by Joe Hill
It wasn’t as if they had nothing to talk about. She was worrying, and it didn’t take a lot of insight to figure out why. He was leaving at eleven forty-five tomorrow morning on British Airways to take a job with Amnesty International and would be an ocean apart from her for half a year. They had never been without each other for so long.
He could always tell when she was worrying over something, knew all the signs. She withdrew. She smoothed things with her hands—napkins, her skirt, his ties—as if by ironing out such minute items she could smooth the path to some future safe harbor for both of them. She forgot how to laugh and became almost comically earnest and mature about things. The sight of her this way struck him as funny; it made him think of a little girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes. He couldn’t take her seriousness seriously.
It didn’t make any logical sense for her to be worried, although Ig knew that worry and logic rarely traveled together. But, really: He would not even have taken the job in London if she hadn’t told him to take it, hadn’t pushed him to take it. Merrin wouldn’t let him pass on it, had relentlessly argued him out of every reservation. She told him there was no harm in trying it for six months. If he hated it, he could come home. But he wasn’t going to hate it. It was exactly the sort of thing he’d always wanted to do, the dream job, and they both knew it. And if he liked the job—and he would—and wanted to remain in England, she would come to him. Harvard offered a transfer program with the Imperial College London, and her mentor at Harvard, Shelby Clarke, selected the participants; there was no question she could get in. They could have a flat in London. She would serve him tea and crumpets in her knickers, and afterward they could have a shag. Ig was sold. He had always thought the word “knickers” was a thousand times sexier than “panties.” So he took the job and was sent off to New York City for a three-week summer training and orientation session. And now he was back, and she was smoothing things, and he was not surprised.
He made his way through the room to her, past the jostle and press of bodies. He bent across the table to kiss her before sliding into the booth opposite her. She didn’t lift her mouth to him, and he had to settle for a peck on her temple.
There was an empty martini glass in front of her, and when the waitress came, she ordered another one, told her to bring a beer for Ig. He was enjoying the look of her, the smooth line of her throat, the dark shine of her hair in the low light, and at first just went along with the conversation, murmuring in the right places, only semi-listening. He didn’t really start to focus in until Merrin told him he should look at his time in London as a vacation from their relationship, and even then he thought she was trying to be funny. He didn’t know she was serious until she got to the part about how she felt it would be good for both of them to spend time with other people.
“With our clothes off,” Ig said.
“Couldn’t hurt,” she said, and swallowed about half her martini.
It was the way she gulped at her drink, more than what she’d said, that gave him a cold shock of apprehension. That was a courage drink, and she’d already had at least one—maybe two—before he got here.
“You think I can’t wait for a few months?” he asked. He was going to make a joke about masturbation, but a strange thing happened on the way to the punch line. His breath got caught in his throat, and he couldn’t say any more.
“Well, I don’t want to worry about what’s going to happen a few months from now. We don’t know how you’re going to feel in a few months. Or how I’ll feel. I don’t want you thinking you have to come back home just so we can be together. Or assuming I’m going to transfer there. Let’s just worry about what happens now. Look at it like this. How many girls have you been with? In your whole life?”
He stared. He had seen this look of frowning, pretty concentration on her face many times, but he had never been scared of it before.
“You know the answer to that,” he said.
“Just me. And no one does that. No one lives their entire life with the first person they slept with. Not these days. There isn’t a man on the planet. There need to be other affairs. Two or three at least.”
“Is that your word for it? ‘Affairs’? That’s tasteful.”
“Fine,” she said. “You have to fuck a few other people.”
A cheer went up from the crowd, a roar of approval. Someone had slid home under the tag.
He was going to say something, but his mouth was too tacky, and he had to have a sip of beer. There was only one swallow left in the glass. He didn’t remember the beer coming, and he didn’t remember drinking it. It was lukewarm and salty, like a mouthful of the ocean. She had waited until today, twelve hours before he left to cross the ocean, to tell him this, to tell him—
“Are you breaking up with me? You want out—and you waited until now to tell me?”
The waitress stood at the side of their table with a basket of chips and a rigid smile.
“Would you like to order?” she asked. “Something else to drink?”
“Another martini and another beer, please,” Merrin said.
“I don’t want another beer,” Ig said, and didn’t recognize his own thick, sullen, almost childish voice.
“We’ll both have Key lime martinis, then,” Merrin said.
The waitress retreated.
“What the hell is this? I have a plane ticket, a rented apartment, an office. They’re expecting me to be there ready to work on Monday morning, and you lay this shit on me. What outcome are you hoping for here? Do you want me to call them up tomorrow and tell them, ‘Thanks for giving me a job that seven hundred other applicants wanted, but I have to pass’? Is this a test to see what I value more, you or the job? Because if it is, you ought to know it’s immature and insulting.”
“No, Ig. I want you to go, and I want you to—”
“Fuck someone else.”
Her shoulders jumped. He was a little surprised at himself, hadn’t expected his own voice to sound so ugly.
But she nodded, and swallowed. “Do it now or do it later, but you’re going to do it anyway.”
Ig had a nonsensical thought, in his brother’s voice: Well, it’s like this. You can live life as a cripple or a lame-ass. Ig wasn’t sure Terry had ever really said such a thing, thought the line might be completely imagined, and yet it came to him with the clarity of a line remembered from a favorite song.
The waitress gently set Ig’s martini in front of him, and he tipped it to his mouth, swallowing down a third of it in a gulp. He’d never had one before, and the sugary, harsh burn of it caught him by surprise. It sank slowly down his throat and expanded into his lungs. His chest was a furnace, and a sweat prickled on his face. His hand drifted up to his throat, found the knot of his tie. He struggled with it, pulling it loose. Why had he worn a button-down shirt? He was roasting in it. He was in hell.
“It’ll always bother you, wondering what you missed out on,” Merrin said now. “That’s how men are. I’m just being practical. I’m not waiting to get married to you so I can fight through your midlife affair with our babysitter. I’m not going to be the reason for your regrets.”
He struggled for patience, to recover a tone of calm, of good humor. The calm he could manage. The good humor he could not.
“Don’t tell me how other men think. I know what I want. I want the life we spent the last however many years daydreaming about. How many times have we talked about what to name the kids? You think that was all bullshit?”
“I think it’s part of the problem. You live like we already have kids, like we’re already married. But we don’t and we aren’t. To you the kids already exist, because you live in your head, not in the world. I’m not sure I ever even wanted kids.”
Ig yanked off his tie, flung it on the table. He couldn’t stand the feel of anything around his neck right now.
“You could’ve fooled me. It sounded like you were into the idea the last eight thousand times we talked about it.”
�
��I don’t know what I’m into. I haven’t had a chance to get clear of you and think about my own life since we met. I haven’t had a single day—”
“So I’m suffocating you? Is that what you’re telling me? That’s horseshit.”
She turned her face away from him, stared blankly across the room, waiting for his anger to subside. He drew a long, whistling breath, told himself not to yell, and tried again.
“Remember the day in the tree house?” he asked. “The tree house we could never find again, the place with the white curtains? You said this doesn’t happen to ordinary couples. You said we were different. You said the love we had was marked out as special, that no two people out of a million were ever given anything like we were given. You said we were meant for each other. You said there was no ignoring the signs.”
“It wasn’t a sign. It was just an afternoon lay in someone’s tree house.”
Ig shook his head slowly from side to side. Talking to her now was like flailing his hands at a storm of hornets. It did nothing, and it stung, and yet he couldn’t stop himself.
“Don’t you remember we looked for it? We looked all summer, and we could never find it again? And you said it was a tree house of the mind?”
“That’s what I said so we could stop looking for it. This is exactly what I’m talking about, Ig. You and your magical thinking. A fuck can’t just be a fuck. It always has to be a transcendent experience, life-changing. It’s depressing and weird, and I’m tired of acting like it’s normal. Will you listen to yourself? Why the fuck are we even talking about a tree house?”
“I’m getting sick of your mouth,” Ig said.
“You don’t like it? You don’t like to hear me talk about fucking? Why, Ig? Does it mess with your picture of me? You don’t want a real person. You want a holy vision you can beat off to.”
The waitress said, “I guess you still haven’t made up your minds.” Standing beside their table again.
“Two more,” Ig said, and she went away.
They stared at each other. Ig was gripping the table and felt dangerously close to turning it over.
“We were kids when we met,” she said. “We let it get a lot more serious than any high-school relationship should’ve been. If we spend some time with other people, it will put our relationship in perspective. Maybe we pick it up again later and see if we can love each other as adults the way we did as kids. I don’t know. After some time has gone by, maybe we can take another look at what we have to offer each other.”
“‘At what we have to offer each other’?” Ig said. “You sound like a loan officer.”
She was rubbing her throat with one hand, her eyes miserable now, which was when Ig noticed she wasn’t wearing her cross. He wondered if there was meaning in that. The cross had been like an engagement ring, long before either of them had ever discussed the idea of staying together their whole lives. He honestly could not remember ever seeing her without it—a thought that filled his chest with a sick, drafty sensation.
“So do you have someone picked out?” Ig asked. “Someone you want to fuck in the name of putting our relationship in perspective?”
“I’m not thinking about it that way. I’m just—”
“Yes you are. That’s what this is all about, you said so yourself. We need to fuck other people.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “Yes, I guess so, Ig. I guess that has to be part of it. I mean, I have to sleep with other people, too. Otherwise you’d probably go over there and live like a monk. It’ll be easier for you to move on if you know I have.”
“So there is someone.”
“There’s someone I’ve…I’ve been out with. Once or twice.”
“While I was in New York.” Not asking it. Saying it. “Who?”
“No one you’ve ever met. It doesn’t matter.”
“I want to know anyway.”
“It isn’t important. I’m not going to ask you any questions about what you’re doing in London.”
“About who I’m doing,” he said.
“Right. Whatever. I don’t want to know.”
“But I do. When did it happen?”
“When did what happen?”
“When did you start seeing this guy? Last week? What did you tell him? Did you say things would have to wait until I took off for London? Or did it wait?”
She parted her lips just slightly to reply, and he saw something in her eyes, something small and fearful, and in a rush of prickling heat he knew something he didn’t want to know. He knew she’d been working toward this moment the whole summer, going all the way back to when she first started pushing him to take the job.
“How far has it gone? Have you already fucked him?”
She shook her head, but he couldn’t tell if she was saying no or refusing to answer the question. She was blinking back tears. He didn’t know when that had started. It was a surprise to feel no urge to comfort her. He was in the grip of something he didn’t understand, a perverse mix of rage and excitement. Part of him was surprised to discover that it felt good to be wronged, to have a justification to hurt her. To see how much punishment he could inflict. He wanted to flay her with his questions. And at the same time, images had started to occur to him: Merrin on her knees in a tangle of sheets, lines of bright light from the half-shut venetian blinds across her body, someone else reaching for her naked hips. The thought aroused and appalled in equal measure.
“Ig,” she said softly. “Please.”
“Stop with your please. There are things you aren’t telling me. Things I need to know. I need to know if you’ve fucked him already. Tell me if you’ve fucked him already.”
“No.”
“Good. Was he ever there? In your apartment with you when I called from New York? Sitting there with his hand under your skirt?”
“No. We had lunch, Ig. That was all. We talk now and then. Mostly about school.”
“You ever think about him when I’m fucking you?”
“Jesus, no. Why would you even ask that?”
“Because I want to know everything. I want to know every shitty little thing you’re not telling me, every dirty secret.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll make it easier for me to hate you,” Ig said.
The waitress stood rigidly at the side of their table, frozen in the act of setting down their fresh drinks.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” Ig asked her, and she took an unsteady step backward.
The waitress wasn’t the only one staring. At the other tables arranged around theirs, heads were turned. A few onlookers watched them seriously, while others, younger couples mostly, observed them with bright-eyed merriment, struggling not to laugh. Nothing was quite so entertaining as a noisy public breakup.
When Ig looked back toward Merrin, she was up on her feet, standing behind her chair. She was holding his tie in her hands. She had picked it up when he threw it aside and had been restlessly folding and smoothing it ever since.
“Where are you going?” he asked, and caught her shoulder as she tried to slip by. She lurched into the table. She was drunk. They both were.
“Ig,” she said. “My arm.”
Only then did he realize how hard he was squeezing her shoulder, digging in with his fingers with enough force to feel the bone. It took a conscious effort to open his hand.
“I’m not running away,” she said. “I want a minute to clean up.” Gesturing at her face.
“We’re not done talking about this. There’s a lot you aren’t telling me.”
“If there are things I don’t want to tell you,” she said, “it isn’t out of meanness. I just don’t want to see you hurt, Ig.”
“Too late.”
“Because I love you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He said it to hurt her—he didn’t honestly know if he believed it or not—and felt a savage rush of excitement to see he had succeeded. Her eyes filled with br
ight tears, and she swayed, put a hand on the table to steady herself once more.
“If I’ve been keeping things from you, it was to protect you. I know what a good person you are. You deserve better than what you got when you threw in with me.”
“Finally,” he said. “Something we agree on. I deserve better.”
She waited for him to say more, but he couldn’t, was short of breath again. She turned and navigated her way through the crowd, toward the ladies’ room. He drank the rest of his martini, watching her go. She looked good, in her white blouse and pearl gray skirt, and Ig saw a couple college boys turn their heads to watch her, and then one of them said something, and the other laughed.
Ig’s blood felt thick and slow and he was conscious of it pumping heavily in his temples. He wasn’t aware of the man standing next to the table and didn’t hear him saying “sir,” didn’t see him until the guy bent over to look in Ig’s face. He had a bodybuilder’s physique, his sporty white tennis shirt pulled tight across his shoulders. Little blue eyes peeped out from under a bony crag of forehead.
“Sir,” he said again. “We’re going to have to ask you and your wife to leave. We can’t have you abusing the staff.”
“She’s not my wife. She’s just someone I used to fuck.”
The big man—bartender? bouncer?—said, “I don’t need that language in my face. Take it someplace else.”
Ig got up and found his wallet and put two twenties on the table before setting out for the door. As he went, he felt a sensation of rightness settling over him. Leave her, was what he thought. Sitting across from her, he had wanted to force secrets out of her and to inflict as much unpleasantness as possible upon her in the process. But now that she was out of sight and he had breathing room, he felt it would be a mistake to give her any more time to justify what she’d decided to do to him. He didn’t want to hang around and give her a chance to dilute his hate with tears, with more talk about how she loved him. He didn’t want to understand, and he didn’t want to sympathize.