are you serious? How can you even say that? You won’t even listen to me and now you’ve decided that I’m crazy? This is fucking ridiculous,’ he storms into the hallway as if he’s going to leave, and then turns around and starts shouting at her as she stands at the other end. ‘Why is it that I must be crazy?’ he roars, as if addressing a large outdoor crowd and not his wife, in the confines of their apartment. ‘Why is that the only possible reason for giving someone four hundred dollars?’ ‘Because you do this sort of shit all the fucking time,’ Mary shrieks. ‘That’s the textbook definition of crazy. You do the same thing all the time and even though a fucking child could tell you what’s going to happen you seem to think that things are going to turn out differently.’ James is painfully aware that their neighbours can hear them through the thin walls of their apartment, so he softens his voice in an attempt to calm things down. He made a mistake by getting angry, but if he could get things back to a calmer state he is confident he can turn things around. This may have even worked if he’d said something to placate Mary to show that he was sorry for giving away their hard-earned money to a complete stranger, instead of what he actually said, which ends up making everything a whole lot worse. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I get why you’re upset and I can understand why you would think that giving four hundred dollars to someone that I was more or less certain was a con artist is something only a crazy person would do, and what I’m about to say may sound even crazier, but the reason I gave that guy four hundred dollars was because I wanted to believe that he was telling me the truth, even though I knew he wasn’t. I wanted to be wrong. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense but I don’t think what I did was crazy, I think it was sort of an act of faith, or something. Do you know what I mean?’ This isn’t what he’d planned on saying, at least not in these words, but now that he’d said it he finds it has the ring of truth, and he elaborates on it as if he’s been contemplating the thought for a long time. James believes he’s being completely honest, and that on account of his honesty, Mary couldn’t help but understand why he did what he did, even though he didn’t really understand it himself. ‘Why would I say something so ridiculous,’ he says, ‘and that reflects so poorly on my sense of judgment, unless I was desperate for you to understand that I hadn’t been conned, at least not in the way you think, but that I gave him the four hundred dollars because I wanted to?’ These words, instead of building something up, turn out to have an annihilating effect. Mary sits on the couch absolutely destroyed by what James has just said, and for a brief moment she stares blankly ahead, until
she’s finally overcome and slumps into the cushions. Her change is so sudden that it takes James a second to realize that she isn’t laughing but is in fact crying. It is a wild, despairing sort of crying. Just a couple of seconds before, she’d been consumed with anger and disgust for what James had done, but his words have annihilated these emotions so that all that is left is howling despair. She knows that she doesn’t have real cause for despair, on the surface of her life things are relatively trouble-free, and she feels guilty for giving in to these feelings of helplessness. Somehow, though, despite all they had going for them, she is now convinced that she is trapped in the most hopeless and meaningless life that a person could ever have the misfortune of getting stuck with. She wails and sobs, the full extent of her despair seizing her with singular ferocity. James sits next to her and puts his arm around her shoulders and she doesn’t even bother to shake him off. His touch doesn’t soothe her. Far from comforting, it only serves to increase her loneliness. Here she is, plunged into the deepest despair, and the very same person who used to be able to reassure her is now the primary cause of her insecurity, and every attempt he makes to take on his former role reveals how irrevocable the situation really is. How did this happen? What had they done wrong? Why did even the most basic contact seem hopelessly out of reach? James pulls her closer and she doesn’t pull away, but neither does she give in to him. She just sits there sobbing and wailing, letting him awkwardly wrap his arms around her because even though his attempt to console her only makes her feel worse, there’s something liberating about letting this feeling take hold. It feels as though something has come undone, or that they have finally gone too far or waited too long and whatever they’d been waiting on had already passed by or would never come. She feels desperate to have it all out, to face up to everything they missed from not paying attention or from looking the other way, focussing on the minor scenes from life without realizing that it’s all part of one long movie that’s been playing on a loop. But even as she struggles to comprehend the entirety of their failure, she knows that it is impossible to keep the whole thing in her head. Life together is too complex. Maybe in some earlier era, when life was slower and things came one at a time, instead of all at once, it was possible to see the whole thing in a glance, to have it before your eyes while you were busy milking the cows or whatever. But now it is as though this lifelong movie isn’t only about her own little world, but all the other worlds in existence, and those that existed long ago and only flicker across the screen for a second, as though the movie she is watching has been running since the beginning of time, as though the loop is getting bigger and bigger, and it was only possible to have a dim sense of how they might plausibly fit into the bigger picture. In short, it feels like they were born too late. That it was no longer possible to know what roles they were supposed to play because all the roles have been taken. Even if Mary had been born twenty years earlier she’s pretty sure she would’ve been better off. Everybody she knows feels the same way. ‘We all feel like the party is over,’ she thinks, ‘like we showed up just as everyone else was leaving.’ All the good times have already been had and the most that they can hope for is to keep the memories of those days alive. That’s how Mary and her friends deal with their crushing nostalgia, by staging tiny recreations of things they never really experienced. Her friend Anna spends her life avoiding mass-produced food, growing her own vegetables, and even going so far as slaughtering the animals that she eats. Then there’s Damion, who refuses to watch movies made after 1951. But these are just extreme examples of what is a general and pervasive affliction. We’re convinced that life used to be better, simpler. We go for a drive and all we can think about is how much better it must’ve been when the cars were slower and the roads were narrower and nobody was in a hurry, or at least not the white-knuckled frenzy that we drive in now. Time keeps adding up. We can’t get on top of it. Mary’s friends with children are overwhelmed by the enormity of what they have to face. Autism, juvenile depression, stone fruit allergies, social anxiety, sexting, the private school system versus the public school system, automatic weapons, gluten, global capitalism. It’s impossible to anticipate every disaster that life has to offer and the inevitability of their failure as parents forces them into a defensive crouch, huddling over their children and swatting away everything that comes near them. If only they lived in a time when their children could go out alone without the threat of being abducted. A nauseous feeling comes over Mary. She lets up on crying for a moment because this nausea is overwhelming. The memory of the cat – the way it hung its head when she started walking towards it, that sucking sound getting louder because of its terror over what she was going to do – every movement, each sound, were clearly signs of an animal in severe pain and distress, but Mary immediately thought she was the one in danger, so she saw everything the cat did as a threat. ‘Maybe this is what I do with James?’ she thinks. ‘And because I’m so afraid I end up ignoring what is staring me right in the face. Maybe the cat is a sign.’ James senses that something is happening and throws his other arm around her and pulls her into a hug, as if he is trying to smother her train of thought, or trying to distract her with intimacy. But now she pushes him off and slides into the far corner of the couch. She is like a TV detective, not the new kind that wallows in blood and semen and stares into the abyss of human perversity with the hard gaze of the chosen few who have enough courage and genius to see the world for what it is, but more like the older ones, who sometimes seemed to know everything but at other times were just as confused as everyone else, and more often than not were only a few steps ahead of us so we could flatter ourselves by thinking we would’ve come to the same conclusion even if they hadn’t been leading us on, and, just like these old-fashioned TV detectives, Mary feels she is on the verge of some revelation, and if she can keep her mind still for just a second then everything will fall into place. James tries to catch her eye to get an idea of what she could possibly be thinking, but she stares straight ahead with a blank expression. She’s trying to exclude everything from her thoughts, when all at once, after James puts his hand on her arm, it’s there before her, so clear and real that she feels like she could take a picture of it. ‘Neither of us believe in what we’re doing,’ she says, and finally she turns to look at James. ‘What?’ he says. ‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’ She smiles as if she wants to reassure him, the way a kindly civil servant might if they were dealing with someone desperate and foreign who couldn’t speak the language but clearly needed help, which in all likelihood the civil servant wouldn’t be able to provide. She doesn’t want James to worry, even though she is now thinking that she might leave him. ‘We don’t have any faith in what we’re doing,’ she says. ‘It’s like we don’t know what else to do, so we keep doing the same thing over and over again without believing that anything is ever going to happen.’ ‘Are you talking about getting pregnant?’ James asks. ‘I’m talking about everything,’ she says. James stands up and for an instant it looks as if he might give in to a terrible rage, but then he slumps back into the couch, deciding that it isn’t worth it, seeing in Mary’s face that it didn’t matter how loud he screamed or whether he started punching walls or throwing things around the room. She can see now what the truth had been all along. It’s useless to try to get her to see it in some other way. He hangs his head between his legs and says nothing and waits as if he’s been found out by the aforementioned TV detective. And without even noticing that he’d started, he’s now sobbing just as uncontrollably as Mary had been only moments earlier. Seeing him fall apart in a matter of seconds takes Mary out of the stupor of her own revelation and she looks over at him as if she’s only just realized who he is, where they are, and what is happening. The doorbell rings as she’s sliding across the couch to comfort James. They both freeze. And then, without a word or signal of any kind, they both make for the basement steps at the same time. James eases the door open silently and they creep down the stairs as if
they were intruders in their own home, feeling their way through the darkness to the ratty couch. James carefully gathers the papers and books piled on the cushions and soundlessly places them in neat stacks on the floor. Mary waits wordlessly for him to finish and then they lie down together in the spoon position. The faint sound of the doorbell drifts around upstairs, followed by the dull thudding of someone’s fist against the door. James runs his fingers over the waistband of her pyjama bottoms and Mary pushes her ass into his crotch. He pulls her shirt up and squeezes her breasts with his free hand as she squirms against him. Her shirt is up around her neck and his arm is pinned under her shoulders so it juts out awkwardly, and she’s reached back behind her to clumsily rub him over his jeans. They suddenly get fed up with this position. James jerks his arm out from under Mary, raises himself on his elbow so he can get his cock out while Mary turns face down and tugs her pants to her knees. Then he straddles her legs and she reaches back and spreads her ass cheeks, but he can’t manage it with his jeans still on, so he rolls on his side and pulls them off. ‘Hurry up,’ she hisses. Someone is still ringing the doorbell. He gets back on top of her but with her legs pressed together he’s having a hard time pushing into her. ‘Just go,’ she moans, and with that he forces himself all the way into her cunt. He braces his arms on either side of her and they have at it like that, in a total frenzy. ‘I’m going to come,’ he says, and when he rolls off of her she starts to laugh. ‘What is it,’ he whispers, but she’s laughing hysterically and doesn’t answer. He starts laughing along with her, occasionally uttering ‘What?’ and then waiting before asking again, ‘What is it?’ When she finally calms down she rolls over to face him and, even though there are no lights on, the little window right above them lets in enough streetlight for him to see that her face is covered in tears. ‘I came at the same time,’ she says. He falls back on the couch and starts laughing again, now just as hysterically as Mary had been. ‘Just like in the movies,’ she blurts out before she starts laughing again. ‘It must be a sign,’ he manages to get out between fits of giggling. ‘Exactly,’ she says, ‘it means we’re meant to be together.’ They both roar at this for a while before settling back down so they’re lying on their sides, facing each other and smiling. The doorbell sounds out above them. ‘That must be the neighbours about their cat,’ she says. ‘Or maybe it’s the stranger,’ he whispers. She smiles, assuming he’s trying to be funny. ‘I almost wish it was.’ They both stare at the basement stairs. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘we should probably go tell them what happened.’