The Smash-Up

by Ali Benjamin

  Either way, the entire story takes shape in Ethan’s mind in a fraction of a second: the exchange of numbers, the texts, then wink emojis, then flirtatious GIFs, and then real-life meetings.

  Ethan takes a deep breath. He will be understanding. He will try, anyway. He will explain the whole fidelity-as-a-window theory, and maybe Zo will cry, maybe she will say that she just needed a little bit of fresh air. He will tell her about what the jackal said, the warning, That’s all over now.

  Will Ethan forgive her? He will. He’s pretty sure he will anyway.

  But also: How could she?

  But also, also: Why shouldn’t she? After all, as long as they’re being honest, wouldn’t he have had an affair, given the chance? He wants to say no, he wouldn’t, but of course he almost did, just last night.

  All of these thoughts pass in a flash. It doesn’t take more than a second or two for his whole world to branch out like a river into tributaries, like an artery into capillaries, all those possibilities forking and re-forking, a hundred visions and revisions, each carrying him toward some different ending of their shared story.

  “I got fired,” Zo says. “From the Lionel Trilling project.”

  This is so not what he expected to hear that it takes him a few seconds to understand. “Fired? When?”

  She looks down at the bed, picks at a loose thread. “About three months ago. They said they wanted to go with someone who had a ‘fresher’ voice.”

  Three months ago. Just after Maddy arrived.

  “They gave the job to some kids in Detroit. College dropouts. Maddy’s age, tops, but somehow they’re already filmmakers and web designers and they make video games. Oh, and they’re also a hip-hop group.”

  “Huh. Hard to compete with that, I guess.” He’s making a joke, but there’s not much mirth in it. Without Bränd, and without Lionel Trilling, and without Dr. Ash, and without something else—some mysterious other project that could miraculously find them here in Starkfield, some idea for the Next Big Thing (which would be what, exactly? What does the world need that it doesn’t already have?), they’re going to have to scrape together a living from tiny, crappy jobs, whatever they can get, not unlike the way his parents did after the factories closed and the world they’d counted on vanished for good.

  No more home construction.

  No more Rainbow Seed tuition.

  No more lives expanding. Only contraction from here, life’s possibilities growing narrower and narrower, until all that is left is a dot, a singularity, no mass or width or depth or shape, and then nothing.

  Ethan knows this is the part where he should tell her about Bränd. But as he’s trying to form the words, Zo says, “I’m sorry, Ethan. I’m really, really sorry.”

  “Well, it’s just one project.”

  “I don’t just mean the Trilling thing,” she says. “I mean everything. I’m sorry about everything. You are a good husband and a great dad, and I know things are hard for us right now. I just feel so angry all the time—I’m angry about the Supreme Court, I’m angry about the White House, I’m angry about the nonstop stream of horrors that fill my timeline, I’m angry about stupid little things that aren’t even important. There are days I can’t even think straight, I’m so furious. But I’m trying. I want you to know that: I really am trying. None of this is personal. I’m doing the best I can.”

  He imagines himself holding these words like they were a physical thing. He imagines all the truths that compose them: that nothing about this, their life together, their marriage, the fact that maybe That’s all over now, is personal. Zo, his wife, is doing the best she can. Maybe he is too.

  It’s not quite infinite truth—it’s more like a fever breaking—but for the moment, it is enough. He nods, and when that doesn’t seem sufficient, he reaches for Zo’s hand. Her fingers curl around his, tighter than he expects.

  They sit together like that on the bed, holding hands—not so much husband and wife as two human beings who’ve known each other a very, very long time.

  He doesn’t know who leans forward first; it’s almost like neither of them does, as if what happens next isn’t so much an idea that either of them had, but simply an inevitability. Their lips meet. They kiss for a while, still sitting up, like teenagers, like the end of that John Hughes movie, a still-sweet scene in a film that the starring actress recently wrote in The New Yorker now seems too racist and rapey to show to her own kid.

  Who knows. Maybe it’s not all over, or maybe they don’t need to know, at least not yet.

  After a while, they lean back together, back against this bed that they’ve shared for some seven thousand nights, this bed on which they’ve made love again and again. Zo touches his shaved head, laughs about the rough feel of his beard against her skin.

  Just like he always knew she would, eventually.

  * * *

  —

  Later, in the quiet dark, Zo slips on her underwear, and his T-shirt, and she puts on music on her phone and begins to dance. She does this sometimes. After. Queues up some song, whatever she’s in the mood for, and dances alone.

  A few bars of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Give It Up” fill the room. And just like that, Ethan is back on the quad outside Old Kenyon, and Randy’s pumping a keg and playing just-the-right song, never the one you expect, never the one you thought you wanted to hear, but somehow always—invariably—exactly the one you needed.

  “Mmmm…no,” Zo murmurs. “Too fast.” The music stops, and the room is quiet. Zo scrolls, and then another song comes on: Still KC and the Sunshine Band, but one of their other hits: “Please Don’t Go.” The music is slow and steady, and it feels like waves lapping on a calm shore.

  Ethan watches his wife move in the dark. He feels sleep falling over him.

  It’s good, this song: better than he remembers. He listens to a swell of violins, a pounding piano. Zo sways her shoulders back and forth.

  Somewhere upstairs, he thinks, Maddy is packing.

  Somewhere in New York City, Evie is probably curled up on a sofa, just trying to live her life.

  Somewhere, on the other side of the country, Randy is probably pacing, trying to think his way out of a bad situation he created himself.

  After KC, Zo puts on another song he hasn’t thought about in years. Wings: “A Little Luck.” Ethan closes his eyes, and he’s a kid again, rolling through Pennsylvania, in the backseat of his dad’s station wagon, watching the world, the only world he knew then, roll by. He opens his eyes again, and there’s his wife, moving alone.

  He’d forgotten how much he loves this song. He’d forgotten how easy it could all be.

  And then a familiar guitar lick, like a long-dead friend coming to him in a dream: Fleetwood Mac, “Rhiannon.”

  In the darkness, in her underwear, illuminated only by her phone, Zo could be twenty-five all over again. They could still be in Brooklyn, their whole lives ahead of them. He smiles, imagining that in the morning they’ll walk to that café over on Fifth Avenue. He can still see Zo sitting across from him, drinking coffee and reading the Arts section, nothing but time ahead for both of them. What was it called, that café? The name is gone. The moment alone remains, like the afterimage that appears inside your lids when you close your eyes.

  Past. Present. What’s to come.

  I’m doing the best I can.

  There will be a final time that they sleep together, he and Zo. And when it happens, whenever it happens, they almost certainly won’t know it’s the last time. Maybe an afterimage of this moment, right now, will remain. Or perhaps this, too, will have dissolved to nothing.

  Taken by

  Taken by the sky.

  He could have fallen in love with Maddy. He could have fallen in love with Evie.

  Taken by

  Taken by the sky.

  He knows, the way he knows a
nything at all, that Zo isn’t dancing for him. That if he weren’t here, if he suddenly disappeared, if he had never existed, Zo would be doing exactly what she’s doing now: moving the same way, to the same song, every motion hers alone. He recalls—faintly, like a flicker of light from some faraway star—that this is one of the reasons he fell in love with Zo in the first place, this sense that he was peering in at her from the outside, glimpsing someone’s private self, the kind of unself-conscious realness that no one ever shows you on purpose. Except she did.

  Taken by

  Taken by the sky.

  Zo’s eyes are closed. Her hands make slow swirls. It looks as if she’s conjuring the music herself, like the chords are streaming from her fingertips. Ethan allows his own eyes to close too. When they do, he sees, on the inside of his lids, Zo’s afterimage: his wife, moving alone through this still, velvet night.

  Ethan wakes early, Zo by his side.

  He leaves her sleeping, splashes water on his face, heads upstairs.

  Maddy’s room is empty. The sheets are twisted haphazardly, the closet is empty. Aside from a single towel on the wooden floor, there is nothing left of Maddy’s presence. He sits down on the bare bed.

  I heard the mermaids singing each to each. In the Prufrock Bränd campaign, he and Randy had paired that line with a man’s silhouette, tiny and lonely against a vast, empty sea. No one, it was clear, would be singing to Prufrock.

  Clever, that campaign. Everything Bränd ever did was so damn clever.

  He peeks into Alex’s room. She’s asleep on the floor, on top of a mountain of laundry. Hypatia’s curled up next to her. As soon as Hypatia sees him, her tail starts thumping. The dog gets up—she seems creakier even than yesterday—follows him downstairs, panting. I need, Hypatia’s saying. I need, I need, I need.

  “Okay,” he sighs. “Come on.”

  * * *

  —

  Clank of the radiator. Scoop of dog food. Bulb flickers.

  Smell of butter in the cast-iron pan. Crack of the egg.

  Drive downhill, over the Ledge, toward downtown, where everything, for now, is still.

  * * *

  —

  It’s Saturday, so only Willie Nelson sits in the window. He’s the stalwart creature of routine, the only member of the trivia gang who’s consistently there on weekends.

  “Where the heck were you yesterday, Encyclopedia Brown?” Willie greets him. “We could have used you.” Ethan has the feeling that thermonuclear war could wipe out the entire human race this afternoon, and tomorrow, Willie Nelson would still be sitting right here, perched in his window seat, thinking about trivia.

  “Yeah, what was the question?” Ethan looks out to the central square, at all those handmade signs.

  Believe women.

  No SCOTUS predators.

  Justice for Zo.

  Justice for Zo, who is doing her best.

  Willie Nelson shows him the question: In this ’70s Oscar-winning film, the title character’s first words are “Why did you go to the police? Why didn’t you come to me first?”

  This one’s obvious. “The Godfather.”

  Willie Nelson throws his hands in the air. “Ah, I really wish you’d have been here. None of us got the damn thing.”

  * * *

  —

  Zo’s still asleep when he returns home, still in his T-shirt, the sheets tangled around her legs. He sets down her coffee on the bedside table.

  The first time he watched Zo sleep was in Iowa. They were there for a wedding, some college friend of Zo’s. This was back when everyone started pairing up, marching two-by-two into the future as if boarding Noah’s Ark. While in Iowa, he and Zo visited the Field of Dreams, the one from that movie. It was real, a real goddamned baseball diamond, in the middle of a real goddamned cornfield. He and Zo lined up behind home plate, waiting for a turn to bat. In line with them were muscled marines, knobby seven-year-olds, rickety grandmas, pimply teenagers. There was a toothpick-thin engineer who’d just finished his final chemo treatment, a group of wine-sloshing divorcées on some First Wives Club road trip. There were far more batters than outfielders, but it didn’t matter. No one was impatient, everyone cheered for everyone else, because (as one of the First Wives slurred) everybody plays at the Field of Dreams! It was America, that crowd, and also it was better than America, like the stories you hear about previous generations, the ones whose mythology holds up only if you don’t look too closely.

  On that trip, Zo had purchased a bumper sticker, only half ironically: Is this heaven? no, it’s iowa. They wouldn’t have a car for years, and by the time they did buy one, the bumper sticker would be long lost.

  But here he is, decades later, watching Zo sleep, just as he had that morning in Iowa.

  He wonders if there is a word, in some language, somewhere, for glimpsing a person you knew and loved when they were young, inside their older self, the way you can go back and forth, like one of those optical illusions (is it a couple kissing or a glass of wine? An old crone or a young maiden?), the line between past and present curling into itself, as if time is merely a jump rope whose handles you can make touch.

  He wonders, too, about a word for the moments before you tell a person something you wish you didn’t have to—that fragile bubble of peace that you know you’re about to pop.

  Zo doesn’t wake all at once. When Ethan places a hand on her back, she opens one eye, then closes it again. Then she inhales, opens both eyes, sees the coffee on the bedside table. “Mmm,” she says. “You got me coffee.”

  “Still hot.”

  Zo rolls onto her back. “What time is it?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  She nods. “Saturday?” This is how she’s always woken up after a heavy sleep. She pieces together the details of her world a fragment at a time, as if she’s snapping jigsaw pieces into place.

  “It’s Saturday.”

  She closes her eyes again. “The rally.”

  “Yeah. You have some time, though.”

  She props herself up on her elbows, reaches for the coffee, takes a first sip. “God. There’s nothing like the first hit of coffee, is there?” And then, when another piece of the puzzle clicks into place: “Ethan, I don’t think I want to be here when Maddy leaves.”

  “She’s gone. She left before I woke up. Listen, Zo. There’s something I need to tell you now.” And then he begins to tell her about Bränd. About Randy.

  “Randy,” she says when he finishes. “Of course. Randy. We probably should have seen that coming.”

  “Randy asked me to do something to make the accusations go away. Something crummy.” Ethan doesn’t say what it is, and Zo doesn’t ask. “I didn’t do it. But I could have done it, I almost did. And I think I probably could have gotten away with it too.” He knows that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Had this been a movie, and he’d gone through with Randy’s plan, the decision would have bitten him in the ass. There would be some sort of karmic retribution. But in the real world, the consequences almost certainly would have been Evie’s alone.

  You’ve always been one of the good ones, Evie had said. She’d been wrong. If he really wants to be honest with himself, he would say this: there were signs. Not just long-ago signs—the hotel room in Irvine, behold the new kings, the occasional actress he saw scurrying away from the audition room a little too quickly—but more recently too. As a partial owner, he still got to see, from time to time, the Bränd ledgers. He saw the occasional lump-sum payments, usually described by Randy as avoiding a nuisance lawsuit, that’s all, you know how it is. Ethan didn’t ask questions, because he thought he did know how it was. He’d taken fragments, crafted a version of the world in his mind, and then convinced himself that this world he’d invented was the real one.

  “Anyway,” he tells Zo. “I’m pretty sure Bränd is dead.”


  “Bränd is dead. Long live Bränd.” Zo lifts her coffee cup to his.

  When Zo finishes her coffee, she pushes the covers back. “Okay.” She places her feet on the floor, rubs her eyes.

  Zo stands, heads toward the bathroom.

  “Hey hon?” he calls. He wants to ask what she’ll do at the rally, whether she’ll speak, and what she’ll say. But when she turns around, he simply says. “I think we’ve done all right, you and I. All things considered.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “All things considered. We have.”

  * * *

  —

  He should be there. This is what he realizes after Zo departs with her poster-board sign. He’s standing in front of the mirror, razor in hand, ready to shave his beard, at long last—this symbol of his pettiness, his selfishness. He’ll make a mess of the sink, then he’ll clean it up, and he’ll try a little harder, maybe manage to do a little better, tomorrow. But before he brings the blade to his chin, the knowledge is everywhere at once: he should be there.

  At the rally. With his wife.

  He should be there, because he is the one who knows Zo the most, the best, who has spent half a lifetime caring about her—not as a symbol, not as a political ally or enemy, not as a hashtag, but as a person. He should be there, because if there is any hope left for this world, it will come from meeting people in the real world, face-to-face, standing by a loved one’s side in actual time and space.

  Ethan sets the razor down. He’ll shave later. Right now, he’ll do what he should have been doing all along: he will join his wife, and he will stand with her, and he will bring Alex along.

  If this is what they need to do to be a family, then this is how they’ll be a family.

  Ethan finds Alex in her pajamas watching TV. She’s eating Froot Loops on the sofa, droplets of oat milk spilling onto the new upholstery. “Alex,” he says. She ignores him, slurps a spoonful of pink liquid. “We have to go.”