Away From Everywhere (16 page)

She'd gone back to university
to get a better job, so I can provide for a child
, and at this point she had just about finished her nursing degree and she resented him for dropping out of university two years ago
to take his writing more seriously.

“You were loving geology, you were getting letters from the department congratulating you for the straight A's, and you were all giddy about it. Remember? I don't get it! You have a closet full of goddamn rocks in plastic cases. Labeled. You'd tell me the differences, why rose quartz is pink not white, and why shale breaks so easily. You loved it. People don't just–”

“Lov
ed
. I
loved
it. And now I don't. Well, I do. I have an interest in geology, but not in a
career
in geology. I'd have no time for writing, and I'd be away too much, you know?”

“You've got to think about your future,Owen. If you can't see into your future, you're never going to get anywhere.”

“I am thinking about my future! I'm trying to avoid locking myself into a fucken cage of a life.”

“You're such a kid sometimes, you know that? Look at your brother, he's happy, he's getting a life set up. He just got married and is quite excited about–”

“If you think my brother is a happy man, you're an idi

you
you don't know the guy.”

“Oh, what? Just because he doesn't hate the world or quote from
Walden
he doesn't know what ‘true happiness' is? Is that it?”

Owen raised his eyebrows, like,
Well, yes. Sort of.

Shaking her head, furious, taking her supper out to the computer desk to eat it alone.“This isn't about Alex, you always steer the conversation off track to deflect me!”

He shouted at her back, “Actually, you're the one who brought up Alex.”

“It's not about Alex!”she howled.“It's about me being stuck in a relationship with some dispirited kid!”

He felt the barrage of exclamation marks.

“Why can't you just admit you only want me to stay on the geology track for the money? Admit it, and I will. Admit it and I'll play the fucken game and get buddy-buddy with all the right people and name-drop my way into an
ideal
job and buy you a wedding ring that puts all your friends' to shame. Just fucken admit it and I'll throw my goddamn life away for a backyard swimming pool and gaudy, oversized wedding r–”

She threw her fork at him, a bit of steak still attached. It knocked a picture frame off the wall and the glass shattered, the image no longer visible beneath fractured shards. They spent the rest of the night in different rooms. It was journalism that Owen really wanted to do, but that was offered only in Stephenville, a ten-hour drive away from Abbie.

They went to Blockbuster to rent a movie. What one of them picked up, the other rolled their eyes at.

“Let's just go home, I'm sure there's something on TV. We'll have some Jiffy Pop and root beer?”

He smiled and nodded. He knew he still loved the girl by the way her adoration of Jiffy Pop and root beer made him laugh. The specifics of who she was. The familiarity he couldn't let go of, for fearing of losing himself along with her.

When they crawled into bed that night, Owen sensed the sort of paused silence that meant a serious conversation was coming. She was merely organizing her thoughts and arranging the words into a short punchy order. She couldn't accept his abandoning university and had lost interest in his writing when it became clear he might never earn a living from it. Then it was just a waste of time he should be spending on a degree, or at least a better job. It came up in bed that night.

“I'm a writer, Abbie. My day job is secondary, and the more time I spend writing the better quality–”

“Are you?” She finally let herself say it. “What have you published,Owen, besides some shorts in a few lit journals that you never even got paid for? Call yourself a writer when you start earning a stable income from it, okay? All right!”

“Not everything's about money. And maybe one in a thousand published writers actually make a living from–”

“And life isn't a fucken fairytale. So keep your head in the clouds, Owen, try your little heart out, but don't consider yourself noble, consider yourself a fool.”

She rolled over and hauled all the blankets off of him. The room was cold, but he didn't bother tugging some back. Her sudden lack of support silenced them both. She cried herself to sleep again, and Owen waited for her to fall asleep before reaching for his notepad and heading out to the living room. If they were going to break up, he could at least fuel his writing with the emotions and insight into love that their demise evoked. But she rolled over as he was getting up, and she spoke with no reluctance, spieling it all out in one rant.

“When I look at you, I see a dispirited kid going nowhere. Another dark wannabe writer. Definitely not husband and father material. Your depressive nature has become a chore, a flaw I falsely assumed I could fix, or something I initially attributed to your mother's death that I assumed you'd get over, like … like Alex has. And, initially, you had this refreshing, quixotic, and atypical approach to life that was endearing. Now, at our age…or my age, I guess…it's just pathetic. You're in no position to provide for a child, and don't seem to be heading in that direction. It's not like we haven't tried or fought for us, Owen, but I just can't picture us five years from now. I can't see you tucking our daughter and all her friends into a minivan and taking them to the movies.”

A few weeks later, after they'd broken up, he walked over to the university to buy a newspaper and to sit and circle apartment ads. There was a lost, first-year blonde sitting on the same dated, burgundy-carpeted bench. She was cute, an awkward and shy studious blonde, not the supermodel type. She was drawing cats and flowers in an exercise book next to a math problem she couldn't solve. She doubted herself, he could tell. She could figure it out if she tried, but lacked the confidence to bother with it.

Sitting there on that bench, surrounded by eager students, academic jabbering, and posters recruiting students to study abroad or volunteer for psychology experiments, Owen questioned why he'd ever left Memorial University. He thought it was as simple as no programs that interested him, but in that moment he realized it was something more profound. Indifference. An indifference to something those hundreds of students hovering around him were so mindlessly dedicating their every thought to, like bees at work in a hive, questioning nothing.

And maybe it was an even more profound revelation that he wasn't one of them. And maybe his grandfather had been right that day, about him and his father.
This world is going to bend you out of shape until it breaks you…there's no room for your type here, boy.

As he walked home, he found himself fixated on Abbie's “new friend at work,”Adam Fleisher. Weeks ago,Owen pulled up in front of the hospital and watched them laughing together in the porch, her hand on his shoulder fit perfectly into the groove of his collarbone, like hands that knew where they lay. Days later it was,
Oh, it's okay. Adam can drive me home. You needn't come get me.
Three nights back she was explaining her situation with Owen to Adam on the phone, not too quietly.
No. I've told him he's fine here until he finds somewhere new. No, I haven't seen him try and find a place, Adam, but that doesn't mean he isn't looking! You don't understand, we have a relationship that extends beyond ex-boyfriend-girlfriend.

He got home and turned the key to what was now
her
apartment. He started supper, and as the peppers fried and the chicken seared, he dialed a phone number he'd jotted down off a telephone pole he'd noticed on Water Street while he was walking home:
Downtown Appt. Available Immediately.

Available immediately was all he needed to see. He was done torturing himself with the awkwardness of sleeping on Abbie's couch while Adam slept in her bed. She had given him a reasonable period of time to get out of her apartment before she started letting Adam spend the night. Sometimes he heard them moaning, and the bedsprings grinding into the bedframe. The images interfered with his breathing. Rage, coated in a sadness that made a pulp of his lungs. He pictured how she looked seconds before an orgasm, so free and lost in a place only he could take her for those nine years they were together, her eyes open but shut, silently screaming. And now Adam was that man.

He thought of how she was a link to his mother, at least in some small inarticulate way. He would miss her most in the mornings: how cold the room would be and how warm her body was. He wrapped himself around her every morning to warm himself before crawling out of bed. The days would be that much colder now without her. He'd miss that little purr she made when he wrapped his arms around her to wake her on Monday mornings. She slept naked and looked so pristine and innocent as he kissed her forehead and crawled out of bed. To Owen, nothing was more attractive than a woman comfortable in her body like that.

He thought back to that overheard conversation between his mother and their neighbour …
Nancy?
How it was the empty bed that got to his mother too, as it now would him. There would be an emptiness now, a physical nothingness beside him. Shouting. A longing and melancholy that would nip at him like a pest every time he rolled over and she wasn't there.

A PLASTIC SMILE

August 19th, 2008,
At the cabin, restless in bed.

I think Owen resents me for it. When he sees me take money from Alex, when Alex opens his wallet and counts out some sum of cash or hands me a card, I feel like a bratty teenager getting her allowance. Not a wife. Not a woman. But only since Owen has come here.

I chose it. I quit my job and I'm comfortable with it, but it's an awkward place to be really. I resent the ditz stereotype of being the stay-at-home doctor's wife, the girl who can buy the fancy shoes because of her husband's job and not her own. It means everyone assumes I don't have a brain in my skull, a university degree, any ambition. That I am a sex-toy, a maid, and a mother only. A living slap across the face of the hard-working professional woman. I resent myself for having given into it. For being guilty of it. For throwing away all my own personal and professional goals to be the woman who irons his shirts and makes everything secondary to him. But I chose this life, that's what people neglect to consider, and nine
days out of ten, I regret nothing. But lately, and today, searingly, I hate that I have to question if every loving wife is so quick to pick up her husband's dry cleaning or if there is a silent understanding at play here, the perks of my easy life come at the cost of a split role: wife and servant.