State of the Union

by Nick Hornby

  She starts to tear up a little bit.

  “It’s okay.”

  He reaches for her hand and squeezes it.

  “I don’t deserve that,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I cheated on you and told you that I was bored in bed as an explanation.”

  “Yes,” Tom says. “That plus my depression and unemployment.”

  “Oh. Yes. I’m a charmer. Being bored isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

  “But life is long, and we’re only just over halfway through it.”

  “I suspect it’s only long if you’re not enjoying it much.”

  “So there you are. I’m doing you a favor.”

  “Perpetual motion and relativity, all in one short conversation about our ongoing marital shambles,” Louise says.

  “Oh, yes. You need to be brainy to get out of being married to me.”

  She smiles while rummaging in her bag for a tissue. She blows her nose.

  “I want to talk about the future today,” Tom says.

  “Good.”

  “Where it went.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can’t see it. It used to be very clear to me. I was walking purposefully toward it. I was like one of those workers in a Soviet propaganda poster, pointing at it. It was shiny and bright, and full of . . . Well. I don’t know what it was full of.”

  “Golden cornfields, factories, and tanks?”

  “Yeah. My equivalent, anyway.”

  “Which was?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “You can’t remember the future?”

  “Nope.”

  Outside the pub, as Tom and Louise cross the road, the old couple who see the counselor before them emerge from the front door.

  “They’ve gone over their time.”

  “Who’s been all the trouble, do you think? Seeing as they’ve been going on and off for years?”

  They approach the couple. Tom nods as they pass. They are walking slowly, the man with some difficulty. The woman is tearful.

  “Oh,” says Louise.

  “What?”

  “I wonder if it’s because he’s not very well.”

  “Like, dying?”

  “That may be what they’re seeking help with now. Do you remember what she said? ‘You’ve got lots of time. Lucky you.’”

  “Oh, fuck. That’s all we needed,” says Tom. “She’ll think we haven’t got troubles, by comparison. She’ll be impatient with us.”

  “But at least they’ll make it through.”

  They have arrived at the front door of Kenyon’s house.

  “Is that the future? Making it through?”

  “I’d settle for making it through,” says Louise. “Making it through is the goal of every marriage, isn’t it? I’m not sure there’s anything else.”

  Tom rings the bell, and they wait in silence.

  week nine

  PRISON SEX

  Tom is sitting in the pub, at their usual table, on his own, with the crossword (and a newspaper). He’s cheerful—more energized, eyes sparkly. He is filling in the crossword with some ease—he writes in one answer, then another.

  “Oh, get in.”

  He clenches his fist. Louise enters the pub and looks over to see whether Tom is there. She smiles when she sees him. She comes over and sits down.

  “Hello.”

  “Well, hello,” he says, with as much sleaze as he can manage.

  Louise grins, almost embarrassed. Something is different in their interaction.

  “How was your day?” says Tom.

  “It was . . . It was fine. The, um . . . The night perked up the day no end.”

  “Same here.”

  “Thank you for asking. I mean it. I’m not being sarcastic, by the way. Really. Thank you for asking. I had a spring in my step for the first time in months.”

  “Well. Happy to oblige.”

  “I hope it didn’t feel like an obligation,” Louise says coyly.

  “Of course not. (Even though, as you have pointed out several times, it really is, within marriage.)”

  Louise takes a deep breath.

  “Let’s try and remain entirely positive,” she says. “Last night was a real step forward, in our current circumstances, and we should just celebrate it.”

  “Agreed. I have been tweeting and instagramming all day.”

  Louise looks alarmed.

  “Instagramming?” she says.

  Tom rolls his eyes.

  “Oh,” she says.

  “I note, however, that tweeting would have been fine. Did it feel . . . weird?”

  “You first.”

  “Why should I answer my own question?”

  “Okay,” Louise says. “But first I want to ask you something.”

  “Unconnected to the weirdness?”

  “Connected to the sex, only tangentially connected to the weirdness.”

  “Okay.”

  “Was it . . . Did you enjoy it?”

  “Yes. Very much so. Oh, so now you answer the question in the light of that information.”

  “I didn’t want to make a fool of myself.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “Well,” says Louise. “If you’d said, ‘No, it was a complete waste of time’ . . .”

  “A complete waste of time? I could have been reading Proust, I suppose. But I could have done that instead of every sexual experience I’ve ever had. Or during, even.”

  “I just meant some phrase expressing dissatisfaction . . .”

  “No dissatisfaction whatsoever.”

  “Anyway,” Louise says. “So this is all in the context of what was to all intents and purposes a mutually fulfilling sexual experience.”

  “Well done. I think you’ve found the right language to describe our lovemaking to a panel of parliamentary ombudsmen. Carry on.”

  “It felt weird.”

  “It did, a bit.”

  “You agree?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t like marital sex at all.”

  “No. It was a bit like I’d imagine post-prison sex to be.”

  “Post-prison?” Tom says. “First of all, who’s been in prison?”

  “Well. You more than me.”

  “I don’t think you can describe it comparatively. Either you’ve been in or you haven’t.”

  “Well, we’ve both been in prison, sexually speaking, apart from my . . .”

  “Mistakes.”

  “Yes. And you should know that my mistakes were not in any way . . . Well, they didn’t commute the sentence, if you see what I mean.”

  “No,” says Tom. “I don’t.”

  “If the sexual prison sentence is defined by how much time you serve before . . . Well, before release . . .”

  “I don’t see how you can define prison as anything else, really.”

  “When you’re in a sexual prison, you’re talking about sexual release.”

  Comprehension dawns on Tom’s face.

  “Ah.” He’s delighted. “There was no release of that kind?”

  “No. That wasn’t what it was about. And I didn’t feel in the right frame of mind, anyway.”

  “Ha! Well, that puts a whole different complexion on things. If you don’t mind me saying so, that’s a real relief to me.”

  “I slept with someone else because I wasn’t feeling very close to any adult human being. I was lonely, and I didn’t feel wanted.”

  This sad confession doesn’t check Tom’s chirpiness.

  “Still,” he says. “No fireworks.”

  “No. No fireworks. Just warmth and solace.”

  Tom makes a face, to suggest that warmth and solace are of only marginal interest.
>
  “This prison-sex thing, though . . . What would I have been in prison for?”

  “Nothing bad,” says Louise.

  Tom is a little disappointed.

  “It must have been something bad, by definition.”

  “Yeah, but tax evasion. Insider trading. That sort of thing.”

  “Those people are the pits. And also not terribly sexy.”

  “Neither are people covered in tattoos who’ve been lifting weights for fifteen years. I’d be scared to have sex with one of those.”

  “I also think you’re unlikely to have married him in the first place.”

  “I could have met him on Tinder or one of those things.”

  “Well, again. Unlikely to have swiped whichever way you swipe.”

  He makes a face intended to convey a violent sex-starved convict, and then cuts to an impersonation of Louise on her phone, looking mildly intrigued and swiping.

  “How do you know you swipe at all?”

  “It’s common knowledge.”

  “Not to me it’s not,” says Louise.

  “Anyway, just to be clear: It was good, honest, unthreatening, tax-evader sex, not tattooed manslaughter sex.”

  “Yes. But actually, without all the, the shortcomings that might be implied by the prison sentence.”

  “What sort of shortcomings are implied by tax-evader sex?”

  “Again, it’s not the tax evasion that’s significant. It’s the release from prison. So, the obvious shortcomings.”

  “Well, I think I avoided those.”

  “You know you did.”

  “I thought I had. But good to have it confirmed.”

  They sip drinks and look around the pub. For the first time during their pre-counseling ritual, they have nothing to say to each other.

  “But it wasn’t . . . just sex to you, was it?” Louise says.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Without feelings.”

  “How would that work? You think I picked you up for a meaningless fling after we’d got our two children into bed?”

  “No, but . . . I wondered whether I was just a body. It felt, I don’t know. Like you’d somehow separated my bits from me.”

  “Well, that’s the prison effect.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But it was good sex.”

  “Yes,” says Louise. “Really good sex. But sort of . . . unsettlingly good.”

  “So you’re now saying we had the wrong kind of sex? I thought any kind of sex was the right kind of sex.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought before yesterday.”

  Tom lets out a weary sigh.

  “I remember . . . It must have been a couple of years after the kids were born,” he says, “and you were feeling fat and unattractive . . .”

  “Thank you.” She’s being sarcastic.

  “Oh, come on, Louise. I didn’t think you were fat and unattractive! You thought you were fat and unattractive!”

  “Go on.”

  “And you asked me, after we’d made love, whether I only wanted to because I loved you. Not because I fancied you.”

  “Yes. That was how I felt then. Ten years ago. And now I feel something different.”

  “And in those ten years, despite everything you of all people know about the decay of the human body, you’ve somehow become Kim Kardashian?”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Isn’t it nice to be a sex object in your forties? And exactly what you wanted in your thirties? When you were feeling fat and unattractive?”

  “Do you have to say the words over and over again?”

  “You’re not fat now. Nobody could say you were fat.”

  They both realize the omission at the same time. Louise is the first to react.

  “But unattractive?”

  “Or unattractive.”

  “You waited just that moment too long. And also, you more or less admitted that I was fat back then.”

  “Now I don’t know what to say.”

  “Just say the right thing, and then you won’t have to worry.”

  “How about this? All sex with you is the right kind of sex. You’ve never been fat. You’ve never been skinny. I’ve always been attracted to you.”

  Louise thinks about this. She can find no objection, so she moves on.

  “You getting out of prison doesn’t make me a . . . a sex object,” she says. “It just means I was conveniently placed.”

  “I hate to be unromantic, but convenient placement is pretty much the definition of marital sex. I put my book down, look over to the other side of the bed, and there you are.”

  “That’s different. Last night it felt as though I were a conveniently placed stranger.”

  “But . . . people pay a lot of money to turn their husbands into conveniently placed strangers!”

  Louise wrinkles her nose up in distaste.

  “Who do they pay?”

  “I’m talking about sex therapy and so on. Isn’t that what they say? Make it strange? And it worked!”

  “It’s not going to work for long, though.”

  Tom throws up his arms in mock despair.

  “Right. I give up,” he says. “We stopped making love because you were bored and I knew it. And then you weren’t bored when we started again, but you didn’t like the lack of boredom because it made you feel weird. And now you’re lamenting the inevitable lack of weirdness if we do it more often.”

  “I can see that might be confusing. But I don’t like you saying if we do it again.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. In an ideal world, I’d only want sex with you.”

  “Wow.”

  “Is that really worth a ‘Wow’?”

  “God, yes. I had no idea. That’s quite romantic, for you.”

  “Really?” Louise says. “The ‘ideal world’ part is a pretty big get-out clause.”

  “Ah.”

  “Because, let’s face it, this is not an ideal world.”

  “No. But do you mean the actual world or our world?”

  “I wouldn’t necessarily need the actual world to be ideal before committing to monogamy.”

  “Good to know. Anyway. The point is, you weren’t saying as much as I thought.”

  Tom looks out of the window. The elderly lady who takes the earlier slot with the therapist is walking slowly across the road. Her husband isn’t with her.

  “Oh, shit,” he says.

  “What’s happened?”

  “She’s on her own.”

  “Oh, dear. He probably just wasn’t well enough to come.”

  “Let’s hope. Otherwise . . .”

  “Maybe it’s nothing to do with his health. Maybe they split up. Maybe he told her where to get off.”

  “Or she’s shagging around. That would be good.”

  “Why would it be good?” says Louise. “I would have thought you’d take a dim view of infidelity.”

  “I take a dim view of your infidelity. I don’t mind hers.”

  “Because it means there’s still fight?”

  “Exactly. It shows you’re alive, and uncertain. Nothing’s fixed. I like that. Plus, she’s someone I don’t know and don’t care about very much. That helps.”

  “But nothing’s irreversible, isn’t that the point?” says Louise. “You can still look around to see what’s available, however old you are.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I think you should move back in.”

  week ten

  ANOTHER DRINK

  Tom and Louise walk into the pub together and head toward the bar.

  “We haven’t arrived at the same time once in the last ten weeks,” says Tom.

  “It’s an omen.”

 
Tom asks for a pint of London Pride and a dry white.

  “Aren’t omens bad?”

  “Don’t they just predict change? Well, there you are. We arrive at the pub together for our last session.”

  Louise looks at him.

  “Why is it our last session?” she says.

  “I’ve moved back in. We’ve had sex twice in the last eight days. Sorted.”

  “First of all, when we started seeing Kenyon you hadn’t even moved out. So you moving in just takes us back to where we started. And the sex . . .”

  “Don’t start on the sex. Leave it alone. We’re having it. Don’t knock it. It’s my only accomplishment of the year.”

  “All I was going to say is that it should be there. We’re married. We’re not old. We should be having sex.”

  “And we are. We went because we stopped. Now we’ve started. Done. Tick. Let’s move on.”

  They take their drinks and walk over to their usual table.

  “But what happened to your feelings of humiliation?” Louise says.

  “Gone. We had sex.”

  “What happened to your hurt and anger about my affair?”

  “Ah, I’ve buried it deep. It will only reemerge as a physical illness, a heart attack, or cancer.”

  They sit down.

  “And you think that’s healthy?”

  “Do I think heart disease and cancer are healthy? No, I do not.”

  “But the burying, which will result in cancer? Do you think that’s healthy?”

  “Yes, I do,” Tom says sincerely. “In the short term.”

  “And what about the other things we’ve talked about in the sessions?”

  “Like what?”

  “Tom, in the last few weeks we’ve both aired more grievances than, than . . .”

  “You’d be looking at some kind of peace process, I’d have thought. Middle East. Northern Ireland.”

  “I was trying to avoid the clichés.”

  “When it comes down to it, most peace processes are about one grievance. We have a thousand. So I don’t know what the right analogy would be.”

  “Ours comes down to one, really,” says Louise.

  “Go on.”

  “We’re married. Everything else is an offshoot. We wouldn’t be arguing about, I don’t know, my sister if we weren’t married. You’d just say, ‘How’s your sister?’”