by Chloe Liese
“That’s not how I feel!” I tell her. “I’d never want emotionless sex with you.”
Dr. Dietrich glances at me, tipping her head. “So what do you feel?”
“That having a baby is no small feat,” I admit, before the words can be stopped. “That raising a child in one of the most expensive cities in America with our kind of student loan debt is not insignificant, that it’s going to take more than I’ve been doing. I got a little fixated on working to prepare us for that, and somehow it gets turned into rejecting her, wanting her body but not her heart?”
Fuck, that accusation hurts.
“Aiden, you talk about it like you’ve been alone in that responsibility,” Freya snaps. “And you’re not. I’m aware of the cost of living and childcare. I happen to have friends who have children, who’ve had to make impossibly difficult decisions about their careers and their motherhood. I’ve carried that with me and mulled it over a lot, considering I work, too, and help pay the bills.”
Help? Her last paycheck was bigger than mine, which meant she got that promotion she’d been gunning for after all. And once again, like an asshole, I forgot to say something. I sighed with relief and moved it over to savings, my pulse steadying as I saw that number get a little bit bigger, before an email about the app swallowed up my happiness and dragged me back into the realm of never-ending to-dos.
“I don’t mean to imply you don’t, Freya,” I tell her. “It’s just that you approach looming expenses differently, confident we’ll weather them. I’m much more familiar with what can happen if you’re not financially prepared, and I act accordingly. You hum happily while you open bills. I grit my teeth and do mental math about what has to happen to maintain our savings. I’m trying to strike a balance between those two positions, and that means securing extra income, setting us up for stability so that when a baby is here, I’m not working constantly. I’ll have done that already. And I’ll be able to focus on taking care of you both, being a present partner and parent.”
“Yep,” Freya says, folding her arms. “There it is.”
Dr. Dietrich glances between us. “What’s the backstory here? And am I to understand you’re trying to get pregnant?”
Freya nods tightly. “That was the plan, yes.”
Dr. Dietrich glances at me. “Aiden?”
“Yes. That was the plan.”
“And?” she presses.
“I grew up poor,” I tell Dr. Dietrich. “With a dad who hit the road when I was a baby and a mom who never recovered from that. I’ve had to work really hard my whole life for every bit of financial gain, to finally, for the first time in my life, have healthy savings. Anticipating what having a kid costs is intimidating, so I’ve been pursuing financial security, and I’ve been working on a project—”
“Which he hasn’t told me about,” Freya throws out.
I glance over at her. “I haven’t, no. But it’s just been a mad rush and constantly moving parts to get where we are, to some semblance of something that might actually succeed. I wasn’t going to keep it to myself forever.”
“Why keep it to yourself at all, though?” Dr. Dietrich asks. “Trust and openness are fundamental in a marriage.”
“Like I said, it was such a pipe dream at first, I just wanted to cultivate it for a while before I shared it with her, once it wasn’t at risk of being a total disappointment.” I turn toward Freya and tell her, “As soon as I knew we had a prayer of success, I was going to share it with you. A gift, a positive step toward making a better life for our family. The day I came home and you had my bag packed for the cabin, I was ready to tell you.”
Freya’s face tightens with hurt. “Why haven’t you told me since?”
“Because we’ve barely talked, Freya, and I was pretty sure the last thing you wanted was to hear me talking about work.” She glances down and stares at her hands, so I press on, hoping I can reassure her, reach her at least a little bit. “There’s no financial risk to us, I’m not sabotaging our funds. It’s nothing that affects you—”
“Except that it affects you, Aiden, and thus it affects me, because I’m your wife, your life partner, who cares about you!” Freya stands and grabs her purse. “This is the shit I can’t stand. It’s one thing, what we talked about earlier, how we danced around your anxiety and my feelings. I think she has a point. And I can hear that. But this? This shit about money?”
She gestures at me, fuming as she speaks to Dr. Dietrich. “He rationalizes shutting me out, acting like George Bailey, leaving the little wifey home alone while he stumbles around Bedford Fucking Falls and wrings his hands about money.”
I love that movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, but I keep it to myself. Freya might kick down a door if I said that.
“I’m your partner,” she says to me angrily. “I should be tripping through the snow with you, not stuck in that house we poured everything into, wondering when you’re going to come back. You locked yourself out, Aiden Christopher MacCormack—”
Shit. I just got full-named.
“—and now you’re upset that I’m staying in there? Well, tough shit. You let yourself back in, or this is it, and I’m done.”
Freya storms out and slams the door behind her.
Dr. Dietrich’s eyes slide to the door, then to me. “Seems I hit a nerve.”
Sighing, I scrub my face. “Yeah.”
“Here’s the thing, Aiden.” Dr. Dietrich leans in. “A relationship is like a body, and without the oxygen of communication, it can only last so long when one person pulls away and deprives it as much as it seems you have. I know it’s hard to be vulnerable. I know you wanted to protect Freya. But your protection keeps you at arm’s length. If you want to feel close to your wife, you have to draw close, to trust her, even if you’re terrified—no, because you’re terrified. Breathe some life back into this marriage.”
As I absorb Dr. Dietrich’s words, my mind fixates on Freya who’s bolted, and adrenaline floods my system. I have to chase after her, make sure she’s not fuming so badly she’s marching toward the freeway, crossing Jersey barriers, and getting herself killed on her way to use the Metro, just to stick it to me.
A horrible image of it happening flashes in my mind’s eye. I know I’m a creative thinker, and that’s a strength, but it doesn’t feel like one when I can close my eyes and visualize my wife dying under a bus.
I jump up from the sofa, grab my sweater, and jog to the door. “I’ll do it, promise.”
“Wait!” she calls.
Cursing under my breath, I swing back around the threshold. “Yes?”
“No sex,” she says, grimacing. “Never like telling a couple that, but you two aren’t a buy-new-curtains-and-touch-up-the-paint job. You’re a down-to-the-studs gut job. No sex for now. It’ll help, believe it or not. It’s…clarifying.”
Sweet relief. If there’s no expectation of sex, that’s one less thing I have to figure out right now. I could kiss Dr. Dietrich. I mean, not really.
Freya, you asshole! Go get your wife!
Dr. Dietrich reads my mind again. “Go get her.” She waves me off. “Be gone.”
Running out to the parking lot, I see Freya only made it as far as the car, where she’s perched angrily on the hood.
I walk slowly toward the Civic, unlocking it with my key remote. She must have forgotten hers. Wouldn’t be the first time. A sad smile plays on my lips because there’s weird intimacy in those familiar patterns. Freya loses her keys weekly, but I’ve privately always liked that she felt safe enough to misplace her keys in the first place. It meant she trusted me to be the one who found them.
“Freya—”
She lifts a hand. “I don’t want to talk right now.”
“Is there a point at which you will?”
“You,” she says, standing and stomping toward me. Her finger pokes my chest. “You have no goddamn room to talk. You started this silent mess. Don’t even blame me for it. Now get in the car and drive me home or give me the keys, Aiden.�
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I walk toward her side and open the door. Freya drops down and yanks it out of my grip. I thought things couldn’t feel worse between us. I was so sure we’d hit rock bottom.
I was wrong.
Aiden
Playlist: “Sleep on the Floor,” The Lumineers
After counseling, Freya disappears into the bathroom the moment we get inside the house, the lock sliding with a loud, poignant click.
I tell myself I should stay, wait until she comes out showered off and cooled down, and try to talk to her. But I can’t. Not when I have no idea what I’d say, no clue how to reassure her when I can hardly reassure myself. I can’t stay in this house a second longer. So I scribble a note, leave it on the kitchen counter for Freya to see, and pack up a duffel bag of workout clothes and tennis shoes.
Once I’m parked at campus, I use the sports facility’s indoor track and run. I run and run, until my legs are jelly and my lungs burn. I haven’t run in too long because I’ve been so busy, but I should—I always feel better after a run, after a rush of endorphins and other potent feel-good chemicals flooding my brain. Chemicals that help with anxiety and everything else that feels like it’s strangling me when I walk inside our door.
After I’ve run myself to exhaustion and showered in the locker room, I throw back on the clothes I wore to counseling, then hide in my office while I lose my shit. Being a college professor who’s not at the absolute bottom rung of the department, I have a decent little space—couch, desk, a wall of books, an actual window and air-conditioning. And while it’s far from home, it’s a safe space for me. If I’m honest, it’s where I’ve hidden when I haven’t known how to be the husband I want to be to Freya.
Which is why I’m here, once again. Because I don’t know what to do. How to go home and face her, what I can promise, after what her brothers put before me at Ren’s the other night, after what Dr. Dietrich said at counseling this evening.
I know her brothers meant well. I know in their way they wanted me to understand how much they’re behind me, how much they care about seeing Freya and me through this difficult moment. But, shit. It just heaped on the pressure. Pressure and more pressure. To function like they do—to emote and reach out and feel and argue and get messy in all those ways that Freya’s fluent in and I’m a stilting novice.
And Dr. Dietrich’s admonition, that I’ve been suffocating our relationship with my behavior, when all I’ve wanted was to protect us from the outside world’s indiscriminate cruelty and threats—it’s so fucking defeating. Because her insight made it clear, how warped I am. My mind sabotages me, always seeing the worst in a situation. My heart’s this traitorous asshole who beats too hard for the wrong things like money and security and order, when it loves a woman who could give a shit less about material comforts, whose heart thrills for wildness and passion and thrives in the untidy present moments of life.
I have never felt so fundamentally wrong for Freya, so ill-equipped to love her how she deserves. And as I flop onto my office sofa and stare at the ceiling, my heart beating like a bird against its too-small cage, I know this is a turning point:
Stay and fight for her. Fight to bring myself back to a place in which I know in my soul how much she and I—despite our deep differences—belong together. Fight to feel once again close and intimate with the woman I love with every fiber of my being…
Or finally give in to that voice that lies and whispers horrible things. That I’ll fail her, that I’ll break her heart, that I’ll sabotage us and ruin what we’ve built together, even the future we haven’t yet built.
I want to be strong. I want to be courageous for Freya. Because she deserves to be fought for, her forgiveness earned, her trust won again. I want to go home and say sorry and tell her I’ll make it right. But can I promise her that, when I have no idea what fixing us looks like?
My eyes dart around the room, full of books crammed into built-in shelves, my desk brimming with tidy piles of folders. All this knowledge and order. And none of it has the answers I need.
Groaning, I scrub my face. “Fuck.”
“Like that, is it?”
I nearly fall off the couch, startled by the voice behind me. Craning my neck, I see it’s Tom Ryan, our building’s janitor. As always, he wears a faded black ball cap pulled low, his gray janitor’s uniform, and a bushy salt-and-pepper beard. Tall and lean, he cuts an imposing figure, yet his body language is hunched, deferential. He never looks anyone in the eye, always keeps his gaze down, his voice low and quiet. For months, we’d cross paths when I was here for evening classes and office hours, and he never said a word. But then one night I stayed late and, on a whim, made conversation with him, then he made some crack I can’t even remember, and I realized he has a great bone-dry sense of humor.
Now…well, now I’d call him a friend of sorts. One of those people who comes into your life unexpectedly and clicks. Now we talk regularly, any time I work late in the office and he comes in to empty trash cans, vacuum, and straighten up.
He’s good company, a laid-back-uncle type, not that I have any of those. I’m not upset to see him right now. I just prefer not to be ambushed and startled so violently, my heart feels like it’s beating right out of my chest.
“Did I catch you off guard?” he asks as he walks in.
I slump back on the sofa and exhale, hand over my racing heart. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Better not have,” he says, bending over to the garbage and emptying it into the big bin that he pushes on casters. “I’m too old to clean up shit. Sorry I startled you, though. I thought you heard me coming.”
“No, man, you have spy-level stealth.”
He drops the garbage can, then steadies it. I notice his hand has a tremor, and because my brain’s a prodigy at imagining worst-case scenarios, I start worrying if he’s unwell, if he’s getting frail, if one day this janitor who I feel oddly bonded to won’t be there and—
Tom pulls out the cord for the vacuum with sure, swift movement, snapping me out of my spiraling negative thoughts.
“What are you doing, still here?” he says. “Awfully late to be in the office.”
“Just…thinking.” I stand from the couch, running my fingers through my hair. I should leave. I always feel bad sitting around while he works, especially when someone his age should be retired, not vacuuming carpets, polishing floors, and bending over garbage cans. “I’ll get out of your hair,” I tell him.
“Please do. You should be gone for the night. I already kicked you out once.”
“Yeah.” I scratch the back of my neck. “Well. Sometimes a guy’s wife needs space. And this is where I can give it to her.”
Tom shakes his head. “Nope. That’s no good. Go home and stay there.” He walks over to my desk, grabs my workout duffel bag, and chucks it at my feet. “When a woman says to leave her alone, when she pulls away from you and acts like she wants you miles away, that’s the last thing she wants.”
“Well, see that’s actually pretty dangerous thinking—”
“I’m not talking about forcing yourself on her. Jesus. I’m saying when your wife acts like she wants you to be gone, she’s asking you to prove that you want her bad enough to stay and fight.”
I stare at the duffel bag, wordless, so fucking lost. Because part of me thinks Tom’s right. And part of me is scared Freya truly finds my epic head-up-my-ass-ery unforgivable, that her anger in counseling isn’t going to fade but only build and deepen.
“I’ve been in your shoes,” Tom says. “And I learned it the hard way. Get home.”
“Tom, I appreciate it, but everyone’s marriage is different.”
“Maybe, but marriage’s dangers are the same.” Turning away, he lifts things off the floor, clearing it to vacuum. “Complacency. That’s what kills them. Dispassion. Resignation. Days become weeks. Weeks become months. Months become years.”
He points at an old copy of Aristotle’s Poetics that I’ve carted around since undergra
d. “You read that, presumably, years ago. Remember what Aristotle said about tragedy?”
“Yes,” I say slowly, confused as to where he’s going.
“This is the moment he talks about—peripeteia, the turning point, and anagnorisis, the point of recognition—when your wife tells you to go, when you finally see your relationship and her feelings in a way you hadn’t before. ‘A change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined…for good or bad fortune,’” he quotes. “What comes next?”
I swallow roughly. “The scene of suffering.”
“The scene of suffering,” he says. “That’s right. ‘A destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds.’”
“Well, now I’m psyched.”
He sighs. “Of course you’re not. Because you’re human. And I am, too. What’s more human than wanting to avoid pain? I figured, if I stayed away for a while, I could avoid it, let it blow over, then come back when the tension had died down. It didn’t seem so dangerous, wanting to shy away from the pain of facing what had fallen apart between us.”
He tugs his ball cap lower and says, “But it’s like a drug, avoidance. And each day that goes without tension or worry or disappointment, lulls you with the promise of peace and ease. You give her time, tell yourself things will quiet down, and before you know it, things have gotten too quiet, then you have papers in your office, and not the kind you grade.”
Pain knifes through me at the mere thought of that. “No. Freya’s not divorcing me.”
Not yet. She can’t. She has to give me a chance. She has to.
“Trust me,” he says, “when a woman tells you she’s at her breaking point, she’s been past it for a while. Now’s your moment, like Aristotle says. Now you have to make the leap and do whatever it takes to make it better. That’s the only way. You just told me.”